26 ms·

Computer Files Are Going Extinct

343 points by respinal 7y ago

verdverm 7y ago
Would read, but alas, behind the medium paywall... Aren't all things in computers eventually a file (descriptor)? And with the rate of data volume increasing, things going the opposite of the headline? And with the cloud, they are being replicated multiple times there and locally?
- KineticLensman 7y ago
  > The file has been replaced with the platform, the service, the ecosystem. ... When we stop paying, we’re left with nothing. No files. The service is revoked
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/2t5BK http://archive.is/2t5BK
- cosmojg 7y ago
  For a better reading experience and for those using Cloudflare's DNS: https://outline.com/yU64Cu https://outline.com/yU64Cu
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    I do use Cloudflare’s DNS but I’ll admit I don’t know much/anything about how it really works... can you explain why the DNS server would matter here? Somewhat related, I have made a deal with the devil and use Comcast and, until yesterday, I was using their combo modem/router. Comcast doesn’t let you change the router’s DNS settings (which are, of course, set to Comcast servers) but I was under the impression that the DNS settings closest to the client always prevailed. But fiddling around with WireShark yesterday I could clearly see my DNS requests going to 75.75.75.75 (Comcast) even though my laptop was set to use CloudFlare. Is that even possible? Could the router have been set by Comcast to somehow override my settings or to intercept & reroute DNS requests?
    - jwilk 7y ago
      archive.is inaccessible via Cloudflare DNS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
arch-ninja 7y ago
There is value in knowing there are 2 demographics: most people use apps and don't care how the app handles it's data; indeed the app usually alters the user's behaviour. Some people run the opposite: they instruct apps and the app had better use the data given in the format given or the user moves to another app (or writes their own). Someday I hope the second demographic's lifestyle is taught in highschools, because it is socially healthier.
- iroo9fkn 7y ago
  That’s not going to happen while top-down social policy is to adapt ourselves to what’s good for corporations. We’re not given much time to consider anything but what’s good for the economy. Pragmatic acquiescence trickles down.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I think the demographics are closer to thinking the data belongs to an app (the first group) vs. believing the data is its own thing (the second group). I'm strongly in the second group. I don't object to an app using its specific file format if it's really needed. But I want to have the data in files, which I can independently move around without invoking the app, and possibly view and alter in software other than said app.
- igornadj 7y ago
  >socially healthier That's a bold statement, can you elaborate? People want to go for walks, meet up with friends, share memories, they don't care how it's done. Having the tools get out of the way and just do those things is a net benefit to society.
aurora72 7y ago
The author says "everyone started to use Spotify" Everyone? Yeah everyone with their shiny $1000+ iFon toys in their hands doing touch gestures.
- njovin 7y ago
  Spotify has 215m users. I’d assume that is more than the group that used to download MP3s and burn CDs (which would require some technical knowhow and a CD burner).
  - ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
    You're seriously exaggerating. In the past, almost everyone had a CD-burner. You could use just a couple of clear as day GUI programs, a dozen of clicks and one drag and drop to download an album and burn a CD. Eleven year olds were doing it no problem.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    iTunes was the most popular music source by 2007 and had built in CD burning capabilities. You created a playlist and hit “burn”. Almost every computer came with a CD burner between around 2000-2010.
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago
  It's not like Spotify has some insurmountable specs to run or is only available on iOS. I have it running in Manjaro, and its catalog is far more extensive than what I could have found on SoulSeek or DC++ back in the day.
- asadkn 7y ago
  I agree, this doesn't sound "everyone": https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/the_basics/full-list-of-territories-where-spotify-is-available/ https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/the_basics/full... Apple music is available in another 59 countries that Spotify is not.
amelius 7y ago
Perhaps one day we can store stuff directly into a transactional database. I'd actually love to see an OS based on this principle.
- tyingq 7y ago
  MVS is pretty much that.
  - amelius 7y ago
    Ok perhaps a little more modern, where the database can be distributed, and where the transaction handle can be sent to different processes so you can have multiple microservices running in a single transaction.
- _Understated_ 7y ago
  Remember WinFS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS The idea was that the OS used a relational DB-like file system to store things and recognise them for what they are and deal with them differently instead of everything being streams of bytes, e.g. pictures aren't the same as Word documents. Didn't materialise but I remember at the time being dead excited by the concept.
- psilocipher 7y ago
  And the database will at a lower level consist of ..... files.....
  - buckminster 7y ago
    High end databases are often run directly on block storage. The db already manages allocation and caching so a filesystem just adds overhead and wonky semantics.
    - psilocipher 7y ago
      And therefore files will eventually go extinct?
ACS_Solver 7y ago
One of my greatest culture shocks in terms of technology was around 6 years ago when I received an iPad, having no experience with Apple products. After the initial setup, the first thing I wanted was to transfer some files - TV episodes and PDFs - to the device. My first attempt was to SSH into it, only to discover that's not an option, and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak. Then I just connected the iPad to my PC by cable, expecting to see a mass storage device. No luck. Likewise, no luck finding a file explorer on the iPad. The iPad is strongly tied to the workflow that Apple suggests, and that's a workflow that removes files as a concept, abstracting them away. It's quite possibly a genius approach in terms of how accessible it is to non-tech people, even though it doesn't sit right with me.
- folkhack 7y ago
  Yep - had the same experience because I got into Procreate with the pencil and all (which is amazing). Had the same exact experience. It's a great device but I feel like they're dumbing computing down too much =(
  - gameswithgo 7y ago
    apple is built on free and open tools, and you can’t make free and open tools on apple products. it is a sad state of affairs.
  - benj111 7y ago
    "Procreate with the pencil" Some things you really need to keep to yourself.
- barrkel 7y ago
  I found it immediately limiting - either you put your stuff in one of the preordained categories like music, movies, photos, videos (and pretty much nothing else), or your stuff is siloed in whatever specific application you load it into. That's not a tool you can use to create things with, unless it's music, movies, photos or videos. It lacked the freedom to permit innovation. (I have never acquired an iPad beyond the first one I got, which was a gift.)
anderspitman 7y ago
If this resonates with you, I'd invite you to follow my work on MooseDrive [0]. I'm calling it a "data ownership" company. The product is focused on storage for developers. [0] https://moosedrive.io https://moosedrive.io
- roryrjb 7y ago
  To me the whole idea of data ownership and everything this article is talking about is antithetical to some company somewhere or cloud storage. I personally collect mp3s. I could easily pay for a Spotify subscription or even have it included as part of a mobile phone contract at a discounted rate, but I prefer to have the actual files on my computer, I own them and no one can change that fact. I religiously catalogue and sort all my files and back them up to multiple external media constantly. I am currently working on a couple of projects that are all to do with organising files locally via their metadata (mp3s, JPEGs, et al). I avoid anything cloud. I am slowly but surely migrating away from the cloud.
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    The vision for the product is for you to be able to do everything you just described, and still have the files available for sharing and publishing through the cloud. Note, that doesn't mean stored in the cloud, unless that's what the user wants.
smitty1e 7y ago
> Files are skeuomorphic. That’s a fancy word that just means they’re a digital concept that mirrors a physical item. So, the digital equivalent of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia
anderspitman 7y ago
> Years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Similar to the ongoing trend of turning every product into service, both on-line and off-line. It turns ownership into relationships, which is something I consider strongly negative. Ownership doesn't require as much maintenance and is much more forgiving, and I can own a lot of things, but there's only so many relationships I can be in before my mind is no longer able to keep track of them all.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I couldn’t read this medium article, it said that I had read too many free articles this month, but hopefully this is relevant: files “are back” in iPadOS. Most iPad apps had interoperability with data in other apps, when it made sense but now with the new File app, I am increasingly doing more on my iPad Pro. I have a GPU rig for deep learning, and use a MacBook for Lisp and Haskell hacking, but now most of my time is spent on an iPad doing research, writing, and entertainment.
maliker 7y ago
I don't understand how people can get work done in the post-file world. Any project I've got that's more complicated than a todo list has text files, images, code, links to websites, emails, and typeset documents. The only thing that holds all that stuff, organizes it into folders, lets me edit/run it, and makes the content searchable is a filesystem. Maybe my standards for usability are too high.
- fit2rule 7y ago
  At work I am constantly battle the following sources of crufty bollocks: the ftp server, the windows-share fileserver, the 'one the linux guys use' (its ssh..), the jira ticket-attachments, the confluence 'pages', peoples mobile-phones, and so on. If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror, without .. oh, I get it .. I just install another 3rd-party app .. C'mon, OS vendors. Pop the cloud already.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror A local file system? UDF does the job.
  - na85 7y ago
    >If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror... FTP provides exactly this experience. Every platform can interface with it and it can be made network-transparent.
  - maliker 7y ago
    I've standardized on Google Drive, which kind of works. Not good enough version control features for code though, which is why I still need git. Been kicking around the idea of moving to git only, but the learning curve is steep (impossible?) for non-programmers.
    - passwordreset 7y ago
psilocipher 7y ago
Files will never go "extinct". Files exist. They will continue to exist. You people are insane.
- rasz 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
  - wetpaws 7y ago
    Does not exist in the wild, probably for a reason.
dangus 7y ago
The article just felt...unjustifiably alarmist to me. Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept. For example, Google or Apple is processing the crap out of your email attachment image because they know you don’t understand the idea that trying to send five 10MB photos likely will not fit in an email. All you want to do is send your photos to Grandma. So instead your iDevice handles it for you and either compresses them or throws them in a temporary cloud storage location with a link. Grandma gets her photos - for most people the alternative is a confusing mail delivery bounce followed by frustration. Apple added Stacks to the desktop because everyone’s tired of seeing other people’s computers with a mess of icons smashed together on the desktop, because that’s the only place files could be conceivably stored in the mind of a non-technical user. The whole idea of a file hierarchy seems either too confusing or too labor intensive to that type of user. Nerds like us always have and had options. We are aware and capable of coming up with a more friendly solution to us, like a home built NAS or Synology box; ask a non-technical user what those are and be met with a blank stare. For most people, they really should be paying someone else to maintain their data, iCloud, Google or whatever. Nobody’s home back up scheme can match what these companies are doing in their data centers. And no, these services don’t just delete your data immediately after your monthly payment method bounces - you are given time and nags to download your data or renew, often your data just becomes download-only. Are we annoyed that most options are not for us, or have to be in a form of a workaround to a technology stack that’s marketed to non-technical people? Maybe. It would be wonderful if there was a device as nice as an iPad that also gave us full access like a Linux PC. But also, nobody’s forcing us in 2019 to stop using our files as we did in 1999. We didn’t have all these services back then. File management was the option. It is still an option. And in 2019, Apple finally adds mass storage support to the iPad. Sometimes things come around.
- Finnucane 7y ago
  > Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept. You have met my mother I see. She still uses her multi-function printer like a copier because she's never quite grasped the idea that she can store her document scans on her computer.
_Understated_ 7y ago
> all culture, raging over us, for $12.99 a month (or $15.99 for HD) as long as we keep up our payments like good economic entities. When we stop paying, we’re left with nothing. No files. The service is revoked. This is the most frightening thing for me... by far: the concept that I no longer have control of the destiny of my own shit. Mine. Stuff I created. I understand the concept of how cloud storage works: "hey, we'll look after it for you, back it up and stuff, and all you need to do it pay us a small monthly fee". Makes sense. But add to that fact that if you stop paying they'll keep you from your stuff. Also if they don't like you for practically any reason they'll keep you from your stuff. Or if they suffer a huge data loss they'll claim that the T's and C's protect them and they'll still keep you from your stuff. What the hell are we sleep-walking into here? Caveat: I'm a tech. I have a local copy, a local backup (that I rotate on an ad-hoc basis with the other HD at my mum and dads house) and an offsite cloud-backup (using Sync) so I'm covered but this stuff isn't aimed at me, it's aimed at my mum and my non-tech friends who just think "hey, it's <mega-corp>. They've got thousands of people and loads of equipment and they know what they're doing!" They sure do!
- FpUser 7y ago
  People are walking into corporate traps left and right. Too bad. they should turn on their brains every once in a while.
  - api 7y ago
    The "bait" for these traps is almost universally ease of use and overall user experience, something open platforms and open source has failed to provide.
    - judge2020 7y ago
      USB drives and SD cards seem to be doing just fine, along with hard drives for desktop use. The inconvenience of these is having to go somewhere to buy them and not being able to magically simultaneously sync between devices.
- ur-whale 7y ago
carapace 7y ago
Files and directories are not a great abstraction. Never have been. E.g. the insides of git are much better (although the abstractions layered on top are fucking gruesome.) Something like IPFS is an obvious way forward. https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/
- jkp56 7y ago
  And ipfs is really just a combo of the two concepts: files and folders wrapped into a git-like tree of hashes; and all that tree-hash-files-folders structure is being synced over a torrent-like protocol.
  - carapace 7y ago
    From my POV it's more like distributed content-addressable RAM with support for file/directory-structured blobs. You can build alternate abstractions over it.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Problem is that we're not getting a better interoperable metadata-rich relational object storage system. We're getting closed silos in short-lived cloud surveillance services.
  - carapace 7y ago
    I agree, but then the issue is social/political rather than technical. I'd love it if the WWW was e.g. Xanadu+Prolog.
williesleg 7y ago
Good riddance 1950s
cproctor 7y ago
To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator. First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth experience identity and relationships this way, it's now a lot harder to teach lower-level abstractions. In my experience, this has changed over the last five years.
- cproctor 7y ago
  Sort of as a response, I'm currently developing/piloting a 9th grade CS curriculum designed around constructionism ("making with code"). The first unit spends a lot of time introducing students to Terminal. By the second unit, assignments are git repos.
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    Hm, does "constructionism" mean a new thing in educational theory now? You don't seem to be using it like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... ?
    - cproctor 7y ago
      No, Papert's constructionism is exactly what I'm pointing at. My phrase, "making with code," was meant to suggest that like maker education, this approach to introductory CS emphasizes personal relationships with powerful ideas, through personally-meaningful projects done in a community of practice. By leading with Terminal, I hope to emphasize students' laptops as tools for making things, not just providing access to content. A lot of current approaches prioritize scalability over everything else, leading to canned and sandboxed curricula. I'm curious, though, whether this is in tension with your understanding of constructionism.
- unqueued 7y ago
  I have a very similar anecdote. I had a long conversation with a friend who is a high school science teacher. She told me that computer literacy has plummeted in the last ten years. She has her students go into the field and collect data in the form of photos, spreadsheets, and typed reports. She wants students to bundle these files in zip files, and email them to her. Students have no idea how to do this. Some of them struggle with emails. She has had to make her tutorials on this longer and longer. And she has also been forced to start accepting assignments as a pile of attachments, because so few students understand zip files.
rhizome 7y ago
File this next to "Mouse buttons are going extinct, because Apple."
esotericn 7y ago
You can pry my files from my cold dead hands. What amuses me about all of this is that it seems to just further cement software developers as magicians. Back in the day it was the Windows control panel. Nowadays? I have direct experience with tons of people navigating cloud service settings or whatever else via endless GUIs. Just give me the filesystem. It's all a bunch of JSON configs or whatever anyway. find -name blah -execdir sed -i blah. Bosh. Well, I'll never struggle for work at least. Perhaps this is our 'guild'...?
- jkp56 7y ago
  We'd call this karma, I think. On the one hand these big corps create siloed software environments that not only take all control away from users, but also remove the necessity to think. From their pov, users are as dumb as rocks and should stay at that level. At the same time the same corps cry about the lack of supply of new engineers and pretend to promote CS in college (by giving out ipads and watching a colorful presentation about software, I guess).
  - the_pwner224 7y ago
    > pretend to promote CS in college Potentially because that means in 5-20 years they'll have a much bigger pool of labor available? They've already done illegal market-manipulating collusion which resulted in billions of dollars of salaries not being paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 ; in the end they got hit with fines for a few million bucks and some developers got a paycheck for a few thousand bucks (two orders of magnitude less than the wages stolen from them). I'm just a college student, but I find it hard to not think that when I see the big companies spending tons of money to push people to learn to code.
    - pm90 7y ago
      I think you're reading too much into conspiracy theories. That can be fun and all but I can assure you these things are emergent and not some concerted effort to keep wages lower. The Steve Jobs market manipulation was def a dick move, but.. well, its Steve Jobs. There will be other such efforts too, but that alone doesn't indicate the kind of concerted market manipulation that you think exists. The emphasis on coding is similar to the emphasis on schooling and mathematics at the dawn of the industrial revolution: societies realized then that basic mathematical literacy can be immensely beneficial to people. And we understand today that basic programming skills can have a similar transformative effect. Jobs in tech are increasing at a tremendous rate. As we shift to more automation, the demand for computer literacy will only increase.
anaphor 7y ago
Your database (in the context of things like blogs and so on) is a filesystem, it's just built on top of a higher level abstraction than traditional filesystems.
lewisjoe 7y ago
Remember "Worse is Better" by Gabriel? Lisp was a correct, consistent and complete system, prioritizing these over simplicity. C, on the other hand, was a simple system but not nearly as much complete, consistent or correct as Lisp. Nevertheless, Lisp lost to C. This is what happens when Capitalism meets Software. When it comes to winning markets, shipping simple stuff is always better than shipping a slightly more complex (in terms of code as well as UX) but correct stuff. That is why most companies prioritize feature development over bugfixes. That is why selecting multiple items from a list is still inconsistent across the web. That is why XMPP lost and Whatsapp and Messenger are winning. There are efforts like Solid (https://solid.inrupt.com https://solid.inrupt.com) by Tim Berners-Lee himself that's trying to bring back the concept of files and data-ownership to end-users, to enforce correctness and consistency. But I'm still skeptical if the efforts will ever win the market.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
My major concern is that data backup is getting more and more difficult. I feel it's increasingly more difficult to figure out what to back up and how to restore it. I have heard several horror stories from people who messed up something and had all their cloud data disappear forever.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
A HN comment from 2 years ago I bookmarked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235151 The war on general computing implies disempowering users, rather than empowering them. But that it's "not surprising" doesn't mean it's good, or that it can't be reversed. I wonder what associations for craftsmanship in software, respect for users, and similar things there are? If there was a web ring about that, I would browse it.
- jkp56 7y ago
  Heh, that's a possibility, actually. Govs like how software and personal phones enable global surveillance, but they don't like the power that general computing devices give (all these encryption protocols, bitcoins and so on). So obviously some people in the govs are trying to convince the rest to keep the first and take back the general computing part. We may even see in our lifetimes how common people will only be allowed access to dumb software (the Apple model), and general unrestricted software and hardware will be threated like weapons, with licenses and prison time for software engineers. The alternative path for society is cheap and powerful general use phones with quantum coprocessors and a constitutional amendments that defend these rights. I'm pretty sure that the two alternatives are now being considered somewhere in DoD offices.
submeta 7y ago
I haven't seen many non-tech people who manage their files in a systematic way. Most non-tech people don't have a naming convention for their files (seen many files named "letter.doc" or "shmith.doc" or "smith2.doc"), let alone a predefined folder structure for their files. What I have seen most of the time is this: A desktop full of files, hundreds, even thousands of files, some within folders, some flat. A chaos. I am a tech person. I do organise my files in folders. And I don't want any other organizing principle for my documents. But I realize that this concept does not work for most other people.
BeetleB 7y ago
This is why years ago I switched to a static site generator. Using something like Django was fragile. My provider would change some library and poof - the site is down. I don't use my site often (post on it once every so many months) - so I simply switched. Never gone down since then. A few days ago I opened a Jupyter notebook I had authored in 2015 - and it failed to reproduce my results. I relied on pandas, and pandas has gone through API changes. Fortunately, it wasn't hard for me to search around for the newer versions of those APIs and fix things - but this is only 4 years after I authored it. Can I have any confidence that 20 years from now I could reproduce the results - or even find documentation for the APIs I used to understand exactly what I was doing? I mean sure - I could put the OS and all the libraries needed to reproduce the work in a container and be guaranteed[1] it'll run later, but the only people who will do that are those who need to for regulatory compliance[2]. [1] Not really. The software to run the container may no longer be supported, and the people with the knowledge may charge more than most can afford to get it to work. [2] Something we're dealing with at work these days. Writing stuff for the automotive industry and they expect that any software + tools should work 15-20 years from now. Same level of expectation for availability as any other car part. Now that there is so much SW in modern cars, this is a good opportunity for being a consultant 15-20 years from now!
pointerpointer 7y ago
I can imagine corporations totally like the idea of users not being able to save their own precious data to a file. In the end they want to own and control your data as much as possible for profit and power. And they sell that idea by telling you it's more convenient. As if it were not possible to create great file management tools or maybe even your own files as a database that you can manage easily. Same with the 'cloud'. What's the difference between running your own FTP server and a cloud server? Technically not that much IMAO, only the latter means the data is controlled by some corporation running that server. And why is there hardly any progress in the area of building a private turn-key 'cloud' server so you don't need gmail, dropbox, github, etc..? I'm sure it can be made, easy to setup, robust, with backup, you name it, just like a Mac pc that's made for non technical people. We know how to build it, but we don't do it, we build for corporations instead. The further we go down this road the less control we will have, and the ramifications of that don't look pretty to me to say the least.
- acolumb 7y ago
  With the advent of database-managed, self-hosted personal clouds (i.e Nextcloud/Droppy,) the difference is even smaller. It's developing into a self-hosted "just works" personal cloud ecosystem.
nintendo1889 7y ago
It reminds me of Stallman's best quote: the computer industry is more fashionable than the women's fashion industry.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  For much the same reasons. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+theoretic+fads&restrict_sr=on https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+th...
brian_herman 7y ago
Can medium go extinct first?
proc0 7y ago
Non-technical people will not hesitate to adopt online services to manage their data. I have a dropbox and other services of my own, but I'm talking about the mainstream apps mentioned in the article that also have a purpose. People completely ignore the fact you would have no access to this data if you have no online connection (or access to the account). It's not that files are going away, it's that they're being increasingly managed by tech companies, and normal people don't know any better, as evident by the article's title... it shows the author doesn't what files are for and that they are invisibly managed by a third party.
mellowdream 7y ago
This is what I'm gonna link to my friends the next time they make fun of me for being a green-texter. This is exactly the story I went through a few years back as well. I had an iPhone 4? 9-ish years ago when I was in a music-kleptomania frenzy (back when what.cd was around too ;) ), and I remember just how frustrating it was dragging and dropping shit through iTunes all the time. Same for movies, photos, and documents! I couldn't see the appeal of using the iPhone at all - why would somebody use this when they could just plug an Android device into their PC and use their file explorer? (The update to iOS7 was the nail in the coffin - I found the neon design just repulsive.) I guess my question is - has the Apple "ecosystem" gotten better for this? Can I actually edit metadata for .mp3s and .mp4s and just drop them into an iPhone or iPad now? And copy them out as well or download them offline, bit for bit? If so, are dongles still the norm? *An aside - I've definitely eased up on the file-ownership thing now. I just let YouTube Premium handle everything. It was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of music files out of some strange ownership OCD. I see it as a net positive overall - now I just find it amazing that someone even uploaded some white-label vinyl-only run-of-100 Foul Play UK garage record (and similar records going for >$100 on discogs - maybe even ownership has its limits?) at 128kbps at all, even if it doesn't stay there forever :)
- launch_queue 7y ago
  I can say from my experience no it hasn't. You are forced to install iTunes for your computer to even be able to manipulate the device with other software, so even if you have MediaMonkey or an alternative music library you will need to install iTunes first. MediaMonkey works well generally, but as soon as there's an iOS update there's no guarantee you can transfer music because it can break something in the chain. As for metadata, you still have to use 3rd party (e.g. mp3tag) which can be its own time-consuming headache--at least you can use RegEx.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > [media file ownership] was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of music files out of some strange ownership OCD Full disclosure: I used to work for Spotify. When people talk about services like Spotify and Apple Music, they usually miss how much value is added in the cataloging and search they do. These are a massive pain to do yourself, it doesn't scale past ~10,000 tracks, they've put more thought into it, and are better at handling the song/track/recording ambiguity in search results.
dehrmann 7y ago
Some of this is that the file/folder abstraction is inadequate for organizing large amounts of data.
jradd 7y ago
files are an abstraction and reference to objects in memory. The only problem I see is storage life cycle without cache in volatile plus redundant non-volatile memory. Same problem for blocks and segments, no?
hakfoo 7y ago
I wonder if this is a variation on a business anti-pattern we see in a lot of other places: "It's better to acquire a new customer at any cost, versus retaining an existing one." There are plenty of verticals where if you develop a piece of software that's blunt, direct, and full of power-user features, it won't take off because it gets panned as "too hard to use." Tricks like abstracting where and how the data is stored tend to be appealing to non-skilled users. They see "look how easy, I don't have to figure out which files are in the cloud and which are on disc, and can't accidentally try to open a spreadsheet in the photo editor." New users buy into it, the developers get their hockey-stick growth chart and everyone declares victory. After a few months, a small percentage of users end up dropping the product with a migraine because they can't break out of the jails and abstractions that are clearly standing in the way of improved productivity. No real point in satisfying those users anyway-- they've already paid, so there's no further value they can provide to your ecosystem.
jacquesm 7y ago
Of course they are. That's just part of the pendulum swinging towards centralization. Files, your files, are an obstacle to centralization so you should lose your ability to access them. So no more books in your library, just access to books through a device under the control of some large - usually American - entity. No more music collections, just access to someone else's music collection. Ditto for movies, you don't have your own copies, there is just access on a pay-per-view basis. And of course only the 'proper' artists, movie production houses and writers will be available. I refuse to play this game. I have my own collection of music, books and movies. Yes, it takes up space. But that's fine with me, at least no billionaire will be able to dictate what I can read, view or listen to. Extending this to your personal files was an obvious move.
JulianMorrison 7y ago
Files were an abstraction that appeared as well as disappeared in my lifetime, at least on home computers - before them, you were saving direct to the medium which was mostly audio magtape. And I've honestly never really liked them. Files get lost in the clutter, get overwritten or corrupted, don't get saved when you crash, are on this computer and not that one, don't make it across when you transition to a newer box, have to be mailed around or put on (gasp) physical media and passed around like a crude lump of plastic. And then your media gets a virus, oops. It was an improvement to autosave. It was an improvement to version. It was an improvement to distribute across redundant backups. It was an improvement, to be able to get at it from anywhere. There's UI issues in the new way of doing things, but that seems likely to shake out with experience. Files were often clunky at first too.
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Also it's worth mentioning, if I still had my files from my 486 PC (I don't), could I even access them? Mostly, not, or not without an emulator and fifty floppy disks of some ancient app I binned in the 1990s. And a floppy disk drive. And an adaptor cable. Files rot, unless they are intentionally low rot by design. Most weren't.
Kenji 7y ago
Simple files will outlast any cloud provider in existence today. Mark my words. That beautiful and elegant simplicity cannot be killed, unless files literally get outlawed.
mpweiher 7y ago
The reports of the death of the file(system) are grossly exaggerated. And it's not been for lack of trying. While I share many of the author's misgivings, files are actually making a bit of a comeback. After many years of trying to void the very idea of a file, Apple was essentially forced to introduce the Files app for iOS and introduce mass-storage support for (some) iPads. This is a good sign. The anti-file movement has also been very strong and vocal in the programming world, where many claim that many if not all of our programming problems would go away if only we put our code in databases, or (Smalltalk) images instead. Yet the files, they persist. That doesn't mean that files, or hierarchical filesystems, are perfect. However, whatever the problems ("Unititled 54.txt", anyone?), the proposed cures for what ails files invariably appear to be worse than the symptoms. And almost inevitably, we have to bring back or reinvent the very same concepts that we gleefully got rid of. That's a resilient concept! One that is apparently useful and pertinent at a somewhat deeper level than we fully understand. So how about we stop trying to "get rid of files", but instead see if we cannot improve the concept and the mechanism(s) to fix the problems.
whyleyc 7y ago
"Files are dead" is an oft-quoted meme, but they aren't going away anytime soon. I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points still hold true today: https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-files-arent-dead/ https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-...
thrower123 7y ago
I find myself very frustrated using newer versions of the Microsoft Office suite. When I want to save a file, I just want the tried-and-true Windows file dialog popped up, but instead I have to click around and avoid going into weird Onedrive dialogs. I save everything to OneDrive anyway, but I'm a not-so-old fogey that is more comfortable using the filesystem myself, rather than crummy layers stuck on top of it.

343 points by respinal 7y ago

Would read, but alas, behind the medium paywall... Aren't all things in computers eventually a file (descriptor)? And with the rate of data volume increasing, things going the opposite of the headline? And with the cloud, they are being replicated multiple times there and locally?

KineticLensman 7y ago
> The file has been replaced with the platform, the service, the ecosystem. ... When we stop paying, we’re left with nothing. No files. The service is revoked

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/2t5BK http://archive.is/2t5BK

cosmojg 7y ago
For a better reading experience and for those using Cloudflare's DNS: https://outline.com/yU64Cu https://outline.com/yU64Cu
- elliekelly 7y ago
  I do use Cloudflare’s DNS but I’ll admit I don’t know much/anything about how it really works... can you explain why the DNS server would matter here? Somewhat related, I have made a deal with the devil and use Comcast and, until yesterday, I was using their combo modem/router. Comcast doesn’t let you change the router’s DNS settings (which are, of course, set to Comcast servers) but I was under the impression that the DNS settings closest to the client always prevailed. But fiddling around with WireShark yesterday I could clearly see my DNS requests going to 75.75.75.75 (Comcast) even though my laptop was set to use CloudFlare. Is that even possible? Could the router have been set by Comcast to somehow override my settings or to intercept & reroute DNS requests?
  - jwilk 7y ago
    archive.is inaccessible via Cloudflare DNS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317

arch-ninja 7y ago

There is value in knowing there are 2 demographics: most people use apps and don't care how the app handles it's data; indeed the app usually alters the user's behaviour. Some people run the opposite: they instruct apps and the app had better use the data given in the format given or the user moves to another app (or writes their own). Someday I hope the second demographic's lifestyle is taught in highschools, because it is socially healthier.

iroo9fkn 7y ago
That’s not going to happen while top-down social policy is to adapt ourselves to what’s good for corporations. We’re not given much time to consider anything but what’s good for the economy. Pragmatic acquiescence trickles down.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
I think the demographics are closer to thinking the data belongs to an app (the first group) vs. believing the data is its own thing (the second group). I'm strongly in the second group. I don't object to an app using its specific file format if it's really needed. But I want to have the data in files, which I can independently move around without invoking the app, and possibly view and alter in software other than said app.
igornadj 7y ago
>socially healthier That's a bold statement, can you elaborate? People want to go for walks, meet up with friends, share memories, they don't care how it's done. Having the tools get out of the way and just do those things is a net benefit to society.

aurora72 7y ago

The author says "everyone started to use Spotify" Everyone? Yeah everyone with their shiny $1000+ iFon toys in their hands doing touch gestures.

njovin 7y ago
Spotify has 215m users. I’d assume that is more than the group that used to download MP3s and burn CDs (which would require some technical knowhow and a CD burner).
- ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
  You're seriously exaggerating. In the past, almost everyone had a CD-burner. You could use just a couple of clear as day GUI programs, a dozen of clicks and one drag and drop to download an album and burn a CD. Eleven year olds were doing it no problem.
- scarface74 7y ago
  iTunes was the most popular music source by 2007 and had built in CD burning capabilities. You created a playlist and hit “burn”. Almost every computer came with a CD burner between around 2000-2010.
barbecue_sauce 7y ago
It's not like Spotify has some insurmountable specs to run or is only available on iOS. I have it running in Manjaro, and its catalog is far more extensive than what I could have found on SoulSeek or DC++ back in the day.
asadkn 7y ago
I agree, this doesn't sound "everyone": https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/the_basics/full-list-of-territories-where-spotify-is-available/ https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/the_basics/full... Apple music is available in another 59 countries that Spotify is not.

amelius 7y ago

Perhaps one day we can store stuff directly into a transactional database. I'd actually love to see an OS based on this principle.

tyingq 7y ago
MVS is pretty much that.
- amelius 7y ago
  Ok perhaps a little more modern, where the database can be distributed, and where the transaction handle can be sent to different processes so you can have multiple microservices running in a single transaction.
_Understated_ 7y ago
Remember WinFS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS The idea was that the OS used a relational DB-like file system to store things and recognise them for what they are and deal with them differently instead of everything being streams of bytes, e.g. pictures aren't the same as Word documents. Didn't materialise but I remember at the time being dead excited by the concept.
psilocipher 7y ago
And the database will at a lower level consist of ..... files.....
- buckminster 7y ago
  High end databases are often run directly on block storage. The db already manages allocation and caching so a filesystem just adds overhead and wonky semantics.
  - psilocipher 7y ago
    And therefore files will eventually go extinct?

ACS_Solver 7y ago

One of my greatest culture shocks in terms of technology was around 6 years ago when I received an iPad, having no experience with Apple products. After the initial setup, the first thing I wanted was to transfer some files - TV episodes and PDFs - to the device. My first attempt was to SSH into it, only to discover that's not an option, and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak. Then I just connected the iPad to my PC by cable, expecting to see a mass storage device. No luck. Likewise, no luck finding a file explorer on the iPad. The iPad is strongly tied to the workflow that Apple suggests, and that's a workflow that removes files as a concept, abstracting them away. It's quite possibly a genius approach in terms of how accessible it is to non-tech people, even though it doesn't sit right with me.

folkhack 7y ago
Yep - had the same experience because I got into Procreate with the pencil and all (which is amazing). Had the same exact experience. It's a great device but I feel like they're dumbing computing down too much =(
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  apple is built on free and open tools, and you can’t make free and open tools on apple products. it is a sad state of affairs.
- benj111 7y ago
  "Procreate with the pencil" Some things you really need to keep to yourself.
barrkel 7y ago
I found it immediately limiting - either you put your stuff in one of the preordained categories like music, movies, photos, videos (and pretty much nothing else), or your stuff is siloed in whatever specific application you load it into. That's not a tool you can use to create things with, unless it's music, movies, photos or videos. It lacked the freedom to permit innovation. (I have never acquired an iPad beyond the first one I got, which was a gift.)

anderspitman 7y ago

If this resonates with you, I'd invite you to follow my work on MooseDrive [0]. I'm calling it a "data ownership" company. The product is focused on storage for developers. [0] https://moosedrive.io https://moosedrive.io

roryrjb 7y ago
To me the whole idea of data ownership and everything this article is talking about is antithetical to some company somewhere or cloud storage. I personally collect mp3s. I could easily pay for a Spotify subscription or even have it included as part of a mobile phone contract at a discounted rate, but I prefer to have the actual files on my computer, I own them and no one can change that fact. I religiously catalogue and sort all my files and back them up to multiple external media constantly. I am currently working on a couple of projects that are all to do with organising files locally via their metadata (mp3s, JPEGs, et al). I avoid anything cloud. I am slowly but surely migrating away from the cloud.
- anderspitman 7y ago
  The vision for the product is for you to be able to do everything you just described, and still have the files available for sharing and publishing through the cloud. Note, that doesn't mean stored in the cloud, unless that's what the user wants.

smitty1e 7y ago

> Files are skeuomorphic. That’s a fancy word that just means they’re a digital concept that mirrors a physical item. So, the digital equivalent of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia

anderspitman 7y ago

> Years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Similar to the ongoing trend of turning every product into service, both on-line and off-line. It turns ownership into relationships, which is something I consider strongly negative. Ownership doesn't require as much maintenance and is much more forgiving, and I can own a lot of things, but there's only so many relationships I can be in before my mind is no longer able to keep track of them all.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I couldn’t read this medium article, it said that I had read too many free articles this month, but hopefully this is relevant: files “are back” in iPadOS. Most iPad apps had interoperability with data in other apps, when it made sense but now with the new File app, I am increasingly doing more on my iPad Pro. I have a GPU rig for deep learning, and use a MacBook for Lisp and Haskell hacking, but now most of my time is spent on an iPad doing research, writing, and entertainment.

maliker 7y ago

I don't understand how people can get work done in the post-file world. Any project I've got that's more complicated than a todo list has text files, images, code, links to websites, emails, and typeset documents. The only thing that holds all that stuff, organizes it into folders, lets me edit/run it, and makes the content searchable is a filesystem. Maybe my standards for usability are too high.

fit2rule 7y ago
At work I am constantly battle the following sources of crufty bollocks: the ftp server, the windows-share fileserver, the 'one the linux guys use' (its ssh..), the jira ticket-attachments, the confluence 'pages', peoples mobile-phones, and so on. If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror, without .. oh, I get it .. I just install another 3rd-party app .. C'mon, OS vendors. Pop the cloud already.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror A local file system? UDF does the job.
- na85 7y ago
  >If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror... FTP provides exactly this experience. Every platform can interface with it and it can be made network-transparent.
- maliker 7y ago
  I've standardized on Google Drive, which kind of works. Not good enough version control features for code though, which is why I still need git. Been kicking around the idea of moving to git only, but the learning curve is steep (impossible?) for non-programmers.
  - passwordreset 7y ago

psilocipher 7y ago

Files will never go "extinct". Files exist. They will continue to exist. You people are insane.

rasz 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
- wetpaws 7y ago
  Does not exist in the wild, probably for a reason.

dangus 7y ago

The article just felt...unjustifiably alarmist to me. Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept. For example, Google or Apple is processing the crap out of your email attachment image because they know you don’t understand the idea that trying to send five 10MB photos likely will not fit in an email. All you want to do is send your photos to Grandma. So instead your iDevice handles it for you and either compresses them or throws them in a temporary cloud storage location with a link. Grandma gets her photos - for most people the alternative is a confusing mail delivery bounce followed by frustration. Apple added Stacks to the desktop because everyone’s tired of seeing other people’s computers with a mess of icons smashed together on the desktop, because that’s the only place files could be conceivably stored in the mind of a non-technical user. The whole idea of a file hierarchy seems either too confusing or too labor intensive to that type of user. Nerds like us always have and had options. We are aware and capable of coming up with a more friendly solution to us, like a home built NAS or Synology box; ask a non-technical user what those are and be met with a blank stare. For most people, they really should be paying someone else to maintain their data, iCloud, Google or whatever. Nobody’s home back up scheme can match what these companies are doing in their data centers. And no, these services don’t just delete your data immediately after your monthly payment method bounces - you are given time and nags to download your data or renew, often your data just becomes download-only. Are we annoyed that most options are not for us, or have to be in a form of a workaround to a technology stack that’s marketed to non-technical people? Maybe. It would be wonderful if there was a device as nice as an iPad that also gave us full access like a Linux PC. But also, nobody’s forcing us in 2019 to stop using our files as we did in 1999. We didn’t have all these services back then. File management was the option. It is still an option. And in 2019, Apple finally adds mass storage support to the iPad. Sometimes things come around.

Finnucane 7y ago
> Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept. You have met my mother I see. She still uses her multi-function printer like a copier because she's never quite grasped the idea that she can store her document scans on her computer.

_Understated_ 7y ago

> all culture, raging over us, for $12.99 a month (or $15.99 for HD) as long as we keep up our payments like good economic entities. When we stop paying, we’re left with nothing. No files. The service is revoked. This is the most frightening thing for me... by far: the concept that I no longer have control of the destiny of my own shit. Mine. Stuff I created. I understand the concept of how cloud storage works: "hey, we'll look after it for you, back it up and stuff, and all you need to do it pay us a small monthly fee". Makes sense. But add to that fact that if you stop paying they'll keep you from your stuff. Also if they don't like you for practically any reason they'll keep you from your stuff. Or if they suffer a huge data loss they'll claim that the T's and C's protect them and they'll still keep you from your stuff. What the hell are we sleep-walking into here? Caveat: I'm a tech. I have a local copy, a local backup (that I rotate on an ad-hoc basis with the other HD at my mum and dads house) and an offsite cloud-backup (using Sync) so I'm covered but this stuff isn't aimed at me, it's aimed at my mum and my non-tech friends who just think "hey, it's <mega-corp>. They've got thousands of people and loads of equipment and they know what they're doing!" They sure do!

FpUser 7y ago
People are walking into corporate traps left and right. Too bad. they should turn on their brains every once in a while.
- api 7y ago
  The "bait" for these traps is almost universally ease of use and overall user experience, something open platforms and open source has failed to provide.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    USB drives and SD cards seem to be doing just fine, along with hard drives for desktop use. The inconvenience of these is having to go somewhere to buy them and not being able to magically simultaneously sync between devices.
ur-whale 7y ago

carapace 7y ago

Files and directories are not a great abstraction. Never have been. E.g. the insides of git are much better (although the abstractions layered on top are fucking gruesome.) Something like IPFS is an obvious way forward. https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/

jkp56 7y ago
And ipfs is really just a combo of the two concepts: files and folders wrapped into a git-like tree of hashes; and all that tree-hash-files-folders structure is being synced over a torrent-like protocol.
- carapace 7y ago
  From my POV it's more like distributed content-addressable RAM with support for file/directory-structured blobs. You can build alternate abstractions over it.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Problem is that we're not getting a better interoperable metadata-rich relational object storage system. We're getting closed silos in short-lived cloud surveillance services.
- carapace 7y ago
  I agree, but then the issue is social/political rather than technical. I'd love it if the WWW was e.g. Xanadu+Prolog.

williesleg 7y ago

Good riddance 1950s

cproctor 7y ago

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator. First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth experience identity and relationships this way, it's now a lot harder to teach lower-level abstractions. In my experience, this has changed over the last five years.

cproctor 7y ago
Sort of as a response, I'm currently developing/piloting a 9th grade CS curriculum designed around constructionism ("making with code"). The first unit spends a lot of time introducing students to Terminal. By the second unit, assignments are git repos.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  Hm, does "constructionism" mean a new thing in educational theory now? You don't seem to be using it like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... ?
  - cproctor 7y ago
    No, Papert's constructionism is exactly what I'm pointing at. My phrase, "making with code," was meant to suggest that like maker education, this approach to introductory CS emphasizes personal relationships with powerful ideas, through personally-meaningful projects done in a community of practice. By leading with Terminal, I hope to emphasize students' laptops as tools for making things, not just providing access to content. A lot of current approaches prioritize scalability over everything else, leading to canned and sandboxed curricula. I'm curious, though, whether this is in tension with your understanding of constructionism.
unqueued 7y ago
I have a very similar anecdote. I had a long conversation with a friend who is a high school science teacher. She told me that computer literacy has plummeted in the last ten years. She has her students go into the field and collect data in the form of photos, spreadsheets, and typed reports. She wants students to bundle these files in zip files, and email them to her. Students have no idea how to do this. Some of them struggle with emails. She has had to make her tutorials on this longer and longer. And she has also been forced to start accepting assignments as a pile of attachments, because so few students understand zip files.

rhizome 7y ago

File this next to "Mouse buttons are going extinct, because Apple."

esotericn 7y ago

You can pry my files from my cold dead hands. What amuses me about all of this is that it seems to just further cement software developers as magicians. Back in the day it was the Windows control panel. Nowadays? I have direct experience with tons of people navigating cloud service settings or whatever else via endless GUIs. Just give me the filesystem. It's all a bunch of JSON configs or whatever anyway. find -name blah -execdir sed -i blah. Bosh. Well, I'll never struggle for work at least. Perhaps this is our 'guild'...?

jkp56 7y ago
We'd call this karma, I think. On the one hand these big corps create siloed software environments that not only take all control away from users, but also remove the necessity to think. From their pov, users are as dumb as rocks and should stay at that level. At the same time the same corps cry about the lack of supply of new engineers and pretend to promote CS in college (by giving out ipads and watching a colorful presentation about software, I guess).
- the_pwner224 7y ago
  > pretend to promote CS in college Potentially because that means in 5-20 years they'll have a much bigger pool of labor available? They've already done illegal market-manipulating collusion which resulted in billions of dollars of salaries not being paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 ; in the end they got hit with fines for a few million bucks and some developers got a paycheck for a few thousand bucks (two orders of magnitude less than the wages stolen from them). I'm just a college student, but I find it hard to not think that when I see the big companies spending tons of money to push people to learn to code.
  - pm90 7y ago
    I think you're reading too much into conspiracy theories. That can be fun and all but I can assure you these things are emergent and not some concerted effort to keep wages lower. The Steve Jobs market manipulation was def a dick move, but.. well, its Steve Jobs. There will be other such efforts too, but that alone doesn't indicate the kind of concerted market manipulation that you think exists. The emphasis on coding is similar to the emphasis on schooling and mathematics at the dawn of the industrial revolution: societies realized then that basic mathematical literacy can be immensely beneficial to people. And we understand today that basic programming skills can have a similar transformative effect. Jobs in tech are increasing at a tremendous rate. As we shift to more automation, the demand for computer literacy will only increase.

anaphor 7y ago

Your database (in the context of things like blogs and so on) is a filesystem, it's just built on top of a higher level abstraction than traditional filesystems.

lewisjoe 7y ago

Remember "Worse is Better" by Gabriel? Lisp was a correct, consistent and complete system, prioritizing these over simplicity. C, on the other hand, was a simple system but not nearly as much complete, consistent or correct as Lisp. Nevertheless, Lisp lost to C. This is what happens when Capitalism meets Software. When it comes to winning markets, shipping simple stuff is always better than shipping a slightly more complex (in terms of code as well as UX) but correct stuff. That is why most companies prioritize feature development over bugfixes. That is why selecting multiple items from a list is still inconsistent across the web. That is why XMPP lost and Whatsapp and Messenger are winning. There are efforts like Solid (https://solid.inrupt.com https://solid.inrupt.com) by Tim Berners-Lee himself that's trying to bring back the concept of files and data-ownership to end-users, to enforce correctness and consistency. But I'm still skeptical if the efforts will ever win the market.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

My major concern is that data backup is getting more and more difficult. I feel it's increasingly more difficult to figure out what to back up and how to restore it. I have heard several horror stories from people who messed up something and had all their cloud data disappear forever.

PavlovsCat 7y ago

A HN comment from 2 years ago I bookmarked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235151 The war on general computing implies disempowering users, rather than empowering them. But that it's "not surprising" doesn't mean it's good, or that it can't be reversed. I wonder what associations for craftsmanship in software, respect for users, and similar things there are? If there was a web ring about that, I would browse it.

jkp56 7y ago
Heh, that's a possibility, actually. Govs like how software and personal phones enable global surveillance, but they don't like the power that general computing devices give (all these encryption protocols, bitcoins and so on). So obviously some people in the govs are trying to convince the rest to keep the first and take back the general computing part. We may even see in our lifetimes how common people will only be allowed access to dumb software (the Apple model), and general unrestricted software and hardware will be threated like weapons, with licenses and prison time for software engineers. The alternative path for society is cheap and powerful general use phones with quantum coprocessors and a constitutional amendments that defend these rights. I'm pretty sure that the two alternatives are now being considered somewhere in DoD offices.

submeta 7y ago

I haven't seen many non-tech people who manage their files in a systematic way. Most non-tech people don't have a naming convention for their files (seen many files named "letter.doc" or "shmith.doc" or "smith2.doc"), let alone a predefined folder structure for their files. What I have seen most of the time is this: A desktop full of files, hundreds, even thousands of files, some within folders, some flat. A chaos. I am a tech person. I do organise my files in folders. And I don't want any other organizing principle for my documents. But I realize that this concept does not work for most other people.

BeetleB 7y ago

This is why years ago I switched to a static site generator. Using something like Django was fragile. My provider would change some library and poof - the site is down. I don't use my site often (post on it once every so many months) - so I simply switched. Never gone down since then. A few days ago I opened a Jupyter notebook I had authored in 2015 - and it failed to reproduce my results. I relied on pandas, and pandas has gone through API changes. Fortunately, it wasn't hard for me to search around for the newer versions of those APIs and fix things - but this is only 4 years after I authored it. Can I have any confidence that 20 years from now I could reproduce the results - or even find documentation for the APIs I used to understand exactly what I was doing? I mean sure - I could put the OS and all the libraries needed to reproduce the work in a container and be guaranteed[1] it'll run later, but the only people who will do that are those who need to for regulatory compliance[2]. [1] Not really. The software to run the container may no longer be supported, and the people with the knowledge may charge more than most can afford to get it to work. [2] Something we're dealing with at work these days. Writing stuff for the automotive industry and they expect that any software + tools should work 15-20 years from now. Same level of expectation for availability as any other car part. Now that there is so much SW in modern cars, this is a good opportunity for being a consultant 15-20 years from now!

pointerpointer 7y ago

I can imagine corporations totally like the idea of users not being able to save their own precious data to a file. In the end they want to own and control your data as much as possible for profit and power. And they sell that idea by telling you it's more convenient. As if it were not possible to create great file management tools or maybe even your own files as a database that you can manage easily. Same with the 'cloud'. What's the difference between running your own FTP server and a cloud server? Technically not that much IMAO, only the latter means the data is controlled by some corporation running that server. And why is there hardly any progress in the area of building a private turn-key 'cloud' server so you don't need gmail, dropbox, github, etc..? I'm sure it can be made, easy to setup, robust, with backup, you name it, just like a Mac pc that's made for non technical people. We know how to build it, but we don't do it, we build for corporations instead. The further we go down this road the less control we will have, and the ramifications of that don't look pretty to me to say the least.

acolumb 7y ago
With the advent of database-managed, self-hosted personal clouds (i.e Nextcloud/Droppy,) the difference is even smaller. It's developing into a self-hosted "just works" personal cloud ecosystem.

nintendo1889 7y ago

It reminds me of Stallman's best quote: the computer industry is more fashionable than the women's fashion industry.

dredmorbius 7y ago
For much the same reasons. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+theoretic+fads&restrict_sr=on https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+th...

brian_herman 7y ago

Can medium go extinct first?

proc0 7y ago

Non-technical people will not hesitate to adopt online services to manage their data. I have a dropbox and other services of my own, but I'm talking about the mainstream apps mentioned in the article that also have a purpose. People completely ignore the fact you would have no access to this data if you have no online connection (or access to the account). It's not that files are going away, it's that they're being increasingly managed by tech companies, and normal people don't know any better, as evident by the article's title... it shows the author doesn't what files are for and that they are invisibly managed by a third party.

mellowdream 7y ago

This is what I'm gonna link to my friends the next time they make fun of me for being a green-texter. This is exactly the story I went through a few years back as well. I had an iPhone 4? 9-ish years ago when I was in a music-kleptomania frenzy (back when what.cd was around too ;) ), and I remember just how frustrating it was dragging and dropping shit through iTunes all the time. Same for movies, photos, and documents! I couldn't see the appeal of using the iPhone at all - why would somebody use this when they could just plug an Android device into their PC and use their file explorer? (The update to iOS7 was the nail in the coffin - I found the neon design just repulsive.) I guess my question is - has the Apple "ecosystem" gotten better for this? Can I actually edit metadata for .mp3s and .mp4s and just drop them into an iPhone or iPad now? And copy them out as well or download them offline, bit for bit? If so, are dongles still the norm? *An aside - I've definitely eased up on the file-ownership thing now. I just let YouTube Premium handle everything. It was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of music files out of some strange ownership OCD. I see it as a net positive overall - now I just find it amazing that someone even uploaded some white-label vinyl-only run-of-100 Foul Play UK garage record (and similar records going for >$100 on discogs - maybe even ownership has its limits?) at 128kbps at all, even if it doesn't stay there forever :)

launch_queue 7y ago
I can say from my experience no it hasn't. You are forced to install iTunes for your computer to even be able to manipulate the device with other software, so even if you have MediaMonkey or an alternative music library you will need to install iTunes first. MediaMonkey works well generally, but as soon as there's an iOS update there's no guarantee you can transfer music because it can break something in the chain. As for metadata, you still have to use 3rd party (e.g. mp3tag) which can be its own time-consuming headache--at least you can use RegEx.
dehrmann 7y ago
> [media file ownership] was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of music files out of some strange ownership OCD Full disclosure: I used to work for Spotify. When people talk about services like Spotify and Apple Music, they usually miss how much value is added in the cataloging and search they do. These are a massive pain to do yourself, it doesn't scale past ~10,000 tracks, they've put more thought into it, and are better at handling the song/track/recording ambiguity in search results.

dehrmann 7y ago

Some of this is that the file/folder abstraction is inadequate for organizing large amounts of data.

jradd 7y ago

files are an abstraction and reference to objects in memory. The only problem I see is storage life cycle without cache in volatile plus redundant non-volatile memory. Same problem for blocks and segments, no?

hakfoo 7y ago

I wonder if this is a variation on a business anti-pattern we see in a lot of other places: "It's better to acquire a new customer at any cost, versus retaining an existing one." There are plenty of verticals where if you develop a piece of software that's blunt, direct, and full of power-user features, it won't take off because it gets panned as "too hard to use." Tricks like abstracting where and how the data is stored tend to be appealing to non-skilled users. They see "look how easy, I don't have to figure out which files are in the cloud and which are on disc, and can't accidentally try to open a spreadsheet in the photo editor." New users buy into it, the developers get their hockey-stick growth chart and everyone declares victory. After a few months, a small percentage of users end up dropping the product with a migraine because they can't break out of the jails and abstractions that are clearly standing in the way of improved productivity. No real point in satisfying those users anyway-- they've already paid, so there's no further value they can provide to your ecosystem.

jacquesm 7y ago

Of course they are. That's just part of the pendulum swinging towards centralization. Files, your files, are an obstacle to centralization so you should lose your ability to access them. So no more books in your library, just access to books through a device under the control of some large - usually American - entity. No more music collections, just access to someone else's music collection. Ditto for movies, you don't have your own copies, there is just access on a pay-per-view basis. And of course only the 'proper' artists, movie production houses and writers will be available. I refuse to play this game. I have my own collection of music, books and movies. Yes, it takes up space. But that's fine with me, at least no billionaire will be able to dictate what I can read, view or listen to. Extending this to your personal files was an obvious move.

JulianMorrison 7y ago

Files were an abstraction that appeared as well as disappeared in my lifetime, at least on home computers - before them, you were saving direct to the medium which was mostly audio magtape. And I've honestly never really liked them. Files get lost in the clutter, get overwritten or corrupted, don't get saved when you crash, are on this computer and not that one, don't make it across when you transition to a newer box, have to be mailed around or put on (gasp) physical media and passed around like a crude lump of plastic. And then your media gets a virus, oops. It was an improvement to autosave. It was an improvement to version. It was an improvement to distribute across redundant backups. It was an improvement, to be able to get at it from anywhere. There's UI issues in the new way of doing things, but that seems likely to shake out with experience. Files were often clunky at first too.

JulianMorrison 7y ago
Also it's worth mentioning, if I still had my files from my 486 PC (I don't), could I even access them? Mostly, not, or not without an emulator and fifty floppy disks of some ancient app I binned in the 1990s. And a floppy disk drive. And an adaptor cable. Files rot, unless they are intentionally low rot by design. Most weren't.

Kenji 7y ago

Simple files will outlast any cloud provider in existence today. Mark my words. That beautiful and elegant simplicity cannot be killed, unless files literally get outlawed.

mpweiher 7y ago

The reports of the death of the file(system) are grossly exaggerated. And it's not been for lack of trying. While I share many of the author's misgivings, files are actually making a bit of a comeback. After many years of trying to void the very idea of a file, Apple was essentially forced to introduce the Files app for iOS and introduce mass-storage support for (some) iPads. This is a good sign. The anti-file movement has also been very strong and vocal in the programming world, where many claim that many if not all of our programming problems would go away if only we put our code in databases, or (Smalltalk) images instead. Yet the files, they persist. That doesn't mean that files, or hierarchical filesystems, are perfect. However, whatever the problems ("Unititled 54.txt", anyone?), the proposed cures for what ails files invariably appear to be worse than the symptoms. And almost inevitably, we have to bring back or reinvent the very same concepts that we gleefully got rid of. That's a resilient concept! One that is apparently useful and pertinent at a somewhat deeper level than we fully understand. So how about we stop trying to "get rid of files", but instead see if we cannot improve the concept and the mechanism(s) to fix the problems.

whyleyc 7y ago

"Files are dead" is an oft-quoted meme, but they aren't going away anytime soon. I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points still hold true today: https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-files-arent-dead/ https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-...

thrower123 7y ago

I find myself very frustrated using newer versions of the Microsoft Office suite. When I want to save a file, I just want the tried-and-true Windows file dialog popped up, but instead I have to click around and avoid going into weird Onedrive dialogs. I save everything to OneDrive anyway, but I'm a not-so-old fogey that is more comfortable using the filesystem myself, rather than crummy layers stuck on top of it.