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by peace2all 2195 days ago
I no longer support the IA. They are a few people who needed a “mission” in life. But they aren’t true librarians or historians.

They waver between flighty utopian idealism and arrogance and self-justifying activism.

It’s getting old. For every “practical” use of the IA, there are just as many concerns.

No one really needs the old internet or all the old Geocities website and first design interactions or personal blogs. There’s no market for it and no one would pay for it.

If these folks had to hand-copy items or make photocopies, they would have quit a decade ago.

They use scraping and cheap hardware to “brag” about their massive knowledge base in the petabytes. Honestly, no one cares.

Outside of the circles of other digital borders and some tech circles, everyone else is playing with their kids, mowing their lawns, reading books, and such. Try to get your neigbor to go look at an IA website from 1996. They’ll just go watch Netflix instead.

1 comments

Funny, I recently stared in wonder at a cuneiform tablet in a museum. When I looked at the description, I found out that it was a log of how much wheat was sold in a transaction several thousand years ago. Why do you think we consider that kind of thing interesting?
Who is “we”? How many people go to museums and really explore them?

But at least you made my point. IA is a museum, but run by amateurs displaying not Egyptian history, but homepages of 13-year olds from 1997.