[echelon]

Anecdotes like this make me so sad at what we've lost.

I spent so much of my early teenage years on Geocities, Angelfire, EzBoards, AIM, ICQ. It's all but vanished.

We should have done a much better job with preservation.

I'm hoping someone will one day bump into un-formatted hard drives from some of these old web hosting companies and resurrect the content.

It's weird to feel so much nostalgia for intangible things.

It's also weird to reminisce about youth. Despite all of the new tech, and the wealth and career I've built, and the people I've met, I sometimes wish I could relive the early 2000s. It feels like all of the adventure and newness has been sucked out of the world. And then I snap out of it.

[Causality1]

I agree with you completely. I miss the days when every website felt like its own solar system, separated by light-years of empty space from all the others. Who you were and what you did on one site had nothing to do with your life on another site unless you went out of your way to make it. When you made a friend somewhere you put them on your instant messenger list and actually talked to them, as opposed to just adding another name to your giant pile of useless Facebook friends. The modern net feels like an endless series of stages with everyone putting on their own show to an uncaring audience instead of real communities. When everything on a website was hosted by the website. I miss when my bookmarks folder had four dozen websites in it that I visited almost every day, instead of five. I used to get news about my interests from ten different sites, now it's just two. I used to get porn from half a dozen places, now it's one. Used to talk to people on five different platforms, now it's maybe two. Used to read over two dozen web comics, now it's just one.

[geocities]

"We should have done a much better job with preservation." - and that is exactly it, people in the future will look back and shake their heads at the callousness with which we just deleted early history

[PavlovsCat]

> "We should have done a much better job with preservation." - and that is exactly it, people in the future will look back and shake their heads at the callousness with which we just deleted early history

I wonder if they'll even look back, at all. Even newspapers post articles linking to tweets or youtube, or articles elsewhere, without mirroring anything. Those will be much more useless than pure text articles that at least describe what they reference. Social media, HN, reddit -- so much is just a stream of things. Permanence and curation, something like building a library, those ideas seem rather abandoned.

[yesenadam]

Facebook seems very good at not deleting data...