Digital Dynamite

I have around 3 Megabytes (Mb) of text. To put that into equivalence 1Mb is equaly to roughly 150,000 words. So in total, my notes account for around 450,000 words. I utilize a bullet notes similar to that of Logseq but they are organizaed in a way that make sense to only myself and was not meant for public viewing.

While I have experimented with some projects such as Quarts which publishes Obsidian files from Markdwon there was one obvious glaring issue faced. I do not utilize network graphing - the ability to connect words and ideas of notes to each other. If I were to publish an online version of my notes not only would they be roughly comprehensible to most readers, a lot of the notes are only useful to myself or would have to go massive reformatting to be useful to other people.

The reason I decided to go with a blog style website is because all of my post, assets, and images can be self-contained without connecting them.

Networked Though is “a network of interconnected ideas and thoughts, clustered by how they are associated with each other. However, overtime as more and more ideas grow it just becomes a mess. Every time you mention something you have to remember to connect it to another note. While that may be great and all if I’m trying to make a highly interactive website. But that’s not why this site was made.

This site was made to provide value to other people with the ideas that I collect and the creations that I make.

This is also in the same vein of why I dislike a slow movement away from forums, there is limited accessability to public information.

So much content is either in a walled garden like Facebook, or written on the equivalent of self-destroying paper.

I grew up on a UBB based forum that has archives back to 1998 or so. You can search everything. It’s mind-blowing how you have an easier time finding stuff from 1998 than 2018 (which will invariably be accessible via some hip AJAX framework that dynamically paints content onto the page, 10 posts at a time, before eventually crashing). From Reddit

For example, one of the easist explinations I found of How does water get to the top of tall trees? was from the MadSci Network Archive back in 1997.

I fully uphold the preservation of data because it may be useful to someone now or in the future if they find it. I’ve had someone from highschool reach out to me to get the program download for the Architecture software that I used. Because I had a backup I was able to easily give it over.

I can name countless other examples of this phenomenon but the biggest one I’ve seen is the current migration to discord due to their large file upload limits and essentially being used as an archive. For example:

• The Battlefield 2 Refractor 2 Modding community moving from https://bfeditor.org/ to Discord
• Almost all gaming communities moving from Skype to Discord/Team (skype wasn’t any better either for saving data, but people used Skype)
• Most companies having a 90 day expiration policy to prevent Standard-Operating-Procedures being in chat channels and actually being documented unlike discord
• Most of my messages from the past 5 years being on Discord
• There is already a Discord Chat Exporter that was made because of this problem

Documents are documents. Books are books, recordings are recordings, and so on. As time has gone on, though, I’ve observed the probably obvious-to-others fact that Lore is the grease between the concrete blocks of knowledge, the carved step in an otherwise impossible-to-scale mountain, the small bit of powder sprinkled through a workspace to ensure sparks don’t fly and things don’t burn. Inconceivably odd to the outsider, but vital to the dedicated or intense practice of the craft. ASCII by Jason Scott, Discord, or the Death of Lore — March 6, 2023

Think of lore as the one issue only a single other person or tiny group has solved. How can you add an additional contribution without re-solving the entire equation? You can’t. It would take more time, effort, and money to do so.

Am I a hypocrite?

I would hope not. the internet still exist to connect ideas. Why else would I be linking other articles for you to explore. If I care enough about that source I archive it for myself because data and storage is extremely cheap compared to the price of not having that information. I link these other post to give context behind my logical and why I hold this stance. Even if none of these post were active anymore there are countless other examples of information being lost to time due to bad practices. An easy one being the Rosetta Stone.

Photo by Elisha Terada on Unsplash