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> Posted on Wednesday, May 22, He’s post had been removed from WeChat by the following day, yielding a 404 message that read: “This content violates regulations and cannot be viewed.”

You don't get your comments censored by commenting about natural entropy on the internet. You do get your comments censored by drawing attention to the censors.

I get very tired of people drawing false equivalences between organic human behaviors in the West and intentional abuse by central authorities in China. We can and should do more to preserve our history in the West, but we are already preserving orders of magnitude more data per person than any of our ancestors could have dreamed of. There's no comparison between emails getting lost when someone dies and centralized censors actively purging old content to make it easier to change the party's narrative.

I've love to have a single letter from some of my ancestors.

I have one, actually, from my grandpa's generation. He told another family member about his time growing up in the early 1900s, riding trolleys and eating Walnettos (a strange Walnut-based candy bar). Then the Spanish Flu came around and the eldest sister just died at the breakfast table one day. Later, the family rallied together to care for each other after his father lost his job due to automation. He moved on to doing odd jobs, then later fell off the roof and broke his back, ending up as an invalid for the rest of his days. They talked about the cherry trees they used to feed themselves, which explains grandma's fondness for the cherry soup I hated so much, and how my grandma and grandpa got married and took care of great grandpa while he was invalid.

They also talked about how Wonder Bread (the original sliced bread and origin of the phrase "best thing since sliced bread") came into town and the eldest son went to work for them to support the family after the local baker he had worked for folded, lost a finger to the machinery. At some point, he had some kind of heated dispute at work due to this, was beaten by security, and as I'm told, died from injuries sustained during that beating some time afterwards.

It was a weird little window into bits of family history that would have otherwise been erased.

I have some letters from 3 of my grandparents, but beyond that, it's pretty much nothing.

Interesting perspective!

For us Russians, collective memory for almost all people starts with post-WWII era, usually 1950s. Old generation rarely told me about what was before - although i am old enough to vaguely remember some of my ancestors born around 1895 and spent a lot of time talking to those born around 1910.

One might think that it was about memories being overly heavy - indeed there was Commie and for some, also Nazi terror, hunger, and the stuff - before ~1956 an average Soviet starved at least for several weeks a year, and before ~1951, once in a few years, some relative always died of starvation - that was the norm, but real reason as i understand it, wasn't that. The reason is that there was almost nothing to tell. These people were illiterate peasants living very local-minded lives, without formal jobs (kolkhoz serfdom), without electricity or money, and with very little worldview apart from primitive propaganda pushed once in a while by visiting agitators.

Before WWII, there was almost nothing any of them could tell: only thing that could happen, was repressions, but those to who they happened, couldn't tell anything - they never returned - and their relatives usually forgot of them because it was too scary to remember. Apart from that, it was all the same - endless toil on a small plot of infertile land to produce as much food as possible to avoid kids dying next spring, and keep as much of it from kolkhoz eyes, and slacking off at kolkhoz forced work as much as possible to keep more energy to work on your own plot. Never leaving the village, unless forced out of it by Nazis or Commies (actually happened to my relatives - one day they were forced out of the village and it was razed, moved ~20km away, and left in the field, being issued some formal "compensation" in worthless money - had to dig a new earthhouse). That's the kind of stories i heard.

I can understand why they were not keen on telling them.

Stories of later generations had a lot more of "story" in them and i can understand they lived an actual life.

The original post was about natural entropy on the internet. Websites from 2005 that have disappeared or been redesigned so that you can't find their old content anymore, and the uselessness of search engines, domestic or foreign, for date range queries reaching that far back into the past. Even on the Internet Archive, the earliest working snapshot of Baidu Tieba is from 2006.

You may think that it's impossible for an innocuous post to get censored unless it has inadvertently unmasked a conspiracy to bury the past, but censorship decisions also get made to prevent unwanted reactions. If a post about disappearing content inspires people to complain about censorship, that's enough to suppress it.

If the disappearance of old websites were entirely deliberate, you'd also need to explain why the West is in on it.

> The original post was about natural entropy on the internet.

The post by He Jiayan was, but that post was taken down for violating regulations. TFA is largely about the censorship angle which He Jiayan specifically avoided talking about (not that it helped him).

> If the disappearance of old websites were entirely deliberate, you'd also need to explain why the West is in on it.

Name one figure who was prominent in between 1995-2005 who you can't find any content about from that era when using Google's date filters. A single figure.

Some sites go down organically. It happens. Every site that references a figure who was once favored and is now out of favor? That doesn't happen in the Western internet.

> Name one figure who was prominent in between 1995-2005 who you can't find any content about from that era when using Google's date filters. A single figure.

The original post listed multiple people famous in China at that time (including Taiwanese celebrities) where even Bing and Google didn't get them old enough results. Sure, they return results that supposedly match the date filter, but if you actually read them, it becomes clear that Google got the publication date wrong, because much later events are mentioned in the text. Or e.g. a YouTube video from 2004, before YouTube even existed. (Actually uploaded in 2013.)

Apparently I should have specified: prominent in the West. We've already established decay in the Chinese internet, I want you to back up your assertion that the West is "in on it".

Also, even Jay Chou, who I assume is the Taiwanese celebrity you're referring to, has a bunch of sources that are clearly from those dates:

http://www.china.org.cn/english/culture/81463.htm

https://westeastmag.wordpress.com/2002/09/08/made-in-taiwan-...

https://time.com/archive/6893975/cool-jay/

The west has almost the opposite "problem", where stuff that some people really want hidden and forgotten is replicated and spread and amplified so much that it will never be forgotten. We even have a name for this: The Streisand Effect

It really does illustrate the difference between information being forgotten and being deliberately censored. In the West the harder someone tries to censor information on the internet, the more amplified it is likely to get

Another false equivalence. "Intentionally or not" actually really matters here. It took work to maintain archives in the pre-digital era, and it takes work to maintain archives in the digital era. So many of those physical letters were lost, rotted, burned, etc.

This is a purge, not a failure to maintain archives. This is like when during the Cultural Revolution, they literally burned archives and letters by intellectuals.

I love your replay, your answer is the near perfect summing up of the issue! My view is some here in America are starting to get too lenient towards Russia and other authoritarian states. Do we not understand that these states want complete control and don't care how they get it? Information and educational purges are two of many ways this is done. After that, it gets dirty.

Rule of thumb, if the Constitution says it stinks, it does. If we don't like something in it, work for a change. In China and Russia they don't have that right.

> In the past the physicality of the letters would persist

I'm willing to bet that these physical letters have historically fared about as well as our digital letters are; otherwise, our world would be absolutely filled with the written detritus of the past.

> Those that love historical understanding should be very worried.

As humans we've always disposed of more than we've kept. It's just not worth the energy cost to operate any other way. Thankfully history is recorded as several overlapping collections and not as a series of single data points.

I inherited plenty of handwritten notes, etc. from my father. Not much from my mother.

After I read them, keeping them doesn't serve much of a purpose... in short-term. That's why I keep them.

What you describe as single data points is exactly what we want, but somehow we don't know that until it's too late. We cherish tablets about copper orders from times far past because somehow it's now more valuable. Who's to say yesterday's letters aren't going to be?

> We cherish tablets about copper orders from times far past because somehow it's now more valuable.

There were three discovered tablets and that was one of them. They were discovered in 1920 but only widely known about 100 years later. They're notable because they're described as the oldest found written complaint. They're mildly useful because they describe specific details of the commerce being conducted at the time, which comports well with other contemporary sources of the same information.

This particular artifact was written in 1750 BC. Our oldest writings extend back to 3400 BC. They're not particularly "cherished" but they are a widely known "meme" thanks to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Tangential, but what is "The Feynman Letters" here? I know of a book of some of his letters, but not about censorship/loss thereof.

Perhaps referring to this? I’m not entirely sure. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/mail-censorship/

Oh thanks, it's funny how I had censoring the mail in a different mental category from publication/archives.

Recently: Google refuses to turn up old pages. I was recently searching for a person who used to have a notable web presence before passing away about a decade ago. I had to dig to find a few links, through DDG and Yandex.

Yandex is getting more and more of my web queries lately. There's a definite irony there.

Google and Bing (so DuckDuckGo as well) seem to like searching for synonyms of search terms and returning the most popular results, thinking popular means relevant. I remember looking for something where I remembered the exact terms and not getting anywhere with them, but on Yandex it was the first hit.

Yandex shows what it thinks you want, Google shows what it thinks you should want.

> Intentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings.

Yes.

China's current leadership is terrified of dissent. Even mild dissent. Even discussions within the party. There's no good reason to clamp down that hard. The current leadership is doing a reasonably good job. But they now have an Xi personality cult, which never ends well.

Yes, China botched their housing bubble, but so did Japan and the US.

I would guess that 99.9% of letters are destroyed

one link of jack ma between that time period on badu? bro that cant be no accident. if the chinese govt didnt do this id be more surprised i mean there already censoring most of the internet

Should the rewritten history still be preserved as history then?