Comment by marcus_holmes
3 years ago
Unpopular opinion: I don't think it matters too much that we lose all this.
90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.
The good/important stuff will be repeated and spread outside of its original container. All the good tweets are already on Reddit or Imgur. If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.
I think it's important that we do forget things. We all say things every now and again that we don't mean, because we're human. I would hate a world where there was a permanent record of everything I've said. I already regret most of my Facebook posts. Also, some answers that used to be correct are now incorrect. We get this problem with tech - I often filter my search for "last year only" when bug hunting because old solutions aren't relevant any more.
I understand that maintaining an archive is important for history, don't get me wrong. I just don't think we need all of it, and I think the important stuff will get preserved through duplication.
> 90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.
Right but with 90% of everything crap you moved the 10% of good things into closed (for search results) system.
> If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.
Tweets are searchable and you can't archive.org discord chat easily. Terrible comparison and it is not same for other platforms.
My point is that the good stuff gets cross-posted. So a worthy Discord discussion will be screenshotted or otherwise recorded, and cross-posted to another platform.
Not necessarily
I was trying to get little big planet 2 working on an emulator recently (yesterday) and a lot of information about how to get secret dlc / costumes and use mod tools were hidden in a discord that I only found after a day of searching for the info. someone in the emulator discord recommended a different discord server, which I never would have known about and couldn't find that information anywhere else on the web (archive.org, YouTube videos, alternate search engines)
I agree. I think this is kind of a feature as you can be a bit more relaxed in chat, knowing that it will probably get buried over time.