[bryanrasmussen]

the discussion was about works that were declared illegal. The burning of the library of Alexandria under Theophilus has some connection to that idea, but it is I think wider. Every referenced lost work from Rome was not lost because they were declared illegal.

[lazide]

The discussion was ‘history is written by the victors’, which isn’t just making books illegal. It also includes making things (intentionally) irrelevant, destroying old copies, etc.

Hell, most early Bibles count, or do you think the council of Nicea resulted in something other than what is being described for large swathes of early church writings?

[bryanrasmussen]

the comment I replied to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296466

>It also depends on whether book written is deemed illegal.

the discussion may be wider than that comment, but my comment, even if one did not want to give it a charitable reading and was really intent on winning an HN argument today for some reason - which I understand, I been there - would really be most reasonably interpreted as a comment that making books illegal often has the exact opposite of the desired result.

With charity one might also conclude that there is an implied link between quality of the winners in these scenarios, but anyway you seem to have some particular problem and unwillingness to say "huh, well the guy replied to a comment regarding making books illegal and only seems to think that is what is under discussion, I guess no arguing him out of that" so I guess we should just stop rather than you throwing out examples in which books have been changed, under the mistaken assumption that I know nothing about this history (I have read the Apocrypha, the Pseudopigrapha, and the "forgotten books of Eden", so I believe I have a reasonable knowledge regarding your latest sally)

[lazide]

My comment was less about rules lawyering, and more about the meaning - I would think?

The Council of Nicea - for one example - definitely did NOT make all the alternatives more popular/less dead, right?

Sometimes the streisand effect is real and permanent, sometimes it’s just temporary and the bans/stamping out/destruction work. And unless we’re buried under a mountain of ‘all the others’ which I don’t see, there is a whole lot of it which just goes away through the passage of time because of those effects. Which looks to me like 100x’ish, due to the ‘reverse pyramid’ effect of history.

Or are you making another point i’m missing?

[bryanrasmussen]

OK fair enough I guess, although not sure about how well the bans, stamping out, destruction works given distributed electronic information and mass printing technologies, most of the obvious examples of written content being destroyed come from before the printing press being widely distributed.

Most recent destroyed content is more likely to be prints of films, in other words things that had a higher cost of reproduction than written content.

[lazide]

Me neither - technology does change the game. Hopefully we won’t find out right away?