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Comment by hpaavola | Hacker News Reader

It always makes me a bit sad when any site is taken offline. I haven't even heard of Simple Desks before, but it still makes me sad that it is gone.

Destroying bits is so darn easy, that people do it too much. I don't delete emails (my spamfilter might delete, I don't). Once in a while it's nice to see what you were up to 5 years ago.

My personal homepage is still running. I haven't updated it in many many years, but it still there. Occasionally my friends and I check some photos from there that I posted almost 10 years ago. And I regret that I have deleted all previous version of my homepage.

And it was a sad day when GeoCities was taken offline.

Sure, if keeping your site up and running (even in read-only) costs too much, it's ok to shut it down. But please, try to save as much of the current Internet as you can so our children can see its history.

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This reply got me thinking: does the nearly-zero incremental cost of a bit cause people to be more likely to turn into virtual hoarders? Anybody who didn't through physical mail away ever would be looked at funny, but I rarely delete an email, either.

Is there a psychological cost associated with virtual hoarding like there is with physical? Or is it truly not hoarding?

Coming from the opposite side, I wonder if there's an "anti-hoarding" disorder; feeling that most things (physical or virtual) in one's possession is a liability, a weight that would be better off discarded unless they are absolutely necessary. Almost everything I own adds to my psychological debt and I feel a weight being lifted off my shoulders whenever I can get rid of stuff, documents, files, emails or anything else attached to me.

I am like this. I am constantly looking to get rid of as much as I can and that includes digital things too.

I just moved a few months ago and everything I own fit in the back of a 87' Volvo wagon. And that includes my bed.

I believe you're describing Zen Buddhism.

"""Coming from the opposite side, I wonder if there's an "anti-hoarding" disorder; feeling that most things (physical or virtual) in one's possession is a liability, a weight that would be better off discarded unless they are absolutely necessary."""

There sure is one -- and the minimalist trend has a little to do with that tendency, but it's something much rarer than hoarding.

A lot of people do the "anti-hoarding" thing with emotions, memories, friendships and relationships, though, just letting them slip through without affecting them.

Coping mechanisms, if I ever saw one...

When the things you are 'hoarding' are indexed digital copies, you are 'archiving'.

"""Is there a psychological cost associated with virtual hoarding like there is with physical? Or is it truly not hoarding?"""

Of course there is -- hoarding is the attitude towards preserving stuff (and fear of mortality / things changing / passing), not about whether it's physical or virtual stuff.

>It always makes me a bit sad when any site is taken offline. I haven't even heard of Simple Desks before, but it still makes me sad that it is gone.

I'm very, very sympathetic to this issue, and agree that it hurts when any site goes down. However, Simple Desks was mostly a curated gallery of what already exists on the internet. A quick Google search for "Simple Desks" will turn up basically the same thing.

The other question to ask is whether permanence is a value worth holding for all things. Is it really worth holding onto all of that email? (This is a personal question, for everyone to answer, not for one person to dictate over others.)

My friend wrote a great piece on this recently (http://patrickrhone.com/2011/12/20/permanently-impermanent). It reflects on the freedom of not worrying about losing everything. He doesn't advocate being complacent, but simply acknowledging that no system is 100% sure to maintain our bits.

In the present case, hasn't this in fact been dictated?

> Destroying bits is so darn easy, that people do it too much.

Really? This is only the third time I've heard of it happening intentionally in at least as many years. (the other two being whytheluckystiff.net and diveintomark.org). It doesn't seem like it happens very often at all.

I had a Wordpress blog with several million hits on it. I ran out of time to update it.

I let the hosting expire because I was tired of wondering if there was a new exploit in Wordpress and dealing with dozens of spam comments every day even with Recaptcha.

That makes sense, but in this case the blog was hosted on Tumblr. Free, no need to worry about vulnerabilities, and virtually no spam.

I wonder if there is a simple open-source tool that can convert WordPress blogs into static sites for archival. Like, just crawl the site, save everything as static HTML, and write some .htaccess rules to replicate WordPress's permalink structure. Everything will remain exactly where it was, except there won't be any vulnerabilities and you can't accept comments anymore.

But I suppose the author really is the kind of person who likes clean desks -- the kind of person who cannot stand the sight of no-longer-maintained things being scattered around his part of the Internet. (cf. SoftwareMaven's comment about virtual hoarding above.) If that's the case, I can understand, because I'm a bit like that, too.

httrack?

"""Destroying bits is so darn easy, that people do it too much. I don't delete emails. (...)"""

The music from Hoarders come to my mind reading this...

Compared to tangible-stuff-hoarders it's all to easy to be a bit-hoarder. I've kept my share of bits over the years (tons of albums I never listen to, old emails and such).

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