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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

I remember in the 90's the promise of the Internet was that it would be a resilient repository of all human knowledge and cultural artifacts. I remember people pointing out that the Internet was designed to survive even a nuclear war, so tragedies like the loss of the Library of Alexandria would never happen again.

Instead, we got link rot, abandonware IP, and lots of memes.

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I wonder who was promising that. It's a lot more like a postal system where you can mail huge volumes of data instantly and for almost no charge, but mailing your neighbor or friend is incredibly difficult compared to mailing a company and getting a reply.

Stuff definitely falls through the cracks.

Even the 20-something-year-old promise of Google to "index the world's information" has failed pathetically. I frequently can't find things I'm looking for, because all I have left in my head is a fingerprint of "I'll know it when I see it" and maybe a couple odd keywords that aren't enough to pull any signal out of the noise.

In one case I got ChatGPT to help me find a book I'd been missing for years because the generic keywords like "magic staff", "tree", "volcano crater" returned jack shit on common search engines. (It was "The Ancient One" by T. A. Barron, if anyone else is stuck looking for it too)

In another case I found a book on Kagi.

The Library of Babel is a much closer analogy. Everything _might_ be in there, but you probably aren't gonna find anything worthwhile. lol.

Specifically, AT&T predicted/promised it in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will (directed by Fincher before people knew who he was)

Just an aside: for SF and fantasy, the scifi stack exchange is an invaluable source to identify a story by a few random bits, they have a specific tag/label for questions like that and it never failed for me.

With offline archive via kiwix!

The internet was originally designed to be robust in the face of nuclear war, but that meant packets could be routed over the network even when individual point to point connections were lost.

I remember seeing an ad for whose premise was a cheap hotel where "we have every movie ever made on our TVs".

That was one promise of the streaming future... but there was never an understanding that the internet was permanent.

Even during the initial fad of "everyone needs their own homepage" before geocities, most pages were dead or broken or obsolete in a few months.

A large distributed redundant archive of data would be useful... probably with some mechanism where you can donate resources to preserve the data you like without having to support the stuff you don't care about (because resources are finite.)

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