Miranda Reinert, writing at Welcome to Hell World:
The companies that buy up sites like Bandcamp are interested in nothing except ensuring the executives’ pockets get lined appropriately. Growth is the only thing of interest. It’s the story of capitalism, but here, like with MySpace, it becomes a matter of cultural preservation. They can – and will – ruin everything you love and wipe it from existence. MySpace lost 13 years of music, photos, and videos. We can talk about what was going on on MySpace and interview people who were there, but the data being erased remains an unimaginable culture loss. It’s difficult to even know what has been lost due to the sheer incompetence. Right now there are brewing problems over at resale site and database, Discogs, due to increased fees as a result of a push for growth and in exchange for very little in terms of functionality. The data Discogs has – just like Bandcamp and just like what has been lost at MySpace – is irreplaceable and ever growing. So to have years of culture on Twitter – everything from the continued existence of legacy accounts to the basic usefulness of news organizations being verified – been ravaged by Elon Musk’s vanity. The internet is forever, until it’s ripped away by people who don’t add value to it.