Karl Voit has an interesting diatribe on his Web site that really resonated with me. The TL;DR is that you shouldn’t commit anything relevant to Web forums like Reddit, Hacker News, or Facebook. What Voit terms as “relevant,” I would describe as important: something that’s worth preserving. If you’re posting something like, “Happy Programmers’ Day,” it hardly matters if it disappears tomorrow. If, on the other hand, you have an important lesson or insight to impart that’s important.
The problem, Voit says, is that anything you commit to one of these forums will disappear sooner or later. Look at the popular Google apps or the MySpace content that are no longer available. Right now, it’s hard to imagine a post-Facebook world but they too shall pass and anything important that you had to say on that platform will be lost.
Sadly, though, the problem is larger than just companies going out of business or dropping products. There’s also the problem of politically incorrect posts. You might think that that problem doesn’t apply to those of us in the sciences and engineering but there is case after case of posts on scientific or technical subjects that violate the current narrative being censored. Even if you embrace the current narrative, there are, as Voit explains, significantly differing laws among countries. For example, Germans consider being a Nazi a crime whereas in the US their beliefs are abhorred but still protected.
This is a smaller part of one of my favorite hobby horses: don’t commit your data to any platform that you don’t control. Ideally that means your data is in plain text and resides on a computer you control. That’s not always possible but it represents a goal.
What’s the answer? Voit suggest things like Usenet and personal blogs. Usenet seems hopelessly out of date but is still available. Personal blogs are an option available to everyone with a computer (hosting Irreal cost less than $10 a month). That’s why everything I have to say I say on Irreal. It’s my platform and will prevail as long as I do or at least as long as I want it to.
Take a look at Voit’s post. Perhaps it will make you rethink the way you contribute to the public discourse.