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It's not static content. It would have been expensive to keep the services running. Not just in terms of computing and storage, but also for the headcount. Spea

by the-rc 7y ago

It's not static content. It would have been expensive to keep the services running. Not just in terms of computing and storage, but also for the headcount. Speaking of the latter, who would want to work on maintaining a read-only version of a project frozen in time? (The enterprise version will evolve, etc.) I am not even going into the legal implications.

tannhaeuser 7y ago
As dredmorbius posted, the content is going to live on at the Internet Archive just fine (Google could maybe redirect to them, don't they?). Your post begs the question, though, why it had to be served as dynamic content in the first place (if it actually was which I'm not sure it was) when it would've been the obvious thing to use just plain HTML. I'm thinking about authors putting in considerable effort into publishing content on G+ (or other platform for that matter). Why would they use an authoring tool that is exclusive to that platform when we have HTML? Why wouldn't they care about their docs being inaccessible if the platform dies?
- the-rc 7y ago
  What IA is doing is their business. I don't see Google linking or redirecting to them ever, for many reasons: security, (mostly) opening themselves to litigation from random users, etc. Why shouldn't it be served as dynamic content, if that's how the system works? All social networks and even most blogging platforms are built like that. I'm not talking about just the contents of individual posts, I'm also thinking of their ranking, as well as smaller details such as user names hyperlinked from the post body. All the data and metadata is stored across a large number of databases. I don't know of any products similar in scope that consist of pre-rendered HTML. Sure, you can scrape or render the HTML at a point in time, but that opens a new can of worms.
  - tannhaeuser 7y ago
    Fair points, but I guess I'm just puzzled how we've come to be fascinated by the business and technical side of Google+'s demise more than being worried about loosing almost all digital history of our times (not with Google+ specifically ;). Rendering HTML in web browsers seems like a problem solved 25 years ago, and so does authoring and server-side rendering (eg. SGML can pull metadata and compose fragments out of databases or whatever you want). But the 2010's have, I dunno, "educated" us to see script-heavy approaches and "platforms" as progress when in reality they're anything but, neither technically, nor from the PoV of author independence, nor for publisher syndication, nor for readers suffering through ads and tracking. Maybe dynamic content is the first we're going to loose, so with a 2010's media blackout, in 2035 we'll all be wondering what this decade was like.
Nagyman 7y ago
> who would want to work on maintaining a read-only version of a project For money? Lots of people. Does Google have a fascination with only hiring people that want to write dissertations about their project of the month?

by the-rc 7y ago

tannhaeuser 7y ago

As dredmorbius posted, the content is going to live on at the Internet Archive just fine (Google could maybe redirect to them, don't they?). Your post begs the question, though, why it had to be served as dynamic content in the first place (if it actually was which I'm not sure it was) when it would've been the obvious thing to use just plain HTML. I'm thinking about authors putting in considerable effort into publishing content on G+ (or other platform for that matter). Why would they use an authoring tool that is exclusive to that platform when we have HTML? Why wouldn't they care about their docs being inaccessible if the platform dies?

the-rc 7y ago
What IA is doing is their business. I don't see Google linking or redirecting to them ever, for many reasons: security, (mostly) opening themselves to litigation from random users, etc. Why shouldn't it be served as dynamic content, if that's how the system works? All social networks and even most blogging platforms are built like that. I'm not talking about just the contents of individual posts, I'm also thinking of their ranking, as well as smaller details such as user names hyperlinked from the post body. All the data and metadata is stored across a large number of databases. I don't know of any products similar in scope that consist of pre-rendered HTML. Sure, you can scrape or render the HTML at a point in time, but that opens a new can of worms.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  Fair points, but I guess I'm just puzzled how we've come to be fascinated by the business and technical side of Google+'s demise more than being worried about loosing almost all digital history of our times (not with Google+ specifically ;). Rendering HTML in web browsers seems like a problem solved 25 years ago, and so does authoring and server-side rendering (eg. SGML can pull metadata and compose fragments out of databases or whatever you want). But the 2010's have, I dunno, "educated" us to see script-heavy approaches and "platforms" as progress when in reality they're anything but, neither technically, nor from the PoV of author independence, nor for publisher syndication, nor for readers suffering through ads and tracking. Maybe dynamic content is the first we're going to loose, so with a 2010's media blackout, in 2035 we'll all be wondering what this decade was like.

Nagyman 7y ago

> who would want to work on maintaining a read-only version of a project For money? Lots of people. Does Google have a fascination with only hiring people that want to write dissertations about their project of the month?