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0 pointsjariel6y ago0 comments

1) "virtue of there simply being more unique knowledge at this point."

>>>>>>> the IA is not 'knowledge' it's 'information' and most of it is irrelevant to anything - more importantly: All of the important information in the IA is well documented elsewhere. We don't need the IA for much at all.

2) Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like ... This did not happen.

>>>>>>> Of course it did! Lucio Russo / "Forgotten revolution" argues that a large part of the scientific knowledge of the Hellenistic era was lost.

3) "Personally I would like to know if homedepot existed 14 years ago if I wanted to do business with them and they claimed so, or if they tried to censor anything (that case of the US government having honeypot sites archives with code comes to mind)."

>>>>>>> If that's a good example use case - then you've proven my point because there are exactly 0 people in this world using IA to see if 'some business existed 10 years ago in order that they might do business with them due to concerns of honey potting'.

4) "Imagine if a similar effort to archive exists today and in a few thousand years we would be able to use it, this is how I see the internet archive."

>>>>>> Some contents IA might be a little bit useful to a few historians, but beyond that, it will have no meaning.

The IA could be cut down to 1/1000000 it's size, and still, maintain it's historical relevance.

If the IA were vaporized today, it wouldn't really matter that much, there's nothing in there we need, and the important content is saved elsewhere. The NYT has a great archive.

The internet is mostly noise and babble, most of it is not important at all. Some of it is.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

Joeri6y ago· 1 in thread

We can’t judge what is important and what is not. This is a job for the future historians in a millenium.

What historians really need is accounts of how regular people went about their business, without a filter applied by the one recording that account. The internet archive is an excellent resource for this, but only if it is preserved.

Previous ages failed to record what was needed to properly understand that age, not because they lacked the capacity to do so, but because they didn’t consider mundane things worth recording.

Kye6y ago

Seriously. It runs contrary to people's intuition, but things we think of as boring now are what historians will care about more than famous, well-preserved, and widely-replicated materials.

The Stoics were always going to survive into the 21st century, but the graffiti on walls would tell you a lot more about the politics and culture of the time than one well-off scholar's view. All those long-gone personal sites are the graffiti on the wall, and we have a copy of a lot of it.

I learn a lot about things I was only vaguely aware of in the '90s from random magazine clippings/media people like Jason Scott and Anatoly Shashkin share.

https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic

https://twitter.com/textfiles

So much of this is in the Internet Archive. Think of what it means to someone 100 years from now trying to piece together an understanding of this era. How much could you find from just 5-10 years ago without it? Most of those websites are offline, the magazines long gone, the companies absorbed into another with no interest in history.

kalium-xyz6y ago

1. All of the important information at Library at Alexandria is documented elsewhere by definition.

2. Sure, 15% of all academics going poof is the exact same thing as the Library at Alexandria burning down.

3. Those are two separate examples

4. You are replying in a thread about how the internet archive making copies of books and allow people access to those is getting them shut down, would you then argue that the Library at Alexandria is also largely meaningless?

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