
Please, My Digital Archive. It’s Very Sick - diodorus
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/please-my-digital-archive-its-very-sick
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bantunes
This is very sad, but other than donating to the Internet Archive what can we
do? Feels like we'll know more about certain periods of the Byzantine Empire
than 1996 online culture in the near future.

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lm28469
It's just life. Society evolved to make everything a matter of "consume and
move on to the next thing". Tbh I doubt anyone care about 99.99% of things
that have ever been posted on internet, it's juste like paintings, books,
movies, music, or any other medium, most of it disappear, some pieces stay
forever, the world move on.

It's nice to dive in the past from time to time but I don't need a 1:1 archive
on 1996 online culture. There is so much low quality content dumped every
second you'd be hard pressed to archive everything, youtube alone is hundreds
of hours of video uploaded every minute, 24/7/365 for years.

Weirdly enough the only pics left from my childhood aren't digital, they're
from a 1980s film slr (that I still use to this day).

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kace91
I think this is the real danger, survival of personal data.

Digital media is way more vulnerable if you don't know how to take care of it
(taking care of physical photos is pretty straightforward in comparison).
There's going to be a lot of people ignorant of the fact that media like CDs
or even hard drives degrade, that lose their phones and the pictures in it
without a backup, etc. whose memories will be wiped away.

In my country for example, there used to be a fb clone that was all the rage
back when I was a teenager (since fb wasn't translated to our local language
yet back then). The company pivoted and its social media site went offline
after a few years, and many many people lost memories that were exclusively
kept there - I met the CEO in a conference a few months ago and he mentioned
that he's off social media entirely because of the amount of people constantly
contacting him to get their photos back.

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londons_explore
Digital archives and privacy protection are pretty much at odds with one-
another.

Have you looked in an old paper archive? Hundreds of personal letters from
Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin. They talk about all kinds of private
matters, yet are very important for historical research.

Would you be happy with a future digital archive to have all your private chat
messages to other people?

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dublinben
Once I'm dead, I won't care.

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FerretFred
Oh, I can empathise with this .. I had 10 years of self-hosted blog postings
that I backed up daily - or so I thought. When I came to try and transfer the
database tables I found I'd actually just backed up the definitions, none of
the actual data. I'm _still_ kicking myself for that one.

~~~
rhinoceraptor
Have you given the Wayback Machine a try?

------
navane
"Oh, the impermanence!"

