Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

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In the pre-digital era, the norm was that content was preserved. Simply because it was printed in newspapers, magazines, books, alsbums, etc.. in thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of copies, so merely by inertia, many copies survived squirreled away in libraries, attics and other storage.

Also, once printed and distributed, it couldn't be taken back and altered since countless original copies existed.

Sure, a lot of it wasn't that important, but only in hindsight of history does it become apparent what was important. So it was possible to go back and research those old unaltered originals.

I fear for history in the digital era. Everything is fleeting, everything is erased and everything can be retroactively altered when the powers-that-be don't like what was said. Thinking centuries ahead, reliable historical records basically stop around 2000-2020 or so.

> In the pre-digital era, the norm was that content was preserved.

So pre-digital, no books, publications, photographic prints, scrolls, tablets, or clay etchings we lost to time?

> Thinking centuries ahead, reliable historical records basically stop around 2000-2020 or so.

That’s basically backwards.

We’re making a stink because people are identifying one needle in a giant pile of needles that they can’t find anymore.

And people point to thousand-year old physical writings that persist, because they persist, and don’t know what was lost because it was lost.

Digital records are far far more long-lived — in the statistical average — than physical.

I'm not sure I've read anything more wrong on Hacker News than this post.

> So pre-digital, no books, publications, photographic prints, scrolls, tablets, or clay etchings we lost to time?

That is already answered in prior post.

> Digital records are far far more long-lived — in the statistical average — than physical.

Obviously that can't be known, simply because the data does not exist yet.

There does not exist any digital data older than a hundred years, let alone a thousand. Will anything digital survive that long? Well, we don't know, come back in a thousand years to see.

So far, the odds are stacked against it. Try to find just some tapes from the 70s to read, and you won't find much. And that's just ~50 years, a blink of an eye in terms of history. Meanwhile my magazine collection and photographs from the 70s are mostly as good as new, as usable today as back then.

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