Wow, I've never heard of any of those websites.
Maybe you're outside of the general demographic that they served. 10-15 years ago, there were few people that I knew between 10 and 20 years of age that didn't visit one or more of those sites occasionally, or at least know of them. In some ways, they filled similar niches to what Youtube videos and smartphone games do now, but in a lower-bandwidth, resolution/device-independent way.
Many of the non-interactive videos can be found on Youtube now, rendered into raster video from the original vector source files. Similarly, most of the game concepts have been replicated in one way or another to various mobile devices.
Optical media, at least the writables we as consumers have access to are completely inadequate for long term storage.
What about something like M-Discs? They're a consumer-available optical medium designed for long-term storage. They require a drive with a higher-powered laser to record, but will read in a standard DVD or Blu-ray drive. Of course, their "1000 years of storage" can't really be tested, but the idea of using an inorganic data layer seems like an improvement, and the discs passed some kind of DoD reliability testing.
Quit going to church and you will finish the task of disassociating yourself from idiots and their idiotic behavior.
If one lived alone in a cabin in the woods, one would still not succeed at escaping irrationality, since there's still one human nearby. People like to pretend that they're rational, but they're fooling themselves. You'll find the only example of non-idiotic humanity riding a unicorn, taking tea with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in orbit about 1.3 AU out from a teapot inscribed "Bertrand" on the bottom.
So you're willing to sell off your privacy for a few bucks?
Not under those terms, which is why I don't use store-specific cards (since it's already bad enough that credit processors want to track me). If there were a pay service that could replace FB in all aspects, minus ads and data-gathering, I'd be more than interested to look at it.
How does it feel knowing that there are complete strangers out there that think they know you because of the data they collect on you about purchasing habits?
Honestly? It doesn't bother me. Similar to "How does it feel [...] that think they know you because of your pseudonynmous posts on Slashdot?" I don't do anything important on Facebook, similar to how I don't do anything important on Slashdot. Sometimes, I make posts that don't reflect my feelings, just for a change in pace. Facebook wants to see my false information? Meh.
How will you feel about it when someone gets it wrong?
Amused, so far. FB has been trying to guess where I live for years. I don't think that it's ever guessed the right city, and it guesses the right county only occasionally. More commonly, it picks a state across the country where it knows I have a lot of friends, or in another country. I commonly look up products that friends are interested in, but that I don't care about. I mark random ads as offensive. If they can actually filter the signal from the noise, I actually think that's pretty cool, and I hope some papers eventually get written and released, based on the methods. They've done the work, and all based on information that I wouldn't have a problem yelling to random people on a street corner.
Your analogy is wrong. My analogy is saying, "Just because a policy's implementation is flawed does not mean the policy is inherently flawed."
I disagree. My analogy is saying that things don't happen just because you say so. Law should follow the will of the people, scientific or not, because anything else is going to cause conflict within society. I think that your entire way of thinking is wrong, because people won't magically conform to laws just because of consequences. If the world was that direct, we could just set the sentence for every crime as death. One of society's obligations is to help and support other members of that society. Otherwise, it's counterproductive for the individual to participate.
Don't break the law if you don't wish to have your license revoked, it's basically that simple.
If they revoke my license, I still need to get to work, because my family and I like eating and living in a nice home. I'll just be driving without a license and praying not to get caught. The world isn't as simple as you're making it out to be. Imagine if we applied that same logic to programming, after all. "To write perfect software, don't introduce bugs, it's basically that simple."
"Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberrys!" -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail