Do you maintain a freely-available repository of all of your knowledge and experience, in case someone else wants to consult it one day?
While the openness of the (now-ending) early days of the internet was liberating and allowed knowledge sharing on an unprecedented scale, the downside is the huge devaluing of that knowledge and skills.
No, but I try to maintain some of it, and I see the value in maintaining as much of it as possible.
The real value of knowledge doesn't change if you duplicate it or make it widely available. On the long term, blocking access and rent seeking doesn't create value, it destroys it. It seems useful for the individual who wants to pay their bills or for the one with insatiable greed but in the end it will makes us stupid.
For example: I would like a high quality UV-B lamp that isn't INSANELY expensive. They are pretty ordinary lamps but developing the coating is very expensive. The work has been done tho, lots of times, over and over again. Most results are just bad.
About 35% of the US and about 1 billion globally have vitamin D deficiency, 50% has an insufficiency: Fatigue, Not sleeping well, Bone pain or achiness, Depression or feelings of sadness, Hair loss, Muscle weakness, Loss of appetite, Getting sick more easily, etc
Great loss of economic productivity or more opportunity for me? You decide!
Call it what most forums are: an ad-supported business. People generate content for the owner for free because they too derive value from the information that others share. The middleman is just a middleman.
To not allow that content to be indexed/cached/archived/mirrored whilst making money off of it is pretty scummy in the long-term. There's tons of forums I used to visit whose information is now forever lost, that included a lot of very useful programs for niche bits of kit, which is now otherwise very expensive e-waste.
Because otherwise their work was wasted.
> Do you maintain a freely-available repository of all of your knowledge and experience, in case someone else wants to consult it one day?
I would if I could, I’ve already contributed what knowledge, bandwidth, and money I can to the Internet Archive. What about you?
> While the openness of the (now-ending) early days of the internet was liberating and allowed knowledge sharing on an unprecedented scale, the downside is the huge devaluing of that knowledge and skills.
I cannot even process how wrong this is. Objectively the preservation of knowledge and skills is a good thing, and you cannot devalue knowledge, which is itself priceless.
This argument really makes no sense. If I tell Bob how to fix his transmission down at the local diner, but nobody records the conversion, that wasn't wasted work. But fixed his transmission: mission accomplished.
Have we really come to a phase of internet use, where everytime you see something, you have to manually save it, and on every post (even here or on reddit, facebook r wherever) a link is not good enough, but you have to copy-paste the whole block of text just to make it a bit future-proof?