[RodgerTheGreat]

It's almost impossible to evaluate what is of lasting value in the moment, while it is readily available.

Imagine an author writes a paperback. It isn't very good, but a few people read it. Later, one of those people goes on to rework some of those ideas into their own script for a film. The film is a success. Years later, the scriptwriter mentions the paperback as an inspiration while giving an interview, but it's long out of print.

To a biographer or a devoted fan of the film, this forgotten book, while of little value in and of itself has become a valuable part of a larger story. If it were culled when the contents of that used book store burned down, we would have lost something without realizing it. And that's how we lose most things. The only way to minimize this is to store as much as we can, in the hopes that we may find a use someday, and thankfully digital storage has made this very, very cheap. The opportunity cost is tiny, and the potential reward, given enough time, is unbounded.

[josephwegner]

But the opportunity cost is not tiny. This is literally a twitter thread asking for financial support.

And I do recognize that the thousands of petabytes will likely be chump change to store in a decade... but necessarily the economies of storage will keep pace with the rate of content production. It will always be expensive to store everything.

The question is, do we gain back this investment from future uses of these archives? I dunno. I’d be interested to hear what value archivists have gotten out of the archives, given it is decently old already.