I don't have a direct answer to your question, but it reminded me of a Tom Scott video where a library tries to keep a copy of everything you can think of (even stuff like leaflets) because it's not possible to know now what will be relevant/interesting in the future, so it's better to err on the side of keeping more stuff than necessary than to lose things that might be useful in the future. I suck at summarizing, so here's the link to this video:
this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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Asklemmy
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Somebody has to make the call. There was this dinosaur book for kids in a little free library. It didn’t even have an author or publisher, because it was AI garbage. Full of misspellings, etc. I contemplated throwing it in the trash because I don’t think it should exist. But for some reason I had trouble deciding that for others.
Digitize and delete? Scan straight to OCR and dump the books. One hard drive can store a lot of books.
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Drop accounting and commercial transaction documents. Invoices, receipts, shipping declarations, etc... Sure it could be interesting to future archeologists but it makes the huge majority of all documents generated by humanity. We still have millions of untranslated accounting docs from ancient Mesopotàmia. It not really that useful.
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Content published in less than 1000 copies, or read/watched less than 1000 times if online. Fanfiction, self published books and so on. Again it's a loss for a couple of niche future historians. You drop a significant % of storage, but even minor works representing our society remain.
Keep the most popular at the time. Pulp. The weird fan fic you wrote when you were 14, memes. The things that actual people enjoy, there is a lot that someone 1000 years from now can learn reading your weird embarrasing fan fiction and diary.
The rich and powerful are going to preserve all their crap just fine, the normal everyday doesn't seem to get high priority for preservation.
The rich and powerful are going to preserve all their crap just fine, the normal everyday doesn't seem to get high priority for preservation.
I don't know if that is true when we are talking about hundreds if not thousands of years. Money and power can only go so far after you die.
I think mostly it comes down to if you were important to history or not. Even then it comes down to who it telling the history.
I'd use a better compression method and kick the can down the road to the next sucker to take the job.
Let an almighty google algorithm decide ❤️
I would sort according to it's relevance/value to it's genre as well as the redundancy of the information contained.
Vibes and cover art