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Comment by Thorrez | Hacker News Reader

>This agnostic, wide-ranging crawl likely represented both the original source of the image

Why do they say it's likely that the person who first posted the image on the message board got the image from the Internet Archive?

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I thought the same thing. If you look at the crawled page, it's only one of like 20 images that survived.

So either the crawl got lucky and saved the only relevant image, or there is survivor bias.

Then again, the actual crawl might be triggered precisely because the image was linked.

What do you mean there is survivorship bias? That the only image used is the one that survived? Or it survived because it was used?

Something I noticed was that all other jpgs in this site have a lager number in the filename, for example: www.hobbytownoshkosh.com/Dsc00348.jpg

So maybe the crawler that saved this webpage had a limit on how many suburls it would capture and it sorted by name and then stopped at around Dsc00161.jpg, which is the name of the image in question. Though there is a Dsc00164 that is lost so it seems kind of unlikely...

That might have been the 161st image taken by an old Sony camera.

Cyber-shot model names use a DSC prefix, which is an initialism for "Digital Still Camera".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber-shot

The filename for sure comes from the camera. My point was that the crawler stopped there and did not pick up the other images on the page because all of them have a higher number in the name and it stopped at an artificial number of sub urls

My guess is because the image didn’t exist in other archives and it’s a very obscure site so why would someone have seen that? More probable they stumbled on something random like this in the wild or on Internet Archive?

Why would someone have been looking at an very obscure site on the Internet Archive? Why is that more likely than looking at it on the web?

Because the obscure site had not existed for years when the copypasta first appeared. So someone would have had to have found that obscure site and then saved the image for years before using it.

Honestly, both options (website or archive) sound pretty unlikely to me. I'm wondering if instead it was a third option: maybe the originator of the copypasta was the person who originally took the photo. It would make sense for them to remember the event and go pull a good image out of their photo folder.

Or a fourth. The world is filled with a myriad of people, and we all have weird hobbies and drives. I can see an 'artistic type' of person, seeing an image and thinking "Oh, that's grungy" or some other label to the room/etc.

And "collecting" it. EG, saving it.

Some people will stare at live ants for hours, others collect rocks. I can imagine a person out of billions, liking "weird, musty rooms" or some such.

But who knows, heh.

They have an index of all images. Maybe someone picked a random image (I don't see a Random button, but one could exist?) or happened to look at this index the day it was added, or just clicked through to 2002 looking for something nostalgic https://archive.org/details/image

The discussion is about Wayback Machine rather than the link you suggest.

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