Funny, I'm the opposite. Since information wants to be free, and storage/compute get more affordable every year, then really everything ever posted on the web should be mirrored somewhere, like Neocities.

I grew up in the 80s when office software and desktop publishing were popular. Arguably MS Access, FileMaker and HyperCard were more advanced in some ways than anything today. There was a feeling of self-reliance before the internet that seems to have been lost. To me, there appears to be very little actual logic in most websites, apps and even games. They're all about surveillance capitalism now.

Now that AI is here, I hope that hobbyists begin openly copying websites and apps. All of them. Use them as templates and to automate building integration tests. Whatever ranking algorithm that HN uses, or at least the part(s) they haven't disclosed, should be straightforward to reverse engineer from the data.

That plants a little seed in the back of every oligopoly's psyche that ensh@ttification is no longer an option.

If "information wants to be free," doesn't that cut both ways? It applies equally to the personal data that I don't want to upload to an age gate as it does to the information that people want to keep behind an age gate.