It's very depressing that all the comment sections from the late 2000s to mid 2010s are nowhere to be found. Also a lot of live journal type sites. Comment sections seem omitted from Internet Archive snapshots, but I find them in many ways more worthy of archival than the published articles that make the cut.
> That type of data would be so interesting for things like historical sentiment analysis
Except that internet commenters are very weird, and like the least representative sample ever. Not quite as weird as Wikipedia editors, but still really weird.
They aren't representative of the general public. This can still make it very interesting though. Do trends show up earlier among commentators? If so, has the time it takes for the trends to flow to the mainstream changed over time. Has the likelihood at which online commentator trends flow to the mainstream changed? It's the influence more pronounced for specific subjects?
It is very depressing, but on the other hand you'd have millions of comments written in another era (pre-culture wars, when the Internet was more, let's say, "tolerant") that can be now traced back to the authors to cancel them. With infinite memory you need protection, otherwise it's un-erasable damnation.
