Old internet thread

That's the problem with digital material. Unlike physical media like books or ancient stone inscriptions which can physically be moved someplace else, digital media, at least interactive media (you can always print a text document), stays forever trapped digitally, and the preservation of said media is not a priority for most people. It makes me sad because there were many wonders of the old Internet that have now been completely lost to the passage of time or sheer ignorance.

People will probably laugh at this but I'm an autist that went for a History degree, but most if not all of my work was done on the history of the internet. You'd be surprised just how little is actually archived, finding proof of shit before 2010 is almost fucking impossible. Hell, in one of my undergrad papers I had to use Jow Forums City and that Zone Animation as a primary source for early *chan culture because there are literally no posts archived from before 2007, not counting the few stray ones that manage to go online.
To make matters worse some of the few sites that archive shit from the early internet are run by jews that demand money to even look at archives, like SomethingAwful, for instance.
We need to be archiving this shit in a secure , accessible way because generations are going to be lost.

Sorry for the rant. This shit just depresses me. 90% of the reason I'm chewing my way through humanities/liberal arts hell is to try and help the small efforts going towards internet archival.

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>People will probably laugh at this
It's cute. I like what you're doing.

>You'd be surprised just how little is actually archived, finding proof of shit before 2010 is almost fucking impossible.
I noticed this as well. The "once it's on the internet, it's on the internet forever" meme really is a meme only normalfags believe at this point.
Finding older material is much harder than most people think. At a certain point, stuff eventually gets deleted, and most of it was never archived.

Ironically, the typical attitude nowadays with respect to preservation seems to be that digital content is somehow "easier to preserve" than physical documents, when it really isn't. If anything, the fact that it's so hard to find content dating to as recently as 15 years ago is proof of the opposite.

There really needs to be a simply app that people could run that takes a screenshot every 6 hours or something. Even at that incredibly slow rate, and even being limited to a simple screenshot rather than capturing the data itself - you'd accumulate so much more information that you otherwise would. Imagine if we'd had apps like that running back after 1990 or something; you'd still have vastly more historical material than you have today.

But you can do it already with something like scrot + a cron job.

Thanks user

It's a really weird feeling, honestly. A personal example I have is that I used to browse the Nsider forums, the old official Nintendo discussion forum, as a kid. It shut down in September 2007, and I can't find a lot of things archived aside from basic topic overviews. A lot of my old posts are just gone. It's partially a relief because I was an embarrassing teenager, but on the other hand I don't like the fact that the entire community was basically lost to time, and I can't help but think about even smaller forums that died out. How many other forums on Invisionfree, Proboards, or any other forum manager just died out, without being archived? How many online communities have sparked up and just slowly died without anyone realizing except for a handful of people?

It's a weird feel. In real life, when an old community dies out, there's at least buildings and landmarkings that show they existed. Online? Nothing. The thought genuinely depresses me sometimes.

Yeah I know, or a Greenshot script. What i'm thinking though is that there needs to be a ready-made app and some sort of attempt to promote it as a valuable enterprise. If anyone remembers "SETI at Home" in the 90's, this could have been advanced back then in the same way, and we'd have ended up with a lot more material.

I was probably one of the first people trying to archive Jow Forums in a sustainable manner. Mostly as project to keep me busy. Don't remember the timeline exactly but I started closely after Jow Forumsuro turned into Jow Forums - technology. Did for a bit over a year...

and lost the data in a cascading raid fail. Lol.

Honestly only thing that really sucks about early Jow Forums archiving is how much CP got posted. I remember some of the earlier ones straight up refused to archive images because of that.

That was a thing, yeah. Less so than many might imagine though. In retrospect it was kind of reckless but I just archived everything, mostly due to not having the time to come up with a scheme to rid the archive of the occasional *actually* problematic content. Doesn't matter now though, the raid started failing at one point and the process of rebuilding it killed another HDD which blew up the whole thing. I'd say nothing of value was lost but that's not entirely true.

I use an extension for firefox called "single file" and it's great for archiving chan threads. Especially when there's a lot of cool info in them.
The guy who can actually great a site scraper that archives EVERYTHING, external links and all will be a millionaire.

This is the most classic internet video I know of.
youtube.com/watch?v=UY0xwRIGOdc

I just remember seeing a picture of a guy shitting on a baby on /b/ almost daily. In retrospect I hope it was shopped.