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The legal angle most certainly has something to do with it. Many of the comments on this thread seem to imply that there should be something legal barring Poste

The legal angle most certainly has something to do with it. Many of the comments on this thread seem to imply that there should be something legal barring Posterous from doing such a thing. Silhouette has been trying to point out, and quite deftly I should say, that what they’re doing is probably pretty much entirely legal for various reasons. Reasonable people can obviously disagree about whether there’s anything sneaky about what they did. I don’t think there is. What do you want them to do, send a mass email out to all their users—95% of whom could care less about this change? That’s just going to confuse a ton of their audience, and it would be completely counter-productive. I’m of the opinion that businesses aren’t obligated to be endlessly transparent to their users. Should Posterous send out a mass email to all users when they change the soup of the day in their employee cafeteria as well? Caveat emptor. This is why I don’t store my data on free services which may decide to make changes like this. But even if I were, this change is completely harmless.

jacquesm 16y ago
Sure it's legal, that's not what this is all about. You shouldn't do it. It's perfectly legal for me to wipe the histories of all my users from ww.com, it was equally legal for Yahoo! to wipe geocities. But that doesn't make it right. Sending a mass email to all the users when they change the cafetaria menu is a clear attempt at drawing this into the ridiculous, as contrasted by simply updating their terms of service and a two line blog post as to why they updated the terms of service. I don't know what kind of email policies posterous has, maybe they have a mailing list, maybe not but that isn't really relevant. It's common courtesy to keep your users informed and it helps to keep your users and your company aware of what the status quo is. To wipe stuff like this under the carpet makes your company look untrustworthy.
- codyrobbins 16y ago
  You’re absolutely right, that’s all it is—a courtesy. They are being uncourteous at worse; but being uncourteous does not equate, in my mind, to being ‘not right’ in a moral sense. Again, it is entirely their prerogative to make this change, therefore there is simply no way it can be ’not right’. This has already been drawn in to the absurd, because a mountain is being made of a molehill. It’s just not a big deal. I don’t think this makes them untrustworthy at all. In fact, I would be more inclined to trust them now, because if they’re making money off affiliate links, there’s a far less likely chance the service vanishes into thin air six months from now when they burn through all of their venture funding without having made a penny. I think you’re being overly idealistic about a practical business decision they made.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    I run several major websites, and if I would pull this kind of stunt I'm pretty sure it would hurt my business tremendously, either in the shorter or in the longer term. So it's not overly idealistic, it's born from experience that you do this kind of thing at your peril. I used to think those were 'my sites', over the past decade I have come to the conclusion that my fortune is that I hold stock in a company that owns a bunch of domain names and operates some servers that other people are good enough to stock with interesting content free of charge. The second I start to pretend - even to myself - the content is mine to do with as I please I might as well shut it down. The community of users owns the site, not the people nominally in charge of the data center and the domains, they're just along for the ride, as stewards, as guides and occasionally as enforcement. If you don't believe that with all your heart do not get in to hosted content because you will eventually have a very rude awakening.
    - Silhouette 16y ago
      Please understand that throughout this thread, you have been projecting your own personal preferences onto everyone else. You write in absolutes and state things as if they were facts, but it seems clear from posts like the one I'm replying to here that you don't actually know any of these things for sure. You are making assumptions about things that would happen under certain circumstances, mixing in some of your personal ethics and business strategy, and then claiming that the entire world should behave as you wish, because otherwise Bad Stuff will happen. You might be right, but you haven't provided the slightest objective reasoning or empirical evidence to support your position anywhere in this entire thread that I can see. Even when you accused me directly of being incorrect, and I asked you to explain why with specific points you could debate, you still only repeated your objection to something I never actually wrote. What are you trying to prove here?
      - codyrobbins 16y ago
        Hear, hear! Thank you, Silhouette, for putting that so well.

jacquesm 16y ago

Sure it's legal, that's not what this is all about. You shouldn't do it. It's perfectly legal for me to wipe the histories of all my users from ww.com, it was equally legal for Yahoo! to wipe geocities. But that doesn't make it right. Sending a mass email to all the users when they change the cafetaria menu is a clear attempt at drawing this into the ridiculous, as contrasted by simply updating their terms of service and a two line blog post as to why they updated the terms of service. I don't know what kind of email policies posterous has, maybe they have a mailing list, maybe not but that isn't really relevant. It's common courtesy to keep your users informed and it helps to keep your users and your company aware of what the status quo is. To wipe stuff like this under the carpet makes your company look untrustworthy.

codyrobbins 16y ago
You’re absolutely right, that’s all it is—a courtesy. They are being uncourteous at worse; but being uncourteous does not equate, in my mind, to being ‘not right’ in a moral sense. Again, it is entirely their prerogative to make this change, therefore there is simply no way it can be ’not right’. This has already been drawn in to the absurd, because a mountain is being made of a molehill. It’s just not a big deal. I don’t think this makes them untrustworthy at all. In fact, I would be more inclined to trust them now, because if they’re making money off affiliate links, there’s a far less likely chance the service vanishes into thin air six months from now when they burn through all of their venture funding without having made a penny. I think you’re being overly idealistic about a practical business decision they made.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  I run several major websites, and if I would pull this kind of stunt I'm pretty sure it would hurt my business tremendously, either in the shorter or in the longer term. So it's not overly idealistic, it's born from experience that you do this kind of thing at your peril. I used to think those were 'my sites', over the past decade I have come to the conclusion that my fortune is that I hold stock in a company that owns a bunch of domain names and operates some servers that other people are good enough to stock with interesting content free of charge. The second I start to pretend - even to myself - the content is mine to do with as I please I might as well shut it down. The community of users owns the site, not the people nominally in charge of the data center and the domains, they're just along for the ride, as stewards, as guides and occasionally as enforcement. If you don't believe that with all your heart do not get in to hosted content because you will eventually have a very rude awakening.
  - Silhouette 16y ago
    Please understand that throughout this thread, you have been projecting your own personal preferences onto everyone else. You write in absolutes and state things as if they were facts, but it seems clear from posts like the one I'm replying to here that you don't actually know any of these things for sure. You are making assumptions about things that would happen under certain circumstances, mixing in some of your personal ethics and business strategy, and then claiming that the entire world should behave as you wish, because otherwise Bad Stuff will happen. You might be right, but you haven't provided the slightest objective reasoning or empirical evidence to support your position anywhere in this entire thread that I can see. Even when you accused me directly of being incorrect, and I asked you to explain why with specific points you could debate, you still only repeated your objection to something I never actually wrote. What are you trying to prove here?
    - codyrobbins 16y ago
      Hear, hear! Thank you, Silhouette, for putting that so well.