https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/i7uvve/the_truth_is_paywalled_... https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/bavaria-to-ban-printing-of-hitl... https://www.schoyencollection.com/23-religions/extinct-religions/23-1-sumeri... " https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-a... I came across a beautifully written article by Nathan J. Robinson about how quality work costs money to access and propaganda is freely given. The article makes some good points on why it is important for data to be more free, which I will summarize below: 1) Nobody is allowed to build a giant free database of everything human beings have ever produced. 2) Copyright law can be an intensive restriction on the freedom of speech and determines what information you can (and not) share with others. 3) The concept of a public community library needs to evolve. As books, and other content move online, our communities have as well. 4) Human creativity is phenomenally leashed when human knowledge is limited. 5) Free and affordable libraries are dying. This got me thinking about why I care about hoarding data. Data is invaluable! A digital dark age is forming around us and we can do what we can to prevent it. A lot of people here will hoard data for personal reasons. I hoard data for others. The things the people in this subreddit hoard whether it be movies, Youtube, pictures, news articles, websites, all of it is culture. Its history. Even memes and social media are not crap. Even literal shit is valuable to a scatologist. Can you imagine if we were able to find the preserved excrement from a long extinct animal? What one sees as shit, is so much more to someone else who is trained and educated. Its data. The internet and social media around us is Art and Culture from our time. This is history for the future to use and learn. Things go viral for a reason. The information shared in the jokes and content are snapshots of the public's thinking and perspective on the world. Invaluable data for future scholars. Imagine we found a Viking warship and on it was a perfectly preserved book of jokes. Sure many at the time might have thought they were shit jokes made at the expense of others. But we would learn so much about their customs, society, and the evolution of human civilization if this book was preserved and found. And the book's contents were made available to the world. Also a lot of political content is shared on social media and comment sections as well. Our understanding of politics will be carved up in units of memes, and shared on thousands of siloed paywalled platforms and mediums over time. And our role is to collect and consolidate them. This is but a small sliver of the documentation of how our world is changing around us. And we can do our part to save and make free to others as much of it as we can. "