[MrBlueIncognito]

It is a really well-written piece that resonates within me, but I am compelled to point out that not everything that the author speaks of is a lost cause. It would suit us better to stop brooding over it, and to focus instead on what can be done to alleviate the situation. Just to offer a few examples:

> When will we have time to sit down, alone or with our loved ones, and look through it all?

The For You page in the iOS Photos app is a good attempt at resolving this. Every now and then the app will notify you with an algorithmically curated album that somehow does very well at keeping out the random food-pics, sunsets, and unmemorable minutiae. This system has its flaws, but it is something. And it has the potential to be a lot better in the future.

> Will Youtube still be there in 50 years? Will Instagram and Dropbox?

Perhaps it is time initiatives like the Internet Archive and GitHub Archived Project were scaled up with better funding. Even for now a lot of cultural knowledge is there and it is safe. People in the distant future will have plenty to look back upon. There are archived copies of HN, Wikipedia, Reddit, and so on.

> If you're young today, your formative years depend on auto-deleted snapchat videos, short-lived memes, stories told in computer games likely unplayable in 30 years.

As someone still in their formative years in this era, I seem to have more mementos (both digital and physical) than my parents did at my age. The only difference seems to be that my photographs are digital and more numerous. Also, the games that my parents once played are unplayable now.

Could it be that everybody has the same experience of fading memories as they age, regardless of the era they were born in? I would think so. In that case it certainly isn't attributable to the change in lifestyle brought in by this century.

[mastazi]

I agree with what you said about the Internet Archive and similar initiatives, hopefully they will do a reasonably good job at retaining important information in the future.

> Also, the games that my parents once played are unplayable now.

I don't understand this point, in my experience pretty much every game from the 70/80/90's is still playable with some kind of emulator, but many games from around 10-15 years ago are no longer playable because the servers went offline.