Is stuff online worth saving?

One hundred twenty-three years ago my great grandmother's first husband died in a hotel in Kansas City from asphyxiation from the gas having been left on over night (the hotel did not yet have electric lighting). A letter was hastily written on a piece of hotel stationary to be delivered to his wife in the neighboring farming community where she lived.

It is fortunate to me that someone thought to hang on to that note since I have become interested in genealogy and this was a fairly significant event in family history (had he not died I don't suppose I would be around since it was her second marriage that gave me my grandfather).

I long for scraps of anything that my dead relatives, wrote, created, etc. It connects me better to the past — the lives they lived, how they lived them. It somehow grounds me a little better ... well, it's rather hard to explain the draw of genealogy.

Sadly very little of the ephemera of everyday life was kept. I get it. It might have seemed like hanging on to junk mail — like you were a hoarder or whatever, but in this digital era we should be able to hold terabytes of what may appear to be ephemera.

I'm doing what I can – not for ego, I think, but for future generations that may find a connection to their past interesting.

30 years ago there was no digital world. Nearly all information was in physical artifacts. The things worth saving haven't really changed, but the amount of noise they are buried in has. Imagine if that letter was kept in a two ton pile of ad fliers. Sure, someone would find some of those fliers interesting, but you'd have been much less likely to even know about the letter.

>...a two ton pile of ad fliers

Alamy is selling scans of ad prints from the 1850s.

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/1850s-advert.html

What about robots reading each flier and checking if something is odd about that particular one? It could find the letter and report it to you. Even easier if it was all digital information.

Because they are rare

Ads range from a (necessary, in a capitalist society) nuisance to a scourge, and people justly put up increasingly thick boundaries to shield themselves from their influence. When waning cultural relevance or whatever dilutes that influence, you can more easily see the ads for what they are— often manipulative marketing tactics implemented through often genuinely beautiful art and design. Both aspects are fascinating to consider and the art can be quite enjoyable. Early modernist posters from Paris are beautiful. Watching collections of mid century television ads in the prelinger archives is fun, and tells us a lot about the ways we are influenced by modern ads speaking to current perspectives, fashions, and concerns.

A selection 74 items over a 10 year period is a different proposal compared to e.g. keeping two tons of ad fliers from November 17th 1907 (and every other thing, every other day, all the time).

I don’t think that’s true? Tons of stuff from that era had been digitized, even before newer more relevant stuff and older rarer stuff, because the acid paper had a short shelf life and there were so many ads in printed stuff then. I might have a skewed perspective from working in the digitization world for quite some time. I think they’re selling what they sell with all their other content— discovery, curation, preparation, and easy delivery.

An aside about ad spam from companies that I occasionally buy from:

Often as spam comes from the same mailbox as order receipts and includes words like “order” while messages with receipts never include the word “receipt”. When inundated with daily or sometimes multiple times a day ad spam from the same company it becomes very difficult to filter for only not receipts, to clean a neglected inbox.

After I’m gone, I fully expect my family just to delete it all because the signal to noise is so low.

A two-ton pile of ad fliers? Sounds like Ted Nelson's Junk Mail collection, https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail .

If only we had search algorithms...

Sorting through twenty years of spammy email is one of those things that seem like an llm would actually be good for.

I don't have anyone to do anything after I'm gone, so I just delete the emails myself. I do keep the notable ones, like registration information and some payment receipts but otherwise everything goes to the trash.

Bonus points:

I don't need 30/50/100Gb mailbox (and the associated mailbox cost nowadays).

Search is not only fast but if I didn't found something - then there is nothing of this something in the mailbox.

I't mentally pleasurable to log in once in a while and throw a bunch of unneeded stuff into the trash bin, quite similar to a real life room cleaning.

Sure, there are a ton of reasons to archive. And if it's cheap to do (in terms of money, yes, but also in terms of time, effort, mental health, etc.) then I am of the mind that we should archive everything.

But, it often isn't cheap to do, and in that case, it makes sense to prioritize. The high priority items for me are the things that I might want to share, the ideas I want to amplify for my contemporaries and future generations that might examine my life. Stuff like [1] [2] and [3] which has influenced my thinking fundamentally, that I hope to build upon so that others can build upon what I have built.

I'd argue that you do this intuitively: you're mentioning a letter from your family's past because it is a high priority item--it's relevant because it was the last written words of your great-grandmother's first husband.

But, there's a lot that isn't worth keeping. My first form of archiving as a teenager was keeping ticket stubs for movies and concerts--a decade later I was going through my pile and found that I didn't even remember most of them. The better movies, I remembered--and I had them on DVD. The better concerts, I remembered--and I also had journal entries and CDs to remember the experience and the music. It's not important to me where/when I saw Everything, Everywhere, All At Once in theaters, but I have it on DVD and I can't wait to show it to my niece when she's older. And sure, I saw Amigo the Devil live, but frankly, he's not an artist you need to see in concert--the greatest impact of Cocaine and Abel[4] on me was when I listened to it alone in my room. The ticket stubs simply don't matter to me.

[1] https://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/451-500/the_last_viridi...

[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerabi...

[3] https://digital.wpi.edu/pdfviewer/wm117p10z

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzjtLm0G49E

EDIT: All the things linked above, I have backed up in one form or another. Notably, the Schutt paper isn't at its original URL.

Capitalism would work 100% fine without ads because people naturally compare and contrast options when buying stuff.

All that's necessary is making it possible for people seeking out your type of product to find you. And for revolutionary products, there's word of mouth.

If anything I think capitalism would function better without ads, because I would argue that advertising overall results in less informed customers, especially the modern lifestyle/brand type of advertising that's clearly quite effective at manipulating people.

Some might say, that years of spammy emails drove the creation of the llms we know today. It's easy to forget how fast some things have moved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering

This reminds me of a recent flea market experience. There at some stand was boxes of old used post cards and 100 year old family photos. Photos of people posed on a porch in their Sunday best. Or just mundanely standing around a car not everyone looking at the camera.

It's hard to assign a value to these things. They are simultaneously junk and treasure. I think about the journey these items took to find their way to that flea market table. It was too diverse a collection to have come from one place. So I imagine all the paths each individual item traversed. The joy of the recipient reading a post card, holding on to it, rediscovering it on spring cleaning days. Or the photo living in an album or framed on a wall somewhere for a lifetime.

I'm not sure what the value of it all is if it just gets lugged around to various flea markets and sold piecemeal for $1 each.

It’s not like you currently go to a webpage and save all the images onto deep storage for archival… I’m not sure what relevance things being digital has on identifying noise.

If the ancestor before you is hoarding anything that comes across their path, be it digital ads or every physical greeting card they’ve ever gotten, the problem is with the person’s collection habits, not the medium.

Well, I remember a lot of great stuff on Usenet circa 1994, but it looks like Google shut down access to it via Google Groups, which used to archive it in a searchable way.

There was a ton of great stuff 30 years ago, and I think it's definitely worth saving.

The Internet was a very different place, but it was quite real 30 years ago, and I think the idea that the further back you go the more valuable this kind of thing is is the right way of looking at it.

Now it's easier to save stuff, but there's more stuff to save. YouTubes and TikToks instead of text notes. Chat messages instead of letters.

Fortunately Gmail tabs go a lot of the way to letting you mass delete junk you don’t care about. Assuming you do even a modicum of labeling stuff you might like to refer to or act on, deleting at least older promotions and updates eliminates a lot of things.

If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things? Ads suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.

It’s an interesting question I guess (and slightly worrying that I can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of advertising). Especially if we take it to the extreme and imagine sponsored listings also don’t exist. I guess incumbents would have a big advantage.

There are second order effects of ads that we’d need to consider. Facebook and Google wouldn’t exist as we know them. Maybe that means some of their research doesn’t happen?

I think the definition would have to be an exchange of something of value for telling other people about a product. There are some companies that got off the ground with no paid advertising but I think they’re an exception. Generally people are not seeking out new products.

But the whole point of a capitalist society is that competitors that do things better/cheaper start taking customers so the capital moves to the best and most efficient system.

Regarding genealogy it is great to look at the work The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was doing that help genealogical researchers around the globe [1] beyond that specific church.

[1] https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/topic/genealogy

> ...well, it's rather hard to explain the draw of genealogy.

I've noticed people becoming more interested in genealogy when they - let me phrase this delicately - reach a certain age. My speculation is that it is a component of grappling with one's own mortality. As the grays and wrinkles multiply, some obsess over healthy eating and exercise, some wealthier ones invest in immortality research, some get blood boys, and the rest feel an urgent need to research our genealogy; any detritus that shows our progenitors existed proves some trace of us having been here will remain, and perhaps our existence means something, as time cruelly keeps marching on.

Didn't use GMail for years but the labels were not quite up to the task.

Thankfully FastMail interface makes 'search from this address' and 'search to this address' (I'm using per-service addresses) and then 'select all', 'delete' actions a breeze.

> There at some stand was boxes of old used post cards and 100 year old family photos. Photos of people posed on a porch in their Sunday best. Or just mundanely standing around a car not everyone looking at the camera.

> I'm not sure what the value of it all is if it just gets lugged around to various flea markets and sold piecemeal for $1 each.

I purchase, scan, and resell those kinds of things. I'd love to have a centralized, public repository in which to store the data. As our tech gets better at extracting data from that material more and more interesting applications could be developed. Imagine being able to find 100+ year old photos of your ancestors via facial recognition and extracted metadata searches.

I wish I could come up with a non-profit business model that worked for preserving that kind of stuff. I would love to gather up the historical ephemera that's being lost, catalog it via manual and automated processes, and make it available to the public. (Yes, I am aware there are privacy concerns. It's a pie-in-the-sky idea. I just hate to see all of the previously captured and curated effort that went into ephemera cast to the winds.)

It's funny you mention ticket stubs, because I also have a similar collection, and I kind of treasure it. Before my Google tracking my every step, before Twitter, as the years go by, I have some record of what I was doing at exceedingly specific times and dates. It helps to structure my memories a bit more than I'd otherwise be able to. I scanned them all at once (in several pages), and it's sort of a map of my adolescence. I can jump across time. I would be sad to lose it. (Along with the photo of the tickets for my make-shift - and first - double feature of Everything Everywhere/Dr. Strange. Multiverse-themed, doncha know?)

People's interests change over time. It's not necessarily because folks are grappling with their own mortality. For instance, lots of older folks seem to get into bird watching.

I also want to point out that saying "let me phrase this delicately" to the person who is the subject of the sentence is not tactful. It's honestly kind of rude when you're on the receiving end. If you're going to judge me to my face, just say the words.

There's a similar question that crosses my mind occasionally: 'how would capitalism work if there were no brand names and no advertising, but only product reviews?'

Would it even be possible to safeguard the product reviews system from bribery? The current systems we use for product reviews obviously would be unsuitable.

At any rate, I commiserate about the role of branding and advertising today. It's as often noise as it is information.

This. Usenet. Then IRC. I think back to full on conversations I had with friends on IRC that I never kept. Then people stopped using IRC. All gone.

Also slashdot. Go back 20 years and start clicking links. Most of them are broken.

I've been thinking about the same topic recently, with a specific focus on antiquarian books.

There is a local business I think of as a "Book Butcher". They buy an old book with beautiful engravings, cut out the pages and resell the individual pages as interior design pictures for hanging. Imagine if we could get them to scan & archive each book before pulling it apart...

Another idea is simply archiving the graphics from eBay listings. Sometimes there is valuable information in the pictures that accompany listing, but they disappear forever once the item sells.

I'd be glad to connect with anyone who's interested in this stuff.

If incumbents would be favored then it stands to reason that total advertising spend would be at least loosely proportional to market decentralization. Yet in America advertising spend has increased many orders of magnitude since the 50s, while the market has simultaneously become dramatically more centralized.

By contrast in parts of the world with relatively negligible advertising, markets tend to be heavily decentralized.

And I think this makes far more sense of you think about it. If you make a soft drink that is rated far higher than Coke in blind testings, or perhaps one that is near indistinguishable in flavor, but cheaper, you stand very little chance of competing successfully. There's a reason Coke spends billions per year in advertising, and it has nothing to do with reaching the three remaining people who are not aware Coke exists.

And yeah without advertising the "free" services on the internet wouldn't exist, replaced by a mixture of genuinely free services, and for-pay. This would IMO be a dramatically better state of affairs. Businesses whose actual customer is not the people using their product/service leads to such dystopic nonsense.

>but it looks like Google shut down access to it via Google Groups

Huh? It still looks accessible to me.

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.radiology.interventional

Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on Groups.