That seems less like an argument for this being a job of Archive Team and more like one for individual Reddit communities and individuals to handle. If the content really matters to people, and the tools to archive that content are available, then it's those entities that are in a better position to archive. Yet, if very few communities manage to take on this task, then that speaks to the lack of actual value that most Reddit content represents.
> That seems less like an argument for this being a job of Archive Team and more like one for individual Reddit communities and individuals to handle. If the content really matters to people, and the tools to archive that content are available, then it's those entities that are in a better position to archive.
Honestly, you're just letting the perfect be the enemy of the good so the job just won't get done.
Everyone can't be competent at and focused on everything, but that seems to be what you're asking.
> Yet, if very few communities manage to take on this task, then that speaks to the lack of actual value that most Reddit content represents.
No, it does not. That's trivially demonstrated by an example where someone had a problem that they got solved in some thread, and then everyone moved on because their problem was solved. Later, maybe years later, someone else has the same problem. By your thinking, because the content ceased to be valuable to someone arbitrarily close to its generation, it doesn't have any "actual value," which is false. Frequently, the "actual value" is found later, by other people.
It has nothing to do with being "perfect". Archiving billions of Reddit posts isn't free or necessarily of enough value to be worthwhile in my opinion.
> Everyone can't be competent at and focused on everything, but that seems to be what you're asking.
No, they're not that incompetent. People are as generally competent as what is demanded of them by their motivation. If the Archive Team, instead of blanketly archiving stuff off Reddit, devoted that effort to releasing archiving tools that make it simple for a 90+ IQ person to back up a Reddit community, that would be more worthwhile and far less wasteful. It would even potentially make communities less dependent on Reddit no matter the outcome of the recent controversy.
> No, it does not.
How so? Scraping old.reddit.com is not hard. Even snapshotting whole pages of the new Reddit can be done if that becomes the only alternative. Given enough motivation to archive valuable information, even a junior developer could do it. If a community is valuable enough, someone will archive it. People don't devote effort to things they don't find valuable.
> It has nothing to do with being "perfect". Archiving billions of Reddit posts isn't free or necessarily of enough value to be worthwhile in my opinion.
No one's making you pay for it.
And my understanding is those billions of blanket-archived posts have been instrumental in training the current crop of "AI" language models.
> If the Archive Team, instead of blanketly archiving stuff off Reddit, devoted that effort to releasing archiving tools that make it simple for a 90+ IQ person to back up a Reddit community, that would be more worthwhile and far less wasteful. It would even potentially make communities less dependent on Reddit no matter the outcome of the recent controversy.
Honestly, you seem to just be really confused about this whole archiving thing. Like you have it backwards about what's cheap (bandwidth and storage) and what's not (human effort), so you're advocating spending expensive resources to conserve cheap resources. Furthermore, you have some strange preference for isolated individual efforts, which are totally unsuited for actual preservation, which really requires long-lived institutions to be successful.
> How so? Scraping old.reddit.com is not hard. Even snapshotting whole pages of the new Reddit can be done if that becomes the only alternative. Given enough motivation to archive valuable information, even a junior developer could do it. If a community is valuable enough, someone will archive it. People don't devote effort to things they don't find valuable.
That's twisted logic. People do find these communities valuable and they do devote effort to archiving it, but that's not actually good enough for you. You deem that only certain people should archive, and if they don't do it (maybe they want to, but are busy with other things) it shouldn't be done. Either you don't realize the flaw there, or it's just a way of indirectly saying "I don't like it, so don't do it, period."
