Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?
I have the habit of looking at the date of things I consume online, it gives me a sense of relevance and context, both when I'm looking for things that are "from now" but more importantly when I'm looking for things given a temporal context, for instance, programming for an old compiler, finding out how to do something with an old piece of hardware or electronics.
I feel like I'm encountering more and more sites and articles where I can't seem to find the date. Google will return irrelevant results from today rather than relevant results from 10 years ago.
I feel it's getting worse, is it just me?
327 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadIt seems to me that its become standard practice on marketing type blogs for corporate websites to remove the date from their posts. I think its because (from personal experience) the company will go though a burst of "blog productivity" create a load of content but then not touch it for years, they don't want that content to look out of date or their website to look stagnant.
Removing the date from their posts, or any other content, hides how old it is and therefore obscures how active they are at crating new content.
Most companies try to use their blogs to attract new customers, a new customer may visit their website once or twice and will never see the blog again, it's not important that they do. They don't want it to look stale.
As a counter example, an interesting thread from yesterday [0] was about how CloudFlare use their blog not as a marketing tool but for technical content and attracting employees. They very regulally use their blog, and so keep the date on it showing how fresh it is.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070422
I understand why this happens, but part of me really wishes we could stop this. Maybe there is some archive.org extension that can show me “this page first appeared on $date”.
Even for static content, the date may be wrong as the output may have been generated multiple times since it was first created.
0: https://fly.io/blog/run-ordinary-rails-apps-globally/
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083764
I don't know what or where 'your stuff' is - but isn't that a fair question for a lot of topics? Writing about data structures or political protests might be valid for decades but a lot of technical writing about languages, platforms, even products and companies can age very quickly and unlike news or culture might be of less interest to people in the future.
Many people find technical writings whilst searching google for a solution to a problem. I love the articles that have a date and version of whatever platform something is relevant for (even better when someone adds a "this was written for version X.Y things have changed in version X.Z see the doc at..." etc)
It's entirely possible a tutorial made for software 3 months ago or something might have outdated information if there was a new, backwards incompatible release, or that a news article might be missing information that was revealed only a few days ago, etc.
But that can also be extremely counterproductive when the content you publish has a natural expiry date - and in many areas of expertise (pretty much anything other than pure marketing talk) things change over time. Potential client seeing the obsolete information might rightfully presume that the company is out of the loop or just plain unprofessional. If you have a date on the page it's far less likely to happen.
COVID recommendations and measures are one such (rather extreme) example where many big players endangered their credibility because they've failed to properly mark the outdated content.
Nowadays they come as individual papers, but the publishers kept the format... because, why change anything when you have guaranteed profits?
Generally, I take the publication dates of the cited works as representative of the age of the paper.
Honestly although I've occasionally derived benefit from these, I think I'm reaching a tipping point where I feel the plethora of how-to articles with their ads and newsletter pop-ups and everything are less productive than just some plain old documentation and taking the time to fundamentally understand the tech so that I no longer need the how-to. Mainly because I trust Kubernetes to keep their documentation up-to-date but who knows how current a random how-to article is, never mind the marketing bloat they're usually polluted with.
AWS has tons of training content they make freely available to their partners and wider community.
In many cases though there are no dates! (youtube shows date of upload but AWS' own training sites lack such markers. We have to guess based on copyright year in the slide footers)
It is clear that they invest heavily in creating new training content. In fact they essentially repeat the same content multiple times in many live tech talks and partnercasts etc. So there is no dearth of new content. It is also well known that they release new features very frequently -- so knowing how recent the content is helps a lot. But they still do this -- seemingly deliberately.
They recently overhauled their whole digital learning portal -- renamed it AWs Skill Builder, built it using the docebo LMS/CMS portal -- changed a lot of things but didnt make any effort to add a published date to any of the courses.
Frustrating.
An article with the title "The ten best pencils you can buy [January 2022]" written in 2017.
© MCMXCVIII
(And dates aside, how the program ages is more important)
This is tempting but I don't know how much credence to give it.
It's more to do with a style that was taken on and kept. My father still writes the month in a date using a Roman numeral, e.g. 25/XII/21.
The date format has been around for many years. There weren't that many BBC programmes made, even over the course of many years. To try and convince viewers that a programme was not "old" was difficult. It might be black and white, and the quality certainly would have looked dated.
Stability and old content can be good. Not everything is being updated and not everything needs to be updated. I'm all for putting dates on pages and blog posts :)
They just lie. I was trying to find out why VLC stopped working for me a few months ago [0] and landed in a terrible site where they suggested to do a lot of cargo cult driver updating and whatnot. A few "comments" thanked the author for the comprehensive (and totally fake) information.
This kind of crap seems to be winning. My other recent quest, finding a uni site about consciusness, psychedelia, emerson and 60s music, that I used to visit 20 years ago, was also unsuccessful.
[0] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/25976
(nobody assigned)
With nothing left, one delves into short term growth numbers.
Because of this, some indexes may de-stress reddit by date search, and, by freshness. And some end users will click, become annoyed more often, and stop clicking on reddit links.
They clearly have nothing left, and no other idea how to improve reddit. They have signaled they are well past peak growth.
Of course, producing true evergreen content takes more effort than just removing the publish date but that’s one easy way to fake it.
Most recent update: <date>
Edit: it’s only a matter of time till an article stops getting updated. Of course I doubt people in the “content industry” (tell me that’s not a real thing) care what happens to anyone else after they stop updating their ‘evergreen’ page.
Exaggerating (which is lying) about the product.
Explaining how good it will make you feel, or better yet, showing photos of people very happy, using the products.
Acting = lying, photshopped photos = lying, fictitious scenarios of use = lying.
Lying is required to write a story (when you read a fiction book, you want the lie about reality, for it is fun to imagine.)
This is a lie all parties engage in willingly.
But marketing types have a sole purpose. To lie, but make it look like truth.
So they don't care one iota about really updating an article or not.
"That's right -- and when you get to the human world, the Nothing will cling to you. You'll be like a contagious disease that makes humans blind, so they can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion. Do you know what you and your kind are called there?"
"No," Atreyu whispered.
"Lies!" Gmork barked
― Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
“When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts
... Who knows what use they’ll make of you? Maybe you’ll help them to persuade people to buy things they don’t need, or hate things they know nothing about, or hold beliefs that make them easy to handle, or doubt the truths that might save them.”
His child books certainly have a deep second reading as adults.
After all, it claims the unreal as real. Fiction, lies.
The difference with things like fiction in books and movies, for entertainment, is that the listener of the lie, knows it is a lie, and listens for entertainment.
It is not a lie, pretending to be true.
I think if there is a thing of any sort, there's an industry for it.
And if it sound dumb to an engineer type, it's more likely there's a lot of it.
Safer to just publish a new article when there's a sufficient amount of content to update. Link the articles together somehow. Maybe add a disclaimer to older (and not updated) articles that they might no longer be valid
Also solves the problem others have mentioned where they don't trust the date on articles. If you have a solid previous article to link to, you're more likely to build trust that the new one really is new
To get even more nuanced generally a superficial update shouldn't change the "updated" time, this gives another level of control.
1. "Top 10 novels inspired by Greek myths" (not tied to a recent event): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/26/top-10-novels-...
2. "How to make pea and ham soup - recipe": https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/jan/26/how-to-make-pea...
These are unlikely to pull lots of traffic versus a more timely event (e.g. interview with an author for a recent book release for the first section; except maybe the second as it's a regular column). However, the usefulness about evergreen content for a local print publication was to fill content for the print edition when there was a slow news week (not enough timely news to fill the pages).
[0] https://www.outsideonline.com/2152131/freezing-death
[1] https://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/peter-stark-and-as-free...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690468853/why-peter-starks-fr...
I would suggest moving it into the browser (i.e. read a meta tag or header) but the obvious problem is that they’ll just be forged and it would almost immediately become pointless.
Search engines could help here. If Google were to provide a last cached date (or a date of the last significant change) in the search result that would be far more useful. They certainly have this information from crawling, and it would be difficult to forge as constant substantial changes to game the system would be both expensive for the author, and harmful to the page’s ranking.
It would be cool if archive.org (or any others) had an API that made it easy and quick to look up "first seen" timestamp for any given URL.
Or it might be good enough, because this kind of content is rarely updated at the same url?
Annoying, for sure, but this is the reality of software and technology as the landscape continues to evolve over time.
Worse still, I’ve encountered sites that automatically update their edit dates to be current as a way to optimize SEO. I’ve found articles with decades old information claiming to have been written mere hours or days prior.
I hope this is a trend that can be reversed.
Moreover, since static pages are no longer a thing, the system cannot even retrieve the date the file was created/modified, always returns the timestamp from when it was presented on the browser.
Getting EXIF data from images might provide a clue, but the image creation/edits often do not correlate with the text...
If anyone knows how to extract such date info, it'd be helpful
One of the most insightful comments I ever read on HN pointed out that marketing folks are good at selling things, period, and that includes selling things internally. So when nascent companies are wondering why the product doesn't sell itself, the first thing they do is hire a Director of Marketing. That person promises deliverables from day 1, and what's more deliverable/visible than a blog? Then they leave -- in my experience, the typical marketing exec's tenure at a startup is about a year -- and no one else feels like putting in the work. Also, by that time, most people have seen that the blog never really drove engagement in the first place.
If you treat blog posts as ephemeral, it means you'll write them once, ensure they're accurate, then leave them there forever. Unfortunately, with technology stuff, that rarely works. Technologies change, libraries break, facts now might be different in two years, etc.
One of the things we're currently working on is tagging all of our technical content so that once a year it pops up in a review board somewhere and someone reviews it for accuracy, updates it if necessary, etc.
This way, technical stuff will still be useful to readers (hopefully) a couple of years from now.
But I've shared similar frustrations, yes.
There’s definitely algorithmic prioritisation for new content but I think it’s also a bit of a “seek and ye shall find” moment happening.
As an anecdote, very recently I had the opposite thing happening. I was researching something about React and noticed one of the comments ( still applicable actually! ) was from 2015. My head exploded when I realised 2015 is actually 7 years ago so for a short time afterwards I just kept noticing old comments or old content everywhere.
I'm currently doing a project in React and Go, and for both, things written five+ years ago are still relevant, and will remain so. The Go blog, for example, is a really good resource where posts about e.g. error handling [0] from 2011 are still relevant and essential knowledge today. Instead of replacing it with something new (they tried), it's just appended to [1] but the existing post is still relevant and required reading.
[0] https://go.dev/blog/error-handling-and-go
[1] https://go.dev/blog/go1.13-errors
Another reason might be that SEO got really good several years ago so older content just can't compete.
It does seem like DDG works for a lot of people though so I'm sure I have to rethink how I am searching and what keywords to use.
My experience too is that DDG is slightly different but just as useless as Google.
Use Kagi (or even marginalia although that might take some getting used to if you didn't use engines before Google.)
Use quoted strings for what you want exact matches for. Terminate quotes before terms you are usure about and maybe even remove them - in particular if it is local variable names, dates, folder paths etc.
Sometimes this work in DDG to but do yourself a favour and test out Kagi.
(No, I'm not paid to write this but I can admit I have been heavily encouraged by Google over the last decade and Ddg over the last three years to write about how painfully broken they are.)
Agree, an absolute no brainer for me as an engineer in tbe west at least. Even if Kagi just keep their current quality it saves hours and tons of frustration every month for me.
My fear is either Google will throw a wrench in their gears or they'll start optimizing for the masses just like Google did and I'll be stuck another decade with Fisher Price tools instead of power tools.
I still used it since I liked their stance on privacy but after discovering Kagi I have abandoned both of them.
(And even on Kagi I have to use doublequotes all the time because it defaults to second guessing me all the time. Still unlike the others it works with enough fiddling.)
It's not just you. Also sites being gone and content getting lost. I think by now pretty much everything text should just not disappear anymore, and we seem to only have web archive which is doing something right (google cache seemed to have lost its persistence at some point but I may be imagining it because that's like 2 data points).
I wish web archive would skip videos and instead fetch more obscure websites but I'm guessing that being able to tell what's spam and what is not is not easy.
Shared distributed history cache for visited websites could be nice but within a short time I spent thinking about it I couldn't figure out a way in which this could work that would make me install it myself.
I have taken now to including 'Original publication date' as a codicil in my pieces.
I watch quite a lot of YouTube and very frequently look up the date that videos were uploaded. I've never found this information to be missing.
If I find that link / another example I will share here. <placeholder>
But this definitely is a feature of YouTube where content creators have an option to hide the date. I googled and found the documentation for this feature.
> Q: How can I hide the date the video was published? (Posted 4/12/19)
> A: That is not an option that is available.*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg0_4EmHLCo
Even ad rolls (if you dig out the video id) have some sort of interesting "noone will see this" title :)
And random apps on the Play Store also have video titles.
Adding the video to Watch Later by replaying the request using cURL seems to work, at which point I can add the video to a playlist to find it later (yay), and also click through to see the uploader: https://www.youtube.com/user/GameloftVideos
Except for the bit where it says "This channel is not available" using the YouTube design from a few years ago and displays absolutely nothing, the account is perfectly normal, nothing to see here.
Wow.
What even is this?? [Edit: just realized I forgot I said that above. I'm leaving it in :P]
Tip: leave Google behind for now.
That site has the last few years been very useful but only in the same way as my very cheap electrical saw: because I didn't have access to anything better.
For someone who has tried good tools like Festo, Milwaukee, Hitachi or old Google it is just a painful reminder of the past and how good life used to be.
It works but hasn't sparked joy for close to a decade.
After kagi and marginalia came into my life my life has improved significantly.
Note: I'm not saying Googlers are evil or dumb now but I will point out that engineers there have incentives stacked against them.
Marginalia for fun stuff.
Kagi seems to use both Google and bing results and will cost a minimum of $10 a month. Seems like the worst of all worlds to me. It’s a good option I suppose for those who want to pay.
I've recently seen queries answered on Kagi that returns utter rubbish when I paste the exact same queries into Google or DDG.
I’m skeptical of their privacy policy as well, given that you need an account and have to pay, it’s unlikely they don’t know your searches.
That being said, even if they did pay if they have any traction at all they’d still be blocked. Why would their competitors help them?
In any case I doubt it will take off, people who are poor aren’t going to pay 10 bucks a month just to search when there are dozens of free competitors.
Happy to be proven wrong.
That's the part I want to avoid. Build your own crawlers and stop relying on Google. Google already has enough control over the internet, I do not want a search engine that's just downstream of them.
I can however use a search engine that doesn't mock me and second guess me all the time and that tries to anonymize me.
But I agree very much with you.
If someone launches a search engine that works as well as Kagi and doesn't use either Google or Bing I'll happily pay a premium for that on top of of what I have already said I am willing to pay for Kagi.
Edit: In fact I already support a search engine with an independent index.
https://search.marginalia.nu/
Still nothing better that Google for me.
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=python+datetime+un...
Has this as the first result, though:
http://www.logophile.org/blog/2010/08/15/python-datetime-con...
Holding up against a HN hug of death last month, providing an absolutely refreshing search experience!
I've only ever "fallen back" to Google for a small handful of searches since then, and only out of curiosity for what it might look like in comparison to the Kagi results.
Although it's only been a small amount of time, I'm sticking with Kagi for now because the search results are at least on par with Google's, and significantly less encumbered by Google's SERP dark patterns.
After that try: python datetime timestamp
or: python convert time
or something similar. Edit: see also marginalias answer next to me.
As I wrote earlier: marginalia is most for fun (although lately I have gotten better results for at least one simple technical query.)
Edit: if a search engine respects your query you can always broaden your query. If a search engine ignores your query you cannot do anything.
This is the way anyone with a clue would approach search until Google broke it: search for words or phrases within the page.
"perfect steak recipe"
"perfect grilled chicken"
and such... typically resulting in the best results.
"R53 mini cooper fuel filter"
reduce the words to the core of the question, and get good results.
Which had been totally fine if they hadn't nerfed it for us who knew how to use it.
If by better you mean supporting a competitive market that doesn't strengthen the monopoly Google has on search and their results which, as years go by, are augmented for their benefit but not yours, then anything is better than Google.
If by better you mean increased chances that the first few results will contain the answer you need, then Google is still king. That being said, when it comes to tech, with most answers found in open git issues or stackoverflow, i find brave search sufficient. So much so that i haven't used any of Google's services in over a year.
The real question is, what are you willing to compromise? There's an in-between for the two extremes above and the choice is subjective.
An exciting alternative is https://neeva.com/ I'll happily pay money for a privacy oriented search engine as i do for email, cloud storage and NextCloud. We shouldn't expect things to be given to us for free. I work, they work, we can do a fair trade with some iou derivatives.
Hasn't been true since at least December. Kagi is better now by almost an order of magnitude.
Of course my Google is not your Google. Still I have experimentdd so much with Google over so many years, logged in, logged out, from multiple addresses that I am confident in saying that it hasn't been itself for a decade and finally now we have a better alternative.
And that's the main problem with the new Google.
A website that requires me to sign up to see what their premium account may cost ... this sounds pretty scammy to me.
Straight from the playbook of big film ;-)
I find this with coronavirus as well.
This is also why having just one big search engine is a bad idea.
Whether this is because of a short term greed motivation to maximize adsense yield or a larger conspiracy of global information control isn't clear yet. But it amounts to the same in practice.
‘site:4chan.org wuhan’ returns no results ‘site:4chan.org wuhan institute of virology’ returns 1,710 results
Vector search is that the thing that makes it ignore my search query and search for something else?
Also, is this the problem Bing has?
And is it much much cheaper since they choose to use only use something so utterly ridiculously broken?
Edit: I'm obviously exaggerating heavily here but this has cost me so much time and frustration.
I agree with others: if pages exist that contains the exact matches why don't return them first?
- inferior power tools (because I couldn't afford good ones last I bought)
- inferior search tools (because Google has broken itself)
The similarities are that I was stuck with bad tooling and when you know how big the difference is it hurts.
For people who never took advantage of how good Google used to be or who have never used good tools it probably wouldn't hurt as much.
Especially "best [product] in [year]" articles and lists, they somehow always are about the current year, even in early January, and even if they are only about outdated things..
The crap dirty tricks SEO content does seem to work quite well atm. It's probably pretty hard to determine whether something is relevant or not.
I also do kinda think we should be thinking more about what legacy we leave than we presently do. HTML has some serious problems with that regard, especially in terms of link rot, and especially now that we treat it as a way to build platforms. Archive.org is great and all, but is it enough? How will SPAs fare when the backend server is down in 30 years? How much value will be lost?
I think the problem is not with HTML but with HTTP as location-addressed protocol. For future-proofing, and DDOS/censorship mitigation, content-addressed storage (DAT/IPFS/Torrent) makes sense. I would love to seed my favorite blogs, if i was given the possibility to do so: in this sense, a web browser based on IPNS would be rad: too bad the only one i know of is bundled with JS (instead of operating a paradigm shift) and produced by an adware company.
> How will SPAs fare when the backend server is down in 30 years? How much value will be lost?
You don't even need to wait 30 years for SPAs to be broken. By the next API update they may stop working, and subtle changes in browser sandboxing could kill them just as quick.
Well great, now you can't even change the content one tiny bit (not even definitively benign changes like fixing a typo or a bug in your CSS or whatever) without invalidating all links pointing to it.
Okay, so as long as anybody still has that version cached and is seeding it at least the link still works (though over time it's not excluded that that number might drop to zero and the link still break after all), though now of course everybody who comes in gets the old version and might not even new that some update exists.
While I acknowledge that the silent updates possible with HTTP for an URL's contents can be a curse as much as they are a blessing, I'm not sure if "absolutely no updates ever" are the right answer, either.
Usually you would subscribe to a cryptographic pointer (the publisher's public key) whose value is stored in a DHT. Then the pointer can be updated to point to new revisions of the content/website. IPNS is a famous implementation of that for the IPFS protocol. So as a client you can seed a specific revision of the content, or all of them, or just seed the latest version.
"Best CMS frameworks (2022)", for example, and yet the content is out of date.
Reddit is still better but I worry in another year that will no longer be the case.
I can't imagine many subjects for which decades-old results would be more relevant than current ones.
Also, Google gives you the option to search by date or date range, so if you just wanted 10 year old results, you could just do that. It even adds the date to the results.
When I’m searching, I want the original article, not one of the 20 blogspam copies that were republished over the years, SEO’ed and loaded up with ads. I wish search engines could come up with a way to more reliably return only the OG article and filter out the copies.
- recipes (doesn't matter whether it's from today or from 30 years ago, what matters is the quality of the recipe)
- art and art theory
- poetry
- chess
- films
Searching by date or date range doesn't work, when you don't know when a relevant article was written. What's needed is not an option to select older articles, but an option to stop prioritizing new ones.
Not that I ever needed to use it, but it's there.
Google does know an indirect date of the page even if it's not written explicitly. The first crawling date should be saved and if no better indicator exists I'd assume they are using that timestamp.
This is pretty much the only reason why I still sometimes used Google - because Duck Duck Go only added this feature recently.
My account is around 15 years old and has gotten worse with time.
I've been using it for many years by now, and have essentially given up on it recently.
I'd often set for past year/month and get articles, reviews, etc that were clearly dated many years previous. I don't know if the site are responsible for the gaming of search, or Google themselves, but the result is the same. I have some doubt that PC hardware review sites are gaming dates on their old articles, although I accept it could be in their interest to do so too.
So modern technology is literally erasing our pasts. Not just calendar entries, but messaging systems (people used to keep handwritten letters for decades), and possibly even photos (if we're not careful about preserving them).
Edit: See my clarification of the 2 years in comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30084620 below. I still think the point remains - we do not own or value our digital data in the same way as physical objects, and there is a much heightened risk of that data disappearing as a result, either by the owners of the platforms the data is stored on archiving the data or by us not valuing it enough to preserve exports and backups through long periods of time.
[0] https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/818677/how-far-ba...
While it's always interesting/practical ("just because") to have a full takeout sitting around locally, that would probably create a multiple GB tome (all of Gmail, Drive, ...) that would a day or two to generate and then potentially a while more to download, so for this experiment hitting "Deselect all" and then checking "Calendar" should be good enough.
The process of generating the takeout archive and downloading it are distinctly separate steps with some indeterminate amount of time in between, so you could very likely initiate the takeout from your phone, then follow up on the download link(s) it emails you when you get to a computer (IIRC the archive(s) hang around for a couple of days).
If you do indeed find deleted entries (nooo), I found that (a) Google Calendar itself has no auto-delete functionality (https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/3530801/how-do-i-...), but that if you have your calendar set up to sync with other software, that software might be issuing "deletion" requests (possibly under the guise of auto-cleanup...?) that is then getting synced back to Google Calendar (https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/8849196/my-calend..., https://www.makeuseof.com/events-deleted-automatically-googl...).
Out of curiosity, what people are you referring to?
(side note: the title of this post is a little sensational imo. the past has always "disappeared". Don't forget that you will die some day and eventually there will be no trace of your existence)
Now that I'm looking for it, I don't see Calendar listed as one of the products controlled here, but it might be grouped under GMail or something.
[0] https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols
I lost a bunch of emails from my now passed mother which I went to go look for, and found out that Gmail chopped history.
edit: Make that 2011
It's not modern technology that's erasing our pasts, but cloud-based services owned by someone else. So I'v always keen on local software - for instance, I'm currently upgrading my was staled desktop mindmap software (http://innovationgear.com/mind-mapping-software/) ;)
It works well when a drive is past the point where its internal error correction code no longer works, but you just want to beat the right answer out of it with a baseball bat.
These days professional disk recovery by a lab is sub-$1000 and they recommend not using brute force tools like Spinrite because it can also exacerbate the problem before they get hands on it.
Logged in to my yahoo account that I haven't used in more than 10 years to look at some convos I've had with a good friend. There was nothing there. Yahoo forums are full of people that want to recover messages from their deceased loved ones, and won't be able to.
I find it fascinating that the only traces remaining of our lives will probably be archived on some NSA server somewhere... Flashbacks of that X-Files episode with the underground bunkers full of DNA.
I've got conversations from 15+ years ago with girls I liked, friends I loved and everything in between. It's hard to watch, but if I ever feel nostalgic I can bring them up in a flick.
I'm not even 30 yet.
The company would take a bunch of arbitrary content and do minimal presentation for it, and host it, forever.
Basically 'hands off archiving'. I'll bet a lot of companies would be interested in this.
There are different ways to look at the issue.
* general assumption: the future is synonim of progress, so now is more relevant.
* general assumption: we know the past, so focus on the unknown aka the now
* fact: maintain the memories needs energy, and energy is a scarce resource. So societies forget its past to focus in the current issues to preserve themselves.
BTW, Same vibes looking to twitter timelines