[efwerf333]

So what's the end-game here? Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with?

This feels religious; Oh, just upload it all to digital Heaven! I'll never "die" and people can continue to revere me and my cats forever!

Just because we can doesn't mean we should care about preserving every bit and byte. Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.

[chimeracoder]

> 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.

[jacquesm]

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.

[macintux]

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

[labster]

I imagine this future institution will be called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.

[username223]

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.

[Chaebixi]

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.

[greglindahl]

The Library of Congress Twitter firehose archive never got off the ground: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-t...

[nl]

And it's too bad, now that Twitter is actually affecting history.

[greglindahl]

Yeah, it's a shame! The Internet Archive does some twitter archiving -- I helped a little by finding a listing of government social media accounts -- but it's not enough.

[nl]

Twitter's policies make it worse, since if you have firehose access you are required to delete tweets when the account deletes them.

This is a well known tactic of many bot-net operators, and has made investigating them much harder.

Even worse, Twitter went and deleted the Russian accounts (and tweets) which Facebook had identified for them...

[greglindahl]

That makes it bad for the Library of Congress, yes, but they're already not succeeding.

IA doesn't have firehose access.

[username223]

> 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.

[eat_veggies]

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.

[Xeoncross]

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.

[greglindahl]

Libraries "weed" books all the time, and most of them are pulped. Which is about like burning them, only the carbon doesn't end up in the atmosphere. So this is probably not the best comparison.

[jhoechtl]

This is a totally wrong analogy. Books were burnt for religios/political reasons. Storify is giving up because of lack of financial instreams for the owners.

[Chaebixi]

Tons of valuable books and records have been burnt because someone thought they weren't valuable or didn't have the money to house them. It's true, it's more likely they were just thrown on a trash heap and left to rot, but trash incineration is a thing.

[johnchristopher]

Parent's comment is about the internet archive, not storify.