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Comment by donkarma | Hacker News Reader

What a waste of the space of the Internet Archive. Just because something exists doesn't mean it should be backed up, I would be surprised if anyone actually needed something from Usenet for example. Things like this are going to kill the Archive eventually.

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> I would be surprised if anyone actually needed something from Usenet for example

Totally disagree. Usenet is the only place recording the history of a huge number of influential projects from the 80s and 90s. That history deserves to be recorded.

absolutely disagree.

Some of the most valuable and insightful anthropological artifacts are merely shop ledgers and discourse on bathroom walls -- and we've never been better equipped to document/store/search/access the entirety of the saved artifacts from the modern age -- and presumably our mastery over information technology as a domain will only improve and make things easier.

I would love to lookup my old usenet posts from the early 90's

My point was that most people wouldn't get much value out of it aside sentimental reasons, and you can back up your own Reddit posts if this matters to you instead of backing up the entirety of it as this is the only part that should matter and should have a smaller fingerprint. If Reddit goes down for whatever reason you could try to merge with others, too.

If you try telling a historian in a hundred years time that there wasn't anything of value worth saving on a site where millions of regular people had conversations about pretty much everything of relevance to life in the early 21st century they will robustly disagree with you.

The groups.google.com search is working again. Why not?

> Just because something exists doesn't mean it should be backed up.

/r/DataHoarder disagrees. It's pretty crazy the what people will back up these days.

I'm thinking about becoming a data hoarder. One of my favorite hobbies is listening to music on YouTube and reading people's comments about how that song was important in some moment of their lives. Most of the videos are unofficial, since the official ones have comments turned off. From time to time, one of these music videos gets dmca'd and sadly the comments are all lost.

There is a limit to storage, especially when you don't own it, and the usefulness of the content collected should be considered when you're backing up what is primarily a news and meme aggregator. They aren't backing up the Library of Babel so where does the line get drawn?

I think the line is drawn where nobody cares enough to archive it.

How interesting would it be to trace the evolution of e.g. TheDonald from parody to party to sewer, without the retrospective editings and deletions?

Yeah, there's a limit to storage, but it's growing faster than, perhaps, you warrant.

The 20 Newsgroups dataset is a collection of ~20k newsgroup documents and is super popular for experimentation in text applications of various machine learning techniques. Without Usenet (and archives of Usenet) that probably wouldn't exist.

You never know what will be useful to the future. To give an example, the field of papyrology is largely built around trying to construct a view of the past using scraps of texts excavated from ancient dumps.

This is why individual people should never be left to make such decisions alone. They're likely to throw away things of enormous value for parochial reasons.

Archive Team is not the same as the Internet Archive.

Where do you think all of this data is being pushed to exactly?

To Archive Team contributors hard drives. You should probably check out how Archive Team works, it's pretty cool.

The "Warrior" program only downloads the data temporarily, and then uploads it to a staging server run by AT members. The staging server packs the WARCs into MegaWARCs and sends them to live at the Internet Archive.

The end result is the data flowing to the IA...sure they are "not affiliated" but the data is sent there which is what the GP is talking about.

Thank you, drive through

...why?

It's a pretty high bar to say that something should not be archived and it's a waste.

I am not even going to state my opinion on the issue now, I am just disappointed about the level of discourse comments like this create. No justification, no logic.

TL;DR is that you don't like reddit. This is not useful to anyone.

no one cared about the snap shot of Bill Clinton dancing with an intern either until later.

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