
Miiverse archive recovers 17TB of social mirth after Nintendo’s shutdown - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/01/missing-nintendos-miiverse-network-check-out-this-17tb-online-archive/
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jesperlang
Could data become part of UNESCO's world heritage? Nowadays alot of culture
happens in the digital space and it's always a tragedy when huge amounts of
cultural creations just vanish into nothing. Web archives are perhaps not
enough, lots of content are inside walled gardens, convincing a company to
release all that information is a different question of course :)

~~~
ragnarawk
No. World heritage sites are of archeological interest, whereas marking and
preserving only some internet properties perhaps less than a decade old, would
only play into the hands of sycophants bent on gaming the UNESCO system for
personal gain.

The reality is that an UNESCO site is something that warring factions should
agree to avoid destroying with bombs and guns, even while they eviscerate each
other amid very real bloodshed.

You can’t make such a promise that destroying a certain server in a data
center may or may not cost the world something valuable. Furthermore, there
are not warring factions in the equation, to threaten precious data centers
housing your precious data.

You would waste UN resources on... bought and sold consumer products? Why not
a clutch of warez d00dz cracked proprietary software? Who decides what world
heritage is?

The wrong kind of war might seek to destroy your precious garbage, if there’s
no obvious reason it’s special.

~~~
derefr
> You can’t make such a promise that destroying a certain server in a data
> center may or may not cost the world something valuable.

Think on a different level of abstraction. Cyberwar is a thing; cyberweapons
are a thing. You could totally have rules about what online services state-
sponsored malware shouldn't try to attack. It would make just as much sense to
protect Archive.org as it would to protect the Library of Congress.

~~~
dysphoric
Except political motives exist to preserve the powers that be, and their
culture.

There’s less skin in the game, when the preserved items are thousand year old
buildings in ruins, of intrinsic interest to tourists from all walks of life.

Compare examples of physical architecture to bar fliers advertising happy hour
and ladies night. Video game profiles rank closer to bar fliers, even if the
architecture in ruins is the bar itself.

~~~
derefr
This discussion isn’t about profiles per se; Miiverse was essentially a game-
visible
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oekaki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oekaki)
forum. It’s the drawings that are worth preserving, being actual acts of
artistic creation.

I mean, you could still compare this to things posted up in a bar—but it’d be
the doodles people have made on their placemats. Some of those placemat
doodles are genuine works of art, you know!

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ivoras
Why?

Communities die, people die, and more importantly, they change. While it used
to be that if you wrote something stupid on a wall or carved it into a tree,
with a natural expectation that it will get erased or destroyed over time, now
even when behemoth social networks shut down, there are apparently enthusiasts
which want to conserve every creepy pasta and highdea everywhere. Just because
it can be done.

At best, the users should have been given the chance to download whatever they
want for private use, and the rest should rightly get obliterated.

Many people would object less to Facebook if it probably deleted all content
not marked "important" after a year, rather than creepily storing everything
ever.

~~~
shakna
One of the most exciting archeological pieces we have from the Roman empire,
is graffiti spouting the same mundane things people scrawl on bathroom walls
today.

> At best, the users should have been given the chance to download whatever
> they want for private use, and the rest should rightly get obliterated.

This is a hard one. The right to be forgotten is probably something the
average person should have.

But equally, human history can be understood and shaped by some of the most
mundane things, and our descendants have a right to review that. To understand
it.

I don't have a solution to it.

> Many people would object less to Facebook if it probably deleted all content
> not marked "important" after a year, rather than creepily storing everything
> ever.

It is not their storage of data I find creepy. It is the fact that this
permanent storage is actively used, sold and traded. A deleted profile
shouldn't be able to follow you around the web, and continue to build upon
itself.

~~~
lj3
The "The right to be forgotten" applies to private information made public
against a person's will, such as revenge porn or showing up in search engine
listings. It does not apply to content willing contributed to a public
community, like HN, reddit or Miiverse. What facebook does still applies,
though, because a lot of the data they use, sell and trade is data their users
think is private.

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saagarjha
> The entire Archiverse archives are posted under an open source license, free
> for mirroring or even personal download if you want to perform a deep,
> offline analysis. I hope you've got a 17TB hard drive lying around...

I'm curious about the legality of offering these under an open source license,
since I'd assume that the original content isn't in the public domain yet?
Unless Nintendo's TOS had placed these under that license itself?

~~~
doesnt_know
Is it really a grey area? Surely it's just plain old copyright infringement?

If facebook shuts down it doesn't mean all multimedia content that was ever
hosted there suddenly gets dumped into the public domain. At most you gave the
company that run the site an irrevocable, international license to that
content (depending on their TOS), it doesn't apply to everyone else and it
didn't get put into the public domain or under some other open source license.

Nintendo is sending all users their post history so they can personally
archive it if they wish. If anyone else archives it, it's just copyright
infringement...

Personally, I respect the work that the Internet Archive and other archivers
do, so this is definitely not a hill I'm willing to die on.

~~~
syntheticnature
Indeed, they've run afoul of this before when mirroring sites, often niche
ones that notice the uptick in traffic and whose users are attentive to their
content rights.

It's an interesting conflict -- there is a benefit to saving things in case of
site failure, but simultaneously it is a problem on a copyright basis,
particularly for written works where the author themselves feels small next to
the Internet Archive. They've walked a fine, fine line with various items like
DOS abandonware games where the owners are potentially in more of a position
to "lawyer up."

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coolandsmartrr
I don't understand why Nintendo has shut it down in the first place, in spite
of its popularity. These community features can enhance user experience,
especially when implemented right in the game. Why wouldn't they even continue
Miiverse on later consoles like the Switch?

~~~
CM30
It's hard to be sure, but it seems like it could be a cultural shift more than
anything else. The Wii, Wii U and 3DS had tons of little extra services and
channels and what not that didn't directly relate to the games, and often felt
like they were going for the 'toy' feel more than anything else. Meanwhile,
the Switch seems to be designed like a simple games console with the games
being the first and only priority and the extraneous stuff being cut out
altogether.

Kind of like they wanted to go back to basics after the Wii U underperformed.

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kalop
This was the shit.

