Welcome to HN, 5_minutes, are you really saying that because you think these interactions are "instantly forgotten," that that's a reason to keep the archives?

No I am merely stating that the discussions on the social web are perhaps the new trend, but not necessarily a reason to discontinue the classic forum setup. Perhaps, for example, IMDb could've invested a little bit more on the usability and interface of the forums, instead of letting it die just like that. And then at least the conversation would have had an honest chance to be hosted on their own platform. Because as it currently is, it's not just on another platform, it's just lost....

I agree. Keeping archives of decade old arguments between random strangers seems like a waste of digital resources. It's like taking and storing minutes for the water cooler conversations in your office. I wonder how many petabytes of forum content there is out there on the web

> seems like a waste of digital resources

Yes, that's exactly the same what Sumerians did say back a few 1000 years ago. Why keep all these clay tables about ordering wine? Who is gonna be interested in that kind of stuff in 10 years?

Don't you think that such an archive would offer a nice glimpse into our current culture a few hundred years in the future?

I've posted about this in other places on this thread, but after feeling the same way as you, I looked at some old movies, and found that most posts are fairly recent. It turns out that IMDB has been expiring posts all along.

Your argument is sound though. Comments on websites, even if filled with trolls and fakes ought to be treated with respect and saved for posterity, since they give an important insight into the current zeitgeist.

Oh, I don't know. I was a daily user of Usenet for years, but the vast majority of the time I don't miss it. (Yes, I know Google still has some unevenly preserved and mostly difficult to access portion of the content.)

Here's the point: if you put some of the great content that was created there 25 or 30 years ago in front of the current generation, what is the general reaction? A yawn, that's what.

It might be fascinating in a few thousand years, but I won't be around then, and the planet might not be either, so why should I care?

For a certain definition of "nice", possibly. It's a little bit of a depressing thought that some future culture might find only our online comments and study our culture through that.

What else should they find of our current culture? Our books are written on very cheap paper which will not survive the next 100 years.

it's not arguments, there are plenty of intelligent discussions which can help someone watching movie years later, there is no surprise to see thread old 10 years answering your questions about movie and also people joining old threads and reviving them with other new people and seriously, flat forum with few comments is really in 2016 any storage problem? so lame YouTube videos are OK but storing few gigabytes of comments or decades is issue?

I see your point, but looking at size, you could take the comments from Amazon, IMDB, and probably Reddit combined and it wouldn't come close to the size of Instagram's archive, let alone YouTube. Text is probably the smallest format we have in existence which may make it less valuable, but also less expensive to keep.

That's a great analogy.