[contrarian1234]

I think that's great.. archiving should be opt-in not opt-out

You can read and access my work/words as I want. And once I don't or change my mind you can't. Once someone posts something, you don't have a right to it in perpetuity .. That's how things should work - but that's just my opinion

[TeMPOraL]

Except for the artifice that is copyright, things don't work like that for anything else. Reality doesn't work like that.

> Once someone posts something, you don't have a right to it in perpetuity

On the contrary, once someone posts something, they don't have control over it anymore. You can't make me unsee what you wrote, or unhear what you said. You have no right to stop me from writing it down, and even if you can stop me from republishing it verbatim right now, you generally don't have the right to do it indefinitely.

> And once I don't or change my mind you can't.

To be clear, I'm not dogmatically firm about it, but I believe that a word in which you get to distance yourself from past views, or mark them mistaken, and people accept it, would be much better than the world in which you're free to gaslight everyone else by pretending that something never happened, even though it did.

(All that on top of the usual point that it's neither the author nor their audience that can judge what's archive-worthy - only future people can.)

[contrarian1234]

I think the core issue is that you have no rights over other people's labor. If I want to share something in an ephemeral way, I should be able to - and have the power of the state to support me

If you create something physical, say a popup art installation, it's trivial to dismantle it and it stops existing (other maybe in some photos or video). When it comes to text the same isn't as simple and it requires a social compact (ie laws)

As for gaslighting, you can archive things without redistributing them. You can just publish hashes of what people published and only redistribute/republish in the context of proving someone said something

[notkaiho]

Brilliant argument/username combo :)

[leononame]

I Disagree. There's not a big difference between someone reading your stuff and saving it versus automatic archiving. Being able to delete what you said makes real discourse with a bad actor very hard if not impossible. If you change your mind, you are always free to rectify, but you shouldn't be able to pretend you never said this or that.

I know there's a line to draw somewhere, personal blogs aren't our countries' leaders' Twitter accounts or press conferences. Copying someone's copyrighted work in form of an archive might some legal implications I'm not aware of. But keeping things for posteriority is important and I don't believe people should be able to choose what part of their words and actions will be recorded and which won't.

[johnfernow]

In the UK, if you publish a book, magazine or newspaper, by law you have to send a copy to the British Library for archive. A lot of other countries have similar laws. In the UK, legal deposit has expanded to include the web (so long as the person/group creating the content is in the UK), but since many individuals and small businesses are unaware of legal deposit, the UK Web Archive will archive a lot of the web by themselves.

Tom Scott interviewed some people from the British Library, and they explain the importance of archiving:

> The importance of legal deposit not being selective, and being everything, is: we can't decide today what's going to be important in 50 years' time. We want everything, because we don't know what will be important.

He also added his own thoughts:

> I cannot overstate just how useful it is to be able to track down things that never made it online, or to research out of print, forgotten books where there are no other copies available, or to scan through every issue of an obscure local newspaper to track down one reference. This is the raw text of history, as it happened, and someone has to keep it preserved for the future.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM

[contrarian1234]

I'm sure it's "useful" for historians and archeologists. But it's fundamentally problematic.. like unwrapping mummies, it's fundamentally disrespecting people's wishes and exerting your will over other people's labor.

Trying to see the limits of this logic. Would you say that if you paint a painting , you should have no right to shred it ?

Text is just trivial to copy perfectly and doesn't have the intrinsic protection of other mediums

If things were archived in a artic vault to be opened in 1000 years maybe I'd respect the arguments for archiving better

Current "archiving" is steal and rehosting other people's work/labor

[Aeolun]

> archiving should be opt-in not opt-out

That’s really weird. If someone posts a sign on their store window, and I take a picture of it, should I be required to delete the picture when they remove the sign?

[echelon]

Vehement disagree. Many of the early communities I participated in are gone forever, and it's a shame to think of how much more has been lost to time.

In the absolute limit, I hope our future descendents reconstruct the past light cone and can replay all of our biochemical thoughts and emotions. Perhaps even simulating our existence and perception to exacting precision.

Maybe they'll get to see t-rexes in their natural habitat, visit lost 90s websites, and feel what taking the organic chemistry final was like.

[rd]

I’ve had this exact thought a million times.

The first time I tripped acid - I remember writing a page of notes on how sad I felt that I would never get to experience the exact way a memory occurred to me in the past.

What’s even more saddening is that with tech like Rewind, and what’ll be the future of Rewind in 10-20 years, by 2040, I fully expect all memories/events ever produced to be logged in an almost endless database of all human experience.

But - because time is linear, we wouldn’t ever fully be able to simulate the past of say everything before 2030? And that’s just so sad.

[Aeolun]

In one way it’s sad, but if we archive everything from 2040 onward I guarantee that any pre 2040 years will always seem like a better time.

[BirAdam]

Kind of insane to think about. Part of me is horrified to think that this time could be seen as “better” but another part says that past was never what you remember it as…

[contrarian1234]

How about if the community participants actively want to have a ephemeral experience that is then deleted for ever? Why do you (as someone who is doing no work and not contributing) have some right to deny them that?

[porcoda]

Totally agree. The tech community has a massive arrogance problem where we tend towards opt-out vs opt-in for everything. Just because us tech-savvy folks understand the consequences of, say, posting something online, doesn’t mean the bulk of humanity who isn’t tech savvy also understands that and agrees with us.

[JoshuaRogers]

While we in the tech community are guilty of taking many things for granted as generally understood, I’m fairly certain that “consequences for past public statements” predates the bulk of our modern technology.

[bee_rider]

There isn’t any way we can make being copied opt-in, rather than opt-out. We can not copy things. But we can’t prevent other people from copying things. So, it is better to set the expectation that things will be copied, otherwise people will be mislead into thinking they can delete their content, and will post things they regret.

Plus, if everyone can delete their mistakes, we’ll live in a world where it looks like nobody makes mistakes, and so we’ll be less tolerant of mistakes.

[CaptainFever]

Disagree. There's a reason why in many countries copyright doesn't apply to archives, and you can't opt-out of it. It's for history's sake since there's no way to tell what is and isn't important.

> You can read and access my work/words as I want. And once I don't or change my mind you can't.

That's not reasonable.

[stjohnswarts]

I can't agree. It's much better to have a voluntary opt out like with robots.txt. I would say one of the top 10 observations about the internet is that you should consider anything posted publically there will last forever and treat it as such, otherwise you're doing yourself a disservice. Just one guy's opinion, though.

[afpx]

That's why I have alt accounts - one for each of my different personalities.

[bovermyer]

I disagree.

If you publish something publicly, it should be available for all time.

If you change your mind, it's on you to make that known.