[buro9]

You have no inherent right to other people's data, regardless of how they shared it or the visibility of it at the time they shared it. You are not owed the sum of human knowledge.

If people wished for their content to be available to all forever they'd run a blog and pay to ensure it is available, and would proactively seek to get it archived.

People on forums aren't doing that, and the data of any given individual is a contextless collection of semi-random mumblings on different topics because without the fullness of a conversation involving others none of it makes sense.

It is within that context that a forum admin can decide what to do, they have been granted right (by T&C) to the collection of all the forum members comments which restores the context and gives meaning to the content. Every individual on the forums I operate can obtain their own data, but it would be meaningless by itself.

As the operator of the collection of content I get to determine what best to do with that, and sometimes that may be to delete it all. Sometimes that may be to seek to archive it. And on this occasion it is to treat this knowledge as having valuable to those already participating in the community and to not be shared beyond that.

Elsewhere you said this:

> Call it what most forums are: an ad-supported business. People generate content for the owner for free because they too derive value from the information that others share. The middleman is just a middleman

But the 300+ forums I run have no adverts, they are not a business, they are non-profit. Their value (if you want to measure everything in a capitalist way) is social, to help those in the community.

The purpose of the forums I run isn't to expand the sum of human knowledge, or to make myself personally wealthy of the back of the efforts of others, the purpose is to help be a remedy to adult loneliness by connecting people by their shared interests in geographically small areas such that it builds relationships and forms bonds.

Yes there is a hell of a lot of expertise captured here around those interests... but no-one has any inherent right to it.

[tourmalinetaco]

There are no downsides to preserving information, but there are all the downsides in the world to losing it.

[buro9]

This tangent is in relation to my shuttering one forum.

That forum was around a music band in the UK, and the audience of the forum turned out to be lower than expected - University age. They were emotionally immature, over-shared online, slept with each other, had relationships and break-ups... all in public. The music forum did have lots of music info on it, but it was intertwined with a lot of very highly personal information posted at a time when a reasonable expectation of the internet was ephemerality.

It was totally right to protect the individuals future selves from their past selves, and I would delete again.

[patrick451]

There are certainly downsides to hording data. At the very least, information takes up space. It also tends to suck up mental bandwidth: you have to keep organizing, de-duplicating, and migrating to newer formats. It's much easier to just delete it. Just like it's much easier to throw old ratty tshirts. IMO, data hoarding is just as much of a mental disorder as hoarding physical stuff.

This idea that all information must be preserved for forever is also at odds with privacy. See, e.g., the right to be forgotten.

[chromoblob]

I think that the reason that many people don't put much effort into archiving information is a cultural one. Most people simply haven't given much thought to the question of fate of information or knowledge they happen to find, and the importance of preserving that knowledge for health of society's discourse.

What if we made archivism more fashionable?..