Item — HN Reader

This is among the most brilliant digital preservation strategies I've encountered. You want to make sure your material lasts as long as possible? Get it out on bittorrent. End of story.

We wonder what books scholars will write about 500 years from now. It won't be what's popular, it'll be whats pirated.

3 comments

Er... bittorrent is certainly not the end of the story. Anyone who's ever used a torrent tracker knows that access to data on a torrent network is only as good as the network's collective will to share data.

If everyone just hops on, downloads the data and disconnects without continuing to serve as a source for the data then the Internet Archive wouldn't be terribly better off than just hosting direct downloads (they'd get the benefit of leechers sharing bits between each other during the download process).

If.

Well, we'll see.

I do not understand your last comment? None of the material on archive.org is pirated. It is all freely available, legally...

He does not mean it as a comment towards archive.org, he means information in general. With increasing threats to free speech and censorship, he suggests that the information that's not popular - or, censored/manipulated/bubbled by mass media/governments/etc. - can only survive through decentralized means of storage and distribution, like BitTorrent.

In essence, he argues that BitTorrent can be a fantastic way of digital preservation, which is the goal of archive.org, and I suspect he uses the word 'pirated' interchangeably with 'torrented', since that's what BitTorrent is commonly associated with.

Bittorrent and other decentralized systems are not good choices for unpopular data. As another commenter pointed out unpopular torrents will only be seeded by archive.org.

I'd argue that bittorrent is still better for unpopular data then direct downloads.

I think BT makes downloading and sharing accessible enough that more people would be encouraged to download more than they normally would and it is for sure easier for someone to see a request for a reseed for an unpopular torrent and load it up onto their tracker for a few hours than it is to try and rehost it.

Surely if one other person is downloading the same torrent at the same time it's better (potentially) than a direct download, as part of the torrent can be shared in the swarm..

As long as archive.org is seeding everything all the bits are there..

Something like Freenet would be better for this I think, since the "what" you share is limited by how much space you give the datastore, unlike bittorrent where you consciously decide what and what not to keep seeding.

It still has a problem with non-popular content being hard to find, but not nearly as much.

That only works for popular stuff - or at least as long as someone is seeding it. Once no-one seeds something, it's gone.