If Twitter Goes Down In Flames, What Happens To Its Huge And Historically Important Collection Of Tweets?
from the something-to-start-thinking-about dept
This blog has just written about the likely loss of a very particular kind of culture – K-pop live streams. Culture is culture, and a loss is a loss. But potentially we are facing the disappearance of a cultural resource that is indisputably more important. I’m talking about Twitter, and its vast store of tweets that have been written over the last 16 years of its existence.
We have rather taken Twitter and its key role in modern culture and public discourse for granted. But the recent purchase of the company by Elon Musk, and his idiosyncratic decisions since doing so, have (a) raised the possibility that Twitter will go bankrupt, as Musk himself has allegedly said, and (b) made people realize how much of value would be lost if that happens.
There is no ongoing independent backup of Twitter. There was to begin with: the US Library of Congress (LoC) signed an agreement allowing it to create a complete Twitter Archive for a while. That ran for 12 years, during which time billions of tweets were collected. As an update on the Twitter Archive explained in 2017, the decision not to collect everything thereafter was taken because of the dramatic increase in the number of tweets; the fact that the Library of Congress only received text, but many tweets were more visual than textual; and the increase in potential tweet length from 140 to 280 characters. The LoC also noted that its partial collection already “documents the rise of an important social media platform”, and that in any case, it does not aim to “collect comprehensively”. As a result, it started adding tweets on a more selective basis. It concluded:
The Twitter Archive may prove to be one of this generation’s most significant legacies to future generations. Future generations will learn much about this rich period in our history, the information flows, and social and political forces that help define the current generation.
I would argue that this was still true after the archive was halted; whether it will be in the future, remains to be seen. Nonetheless, at the very least we are faced with losing many, perhaps most tweets from the years 2017 until 2022. That’s because as far as I am aware, no one else is receiving a full feed of tweets in the way the Library of Congress was. The indispensable Internet Archive holds snapshots, but there is no guarantee it has a particular tweet.
Downloading and storing all tweets directly from the public Twitter service is not possible. That’s not so much for technical reasons – it would be a challenge but surely not beyond today’s advanced systems – but because of copyright. Twitter’s Terms of Service state:
You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content).
Making copies of billions of tweets without permission would be too risky for any organization to contemplate, given the huge costs involved in such a project. Obtaining that permission from hundreds of millions of Twitter users to make copies of their tweets would be a licensing nightmare. Whatever happens as a result of Elon Musk’s changes to the service, that copyright problem is not something that is going to disappear. As a result, what the Library of Congress rightly called “one of this generation’s most significant legacies to future generations” will always be at risk of disappearing forever, leaving the valuable but incomplete archive the LoC holds, but does not make publicly available.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, or Mastodon. Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.
Filed Under: archiving, elon musk, history
Companies: twitter
Comments on “If Twitter Goes Down In Flames, What Happens To Its Huge And Historically Important Collection Of Tweets?”
Except, maybe in a bit barn in Utah ;-).
Re:
Yeah, but that’s a write-only archive
Re: Re:
They could make it valuable by making it an archive or public data for the library of congress. That way they have an excuse for collecting the data,and give some value back to the public.
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Apple can do whatever it wants. They are a private business. If the history of tweets disappears, oh well.
If you’re worried about it, maybe lobby Apple to not team up with Google and destroy Twitter.
Re:
Apple and Google won’t be responsible for the destruction of Twitter. That burden will lie entirely on the shoulders of Apartheid Emerald Mine Space Karen.
Re: Re:
Do you know of any successful app that is banned from both app stores?
And if Apple and Google ban Twitter, too bad. They are private companies and can ban whatever they want from their platforms.
Both platforms can make it so their phones can’t connect to Twitter’s servers, effectively destroying the company.
Should they have that power? Doesn’t matter: PRIVATE COMPANIES.
Re: Re: Re:
Should Apple and Google choose to ban Twitter from their respective app stores, their hands will have been forced by Elon Musk’s haphazard management of Twitter. The burden for the destruction of Twitter will lie on the shoulders of the person(s) most responsible for the policies upon which it runs—and right now, that person is Elon Musk.
Re: Re: Re:
Um, let me tell you about these things called “web browsers…”
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Re: Re: Re:2
Are you saying Apple and Google can’t put a hosts-type file on their phones’ operating systems and block Twitter servers?
Do you really believe this?
Re: Re: Re:3
Only if they have credible evidence to believe that Twitter is a threat to national security.
I mean, it’s not as if government entities, Representatives and Senators are on Twitter. I mean, I’d love it if they all moved to Mastodon and the other options but…
Re: Re: Re:
They can, but to my knowledge they’ve never done anything remotely like that. At most, they’ve banned apps, and whose fault is it that Twitter is almost unusable without the apps?
It does matter. The “power” was granted by the public and can be taken away if abused. By means other than the legal system, if necessary.
Re: Re: Re:2
That power was, IIRC, granted by the FTC and while Google and Apple can block the app AND the website, the FTC would be asking questions if this happened, or would issue a remimder that they are monitoring the damn issue.
Yes, Private Companies. No, they still have to obey the law, plus there might ne 1A violations if they fully cut off access to Twitter.
I say might since there’s a ton of politicians, government organizations and the like on Twitter. Cutting off access to these government entities might cause issues as well, but I’m less sure on this area.
Your logical fallacy is not only bad, but also shows how antidirt you are.
Re: Re: Re:3
The law says the only 1A violation would be the government preventing apple et all from banning twitter.
No, politicians have no more right to be on a private platform than anyone else. Platforms retain their full 1A rights to kick out problems for being problems.
Re: Re: Re:
“Do you know of any successful app that is banned from both app stores?”
Twitter is a website, people just commonly use an app to access it. I know of a great many successful websites that don’t have dedicated apps.
“Both platforms can make it so their phones can’t connect to Twitter’s servers”
Again, no they can’t. They can make it so that they don’t supply special services, but they aren’t even thinking of blocking the website. They weren’t even thinking of removing the app until Musk welcomed Nazis back on to the platform and started goading Apple because they stopped paying him advertising.
Re: Re: Re:2
I don’t think we even have evidence Apple is looking to remove twitter outside the claims of known liar Elon Musk.
Re: Re: Re:3
Exactly, why is anyone relying on the least reliable source of info about Twitter.
Re: Re: Re:
Your strawmen are bad and you should feel bad.
Re: Re: Re:
If you’re talking about installable apps (that is, not web apps), very few people could use iPhone apps not in the app store, whereas with Android phones most people just don’t know how. One would therefore have to use an idiosyncratic definition of “success” for it to apply to an app most people can’t install. For example, if an app-writer’s goal were to create controversy, searching for a list of the most controversial banned apps should reveal ones considered successful by that metric.
Re:
“maybe lobby Apple to not team up with Google and destroy Twitter”
Why do you think Elon Musk, super genius, needs any help to destroy his own company? He’s doing just fine in that respect.
Re:
Apple doesn’t control the existence of storage on Twitter servers.
But yeah, corporations can do what they like, to an extent, such that shareholders aren’t enormously pissed off, and privately held companies are even freer. What’s your point?
Re:
“lobby Apple to not team up with Google and destroy Twitter”
I’d be careful with that free Flavor-Aid, someone might be spiking it 😉
So far, the complaints from Musk seem to be that a) Apple aren’t advertising with him and b) they take a cut for the services they provide. I’ve not heard anything about Google’s advertising practice, but if Musk has a problem with the Play store charging for their services, there’s numerous more easy options he can suggest to Android users, and users of both platforms can easily bypass the apps entirely by just using the website in a browser.
If “I can’t force people to pay me” and “I have to pay them” are what will kill Twitter under Musk’s management, he deserves to fail, no matter what conspiracy he’s hallucinating. Stop drinking the spiked beverages and stop hallucinating along with him. If Twitter dies, it’s because and incompetent billionaire drove it into the ground.
Re:
Citation (other than Elon) needed
This has got to be a new meme about storing important data on public websites.
Are they called “cold twitter wallets” yet, to ride the crypto wave? :\
Maybe AI can use a neural network to figure out an archive strategy and save the day :/
Did you hear the one about the oceans being integral to future generations? It was a knee-slapper too :\
Seriously though, plastic litter aside, anybody with that archiving problem probably screwed the e-pooch.
It looks like its a tedious task to archive specific threads and pulldown any associated audio, videos and images. To get the context from twitter, its all about archiving the threads.
Did you hear the one about string theory?
Re:
You appear to misunderstand the problem, if Twitter disappears, it does not matter how many archives Twitter has,they disappear with the company. It takes at least one, and preferably more, unconnected entities holding copies to preserve copies of information. Partial copies may suite some purposes, but for longer term history, full copies held by libraries or their equivalent are required. Keeping up with the volume of new tweets takes some serious bandwidth and server capacity, and that may well mean a government funded entity, or one such for every country.
Re: Re:
They indicated the Library of Congress stopped archiving in 2017 except for select accounts. Its obvious they had foresight about either waning interest in social or the complexities involved.
As far as 2022 historical value, it wasn’t valuable enough for the L.o.C.
Re: Re: Re:
It would have been if the LoC had the funding for that and a million other things.
But even if the LoC found it non-valuable, what does the opinion of the current management, at any given time, of the LoC, matter? What are they, arbiters of culture?
Re: Re: Re:2
Trends come and go. It was a clear indication in 2017 that Twitter was not important by their standards.
There were stories this week of posts on social pertaining to protests in China were spammed with porn and other toxic content to flag content moderation.
Twitter was just not representative of the United States.. Thats all.
No mention of the UN scarfing up all that SPAM.
Re: Re: Re:
The Library were running out of bandwidth and servers and storage space. Handling the firehouse of new twitter data take a lot more than a server in a closet somewhere, it takes a small data center.
Re: Re: Re:2
Really? Do you have a citation for that? The Internet Archive has 5% of their budget (the LoC’s budget being shockingly small itself—less than 0.1% of the military budget) and has the ambition to archive the entire web. They don’t, of course, but it’s hard to imagine Twitter being some kind of tipping point here. How big could it be? Even if someone had to insert a new 16 TB hard drive every day, the annual cost would be less than a million dollars per year.
Re: Re: Re:3
The libraries reasons are linked in the article itself, those being volume and number of transactions.
Re: Re: Re:4
Alright, I’ve looked at it even though it’s a PDF. It does not mention a shortage of bandwidth or storage space. It’s quite vague, really:
* “The Library only receives text. It does not receive images, videos or linked content. Tweets now are often more visual than textual, limiting the value of text-only collecting.” (But wasn’t it the LoC who decided to collect only text?)
* “The volume of tweets and related transactions has evolved and increased dramatically since the initial agreement was signed. … Twitter is expanding the size of tweets beyond what was originally described at the beginning of effort.” (They’re not saying they couldn’t do it, though, just that this isn’t what they signed up for.)
* “The Library generally does not collect comprehensively. […] With social media now established, the Library is bringing its collecting practice more in line with its collection policies.” (This is circular logic. They’re not collecting comprehensively because it’s not their policy to collect comprehensively. Under the new rules that were just passed; the very policy change that this document is describing.)
Notably, it gives no hints whatsoever about the amount of data involved or the costs of collecting and storing it.
And then the last paragraph kind of undermines the whole thing: “Without the efforts of past generations, the nation might not have a collection of […] film footage depicting San Francisco before and after the great quake of 1906”. But film was more than 12 years old by 1906, so we’d have been throwing away the “before” footage as uninteresting and mundane under such a policy.
Re: Re: Re:5
Both increases resulting in higher bandwidth demands, along more processors and disks to manage the database,. That is a growing data center, with its implications floor space, cooling and power delivery.
Re: Re: Re:6
Yes, of course, but they didn’t say any of these things would be significant burdens, and we can’t evaluate that without knowing how Twitter’s data stream compares to the stuff they’re already storing. Like, do they need to send an admin to the occasional Black Friday sale to buy 20 hard drives, or ask Congress to fund a new datacenter and the staff to run it?
Re: Re: Re:7
Well, the 2022 figures are 867 million tweets a day, and an estimated 361 billion a year. I will let you figure which option applies.
Re: Re: Re:8
Assuming an average length of 100 bytes, that’s around 36 TB per year for the text. It would take a 10 Mbit/s connection to download that, and three $250 hard drives to store it. Double that to account for backups. That’s not accounting for metadata; then again, text compresses extremely well.
Having no information on how often people post (unique) images or videos, or the average size of such things, I can only guess. If we multiply by 100, it’s within the realm of possibility for one eccentric high-income-but-sub-millionaire archivist. Doesn’t seem like it should be a problem at all for a national library, especially if they’re not letting people browse it online. Storing data is literally their job.
My conclusion is that the LoC is likely severely underfunded, and probably wanted to continue the project but couldn’t justify the resources. As a point of comparison, here’s how much data the Internet Archive is storing: 120 PB (120,000 TB, or 7500 hard drives of 16 TB size), expanding at about 25 PB per year (1500 drives). On a tenth of the budget, while allowing the public to browse and download most of it.
Re: Re: Re:9
Actually, that seems to be the amount of unique data. Another page lists the gross amount as 212 PB across 28,000 hard drives, as of December 2021. They store 240 disks per rack, and with 4 data centers, that’s about 30 storage racks each. A large data center can evidently have upward of 10,000 racks (references: Rack Solutions, Enconnex, some person on Reddit).
Re: Re: Re:9
You have omitted the indexing,that will multiply the storage requirement by 10 or more, otherwise all that data will be useless. Building those indexes takes a lot of horsepower as well. Also, back up for such data streams means at least one duplicate site, preferably two or three, play all the journaling needed to allow sites to resyncronize after an of service at one, at one, and build another copy if necessary.
Just copy the data to duplicate disks is the same as not bothering to archive the data.
Re: Re: Re:2
More like the value to spam ratio was not adequate to even be considered useful.
With the United states having a population of 335+ million and an estimate of 5.5 billion Internet users in 2022, the math makes a logical conclusion easy.
There was an estimate of 3.9 billion Internet users when the LoC pulled the plug.
I got to enjoy the information superhighway when the population was 16 million. The quality was superb 🙂
Network architecture 2.0 is an easy way to dump a lot of the trash too.
The same thing that happens when any website is going down in flames. You hope that some legitimate group such as a national library would have already recognized it as “historically important” and simply dealt with the “hugeness” to store a copy. Then you find out they didn’t, and the bunch of amateurs known as Archive Team are buying up hard drives and making a desparate last-ditch effort to save what they can.
You can help—with their general effort, not currently Twitter—by running their virtual machine image from a “clean” internet connection. Shit like this happens all the fucking time, GeoCities being perhaps the most famous example (and Archive Team managed to get about 900 GB of it; more than any other entity we know about).
The Wayback Machine does capture a lot of stuff on its own, but not nearly enough. It obeys robots.txt, for example, and is often blocked by it. Some sites have other means like CAPTCHAs for blocking robots. In practice, it’s up to unaffiliated entities including Archive Team to bypass these measures, download the sites, and upload them to the Internet Archive or elsewhere. If you’re posting anything you care about, you should upload it to archive.org right away. They’ll host it for free for as long as they exist, and they don’t use automated content blocking.
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Also, if you see anything you care about, stick “https://web.archive.org/save/” in front of its URL and access that page. It asks the Wayback Machine to save a copy. Doesn’t always get all the associated media, though, and might not do anything if the page was recently saved (as with the copy of this very Techdirt story I tried to save just now; I got a snapshot from 30 minutes ago instead).
Re:
“The same thing that happens when any website is going down in flame”
Which is the problem. Twitter happens to be larger and failing faster than most, while having some very important historical data on there (yes, there’s a lot of trivial stuff too). If stories like this end up helping with general archival efforts, then that’s a great thing.
Re: Re:
Several people in this thread have said similar, as if that’s a bad thing. Do y’all realize how overjoyed archaeologists are when they find ancient trash piles? Ironically, it’s often the “unimportant” stuff that’s the most desirable, because that’s the stuff nobody wrote about in the history books or thought to save. For example, there are all kinds of photographs and portraits of important historical figures, but comparatively few streetscapes of ordinary life.
Re: Re: Re: Ordinary life isn't archival material
Nobody writes a book about how to go to sleep, wake up, shower, shave, brush teeth, eat, go to work, come home, watch news, eat, rinse, repeat.
History is about historically significant events. Twitter isn’t that repository anyone looks for now nor will anyone in the future care either.
Tom from Myspace agrees. So does Steve “You’ve got mail” Case.
Nobody cares. Twitter is not a storehouse and its content is ephemeral garbage, much like what’s between Florida Man’s orange ears.
E
Re: Re: Re:2
Again, Mr. Gavron.
Pontus Pilate isn’t important, he was just some Roman governor who sentenced a terrorist to crucifixition. That’s going off what was actually preserved and not including recent archeological finds.
The man who issued the Magna Carta TWICE? Just some lucky knight who knew how to actually do more than his job. His flowery biography deserved to lay undiscovered in a fucking rich guy’s library, left to rot.
Seabiscuit? A flash in the pan and a bloody animal.
If I may apply your logic to its absurd conclusion, anything you don’t consider important should be thrown out like yesterday’s trash. You’d be throwing out a LOT of human history and culture.
It’s okay, though.You are the final arbiter of what’s considered culturally relevant, and totally not a product of a capitalistic culture that values throwing away junk thats not useful to the economic machine…
Re: Re: Re:3
In addition, as some people have already said, Trump’s tweets should be, at least, be preserved, if only to try to convict the fuck with illegal insurrection.
And while it’s a bit too early to say, Trump’s presidency IS a relevant point in current history. Not just in America but also in the fracturing of the American order.
Then again, you’d probably tell me I’m crazy for saying that CHina has risen up to try to be a rival global superpower…
Re: Re: Re:4
There’s absolutely no danger of Trump’s tweets being lost, any more than we’re going to lose an episode of the original Star Trek. It’s the stuff nobody seems to care about that goes missing. Like, does anyone have comprehensive recordings of the advertisements shown when Star Trek was first aired? Or during the reruns, as it became a cult hit? The news stories referencing it? I’m sure someone would be interested.
Re: Re: Re:3 It’s okay, though
Thanks for addressing me directly, nobody
When one day you’re my commanding officer you can say “Again” but until then you’re a dick without balls to sign his own name.
Sure thing, Jellybean.
Now let mommy and daddy use the computer “again”.
E
Re: Re: Re:4
I’ve mentioned time and again that if I sign my name, I will get arrested in Singapore for a lot of “reasons”. Can’t criticize the government there.
Besides, you don’t even want to engage with the argument * asshole*.
Your callousness is unbecoming.
Re: Re: Re:5 Anonymous Coward I and We stuff
Everyone who is anonymous is listed as “Anonymous Coward.” You indicate you fear reprisal from SG. Understood. However, unless you substantiate your “Anonymous Coward” from the many other such people, you’re just all the same.
I’ll save the lecture as to how you can remain anonymous on this forum that SG monitors daily to come arrest you, and yet still maintain an individual identity (or like a moron above claim to be a “we” collective). That’s up to you.
In becoming a citizen of the United States there were decisions I had to make. One of those is that I will not hide who I am. You are welcome to find some middle ground that is distinguishing yet not identifying.
E
Re: Re: Re:3
dude, what the fuck is your obsession with Seabiscuit
Re: Re: Re:4
Just an interesting bit of history regarding the US that accurately could be considered “trash history” in the eyes of modern people. And thus, fit to be torched since no one should care about racehorses or the industry surrounding it.
It is a bit weird, yes, but a lot of people don’t consider the racehorse more popular than WW2 “important culture”.
Re: Re: Re:5
Thinking the story of Seabiscuit is interesting doesn’t make you weird.
Bringing it up unprompted—multiple times!—and equating the story of a racehorse to the importance of [checks notes] one of the most important legal charters ever written? That makes you fucking weird.
Re: Re: Re:2
Right, that’s the point. We don’t know a lot about the ordinary daily lives of people in the past, and archaeologists want to know. What did they eat, how often did they bathe, how common was shaving and how was it done, what did they use as toothpaste and how did it affect tooth decay, etc. All this stuff was considered too mundane for the history books; at the time, “everybody knew”, but now we have significant gaps in our knowledge of the past. Like the hypothesis of biphasic sleep being a historical norm: lots of texts hint at it (and people missed the hints for a long time), but since nobody felt the need to record it in detail, we can’t be sure.
Garbage, literal or otherwise, is one of the few unfiltered records of history left to future generations, precisely because it’s ephemeral. Whether or not you care, people do: CNN, National Geographic, Popular Anthropology. Some people in these comments are saying Twitter is useless, some are saying it’s actively harmful, some are saying it occasionally has something important. People have seriously said it may have changed election results. Maybe in a thousand years, people will be arguing about how much of a role it played in the downfall of the American Empire.
Re: Re: Re:
Indeed. You’ll note I didn’t say not to keep the trivial stuff, it was just an admission that people demanding archives don’t look at all the data stored as equivalent to the Bible or something as some seem to be claiming we think.
“…and (b) made people realize how much of value would be lost if that happens.”
And nothing of value was lost.
Re: I hope you're joking
Absolutely nothing of value. No fun things to read. No important conversations. No debunks of misinformation. No exposure of corruption. No records of social movements. No music. No animations. No trailers. No links to news sites. No links to blogs. No links to game websites. No clips of concerts. No memes. No links to archives.
Re: Re:
I can’t believe that I included animations but forgot to list photos, drawings, paintings, and fanart.
Re: Re: Re:
Or shitposting!
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Twitter backup
What important twitter data? Twitter is cancer and it’s demise would improve society and life in general.
Re:
If true, wouldn’t that prove the importance? Something that is “cancer” or otherwise a detriment to society needs to be studied and understood. After all, those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it.
Re:
I’d also argue that if all 8 billion humans died, it would improve society immensely.
It’s not Twitter that made everyone such shitty sapient beings; it was 2 million years of evolution, influenced by not only the people before us, but also current shitters like Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch, that made humanity a toxic cesspit.
Social media 9nly amplifies all of that shittiness, ie, you probably are an asshole too if someone pushed the right buttons.
Re:
Just because you don’t find it important, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Even if it were 100% negative to society (and it’s demonstrably not), having a record of what happens when things go wrong is still valuable. You don’t learn from history or prevent it by only having a record of when unicorns and butterflies were around.
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Re: Re:
Lolololol… I always laugh at that perspective.
If you taste everything in a cesspool, you’ll eventually find a morsel you like 🙂
Thats not a very efficient mantra in the modern world.. And all that crap that had to be ingested is only someone elses mental illness.
Re: Re: Re:
Let’s put it this way.
Preserve the crap to inform future generations about how much crap we put out. With the hope that they’ll learn and not make the same mistakes.
Or burn all of that and let the future repeat the same mistakes.
We seem hellbent on repeating the same mistakes anyway, so here’s a third option: a body count of 8 billion and counting, along with the total destruction of everything we’ve created or left behind, so as not to pollute any hypothetical alien race.
After all, we are so insignificant and toxic in the grand scheme of things and the universe it’s safe to assume we will pollute and/or harm any hypothetical alien race with OUR culture.
Re: Re: Re:2
One generations trash is another generations recycling effort then, huh?
Its easy to see that the ratio of illiteracy/spam/fodder on a global network removes any value from the pool of information.
I happen to skip all of social media and still enjoy reading millions of words per month without it. Filtering tabloid trash, spam and inferior social promotions are someone elses problem.
Any quality information gleaned made its way to a more reputable information outlet, just as it always has.
They used to call television “talking heads”. What do you think they call social media? I did like the paragraph in Twitters download statement:
“interest and demographic information that we have inferred about you, information about ads that you’ve seen or engaged with on Twitter” – https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-your-twitter-archive
Sounds like humanity to meh :p
Re: Re: Re:3
I meant humanity in general.
We love to destroy ourselves, and not even a global superbug, or TWO WORLD WARS could force some semblance of unity to fight a common enemy.
And we continue to want to hurt ourselves, regardless of whatever we choose to pooison ourselves with.
You want to kick the problem to the next generation, I want to eliminate the problem entirely. After all, if humanity and all the culture humanity has ever created were destroyed, it’d be a net gain to the universe at large, asuming that there’s any intelligent life.
Harm reduction is the goal here. I don’t give a fuck about “reputable entities” in this case, all of them have directly or indirectly caused enough harm that extermination would be necesary.
Brutal, violent, whatever, I get that. But hey, if you think only certain bits are culturally significiant and whatnot, there’s always someone else who does not consider your “culturally significant” bullshit significant, and then there’s people who actually detest humanity to the point where nuking EVERYTHING is the only option.
Re: Re: Re:4
I prefer to enjoy innovation in the 21st century. There is more to enjoy than I have time for 🙂
There are vocabulary hints that make it clear when an individual (or group) is in an unhealthy environment. Choose your friends wisely still has value.
There are so many topics that are not a priority in modern times. IMO, if someone serves no purpose and/or has a meaningless existence, they’ll portray something as a “We” when it has no merit in a healthy environment.
It’s easy to identify culture rot when all they talk about is rot 🙂
Re: Re: Re:5
It’s true that I live in an unhealthy society.
It’s made up of people like you who refuse to want to learn about the mistakes of the past.
Congrats, I hope you don’t get shot as you let the white supremacists or other sort of autocrat get into power, aided by your wilful ignorance.
It’s not a threat; it’s your eventual fate.
Re: Re: Re:6
Is that like getting obese by eating pig slop food?
Considering your poor choice of words, nobody speaks english to you 🙂
It does make it easier to ignore when culture rot only talks about rot :p
If you didn’t have culture to start with, you just bleet about nothing.
Illiteracy is not a humanity problem. There are so many outlets to quality information.
Re: Re: Re:6 Unhealthy society
No, society is what all of us live in. If YOU don’t like it that doesn’t make the other 99.999% “unhealthy”. It just means this is not the society for you to be in.
Bye now. As in, go somewhere else. This society does have its flaws, but it IS THE SOCIETY WE LIVE IN. Unlike you, who are leaving. Don’t let the door hit you in the brain on your way out.
Re: Re: Re:7
Again, ypur callousness is a blight.
If it’s wrong to call the same society I share with you assholes unhealthy, then yeah, I guess I should take the hint and commit suicide then.
Please don’t EVER hint that. But knowing you, asshole, you probably wish I killed myself earlier.
Ironic, considering it’s me I’m talking about.
Re: Re: Re:8 Suicide for losers
Brothuh, you took that way way way out of perspective. I didn’t wish you death, suggest that you die, nor encourage suicide. Being a member of society (or not) doesn’t entail ritual death if one cannot be a member of that society.
Yeah, so first, I didn’t “hint” at anything like that, and secondly I have the right to speak my mind — same as you do — and lastly when you’re my commanding officer you come tell me what I “Don’t EVER” do again. Until that time try reading the text… not “between the lines” but the actual text.
Sorry you’re unable to sign a real name or a unique identifier. You’re a nuisance troll because all “Anonymous Cowards” are indistinguishable.
Please don’t go kill yourself. <— clear enough?
E
Re: Re: Re:8
Have you ever wondered how many letters to Santa are thrown in the trash?
All of the “postcards from oblivion” are trash in the 1st world.
Even pre-Internet/analog, illiteracy and poor education made those “postcards from oblivion” a waste of time.
I always laugh when its pissing down rain on a sh!tshow parade that is not even relevant :p
Re:
Your comment shows more about how you interact with the Internet than it does about twitter, but then trolls are a cancer on the Internet.
Re: Reposting what I wrote in another comment
Sure, there was nothing important on Twitter.
Also, I should add that it’s very difficult to access archived webpages if you don’t know the URL. If the site goes down, then you’d better have saved the URL on your computer beforehand.
Re: Re: Forgot a part
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Smoking the Canadian weed again.
Begged question. Nothing historically important is in a privately held free and non-backed-up database of short messages.
NOTHING.
It’s not historically important because it’s not in any way indicative of anything other than a general “mood” or malaise of the populace.
No public or governmental rulings are released on Twitter. Twitter is not a “repository” in any way, shape, or form of anything other than ephemeral thoughts.
SO,
What happens? It’s what happens. It’s not historically anything let alone important.
If you feelz differently please prove what you assert. Good luck with making a public toilet appear to be the holy bible. [or whatever book you prefer.]
Re:
Well, that’s a lot of very dumb assertions. From claiming there’s no historical value to what happens on there (I can name several major historical events – positive and negative – that were coordinated, discussed or recorded via Twitter) to claiming that wanting to record history means that you’ll treat the result like the Bible? A whooole lot of dumb.
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Re: Re: Dumb
Dumb is the inability to speak and a real condition. Please don’t use it to insult someone you hate. Do you yell at deaf people or call other victims of life names?
Re: Re: Re:
While we appreciate the tone policing, we’re not calling Mr. Gavron unable to speak, but his views as not rooted in any percievable reality. Or evidence. Or history.
Re: Re: Re:2 Dipshits speak and yet they are not mute -- just dumb.
You are an anonymous coward. There is no “we” there. You’re as far from a “we” as you can get.
No, you’re not a we, and what you “call” or not call is of no concern to the rest of the collective “you” that isn’t a “we”.
Thank you for your baseless evidence-free reality-proof opinion of my “percievable[sic]” reality. Goldwater Rule.
Next time you want to judge my percievable[sic] whatever, have the goodness of actually communicating. Judgment is not for anonymous cowards who think they’re a “we.”
We say so and we sign our names so. Back to your homework and give mommy back her laptop.
Re: Re: Re:
I’d suggest you pick up a dictionary before getting offended by someone using the word as a synonym for muteness. There’s multiple definitions of the word, and most dictionaries place the lack of intelligence usage above the one describing a disability (for example, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dumb places your definition second).
It also states the following:
It seems you’re getting angry that I’m not using a slur for mute people. Very strange.
Re: Re: Re:2
That’s an interesting point, because the records of the changing meanings of words such as “dumb” are rarely headline news. When did people start using “dank” as a compliment? Someone might eventually dig through thousands of mundane tweets from 2015-2020 to figure that out. The book “The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words” tells the story of a “lunatic” doing pretty much that to create the Oxford English Dictionary.
Re: Re: Re:
Words can mean more than one thing. Now think about it while you fuck off.
Re: Re:
Again, even the historicity of the events and people in the Bible boils down to… “yeah, probably exists” due to how little actual evidence there is for that era. This is a field of study where a bloody stelae of Pontus Pilate is considered “HOLY SHIT WE HAVE ACTUAL PHYSICAL PROOF HE EXISTEDDDD” levels of excitement.
I mean, from the actual historical accounts we have of the era, no one thought much of Jesus and his supposedly insurrectionist apocalyptic cult, since it was one of possibly hundreds back in the day.
Re: Re: Re:
That line of thinking always amuses me. Yes, there’s a number of things mentioned in the Bible that are real, and some things that were thought to be questionable that have since been backed by evidence. That doesn’t mean it’s a 100% accurate record of everything that happened.
Plagues and Las Vegas exist. That doesn’t mean that if someone picked up a copy of Stephen King’s The Stand in 2000 years that these things are proof that the battle against Randall Flagg actually happened as documented in that book.
Re: Re: Re:2
The academic consensus on the historicity of the Bible is fascinating. And a great read.
And mind you, history as an academic field is already like that, in a sense.
Re: Re: Re:3
It’s fine as a piece of literature, the problems come when people start cherry picking the parts that suit them to try and control the lives of others.
Re: Re: Re:4
Whoa, now, let’s not say things we can’t take back.
Re: Re: Re:5
Perhaps he was referring to the typography commonly used? Gold lettering is a bit last century, but if it tickles someone’s fancy – who are we to complain… 😎
Re: Re: Re:4
It’s also just as wrong to cherry pick parts of it and take them out of context to use as a means of condemning it. And people like you also seem to conveniently forget that it wasn’t written in English or for a modern audience yet apply your modern perspective to it without taking into account the languages it actually was written in and the culture of that time.
For example, there are multiple Hebrew words for “day” – it’s common for there to be more than one Hebrew word for an English one because they have different contexts and meanings which are often lost in the translation to English. In the Genesis creation account, what is translated as “day” in English actually isn’t always the same word in Hebrew. Only one Hebrew word for “day” actually specifies a 24-hour period, and it’s only used once in the entire account (when God was setting up that very thing).
But the word used for “day” in most other instances in the account (such as when the text gives the creation day, ie the first day, second day, etc.) can actually refer to a long, unspecified amount of time on the order of a geological epoch, which fits with Earth being millions of years old and is different from the 7 literal creation days most people unfamiliar with the faith and the Bible tend to think those who follow them believe. But not all do. And from the perspective of seeing each of those creation “days” as eons rather than what we think of as days, it can be said that we are still in the seventh “day” of creation.
Re: Re: Re:3
Last I read, academia was starving adjunct professors, employees and researchers as seen in the USC strike (it looks like they got a $12k to $15k payraise today though)
Also, medical/science journals have their own epidemic of fake content that occurs when its only certain ilk among the crowd.
The baton pass among generations makes much of that a cluster “F” of what is valued in modern times.
Just because a medical/science journal or academia said it, doesn’t make it true 🙂
Re: Copying what I wrote elsewhere
“Nothing historically important is in a privately held free and non-backed-up database of short messages.”
No fun things to read. No important conversations. No debunks of misinformation. No exposure of corruption. No records of social movements. No music. No photos. No drawings. No paintings. No animations. No fanart. No trailers. No links to news sites. No links to blogs. No links to game websites. No clips of concerts. No memes. No links to archives.
It’s very difficult to access archived webpages if you don’t know the URL. If the website of interest goes down, then you’d better have saved the URL (or the webpage, if you use archiving tools such as Webrecorder) on your computer beforehand.
And Pontus Pilate was simply an insignificant governor of an unruly part of the Roman Empire and simply crucified a terrorist and crippled his nascent cult. Nevermind that the cult would become one of the Empire’s biggest religions just 200+ years later.
And the man who wrote and issued the Magna Carta TWICE was a no-name knight who simply was lucky and his flowery, biased biography has zero historical and cultural significance. Nevermind the fact that the existence of this biography has opened insights into Middle Age England and Europe.
And Seabiscuit was simply an unruly horse and was not, for a brief moment in WW2, more popular that fucking World War 2. After all, a famous racehorse is just a fucking fad.
I understand that Twitter and most social media may be unpalatable due to what it enabled. I’d also like to extend that to email lists, IRC, and Usenet as well, if one follows your argument.
In fact, I’m more than willing to admit that the entirety of human culture is more harmful to any sapient being that is capable of reading our cultural output and it would be better to not only torch all of it, but also us just to be safe.
After all,we’renot culturally significant, or even materially significant in the grand scheme of things, and we’ve proven time and again we’d rather hurt ourselves and harm Earth than actually trying to fix our problems.
Re:
Welp, WordPress has done it again.
This was meant to be a response to Mr. Gavron’s spiel about Twitter being culturally insignificant.
In general, I agree that singing birds are not worth the shit they drop. However, as a specific exception, I’d save everything that #45 ever posted. Even if not for investigative purposes (vis-a-vis the insurrection), it’s still important to keep in the public’s awareness that the orange baby lied more often that most individual’s hearts can beat, minute over minute. I’d also include all of #45’s cronies. Many of them dropped clues, and saving them could be valuable to an investigator as well.
Then, for good measure, I’d also save off everything that anyone communicated about the insurrection, before, during and after. But after any and all investigations are closed, these probably aren’t worth keeping.
If the public valued archiving (or free speech), USENET would still be a thing.
Re:
UseNet is, fortunately, still a thing, and active, to boot.
No guantarees on quality, though. And you still have to pay for access.
Re:
It is still a thing, most people just stopped using it after it got overrun by spam, trolls and warez. It’s also been archived already.
Plus, I’d warn against using public demand as a metric for whether or not something is important enough to archive. That leads you down some very unproductive paths.
This can be outsourced to users. I’m fairly sure there would be volunteers to run some browser addon that keeps browsing all history from publicly accessible @’s and sending the data to the archive to avoid blockades. If push comes to shove I can’t see why fair use wouldn’t apply to an archive.
I’m quite surprised by how fast and how thoroughly Musk is destroying Twitter. I thought it would be a bit more subtle.
Re:
I was not aware that Elon Musk was a subtle person.
Someone needs to just wget the whole thing.
Re: compuserv
Are you one of those people who thought they were installing the entire internet when they loaded a compuserv CD back in the day?
Re:
Well, if you want to empty a reservoir by sucking water through a straw, go ahead, but don’t be surprised that there is more water flowing in than you can remove.
Re: Re:
…or much less, in this case, because wget is likely just gonna download a bunch of pages telling you to enable Javascript.
In another context, we’d all be raving about Apple and their walled garden. It’s a monopoly (or monosopy?) where if you want to sell software, between them and Google, they’re about the only game in town.
They can and will reject legitimate, legal applications for any reason or none at all. It hurts smaller software developers, and it hurts consumers as they’re steered towards the software that helps Apple’s bottom line at the expense of that which doesn’t. It’s quite frankly abusive.
Of course, when the abuse targets those who we don’t much like, we turn a blind eye or even cheer it on. It’s not a healthy inclination.
And to some extent it does expose the lie that “if you don’t like the rules on a platform, go found your own” because apparently even platforms themselves can be silenced. Gigantic, known-throughout-the-world brandname platforms.
Re:
[Projects facts not in evidence]
Re:
While those companies can ban the apps, neither of them have shown any signs of blocking a web browser from visiting any site, so they are would not be blocking the use of Twitter, just not endorsing its use by allowing the app in the app stores. Android users can side load with ease, and anybody can use a web browser, so twitter use would not be blocked. Indeed any web browser on any computer, including tablets, can be used to access Twitter.