[drdebug]

Internet Archive is likely the only memory of the digital world. They may or may not have made a mistake during the covid pandemic by extending their book lending program, but in the age of IA where many text and images are going to lack any source of truth, they may be one of the very few ways to document modern history.

[tablespoon]

I'm not saying it's not valuable, I'm saying not that many people would even notice, let alone care, if it disappeared.

You may personally be one of the people who cares about the IA, or know a lot of people who care, but if you go to a shopping mall six months after the IA shuts down and ask people about it at random, you'd find that level of knowledge and caring is unusual. It's not the kind of too-big-to-fail that the government would take interest in.

[billiam]

Sorry, but this is a reductionist argument. There are any number of things that could disappear without mall visitors knowing about it (NOAA, Earth's magnetic field, etc) but that doesn't mean they are not important for researchers, students, and others all over the world.

[Aeolun]

Eh, if all nuclear research would disappear overnight less than 0.001% of the world population would be impacted. I’m still inclined to say that a repository of that knowledge is too big to fail, simply because the knowledge is so important.

Not that that’s necessarily true for the internet archive, but…

[pdntspa]

Stop giving a shit about what "many people" care about. "Many people" are dumb, hardly aware of the world that isn't directly in front of them. Their opinion here is worthless, doubly so because of how easily they can be misled.