It's difficult to know beforehand! A startup might be a total flop that delivers nothing of value to us now, but it might be a valuable datapoint for future historians to understand how startup culture changed and evolved. Or it may be interesting to future founders - I've seen some startups with perfectly fine ideas fail, and then a few years later, someone succeeds doing something very similar.
This may not be the best example, but while I'm sure the Rosetta Stone, being a treaty, likely would have seemed like something worth preserving, would anyone have imagined that it would be the pivotal document in understanding ancient Egyptian? That it would be one of the most important documents of all time?
that's optimistic, and I could see the potential. But I've become a bit suspicious of the content on the internet and the costs in archiving it. Maybe Internet Archive could have a curation threshold .
I would rather revert to the internet where quality content was published openly on the web. But presently web content, at least that upranked by Google, is very low quality (seo, clickbait, biased, trivial)
This may not be the best example, but while I'm sure the Rosetta Stone, being a treaty, likely would have seemed like something worth preserving, would anyone have imagined that it would be the pivotal document in understanding ancient Egyptian? That it would be one of the most important documents of all time?