Yeah and it sucked for archival purposes then and it still sucks now and forums took its place and that’s still where serious people go to talk about their field. Want a custom ROM for your phone? You’re going on a forum. Want to know how to repair a specific thing on a car? You’re going on a forum. Want to talk about your new patchwork passion? You’re going on a forum.
But somehow there’s some fields (crypto, some parts of gaming…) where people have forgotten that or simply have never spent time on forums to see the difference in quality of info having an ongoing discussion makes.
Just thinking about the fields and fields of car, electric, and plumbing forums all sitting out there with broken links and dead photobucket / imgur embedded pictures…
That’s an issue with the cost of storage back then meaning that people needed external hosts, but these days if Reddit and Lemmy can self host then an equivalent forum could do it too.
You aren’t “archiving” shit of this magnitude. Forums and hosts get the real letters and even the more permissive countries and hosts tend to have minimal issues taking action for these kinds of leaks. They are just as transient as chat rooms with a much bigger investment to run
Which leave “dark web” sites that very much do exist but don’t get linked in news articles
Didn’t we use things like irc in the past?
Yeah and it sucked for archival purposes then and it still sucks now and forums took its place and that’s still where serious people go to talk about their field. Want a custom ROM for your phone? You’re going on a forum. Want to know how to repair a specific thing on a car? You’re going on a forum. Want to talk about your new patchwork passion? You’re going on a forum.
But somehow there’s some fields (crypto, some parts of gaming…) where people have forgotten that or simply have never spent time on forums to see the difference in quality of info having an ongoing discussion makes.
Just thinking about the fields and fields of car, electric, and plumbing forums all sitting out there with broken links and dead photobucket / imgur embedded pictures…
That’s an issue with the cost of storage back then meaning that people needed external hosts, but these days if Reddit and Lemmy can self host then an equivalent forum could do it too.
You aren’t “archiving” shit of this magnitude. Forums and hosts get the real letters and even the more permissive countries and hosts tend to have minimal issues taking action for these kinds of leaks. They are just as transient as chat rooms with a much bigger investment to run
Which leave “dark web” sites that very much do exist but don’t get linked in news articles
And Usenet before that.