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Storify was acquired by Livefyre ~4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354835 Livefyre was acquired

Storify was acquired by Livefyre ~4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354835 Livefyre was acquired by Adobe last year. Whatever the route they've taken, the upshot is a helluva lot of content going poof (per usual).

username223 9y ago
At least they seem not to have blocked the Internet Archive bot, so some history may have been preserved: http://archive.is/storify.com http://archive.is/storify.com
- efwerf333 9y ago
  So what's the end-game here? Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with? This feels religious; Oh, just upload it all to digital Heaven! I'll never "die" and people can continue to revere me and my cats forever! Just because we can doesn't mean we should care about preserving every bit and byte. Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.
  - Xeoncross 9y ago
    While everyone would agree with this, everyone doesn't agree with what should be thrown away. Burning books because they aren't "valuable" is dangerous ground. Safer to store everything.
    - jhoechtl 9y ago
      This is a totally wrong analogy. Books were burnt for religios/political reasons. Storify is giving up because of lack of financial instreams for the owners.
      - johnchristopher 9y ago
        Parent's comment is about the internet archive, not storify.
      - Chaebixi 9y ago
        Tons of valuable books and records have been burnt because someone thought they weren't valuable or didn't have the money to house them. It's true, it's more likely they were just thrown on a trash heap and left to rot, but trash incineration is a thing.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      Libraries "weed" books all the time, and most of them are pulped. Which is about like burning them, only the carbon doesn't end up in the atmosphere. So this is probably not the best comparison.
  - eat_veggies 9y ago
    Given that it was used by a lot of news websites, there's a lot of legitimate history in there, whether we see it as such or not. That's worth preserving.
  - username223 9y ago
    > Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with? That seems kind of dumb, but with Moore's Law still mostly working for storage, it's also cheap -- certainly cheaper than building actual libraries. There's also currently no way to mark URLs as temporary, so we can't distinguish the permanent from the ephemeral. Finally, it's far cheaper than having everyone who wants to save URL content archive it on their own personal box (plus however many backups), which is what I do now if I really want to use something again.
    - efwerf333 9y ago
      Of course on HN I get a bunch of "But if you do it with this method relevant to 2017 tech and economics..." answers. No one seems to catch the point of whether or not we should as a species, care about great-great-granddads cat posts on Facebook? "But maybe in the future they'll be useful!" My background is in math and information theory, not programming and fetishizing turning every idea I have into a technical implementation. 1) I don't see giving the future a legacy technical infra to deal with because relative to them, cave men from 2017 thought it would be "awesome." 2) I highly doubt there's going to be useful information that isn't already abstracted into news services (which keep records), academic works, etc. that can be culled from storing everyone's Facebook and Instagrams. Why bother going to the beach? Oggle great-grandma's Instagram from 2019! Like I said, religious endeavor to "live forever" by conceptualizing a way to "cheat death" is what this smells like. None of those people will have cheated death, and future humans would be under no obligation to keep it online. So why bother?
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    You never know what has historical relevance until it is history. That lesson was learned the hard way and so now if something can be preserved at low cost we'd do well to at least attempt to keep it around until history can judge it.
  - Chaebixi 9y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding the context. IIRC, this isn't a collection of all tweets, etc (though the Library of Congress is already doing that), it's a curated collection of tweets, many important enough that some journalist somewhere bothered to write an article about them.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      The Library of Congress Twitter firehose archive never got off the ground: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-twitter-fit-inside-the-library-of-congress/494339/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-t...
      - nl 9y ago
        And it's too bad, now that Twitter is actually affecting history.
        greglindahl 9y ago
        Yeah, it's a shame! The Internet Archive does some twitter archiving -- I helped a little by finding a listing of government social media accounts -- but it's not enough.
        nl 9y ago
        Twitter's policies make it worse, since if you have firehose access you are required to delete tweets when the account deletes them. This is a well known tactic of many bot-net operators, and has made investigating them much harder. Even worse, Twitter went and deleted the Russian accounts (and tweets) which Facebook had identified for them...
        greglindahl 9y ago
        That makes it bad for the Library of Congress, yes, but they're already not succeeding. IA doesn't have firehose access.
  - macintux 9y ago
    Trump's presidential library is going to be a Twitter archive.
    - labster 9y ago
      I imagine this future institution will be called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.
  - username223 9y ago
    Yo, I clearly don't agree with this guy, but I don't see any reason to downvote/flag him into oblivion. I both upvoted and vouched this comment, not because I agree or think it's valuable, but because it doesn't deserve to be disappeared. Comment if you feel like it, or page on by if you don't. Ironically, his words will live on forever.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs. Of all the arguments against archiving information like this, "environmental costs" has to be the least convincing one. Storify posts are just a bunch of links to tweets, and those are already intended to be archived by the Library of Congress. A static database dump of Storify content has negligible cost and is highly compressible. If you want to talk about the environmental impact of tech, let's talk about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, or the usage of rare earth metals in non-recyclable hardware that gets replaced every year[0]. [0] This is generally non-recoverable. Even Apple, which claims to recycle their hardware, recovers very little from the process.

username223 9y ago

At least they seem not to have blocked the Internet Archive bot, so some history may have been preserved: http://archive.is/storify.com http://archive.is/storify.com

efwerf333 9y ago
So what's the end-game here? Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with? This feels religious; Oh, just upload it all to digital Heaven! I'll never "die" and people can continue to revere me and my cats forever! Just because we can doesn't mean we should care about preserving every bit and byte. Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.
- Xeoncross 9y ago
  While everyone would agree with this, everyone doesn't agree with what should be thrown away. Burning books because they aren't "valuable" is dangerous ground. Safer to store everything.
  - jhoechtl 9y ago
    This is a totally wrong analogy. Books were burnt for religios/political reasons. Storify is giving up because of lack of financial instreams for the owners.
    - johnchristopher 9y ago
      Parent's comment is about the internet archive, not storify.
    - Chaebixi 9y ago
      Tons of valuable books and records have been burnt because someone thought they weren't valuable or didn't have the money to house them. It's true, it's more likely they were just thrown on a trash heap and left to rot, but trash incineration is a thing.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Libraries "weed" books all the time, and most of them are pulped. Which is about like burning them, only the carbon doesn't end up in the atmosphere. So this is probably not the best comparison.
- eat_veggies 9y ago
  Given that it was used by a lot of news websites, there's a lot of legitimate history in there, whether we see it as such or not. That's worth preserving.
- username223 9y ago
  > Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with? That seems kind of dumb, but with Moore's Law still mostly working for storage, it's also cheap -- certainly cheaper than building actual libraries. There's also currently no way to mark URLs as temporary, so we can't distinguish the permanent from the ephemeral. Finally, it's far cheaper than having everyone who wants to save URL content archive it on their own personal box (plus however many backups), which is what I do now if I really want to use something again.
  - efwerf333 9y ago
    Of course on HN I get a bunch of "But if you do it with this method relevant to 2017 tech and economics..." answers. No one seems to catch the point of whether or not we should as a species, care about great-great-granddads cat posts on Facebook? "But maybe in the future they'll be useful!" My background is in math and information theory, not programming and fetishizing turning every idea I have into a technical implementation. 1) I don't see giving the future a legacy technical infra to deal with because relative to them, cave men from 2017 thought it would be "awesome." 2) I highly doubt there's going to be useful information that isn't already abstracted into news services (which keep records), academic works, etc. that can be culled from storing everyone's Facebook and Instagrams. Why bother going to the beach? Oggle great-grandma's Instagram from 2019! Like I said, religious endeavor to "live forever" by conceptualizing a way to "cheat death" is what this smells like. None of those people will have cheated death, and future humans would be under no obligation to keep it online. So why bother?
- jacquesm 9y ago
  You never know what has historical relevance until it is history. That lesson was learned the hard way and so now if something can be preserved at low cost we'd do well to at least attempt to keep it around until history can judge it.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding the context. IIRC, this isn't a collection of all tweets, etc (though the Library of Congress is already doing that), it's a curated collection of tweets, many important enough that some journalist somewhere bothered to write an article about them.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    The Library of Congress Twitter firehose archive never got off the ground: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-twitter-fit-inside-the-library-of-congress/494339/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-t...
    - nl 9y ago
      And it's too bad, now that Twitter is actually affecting history.
      - greglindahl 9y ago
        Yeah, it's a shame! The Internet Archive does some twitter archiving -- I helped a little by finding a listing of government social media accounts -- but it's not enough.
        nl 9y ago
        Twitter's policies make it worse, since if you have firehose access you are required to delete tweets when the account deletes them. This is a well known tactic of many bot-net operators, and has made investigating them much harder. Even worse, Twitter went and deleted the Russian accounts (and tweets) which Facebook had identified for them...
        greglindahl 9y ago
        That makes it bad for the Library of Congress, yes, but they're already not succeeding. IA doesn't have firehose access.
- macintux 9y ago
  Trump's presidential library is going to be a Twitter archive.
  - labster 9y ago
    I imagine this future institution will be called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.
- username223 9y ago
  Yo, I clearly don't agree with this guy, but I don't see any reason to downvote/flag him into oblivion. I both upvoted and vouched this comment, not because I agree or think it's valuable, but because it doesn't deserve to be disappeared. Comment if you feel like it, or page on by if you don't. Ironically, his words will live on forever.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs. Of all the arguments against archiving information like this, "environmental costs" has to be the least convincing one. Storify posts are just a bunch of links to tweets, and those are already intended to be archived by the Library of Congress. A static database dump of Storify content has negligible cost and is highly compressible. If you want to talk about the environmental impact of tech, let's talk about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, or the usage of rare earth metals in non-recyclable hardware that gets replaced every year[0]. [0] This is generally non-recoverable. Even Apple, which claims to recycle their hardware, recovers very little from the process.