Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?

I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.

It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.

I don’t know anything about small US towns but these stories always remind me of stories from Jack Reacher involving small town corruption. Pretty incredible.

Unfortunately here in the UK there has been systematic defunding of things like libraries.

This wasn’t what I read but this looks excellent.

https://archive.org/details/jonah-edwards-presentation

Another super interesting story is about Marion Stokes, who recorded around 71000 cassettes worth of television media from 1975 to 2000s. She houses them in 9 apartments. I need to watch the documentary about her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

I remember I started reading about about this when I wondered what kind of media is “safe” for storage. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. Digital media, unlike print media, is so easy to lose.

I love how so many comments and replies ascribe some form of ‘guilt’ to this, as if HP employees would feel shame. This doesn’t really mean anything to a company that size.

One of the great things about moving to the UK is that, despite all its problems, consumer protection Europe is so much better than in the US.

Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.

Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).

Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.

A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.

There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.

The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.

Hmm to be fair with YouTube you don’t think this is now a repository of incredibly valuable resources? If YouTube went down and we lost all videos, we would be losing many important resources, from historical documentaries no longer easily found in media, to guides on woodworking.

It’s a bit scary. Once you remove the crap, it’s an incredibly valuable library resource and time capsule.

Nah this is changing.

This of course is what they said about tablets. Now people are replacing desktop or laptop workflow with tablets, or alternatively tablets are being designed with removable keyboards so the lines are blurred.

I know scientific researchers who now only travel to conferences with tablets instead of their laptops.

Finally, I predict that we’re moving to cloud computing. It’s the natural way. You VPN into a network and your computing is done on a cluster or on a central computer.

The same is already happening for gaming. People are connecting controllers and glasses like the Xreal Air to phones, then networking into a computer to play a desktop game on their phone.

Women also make up 50% of PC video game players and 54 percent of mobile game players.

I find a lot of these figures really hard to believe, to be honest.

Looking at the link, there is little I can find about their methodology.

I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.

Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.

For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.

Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.

So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.

I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw