I can't speak for the old internet, but in there is a frightening amount of information loss going on in the modern internet. Entire fandoms' worth of creative works and output are locked on platforms like Twitter, Discord, pixiv, etc. And as Twitter demonstrates, you're one madman CEO away from the site imploding and taking priceless fanworks, discussion, etc. along with it. There is no guarantee all the discussion happening on Discord today will be there in 10 years or even 7 or 5.
Someday in 50+ or so years, historians will look back today and there will be a massive black hole in the collective knowledge of the internet because so much of it will have been on a platform that died or otherwise imploded. It's kind of depressing.
You can say "well who cares about the pointless discussions or fanworks we shared on Discord?" The point of history and archival is that you never know what will be important in the future, so you should save and archive as much of it as you can. There's a reason why if you publish a book in most countries, you have to send a copy of it to the government (Library of Congress, etc.) that they will then save in archive. That same rigor isn't applied to the internet, where massive amounts of cultural heritage live.
That's why I still try to post here every so often, edit touhouwiki pages, etc. in an attempt to get things up and archived in the internet archive and other places so they have a slim fighting chance of surviving the ephemerality of closed, proprietary platforms. More people should also learn to host their own websites and put their thoughts and fanworks there too.
