Expired Content

I warn you now this post is a rant.

There's nothing more I hate online than expired content, things that are left around online that are essentially litter.  Adverts for competitions whose closing date has passed, articles that talk about thing that are happening / about to happen which aren't updated later to reflect the changes and perhaps the most annoying of all, old posts on sites that people reply to - this last one is complicated.

There are lots of forms of content online that don't expire, take this blog for example, my old posts are there for you to read and feel free to comment on, I see all comments etc so the posts have no expiry.  Take a video on Youtube though and see the stream of comments underneath, anyone who actually goes back to read and reply to old comments there other than the person who posted the video is extremely annoying.  I posted a comment about 3 years ago on a youtube video that someone replied to today, not the person who posted the video, just some random and I have to say two things 1, who the hell cares and 2, Youtube video comments aren't exactly search optimised, to have actually found my comment you'd have to have read or skimmed through a few thousand maybe a few hundred thousand comments - I honestly ask why anyone would ever do that . . .

I have made this comment before on online activity and in particular data stored by online communities.  Data should "fade".  Activity should be in two sets, one where the user marks it as persistent, that way it remains, and the other, which should be default, would be a set of data that naturally degrades - i.e. after a period of time it is deleted or made unreachable.

Twitter is fantastic.  About 6 months worth of your twitter feed, or a few hundred tweets whichever is shorter, is the visible data that is kept and is easily accessible, anything older is exported and saved by twitter, but for all intents and purposes inaccessible to you, or to people looking through your feed.  Unless you have a direct link to a tweet made 3 years ago, you wouldn't find it through searching and you wouldn't find it through reading the feed.  Youtube and other sites need to take this approach, either make data delete or be exported - I'm talking about the comments, the data that *should* expire, the video itself, like my blog posts can remain as it wouldn't make sense for the actual content to expire.

For the technically minded readers, I would phrase this more simply: actual content should not expire but meta-data should fade in time, perhaps 6 months would be acceptable as the case with twitter, or a certain cap, again as with twitter.