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Delete Never: The Digital Hoarders Who Collect Tumblrs, Medieval Manuscripts, and Terabytes of Text Files (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Online, you'll find people who use hashtags like "#digitalhoarder" and hang out in the 120,000-subscriber Reddit forum called /r/datahoarder, where they trade tips on building home data servers, share collections of rare files from video game manuals to ambient audio records, and discuss the best cloud services for backing up files. The often stereotyped hoarders letting heaps of physical items of questionable utility dominate their homes and lives often suffer social stigma and anxiety as a result. By contrast, many self-proclaimed digital hoarders say they enjoy their collections, can keep them contained in a relatively small amount of physical space, and often take pleasure in sharing them with other hobbyists or anyone who wants access to the same public data.
[...] Many people active in the data hoarding community take pride in tracking down esoteric files of the kind that often quietly disappear from the internet -- manuals for older technologies that get taken down when manufacturers redesign their websites, obscure punk show flyers whose only physical copies have long since been pulled from telephone poles and thrown in the trash, or episodes of old TV shows too obscure for streaming services to bid on -- and making them available to those who want them.
[...] Many people active in the data hoarding community take pride in tracking down esoteric files of the kind that often quietly disappear from the internet -- manuals for older technologies that get taken down when manufacturers redesign their websites, obscure punk show flyers whose only physical copies have long since been pulled from telephone poles and thrown in the trash, or episodes of old TV shows too obscure for streaming services to bid on -- and making them available to those who want them.
It's more common than you think; I never get tired of her either
TFA calls these people "hoarders," but I'd liken them to modern day librarians/historians. Preserving and maintaining old data is a noble endevour in my opinion. I still come across and enjoy listening/discovering old music that was created before I was even born. When I was a child, there were tons of video games advertised that I did not have the money to buy nor the hardware to fully run it on. Nowadays, I can download many of those old titles for free and run them in fairly good emulators on modern hardware. It's great!
Well how much physical media has been lost, destroyed, degraded over the ages. The burning of the Library of Alexandra has been said to set mankind back Hundreds of years.
During revolutions it is popular to burn and destroy material from opposing ideas. Storing and preserving such media is a multi-generational activity, which requires a lot of capital, as well danger (from such revolutions), Digital Storage is cheap, and big. For under $10,000 a hobbies in digital archiving can collect enough data to fill up the worlds largest physical library in physical media. If we have thousands of people doing this hobby, who will then copy the data to new media, we are better off then we ever were.
The key advantage of digital media, the more times your copy it, the safer the data. Because a digital copy is an exact copy of the data. So unlike taking a Tape Recording of a Tape Recording by the 3rd or 4th copy its quality is nearly useless. Or trying to transcribe books, where errors from human translation happens (see the joke from Red Dwarf can happen.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"Porn has a very short shelf life." TRANSLATION: "I have a very short attention span."
I'm not being randomly insulting...this is a big problem, especially among millennials. Before you accuse me of being get-off-my-lawn, check out the science. Research lately has been pointing to the fact that multi-tasking, looking at multiple screens with different content all day long, is leading to a statistically measurable and significant increase in attention span deficit.
I can see it in my roommate. She is 28 years old, and watches every movie on the TV with either a tablet in her hand for imgur/reddit/facebook/twitter or a phone in her hand for a video game. I'm quoting her the other day directly when I jokingly asked if she was physically able to watch a movie, 90 full minutes, without doing or looking at anything else and only using her mind to think about the one movie. She said: "I can't even imagine watching a movie without also tabletting!"
Thus, what you feel as "I can't watch the same porn again a second time" I suspect is "I need to continually watch new porn otherwise my brain gets bored/distracted/detached/aware-of-the-abyss".
Every time I get a new laptop, I take the files on the desktop of the old laptop and put them in a dated folder on the desktop of the new one. So on my current laptop, I have "Old Laptop - 2018-01-18". Inside that is another old laptop folder and inside that is another one. There are files that are a decade old in there which I haven't looked at in nine years, but I don't get rid of them because "maybe I'll need this one day and it only takes up a couple of MB."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.