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February 18, 2009

| Against Exactitude >>

Ephemerality and Regeneration

Before reading Rex’s interview with 4chan’s founder, I didn’t realize that those boards were so ephemeral:

The lack of retention lends itself to having fresh content. The joke is that 4chan post is a repost of a repost of a repost. There was a guy who was downloading every image from /b/. He calculated that 80 percent of what’s posted has been posted before. So it’s survival of the fittest. Ideas that are carried over to the next day are worth repeating. The things that are genuinely funny get carried over.

I actually like that a lot. Reminds me of, er, life itself. DNA getting transcribed again and again. Little mutations along the way.

Now, of course, there’s great value to the opposite, to durability and accretion. (See, e.g., Matt’s vision for news.) But I wonder if we’ll get tired of always leaving a digital paper trail, and if ephemerality will sometimes be considered a feature.

For instance — am I alone in this? — I wish I could set Twitter to auto-delete tweets older than a week or so.

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Posted February 18, 2009 at 4:24 | Comments (1) | Permasnark
File under: Briefly Noted

Comments

The ephemeral nature of 4chan is what makes it the well spring of the most lasting and esoteric internet memes: only the strongest, funniest, or most bizarre survive long enough to propagate to the rest of the web.

And there is of course ephemeral e-commerce at w00t.

And for transient commerce with a slightly longer persistence of vision there's shirt.woot's Day of Reckoning policy.

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