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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

So this is the "having stuff weighs you down thread", I guess tomorrow something people like will get deleted off streaming services and we'll have the "owning physical media is The Way" thread.

The thing about archives is that it's never clear what will turn out to be important or valuable. You're buying and storing a pile of lottery tickets. Yes, they're probably worthless. But only probably.

I suspect a lot of people's thinking is informed by the long saga of missing Doctor Who episodes, too.

Edit: here's today's "keep forever" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665593

Myself, I hoard in moderation and don't even have a home media server.

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Case in point: Marion Stokes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...

a noted Philadelphia legend who also made a large fortune on early Apple stock! she's as close you can get to a modern folk tale

I've started saving web pages, since several of my favorite websites went offline, and some even self-deleted from WayBack Machine.

The impression I get is that if I want something to continue existing, it's my responsibility to make that happen.

On a darker note, this appears to be true of civilization in general...

I find it interesting to think about this while listening to historical content like the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Tl;dr, if you want something to survive for millennia, it needs to be carved in stone or you need to arrange for monks to keep transcribing it

I only started to really appreciate having a web page archive after cataloging the coffee I drank, which often have pages full of detail about the beans until they sell out and then, poof!, they’re taken offline.

I think archive.org holds onto copies of websites, even if they're no longer accusable on the wayback machine, as long as they don't get a direct deletion request.

If a domain gets parked and someone adds a robots.txt that disallows all, past versions become unavailable in most cases. Very annoying.

A storyied ephemera shop "plan b",Halifax,ns was closing,and a 3/4" brodcast vhs machine was gifted to me,and much latter upon investigation revealed a tape inside,with "Doctor Who" and an episode that is too blurred to read Also have an ancient steel wire recorder with a role of wire,and going back even further a pair of wax drum dictaphone recorders with drums there are of course ,truely monsterous collections out there lurking with the epic storys known to just a few or perhaps only one disinterested guardian/custodian,and these will keep cropping up for centuries new motszart piece popped up recently was sitting on a shelf safe and sound for all this time

My Observation: If the item is kept long enough, just about EVERYTHING becomes valuable. (I guess that's because other similar items are lost or destroyed over time )

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