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Comment by nextlevelwizard | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much. Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are nice when you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine and plate of cheese. Otherwise who cares? Nothing is worse than trying to go through bunch of old faded photos where no one - even the owner - can identify who is actually in the picture.

I guess in our day and age we could write extensive meta data about where and when a picture was taken and who is in the picture, but I don't care to look through my own pictures, why would anyone else?

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  > Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are nice when you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine and plate of cheese. Otherwise who cares?

I could imagine a future where DRM and copyright and just the cold fear of ligation could change the recreational screentime for families from being primarily studio-produced content to being primarily ancestor-produced content.

I remember some book I read where the child was constantly hearing about his family's history. Dune, maybe? Maybe a Philip Dick book? Asimov? I'm getting old.

My experience is completely different. I've painstakingly scanned my family's old pictures, transcribed the letters they wrote when on holiday, and still have some school crafts made by my grandparents.

After the death of one of my great uncles who died childless I picked up his photo and music collection. And I discovered the grandfather of a friend of mine in one of his holiday pictures, turns out they used to be friends and we had no idea.

I know my carefully curated collections of stuff will be worth pretty much zero to anyone a I leave them to. They may be interested in the pictures. But that would be about it. My massive cd/dvd/bluray/games/books/coins collection that I have amassed and carefully cataloged. At best it will end up at goodwill/ebay or at worst in the trash.

> Otherwise who cares?

People who can profit. And the idea of profit might be different in future.

That attic might contain a priceless vintage synthesizer, that encrypted drive might contain a priceless set of vintage unpublished club penguin screenshots that would make its AI approximation 0.03% more accurate. Etc.

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