> And websites who can't afford hosting, and there's hosting for $5 these days, BTW, self-curate themselves out of existence.
It is not a given that the more a website can afford hosting the better quality they are. For example, many good-quality websites die because the webmasters themselves died (and thus cannot keep hosting the website), and meanwhile there are endless examples of SEO-bait content farms that provide little value, but can easily afford hosting.
This means this "self curation" ends up curating for newer websites better ranked in search engines, which would be the online analogue of libraries having no books from before 2000, and being full of modern day magazines and newspapers of dubious quality. Were Beowulf a website, how long would its owner be able to host it?
Generally, yes. But does Library of Alexandria count as such if officials were confiscating all the books on ships arriving to Alexandria, putting them in the library, and only returning copies to the ship crews and passengers (once these were furnished)? To me, Library of Alexandria in a way was the Internet Archive of the ancient world.
It was curated, but not by the Librarians of Alexandria. The curation was done by travellers who decided that particular books were important enough to bring with them.
Incidentally I've imagined the Librarians scrambling to grab books from the shelves as the Library burned, and wondered if they would have actually "saved" anything.
The idea being, anything the librarians thought worth saving probably existed in other libraries, and would be more likely to have multiple copies survive to this day. Meanwhile, if they grabbed some book of third-tier poetry at random, that would be more likely to be a unique volume.
Along the same lines you could argue that any book collection is being curated by writers, as it's the writers who decide what books are important enough to write.
> Comparing the Library of Alexandria with random web sites is unwarranted. Libraries are curated
I wasn't trying to compare, just making an analogy / metaphor. As in: how many libraries of Alexandria do we lose each day on the web? Because it it's too high a number, then the web is fundamentally broken.
> And websites who can't afford hosting, and there's hosting for $5 these days, BTW, self-curate themselves out of existence
But it shouldn't have to be like that. I've seen some real gems out there that disappeared and weren't backed up on Wayback. Literally all the owner needed was $5 as you say and the site could continue.
There's some complexifiers to this that seem worth recognizing, especially since the "financially drained" that was mentioned was pandemic-related and therefore is likely part of a broader cluster of problems:
1. $5 and tail risk. Even if your financial hardship isn't that bad, if it's still making things more unpredictable, that could be $5 plus a cascade of overdraft fees one day. If things are worse, of course, it could also be your last meal for the month, or your last chance to not go homeless. Better get rid of any expense you can.
2. $5 and executive function. The payment card you were using expired. Are you going to remember to update the info when you're in constant low-grade panic or depression?
3. Relatedly to (2), $5 if you can get to that point in the first place. Maybe you had your site hosted on something more expensive, for… whatever reason. Now you have to remember how to transfer all the files and hope everything still works, and so on.
4. Kind of like (3), $5 except for the more-expensive domain name that seemed like a good idea at the time. Oops. Where are you going to move to? Will anyone be able to find it afterwards anyway?
5. $5 and relationship overhead. Which of these five-dollar hosters are trustworthy? Will they stay that way?
There's probably more.
If we care about preserving the independent Web, these sorts of problems definitely present themselves over the long run. I'm theoretically an affluent-by-many-standards technologist, but I've had issues over time that resulted in my previous sites going splat and just… couldn't really pull together what it would take to revive them, and wasn't that motivated. Decentralization of maintenance-energy overall while having individual sites relying on one or a few people has real inefficiencies that way if permanency is valuable.
> As in: how many libraries of Alexandria do we lose each day on the web? Because it it's too high a number, then the web is fundamentally broken.
If your brain remembered every piece of information it stumbled upon, you'd cease to function before your first birthday.
Your computer would be out of RAM before it gets past its BIOS check.
And your HDD would get filled to capacity in less than a week and become inoperable.
The web doesn't have to preserve everything. 99% of everything is garbage, and I'm being conservative. Forgetting is an essential capability, and we should focus on quality, not quantity.
It is not a given that the more a website can afford hosting the better quality they are. For example, many good-quality websites die because the webmasters themselves died (and thus cannot keep hosting the website), and meanwhile there are endless examples of SEO-bait content farms that provide little value, but can easily afford hosting.
This means this "self curation" ends up curating for newer websites better ranked in search engines, which would be the online analogue of libraries having no books from before 2000, and being full of modern day magazines and newspapers of dubious quality. Were Beowulf a website, how long would its owner be able to host it?