Is stuff online worth saving?

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JKCalhoun ◴[21 Dec 24 14:22 UTC] No.42479856[source]▶

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.

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willis936 ◴[21 Dec 24 15:02 UTC] No.42480069[source]▶

>>42479856 #

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.

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1. jonhohle ◴[21 Dec 24 16:17 UTC] No.42480468[source]▶

>>42480069 #

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.

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2. sdenton4 ◴[21 Dec 24 16:30 UTC] No.42480543[source]▶

>>42480468 (TP) #

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

replies(1): >>42481358 #

3. justsomehnguy ◴[21 Dec 24 16:47 UTC] No.42480646[source]▶

>>42480468 (TP) #

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.

replies(1): >>42482447 #

4. be_erik ◴[21 Dec 24 18:42 UTC] No.42481358[source]▶

>>42480543 #

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

5. ghaff ◴[21 Dec 24 21:25 UTC] No.42482447[source]▶

>>42480646 #

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.

replies(1): >>42483697 #

6. justsomehnguy ◴[22 Dec 24 01:16 UTC] No.42483697{3}[source]▶

>>42482447 #

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.

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