Hahaha. Hee. Hoo.
Oh man the amount of completely unrecoverable media, legacy information, hyperlinked news citations and just so much historical information is going to be gone very soon.
Reddit is so screwed.
Wait. Ruffles papers Oh my god Twitter is doing it AGAIN lmao, lol
"On the internet, it is there forever"
that was always a lie. But it was useful to try and get people to do some data protection.
They are gonna burn the collective library of alexandria because it is not profitable to maintain information. If it is not immediately monetizable, if they cannot extract value from it IMMEDIATELY
then it is worthless.
They see no value in anything that does not involve rent seeking.
I keep telling people I know that there is no 'public square', and we're lacking in a truly publicly backed internet. It's taken a while to build the actual explanation for normal people but it goes like this:
You shouldn't count on the small Coffee Shop being there forever. It's lovely to have it while it is there, and hopefully it's there for a long time. You get in the habit of hosting D&D night and are on a first-name basis with the owner, and for a few years it's pretty nice. Then a Starbucks opens across the street, and kills your little friendly local coffee shop pretty quick, and everyone's unable to host D&D nights somewhere else because your quiet little coffee shop is gone and the Starbucks won't even let you play in their lobby during slow hours. Then a recession hits, the Starbucks goes under because the sales have slumped just past the mark of profit the franchise owner agreed to hit. Now no one can play D&D anywhere, and downtown is deprived of both coffee and even a minimum social gathering space.
Meanwhile several blocks away at the local Library, the rented space that has a public fund that tax payer money goes into is still operating after 38 years. It's just a bit inaccessible at the moment and smells a bit mildew-y, but it's still there. The publicly funded park is nearby, and that's nice too (though not really ideal for D&D), and the stipulations on these publicly provided places do curb a bit of your opportunities for acting audacious and weird, but at least the space is present and you can use them for networking. The Corkboard in the Library's main lobby is open as long as you fill out a form and pay a small fee to use the space, which sucks but not nearly as badly as having nowhere to go entirely. It's only because of taxpayer money that the option exists, and without beating around the publicly-funded bush, these things require that money to run. Government budgets however? Budgets are not built for profit, they're built for society's necessary expenses.
The internet as-is currently sits with almost all of its structure being privately owned, with no public funding options available for hosting sites nor protocols in the legal framework to enable such a public venture. Ironically, our most noteworthy examples are all Chinese social media sites... not a great comparison. But the way we handle this kind of problem is through Public Funding, through treating the internet as critical infrastructure, through providing literal green spaces through public funding, as if it were a park or nature reserve. Without the consideration that profit is not an end-goal for many fandom sites, we're really missing the mark. It's hard to ask for public funding, but that's what needs to happen.