The Internet forgets, but I don’t want to
30 points by holsta
30 points by holsta
A few years ago I manually started saving screenshots, full PDFs of articles, audio and video locally because I can't trust resources to stay online, and it makes local annotations easier.
I found this approach to the same problem interesting.
Don't forget the SingleFile extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/
It's so amazing and convenient to save entire pages in a plain HTML file where everything (including images) is inlined. I sometimes edit the HTML a little bit with the inspector to make it nicer and smaller before I save the page.
Does it work well with scripts?
I believe it just makes a snapshot of the site's HTML elements as they appear at that point in time. If there are unpressed buttons that dynamically load or generate content with JavaScript, I don't think it is contained in the saved document, those buttons lose their functionality.
I nowadays generally try to go all the way to grabbing first, converting to text and reading in Vim second… (PDF more often than not get saved and read locally)
I have desperately wanted this for so long. This approach matches exactly what I've envisioned when thinking about implementing it. Excellent to see it's actually viable.
Social media is fragile
I'm wondering if I am misinterpreting the author here, in thinking they mean to say social media is ephemeral. Last I checked, we have an increasingly invasive problem of people's social media (in some cases, stuff from posts the user made years ago) being used against them politically, economically and socially. To me, that says social media is anything but fragile, but almost embodies the fabled "permanent record" that was used as a threat in my father's youth. I'd argue that permanence is what we want to avoid precisely because of the way these things can now be used against us.
As typical for modern technology, it is permanent enough to be used for harm, but not enough to be relied upon for constructive work.
Someone (maybe Techdirt's Masnick) once compared personal data to toxic waste. Ideally companies should work to get rid of it permanently rather than let it fester in their silos... but that's not how ad targetting works.
A lot of toxic waste reprocessing aims to keep something out of it. And a lot of it is constrained by the fact that it is easier to use the technologies for WMD production than for safe reprocessing… Now, arguably, adtech tries their best to concentrate the dangerous part.
The internet only remembers what gives it schadenfreude, in the same way piracy only preserves what teenage boys cared about.
Increasingly often, I find threads on reddit where the key comment (which many repliers found interesting, relevant, or useful,) is either deleted or replaced with word salad, and the original comment is not recorded in any public archive.