The Future of User Generated Content

To anyone who wants to understand human nature, Twitter is a gold mine of insights. But now it may go — the way of The Great Library of Alexandria — and disappear. So what is a user generated content curator to do?

Why the (possible) end of Twitter probably won't mean Dark Ages 2.0

Since 2006, Twitter has had a major role in documenting everything from the Arab Spring to the current war in Ukraine. It’s been a lifeline for dissidents. And a weapon of disinformation for bad actors. It’s a living historical chronicle. But it’s also full of tiny everyday insights and real-time observations from over 330-million active users. Whether you're looking for breaking news, the latest funny memes, or opinions about your new product, Twitter is a great place to start your search.

But now Twitter is in trouble. User growth has stalled, engagement is down, and the company is losing money and people fast. Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, has even suggested that Twitter might go out of business if his plans don’t pan out. If Twitter went down tomorrow, where would all that information and insight go? And what about all the other information stored on the servers of privately-owned companies? When the business fails, do all those billions of bits of User-Generated-Content-in-waiting just disappear forever?

The Great Library of Alexandria was one of the largest and most renowned libraries of the ancient world. Ptolemy I wanted to attract the world’s brightest thinkers to Egypt. So he sent government agents to meet every ship that came to harbor in his city with instructions to buy (or just take by force) all the books, scrolls and manuscripts onboard. The library quickly became a center for ideas, attracting scholars from all over the world with its store of human thought.

Ptolemy I, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

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At some point, the library was lost to political strife, war and neglect. First the scholars were expelled from Alexandria. Then Julius Caesar mistakenly burned the library during his Civil War. And Egypt was eventually invaded by regimes who didn’t see the value in Hellenic philosophy. Many historians believe that the destruction of the library was a key factor in the decline of the Roman Empire and the onset of the so-called dark ages, a period of intellectual darkness from which Europe only slowly emerged.

Of course, Twitter is not exactly the Library of Alexandria. It’s full of disinformation, hate speech and dumb memes. But there’s tons of useful knowledge on the platform. And what about all the other content sitting on private servers everywhere? If it all went down tomorrow, would we be plunged into another dark ages? Or is there a modern-day Ptolemy out there gathering all this information?

The closest thing to a Great Library these days is called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and it is the home of over 760 billion web pages that would have otherwise been lost to time. It was started in 1996 by The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, to be a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like the Great Library of Alexandria, they provide access to researchers, historians and scholars. But they also offer free access to the general public. Their mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.

Today the archive contains:

• 625 billion web pages
• 38 million books and texts
• 14 million audio recordings (including 240,000 live concerts)
• 7 million videos (including 2 million Television News programs)
• 4 million images
• 790,000 software programs

Anyone with a free account can upload media to the Internet Archive. And they work with thousands of partners globally to save copies of their work into special collections. They have a TV News Archive, an excellent blog, and they just added a Mastodon server, which just so happens to be the place that a lot of Twitter users are going to as a hedge against what could be the end of it all.

So, while Twitter, like thousands of other websites, may indeed disappear from the internet someday, all the Found Content on there doesn’t have to disappear from human memory. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is the Ptolemy of our time, collecting and preserving vast amounts of information that would otherwise be lost to history (without the stealing, of course). And while it may not be as sexy as Twitter, it might just be more important.

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