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Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

I suppose we can look at this with nostalgic eyes.

I was a big Shirky reader back in the day.

But the truth is that all kinds of things disappear all the time in all aspects of life. The web is no different at all.

Take my dad for instance - a quite profilic and famous mid level artist. It’s coming to the point where not much people remember him. And when my siblings pass on that will be that.

Let’s not get too nostalgic. If someone is interested they should try to preserve the writings and keep them going.

That’s why certain groups have taken it upon themselves to preserve old important films. And as we know they are always fighting for more donations to keep things going.

Because in the end… no one really cares.

50 years from now children will be asking who was Van Gogh.

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> Take my dad for instance - a quite profilic and famous mid level artist. It’s coming to the point where not much people remember him. And when my siblings pass on that will be that.

Why not say his name here, to give him a bit more memory?

> 50 years from now children will be asking who was Van Gogh.

This seems a strange cut-off. Van Gogh is an artist who died 130 years ago; why should the next 50 years be the ones that forget him? There are plenty of artists today whom we remember from earlier than 200 years ago.

> Van Gogh is an artist who died 130 years ago; why should the next 50 years be the ones that forget him?

Indeed. I think he will more likely become even better known as people use style transfer and such to generate many new pictures in his style.

I don't think Van Gogh is a good example. There are certain artists whose work outlives them by centuries, not many, but we still talk about Michelangelo, da Vinci, Monet, etc. The rest of your post is accurate, though.

Who was the most famous artist of Mesopotamia?

No one really cares.

We simply haven't had enough time pass. Eventually, some day, people will forget who Julius Caesar was. It may take 50,000 years. It may take 500,000. They'll forget.

The Mesopotamians were more preoccupied with writing down contracts in cuneiform than writing down historical fiction to last through the ages. Maybe because they were one of the first civilizations to thrive and to invent writing at all, they didn't know their oral traditions and history would be lost to the sands of time without writing them down.

We do have more insight into ancient Egyptian pharaohs and architects, however, as these details were more carefully preserved.

That being said, I'm sure 500K years from now, these details will all be buried on some thumb drive in an underground archive and our descendents will lack the drivers to decode them.

> will lack the drivers to decode them

Unless the humans figure out reliable ways for them and technology to survive multiple nuclear world wars

Which doesn't seem impossible, not at all

Counterpoint: an ancient Babylonian copper merchant is remembered to this day for being a no-good swindler due to complaints against him recorded in stone tablets [1]. Remembering things is only getting easier with better data storage. I guess you could just move the timeline out to the heat death of the universe, though.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir

Also, once you're dead, and your loved ones / family / those who truly knew who you were, are dead too, then,

what does it matter if you're forgotten after 5 years or 50,000

It isn't as if you would notice anyway

> But the truth is that all kinds of things disappear all the time in all aspects of life. The web is no different at all.

Glad we have the Wayback Machine then. But if you don't want your blog mirrored by Wayback you can declare that in your `robots.txt` file. Do this:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

But that doesn't mean crawlers/bots will honor that request and presume any content you post publicly will be backed up somewhere. If not somewhere on the net, then on someone's hard-drive!

The Internet Archive does not respect robots.txt - https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

The blog post you are linking is outdated. They are honoring robots.txt files. From the FAQ:

> Some sites are not available because of robots.txt or other exclusions. What does that mean? Such sites may have been excluded from the Wayback Machine due to a robots.txt file on the site or at a site owner’s direct request.

If you exclude them in your robots.txt file they will also absolutely retroactively remove your site from the index.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965575

- https://help.archive.org/help/using-the-wayback-machine/

I hope you're right! The lack of an update on that post, combined with the FAQ saying the opposite thing, makes it even harder for me to know what their policy is. Respecting robots.txt is a civilized thing to do and I hope they do it.

I hope they don't. If you don't want things archived, don't put them out there.

I would absolutely love an option that meant "archive and make available forever from this point backwards" to protect against domain expirations and re-registration (possibly by domain squatters or content farms).

Well, the fact that they will be asking will lead them to discover to who van Gogh was and so he will live on, as will his paintings and the reproductions of those paintings.

Bach has been dead for hundreds of years and his works are being rediscovered by people every day.

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