If you'd re-read my post, you'd notice my focus is on the content's quality, and not its age. Age serves as a useful threshold to review if something should stay or not, but it's not the sole criteria.
Important things will be copied and preserved. That's the natural order of things.
Despite I expressed myself very clearly, I expected two types of reactions: knee-jerk reactions like yours, which argue against something I didn't say; and getting down-modded, because the currently accepted wisdom of HackerNews is that we should hoard any type of information regardless of its merit.
Even though it's explicitly against the rules to down-mod to disagree with someone's opinion, every scoring system gets abused this way eventually. I find this sad.
>you'd notice my focus is on the content's quality,
But then you redefined it as 'popular' and 'interesting' content. While something that is popular and holds the interest of people might also be quality content the reverse is not necessarily true. How many quality on maths or chemistry or history or engineering or some remote tribal language or what have you are popular? (Lets assume some arbitrary popularity metric like a million views) Sure you might be able to popularize the 1-2 minute nugget of incomplete/dumbed-down information but I don't consider that quality. And I'm quite sure that you won't be able to actually do anything by knowing some random formula/effect/trivia without the multi-hour lectures associated with their fundamentals.
>Important things will be copied and preserved. That's the natural order of things.
I disagree. We've lost countless important historical documents because they were neglected/destroyed/etc. What you're defining as the natural order is just the 'winners' re-writing history. Its already easy to alter history by altering Wikipedia or buying a news publication and making certain articles un-crawlable. What if Google deleted the cache or Wikipedia did not keep a history of changes? "If you can't Google it, it doesn't exist" is pretty much how the future might unfold. I think its important to preserve even unimportant things.
You might have a point or two in what you're trying to say, but you should really consider the broader argument. Oh and I did upvote you. :)
Important things will be copied and preserved. That's the natural order of things.
Despite I expressed myself very clearly, I expected two types of reactions: knee-jerk reactions like yours, which argue against something I didn't say; and getting down-modded, because the currently accepted wisdom of HackerNews is that we should hoard any type of information regardless of its merit.
Even though it's explicitly against the rules to down-mod to disagree with someone's opinion, every scoring system gets abused this way eventually. I find this sad.