Here here

I have only just received my journeyman’s old geezer certificate, so I am not a respected source on the definition and classification of curmudgeonly behavior. Yet I find your admonition fits more in the line of “if you spill gasoline on yourself, don’t strike a match” than “stop breaking the windows.”

I have been aware of this problem for a while, having seen it critiqued by other sources. There is a value in knowing that there was a link, even if it can not be retrieved. Further, Dr Doctrow certainly knows that there is a reasonable likelihood a link can be retrieved via the “Way Back Machine.” His rationalizations have seriously damaged the credibility of BoingBoing — and far worse, the net in general.

As such, I believe that your remonstrations have been far too genteel.

Which makes me the curmudgeon shaking his cane and shouting at kids who are throwing rocks through windows. “Geez, Grandpa, this is our building, who the hell are you to complain about how many windows we break?”

And the idea that we are all citizens of a city with more broken windows than it needs to have? Just doesn’t seem to bother the rock-throwing crowd. They think I don’t get it about the internets, and I think they don’t get it about the internets, and so we shout at each other.

Or, as in the case in the Boing Boing thread, people just flat refuse to believe that I even care about the internets, and decide to ascribe worse motives to me, and call me a liar while they are about it. (Now that I think about it, that happened in the vandalism thread also.)

And again, it’s not that I’m against people maintaining their internet resources, which does indeed sometimes require deleting stuff for a good reason, just like maintaining a landscaped garden sometimes requires removing a tree. I just hate to see bulldozers and paving machines when a pruning knife and a hand saw would get the job done.

Though I don’t quite understand the part about being a geezer for defending the integrity of links. Swill or not, the greatest informational value is contained within the complete unedited, unbowlderized, original. Anything else is a surrender to entropy at best, or more likely, censorship of one variety or other.

Do you perchance know your MBTI?