> Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.

Of all the arguments against archiving information like this, "environmental costs" has to be the least convincing one. Storify posts are just a bunch of links to tweets, and those are already intended to be archived by the Library of Congress. A static database dump of Storify content has negligible cost and is highly compressible.

If you want to talk about the environmental impact of tech, let's talk about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, or the usage of rare earth metals in non-recyclable hardware that gets replaced every year[0].

[0] This is generally non-recoverable. Even Apple, which claims to recycle their hardware, recovers very little from the process.

You never know what has historical relevance until it is history. That lesson was learned the hard way and so now if something can be preserved at low cost we'd do well to at least attempt to keep it around until history can judge it.

Trump's presidential library is going to be a Twitter archive.

Yo,

I clearly don't agree with this guy, but I don't see any reason to downvote/flag him into oblivion. I both upvoted and vouched this comment, not because I agree or think it's valuable, but because it doesn't deserve to be disappeared. Comment if you feel like it, or page on by if you don't. Ironically, his words will live on forever.

I think you're misunderstanding the context.

IIRC, this isn't a collection of all tweets, etc (though the Library of Congress is already doing that), it's a curated collection of tweets, many important enough that some journalist somewhere bothered to write an article about them.

> Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with?

That seems kind of dumb, but with Moore's Law still mostly working for storage, it's also cheap -- certainly cheaper than building actual libraries. There's also currently no way to mark URLs as temporary, so we can't distinguish the permanent from the ephemeral. Finally, it's far cheaper than having everyone who wants to save URL content archive it on their own personal box (plus however many backups), which is what I do now if I really want to use something again.

Given that it was used by a lot of news websites, there's a lot of legitimate history in there, whether we see it as such or not. That's worth preserving.

While everyone would agree with this, everyone doesn't agree with what should be thrown away.

Burning books because they aren't "valuable" is dangerous ground. Safer to store everything.