[borisjoffe]

I love the emphasis on data export / analysis and ownership of your data. I also love the quantified self aspects of this.

However as I've gotten older, I've learned that it's incredibly freeing to at least partially let go of some of your data and not worry if it gets lost or erased.

Tracking and managing all of this sucks up a lot of time and mental effort, that you could be using to progress in other areas of your life. I prefer to focus on the present instead of letting the past occupy so much of my mind.

On one hand, keeping backups of important files and automating that as much as possible is good. Tracking your top 2-10 most important habits (e.g. sleep, workouts) can also be very good.

But for social media sites (like Reddit, HackerNews, Twitter, YouTube, etc), it's just too much of a pain to manage. And they can kick you off in a heartbeat for any reason. I personally treat all content on those sites as potentially being erased at any time.

If I have anything important (e.g. a good post, comment, or image that I want to save), I make sure to save that locally, usually in a personal outliner/wiki that I use called zim-wiki (it's like Evernote/Notion/Obsidian, but it's all just flat wiki-formatted plain text files and folders that are easily greppable and scriptable). You can also post the best content on your own site. None of this requires regular social media exports, APIs, or any programming - you can just copy/paste/save this content as you create it into your own categorized section of your filesystem or PIM tool.

[rektide]

> However as I've gotten older, I've learned that it's incredibly freeing to at least partially let go of some of your data and not worry if it gets lost or erased.

I'm ok with people opting to let it go.

What's uncool is how much effort it takes, how ridiculous it is to opt to do anything other than let it go. To marshal oneself & one's data should not be a huge sprawling saga, fought for tooth & nail every step of the way. Resisted at every step.

This is not an ok condition for humanity to try to live under. As Geohot said[1], we are coming to live in an eternal prison. Providing the advice to let it go, find happiness in these conditions, is what I hear again and again and again on this site, and I'm mad. I'm mad people advocate for giving up agency, will, control, for what feel like the most core genuine & true pieces of humanity. I'm ok with the option, absolutely, but only as a choice. And today there is no choice at all.

[1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/01/18/techn...

[xupybd]

Everyone needs a hobby. If this is the authors, great!

It's cool and meets exactly the nerdy cool factor I look for in articles on HN.

Would I invest time into doing the same, nope but then I don't think many out there would spend the same time I spend on my hobbies.

[brokenmachine]

The problem that I have is that three years down the track I will suddenly think of a topic and remember just a few details of a really good blog post or comment thread that I would like to read again, but I can never find it.

I'm just not very good at knowing in advance which is the 0.001% of posts I will want to read again.

Storage is so cheap that in my ideal world, I would like to store everything I read and post. But that's difficult as you mentioned.