
How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost? (2012) - sp332
https://arxiv.org/abs/1209.3026
======
cableshaft
Yep. The way social sites encourage you to share your content via their
websites and only their websites is not good for longevity of content. It will
disappear over time.

I do think you need your content in a share friendly way in order to get any
visibility anymore, but you also need to keep a 'non-social' version of it
(linked from the shared version) if you want it to stick around for the long
haul and maintain link integrity.

I still pay for web hosting, and if I ever get a solid weekend again I intend
to put up a much simpler, almost early WWW homepage, and Archive.org friendly,
to store my projects and thoughts on, that I plan to keep up as long as I'm
still kicking (the domain might eventually change, I haven't settled on that
yet).

I used to want to show off my web developer skills and make fancy pages, but
that just makes me never get around to finishing and/or updating them. There's
a reason busy people often have bare-bones websites, and you can still make a
simple website look decent with HTML and CSS.

~~~
artursapek
I quit using Facebook around 4 years ago and have since then learned AWS
pretty well. Last summer after my son turned 1, I realized I was at risk of
losing all my photos because they were sitting around on random devices and
hard drives. I set up my own 250GB EBS volume and went through everything I
had and archived it in that volume chronologically.

    
    
       /mnt/raw/photos/2014/06/IMG_5930.JPG
    

etc.

I've even built tooling around it to help sync my photos from my computer
whenever I plug my phone in. I also wrote a custom web server in Go that makes
it easy for me to arrange them into albums and email its URL to friends and
family. I even hope to eventually learn Swift and just build an app like
iCloud that will upload everything directly from the phone, with no laptop
required.

It's all completely overkill, but I enjoy knowing that I have full control and
ownership over it. It's a nice little "fuck you" to Facebook. It's also been a
fun project to work on. It's the 2016 equivalent of my parents' bookshelf full
of dusty photo albums from the 90's. At least there's a decent chance it will
survive the next 20 years.

~~~
webwanderings
Sounded all good until I read this: "email them to friends and family."

You have a weak link there. In today's day and age, most people expect not to
send or receive emails. Be that family photos or birthday wishes. The
expectations is to share in a pool of social media, for everyone to see (or
not see).

I am not a naysayer of your method (I prefer email), but it is practically too
much work to select and send emails (takes a lot of thinking and decision
making). This is why one-click sharing on social media, has been able to
evolve to a point where it has set such an expectations across common
denominator crowd.

~~~
GuiA
_> In today's day and age, most people expect not to send or receive emails_

People who don't care about your shit expect not to send or receive emails,
just easy to digest posts in an infinite timeline while they're on the toilet.

But people who care about what you have to send them (e.g. your grandma when
you send her pictures of you and your boyfriend on vacation, your dad when you
send him pictures of his grandchildren, a close friend when you tell her about
your new job) are very happy to receive what you have to send to them and
reply to it, no matter the medium.

Yes, if you want to address 99% of your social network email is probably not
as good as Facebook, but if you only care about the 10% that's closest to you,
the technology doesn't matter. One of my best friends from high school still
sends me paper letters, and I am ecstatic to receive them when I do.

~~~
webwanderings
I agree with you. I clarified similar position in a followup[0]. However,
let's not just confine ourselves to grandma and personal pictures. The issue
is all encompassing content; some of lesser value, and some greater. You may
think all of your shared content is of value, but the receiver may not feel
the same. You have to judge (think) before you direct your message. It is of
course an easy choice to send baby's pictures to the grandma, but when you
have to target different pictures, you have to think about the target
audience. Going one level deep, you may have a story to share instead of a
picture. You are now hard pressed to email because you know others may have
already seen it, or something else.

Ultimately, the evolution of the web to the social media has happened due to
human's lazy nature. We are not capable of directing messages of mass nature
to one-on-one. We can direct messages of personal nature to one-on-one, but
that's about it. For this reason, social media - versus email - has been able
to make inroads into people's lives. Certainly, we feel that one-to-many is
not the right approach, hence we form this or that group, to confine ourselves
into self-created boundaries (groups have its own pros and cons).

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345534)

------
Bartweiss
There are at least two distinct patterns producing this result.

One is the obvious pattern of sharing new and ephemeral content. John Kerry's
campaign site was popular for a time, but disappeared with waning public
interest.

The second, more interesting pattern is of content which is lost _because it
is shared_. Think of works like Flappy Bird - taken down to spare its creator
excess attention - or copyright-violating works that face legal action when
they grow too notable. Seeqpod remains one of the best internet music services
I've ever found. I used it for two years, after which it became notable and
won enough R&D awards that the record industry sued it into bankruptcy, a
victim of its own success.

The simple result here, about disappearing content, is worthwhile. But I would
be fascinated to see an investigation of how many shares are received by
content which is _removed_ instead of _abandoned_ , to look at what
constitutes critical mass for legal and financial headaches.

------
grillvogel
the same could be said of most forms of media. how many stupid tv commercials
and made for TV movies are only preserved via a betamax cassette at a
hoarder's house?

~~~
CM30
Tons and tons of works are basically lost because of this. It's the kind of
thing the Lost Media Wiki is trying to track:

[http://lostmediawiki.com/Home](http://lostmediawiki.com/Home)

And for an example of a made for TV movie nearly lost this way... well, the
Rapsittie Kids Believe in Santa was only found in September 2015, presumably
thanks to some random guy saving it on a tape or something:

[http://lostmediawiki.com/Rapsittie_Street_Kids:_Believe_in_S...](http://lostmediawiki.com/Rapsittie_Street_Kids:_Believe_in_Santa_\(Found_CGI_Animated_TV_Movie;_2002\))

Of course, it also kind of proves that a lot of lost media isn't particularly
good (the film mentioned there is one of the worst animated films ever made,
and yet somehow still managed to air on network TV), but yeah, same thing
applies. Lots of thought lost or thought non existent media is just waiting
around on videos and cassettes.

~~~
at-fates-hands
Wired did an article back in 2015 about the underground bunker that houses
some of the most famous Hollywood movies:

Inside the Nuclear Bunker Where America Preserves Its Movie History -
[http://www.wired.com/2015/07/film-
preservation/](http://www.wired.com/2015/07/film-preservation/)

 _Willeman presides over more than 160,000 reels of combustible cinematic
treasure, from the original camera negatives of 1903’s The Great Train Robbery
to the early holdings of big studios like Columbia, Warner Bros, and
Universal. And more barrels keep showing up every week._

------
tmaly
I use a backup over the net provider for all my photos and videos, it costs me
about $5 a month.

This is one of the reasons I started my food side project
[https://bestfoodnearme.com](https://bestfoodnearme.com) I realized if I
shared an amazing dish on a social network, it would get lost in the timeline
black hole after a short duration.

------
anotherevan
I was using thinkup.com for the last few years as a way to archive my FB and
Twitter postings - alas it is no more.

Wish there was a good tool to do this (on Linux - so digi.me is not an option
(not to mention clunky as hell)).

Would also love to be able to archive my HN comments. There's been times when
I've wanted to recall something I know I've previously written here, which has
been a bit laborious to find.

------
jkot
Is it a bad thing? I imagine most results from such data will not have direct
benefit for users (advertisement, profiling, persecution).

~~~
pmlnr
Tricky question.

At the moment destroying these means destroying people's external memory. The
"promise" was to keep them for us, so we needn't have to worry of keeping it
ourselves, and so we can "live" more, since there is less to worry about.

Many will only realize years later how bad this is, and will try to re-live an
experience which they physically attended to, but not really took apart in it
- just to find that all of this is gone.

So at one point, it's a good thing that they are gone: people will learn not
to rely on them. From another perspective, it will result it a lot of lost
memories.

But hey, we need to learn our lessons somehow.

~~~
jkot
Sounds like a good idea for startup. Archive someones social media, if they
require it. Perhaps browser plugin which archives all visited pages with some
filtering.

~~~
sp332
To me, startups are a little too flaky for this job. They have a pattern of
deleting customer data when they fail, and the nature of startups is that they
mostly fail. I'd prefer a tool I can run locally, or a larger established
player like the Internet Archive.

~~~
ashark
I keep looking for a good long-term, low maintenance solution for storing,
organizing, and sharing family data (photos, videos, stories, _et c._ ) and
haven't found anything even close to good enough for me to commit to it. It
must be a Hard Problem, I guess. Or demand is low because everyone just relies
on Facebook or whatever to do it for them.

~~~
dublinben
I recommend taking a look at GNU Mediagoblin for collecting/sharing your
personal media. It supports multiple file types, like pictures, video, audio,
and text.

------
rurban
I lost much more with web, email servers or databases going down, than
anything on one if the big social sites. Google code was a big loss but had a
nice exporter.

------
amelius
This makes me wonder: does Archive.org crawl Youtube?

~~~
sp332
They seem to have some YouTube pages archived e.g.
[https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.youtube.com/watch?...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0)
They're definitely interested in archiving interesting videos but the project
isn't there yet.

