The Joe Brown article on the other channel made me think about this. Mick's been able to write an in-depth dissection of hard climbing of the era. That's helped in part because there were fewer disciplines of climbing and fewer people operating at the top, so there's less information to sort through. But I'm sure it's also helped by the fact that stuff got written down in places where it could be referred back to later, and information was properly recorded. I can sit here in my house and work out that Tony Barley did probably the second ascent of Forked Lightning Crack, then the first ascent of The Creation later in the day. The next day, he and his brother went to Malham and made the first ascent of Carnage - an outrageous piece of climbing for the time. They would have been boys at the time.
If you are a climber who has done a new route or significant repeat or anything even remotely noteworthy for the future, when you record it by posting a little video or photo on Instagram, often with little or no caption, you are effectively throwing your achievement onto landfill. Everyone else is also throwing their experiences onto this steaming shit heap of climbing, and with every new thing that is piled on top, significant or not, the stuff underneath becomes harder and harder to access. Instagram has not been set up as a way to record historically significant events in a way that they might be easily recalled and reviewed later.
To the very cool people who are out there doing these great things, the act of properly recording something that might be the hardest piece of climbing on gritstone (or any other significant things - I'm not just picking on Ned) might seem desperately uncool and showy, but when future chroniclers come to write the history books in 50 years time, don't be surprised if very few people can figure out what the fuck was going on. I can understand why people might not like to share what they've done - I've taken the piss out of #blessed people on Instagram enough - but it is possible to record things without being a complete sap about it.