15 ms·

Shirky.com is gone

331 points by lkrubner 5y ago

chubot 5y ago
I also noticed recently that Philip Guo’s site is gone, and was taken down on purpose. I remember a few great articles that showed up on HN. My interpretation was that the ratio of effort to reward just started to skew, which is understandable and sad
lkrubner 5y ago
I read this essay in 2003 and it influenced how my business partner and I built our startup. It influenced what possibilities we chased after. But Shirky.com is now off-line: http://www.shirky.com/ http://www.shirky.com/ I'm not sure when this happened but I see that Wikipedia has adjusted to this and now links to the archive.org link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky This is yet another example of the history of the early Web disappearing. Shirky's early essays were fundamental to way we understood the potential of the Web back in 1999-2008. I actually discovered this while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web.
- notRobot 5y ago
  > while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web. Do you remember the title or subject or any key words/phrases?
  - rwmj 5y ago
    I don't know if it's the one that the GP has in mind, but this is a classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky.com/writings/information_price.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky... "Help, The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up"
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      Wow this guy was straight up prescient. I’ve never read his blogs until today - thanks for sharing this.
      - Alex3917 5y ago
        I would honestly start with his presentations, they are amazing: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky
      - rwmj 5y ago
        I wasn't quite sure when he wrote this. The earliest capture in the Internet Archive was January 2000, but it could be from earlier than that maybe? I do remember that it was quite prescient when I first read it, although it's sort of obvious in 2022.
        Forgeties79 5y ago
        Yeah that’s sort of what I’m driving at. He called a lot of stuff that wasn’t exactly an easy take.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        Highly recommended: http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky....
        walterbell 5y ago
        Classic essay. > People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done. > And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
  - lkrubner 5y ago
    He explained that an expanding __________ (I can't remember this word. Maybe he said "network"?) meant that each person in the __________ was exposed to a greater variety of choices, however, the total number of choices decreased. His point was that separate niches each maintained some unique offerings, but when everything was combined together into a single market, and attention focused on certain items, there would be a winnowing effect. The paradox was that everyone could legitimately feel they were enjoying an abundance of options, greater than ever before, while the total number of options decreased.
    - sebastianconcpt 5y ago
      Good summary. The other day I was hearing a political example mentioning that every little local detail, now with social-media, it becomes potentially "a national issue" but that never happen before. Surprisingly, the Founding Fathers were aware of this issue back then and tried to solve (actually mitigate) the problem by keeping the central power as small as possible.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      I was just thinking about this - I can go to the store and have fifty variations of peanut butter at my fingertips - but I get basically the same fifty variations anywhere in the US, and much of them anywhere in the world. Whereas in the past, my store might have 1 or even 0 options on peanut butter, but travel 10/50 miles away and there'd be an entirely different option. We have a little bit left of this with beer, as most places have a "local" beer available.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        Sadly most places outside the US get one, two maybe 4 options but that leaves room for other products.
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        Ever stopped to ponder the laundry detergent aisle at your local grocery store? Or the potato chip aisle? Especially on detergent, what's there is a huge proportion of the shelf space devoted to a couple of brands (which may, in fact, be from the same parent company) with very large containers taking up a lot of space for relatively little actual product, but lots of different choices for those brands. Or, as I like to say, 31 flavors of Tide Pods. Same goes for potato and corn chips. Lays and Ruffles dominate, which oversize bags that are half air, relegating other brands to lower shelves on one end. But consumers can "choose" from half a dozen different flavors of the same brands. And it's the same all over the US. The only variation tends to be that some flavors Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle or Wasabi Ginger, e.g., appear more often in some markets than others.
- influx 5y ago
  Great essay, how did it influence your startup?
  - lkrubner 5y ago
    We focused on the "unfairness" and we thought there might be a technical fix, so we focused on new discovery mechanisms. But our solution did not get traction, so we eventually pivoted towards tools for building commerce sites, and there we had more success.
- clay_shirky 5y ago
  This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll tell you how it happened. I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since the early 90s (alt.culture.usenet and alt.folklore.urban ftw), but by the middle of last decade, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was marketing on Facebook, which was the boringest possible topic. At the same time, my wordpress host had lousy security, and my site was getting frequently disabled because of some malicious javascript uploaded through some hole they hand't patched. I wasn't writing there anymore, so it was pure cost at that point, and cost of my time, not just dollars. Then I moved to Shanghai for several years, working on other stuff, and fixed the site a couple of times again, and one time, my host was like "We disabled your site!" because of their own security flaws had let it get hacked again, which, the whole thing had entered 'ugh field'territory. I never decided to let the site lapse, I was just tired of dealing with it, and the political circumstances in both China and the U.S. seemed much more urgent than rescuing some historical essays, so one day at a time of not dealing with it became years. And here we are, me reading my own eulogy. Which is incredibly flattering and touching, I have to say. I'm not even sure what of it can be resuscitated -- maybe if I want it back, I'll have to copy it from Wayback (and will say "Thank you Brewster", not for the first time), but if anyone here has advice about competent and secure hosting for an old Wordpress blog, hmu at cshirky@gmail.com, because reading this, it makes me embarassed not to have just fucking fixed this a year or two ago. And thanks, all, for this thread. -clay
  - lathiat 5y ago
    You’ll never maintain a Wordpress site long term securely. Need to convert it to static html one way or another.
    - egypturnash 5y ago
      10y of http://egypt.urnash.com http://egypt.urnash.com running on Wordpress with a small set of plugins, including one for security, says otherwise.
    - karjaluoto 5y ago
      Another approach might be to toss it on blot.im. (I’m in no way affiliated with Blot, but I like how simple the product is.)
mxmilkiib 5y ago
Also fairly hidden these days is Many-to-Many (also sometimes referred to as Many2Many) http://web.archive.org/web/20081229123241/http://many.corante.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20081229123241/http://many.corant... where Clay Shirky, Liz Lawley, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet, David Weinberger and danah boyd posted.
- Alex3917 5y ago
  This is terrible. But the upside is that most of them have really good books you can still buy on Amazon, so if not the actual historical essays then at least most of their ideas will be preserved indefinitely. Clearly a lot of them have been looking back at that period with mixed feelings over the last few years (and have said as much), but even still it's shocking that something like Clay Shirky's blog would disappear when he's very much still alive. The fact that we apparently now have to worry about whether or not something like Danah Boyd's MySpace vs Facebook essay could disappear though is ridiculous; even with all the known technical and social problems with the web it's hard to imagine that it's come to this.
  - Bilal_io 5y ago
    > But the upside is that most of them have really good books you can still buy on Amazon I am wondering, are there any organizations that actively scan and archive books, even if they don't share them because of copyright laws? Amazon is almost a monopoly when it comes to books, and we cannot rely on it to preserve the books for the next 50+ years, and not every purchased copy is guaranteed to be around by then.
    - yesbabyyes 5y ago
      Sweden has the Royal Library, US has the Library of Congress. I believe most developed countries have national libraries, archiving books and newspapers as they are published.
      - Bilal_io 5y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Aw, man. Clay Shirky’s stuff was a regular “go-to” for me.
- legrande 5y ago
  Same. Watched many of his talks on Youtube. Refreshing to hear an academic grade description of Internet & blogging culture.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
does anyone know why he took everything down? I noticed this when I was looking for one his presentations last year
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Most of the time it is time and/or money. Vulins found every other day in some obscure package you thought you were one and done with. You get to spend a couple of hours fixing it. Oh new update on the java core you are using few more hours. Oh that update breaks 2-3 things. More time. You float the idea that someone else takes it. But those who step up have 'other ideas' what they want the site to be. Oh and your base OS is 2 releases back better get on that. Then the actual cost. While you can get a cheap site up and going for not much. If you get even slightly popular you are now looking at a decent amount of money for many people. You may not see a couple hundred a month as 'no big deal' but many people do. You can pay a provider to take some of that patching work out of your hands but you pay for that. The programming world is very ephemeral. We get bored easy. We move on quickly. Sometimes we are just cheapos. Things that cost time and money get left to rot or turned off. What I find interesting in my 'internet' life. Is I always seem to find out about the really interesting places as they are being closed out :(
  - mattlondon 5y ago
    This is where static sites help a lot. No maintenance upkeep, minimal server costs.
    - rmbyrro 5y ago
      Not even server these days. One can dump it on S3, configure a CDN in front of it and pay pennies a month to never have to think about it again...
      - bombcar 5y ago
        Even having to pay pennies a month is something that has to be maintained (do you remember to update your credit card info, are the emails correct, etc). It would be nice for something like the Internet Archive to offer "perpetual hosting" where you pay upfront for enough to fund hosting "forever". $100 would generate $1 a year in interest which would be enough to host small data.
embit 5y ago
I was one of very early subscribers of his NEC mailing list. Just found this article he had sent out and now on archive.org. It’s another prescient article which now seems obvious https://perma.cc/9ESH-V2YE https://perma.cc/9ESH-V2YE
rmbyrro 5y ago
Calls my attention that the most valuable content on the web is designed with simplicity, in HTML, without moving bells and whistles.
- oblio 5y ago
  Data is forever, systems are temporary.
platz 5y ago
The observable universe is also disappearing.
eric4smith 5y ago
I suppose we can look at this with nostalgic eyes. I was a big Shirky reader back in the day. But the truth is that all kinds of things disappear all the time in all aspects of life. The web is no different at all. Take my dad for instance - a quite profilic and famous mid level artist. It’s coming to the point where not much people remember him. And when my siblings pass on that will be that. Let’s not get too nostalgic. If someone is interested they should try to preserve the writings and keep them going. That’s why certain groups have taken it upon themselves to preserve old important films. And as we know they are always fighting for more donations to keep things going. Because in the end… no one really cares. 50 years from now children will be asking who was Van Gogh.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- legrande 5y ago
  > But the truth is that all kinds of things disappear all the time in all aspects of life. The web is no different at all. Glad we have the Wayback Machine then. But if you don't want your blog mirrored by Wayback you can declare that in your `robots.txt` file. Do this: User-agent: * Disallow: / But that doesn't mean crawlers/bots will honor that request and presume any content you post publicly will be backed up somewhere. If not somewhere on the net, then on someone's hard-drive!
  - hexis 5y ago
    The Internet Archive does not respect robots.txt - https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
    - dewey 5y ago
      The blog post you are linking is outdated. They are honoring robots.txt files. From the FAQ: > Some sites are not available because of robots.txt or other exclusions. What does that mean? Such sites may have been excluded from the Wayback Machine due to a robots.txt file on the site or at a site owner’s direct request. If you exclude them in your robots.txt file they will also absolutely retroactively remove your site from the index. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965575 - https://help.archive.org/help/using-the-wayback-machine/ https://help.archive.org/help/using-the-wayback-machine/
geuis 5y ago
Its not like the guy passed away. Given the community, I'm sure someone here can get in touch with him and let him know that his site is down.
- virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
  I pinged him on Twitter a few hours ago about this discussion and he acknowledged. Still not sure what the situation is though.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  I was scrolling down looking for some comment on what happened to him or what he was up to now a days.
enobrev 5y ago
One thing I always loved in any old sci-fi that dealt with internet-like spaces was that most of them had a concept of a public internet. They generally sort of felt like the "slums" of the internet filled with trash and spam and stashes for hackers, but the concept of a public space to which anyone could post anything always appealed to me. I'm quite sad that we don't have something like this. We've had plenty of things that had that general appeal, but they've always been owned, run, and eventually shut down, but companies of some sort. I'm not opposed to companies having websites, but I'd love to see a public space as well. The idea that we could post our content to that space and expect it to live far longer than us would be a huge deal.
- otachack 5y ago
  IPFS is one way, I believe. Archive.org has been pretty dependable too so you can technically post on Twitter or a blog post then have Archive take a version of it. I still see your point, though. Maybe mixing in IPFS with some public solution, like a guest book, might be something?
- dgellow 5y ago
  I don’t really see what stops you from having your own site with static content you want to publish. Get a domain for like 10 years, with auto renewal enabled. Get a box somewhere, serve you static content. You can publish whatever you want for almost no maintenance for decades. (Of course, that’s unless you’re talking about sharing the type of content that would make interpol want to track you down)
  - enobrev 5y ago
    And once I'm dead, broke, or have simply moved on from the tech universe? The ephemerality of the thing is the issue I'm speaking to. We've lost something here. The requirement for books to last is physical space, and those shelves and boxes continue to exist far longer than the publishers, authors, illustrators, etc. We don't have that with this medium (except, of course, archive.org which is excellent and not nearly enough). We've built something that's lighter than books and easier to store in smaller spaces, but we've [collectively] given no thought to maintaining a proper archive. The freedom to publish to the world in an instant is as magical as it is fleeting. On a longer scale of time - and not a very long one - it's practically worthless.
donohoe 5y ago
The site has been effectively down since November 2019 when it started showing up as parked https://web.archive.org/web/20191130082649/http://shirky.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191130082649/http://shirky.com...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zackmorris 5y ago
I hadn't read this before, but I think I have a new guidepost for innovation: real tech flattens the power law for everyone, whereas phantom tech amplifies the power law.
- mattcwilson 5y ago
  I think you’re drawing the exact wrong conclusion from the article? Increased access to choice amplifies the effect of the power law. From the article: > Now, thanks to a series of breakthroughs in network theory by researchers like Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Duncan Watts, and Bernardo Huberman among others, breakthroughs being described in books like Linked, Six Degrees, and The Laws of the Web, we know that power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options. We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot. Unless your real tech equates to censorship or control or something, I am not sure how it would help reduce power law effects?
elevation 5y ago
Clay Shirky's essay, "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview:" [0] is a powerful warning about the pitfalls of global efforts to categorize information. In the early 2000s I had a manager who evangelized "the semantic web" to our team as being just years from taking over the world. He was convinced that we needed to integrate RDF into every product to remain relevant. Shirky's essay persuasively articulated why this would have been a waste of effort for us. Years on, these ideas still influence my analysis of elevator pitches, business plans and requested features. edit: Thank you, Clay! [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150323162650/http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150323162650/http://www.shirky...
uwagar 5y ago
crikey clay shirkeyed on his duty to keep up a webshitey
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
xyzzy21 5y ago
NOTHING on the web can be trusted to last very long. It's the deep flaw of digitalization of paper.
Vexs 5y ago
Recently I was trying to look for some documentation on TK. I had remembered an older site, the book on TK, all very good information if slightly dated. Took me a decent amount of searching to remember- effbot.org, which also somewhat micro-famously went down recently due to the author's death. Makes me wonder what other very high quality resources will be lost in the next two, three decades as developers age... RIP shirky.org, your insights then are just as good today
Rich_Morin 5y ago
Clay- I strongly encourage you to find a way to make your writings available once again. Many of the things you wrote are as true today as they ever were and the rest are valuable as historical reminders. FWIW, GitHub Pages might well be the simplest and best solution.
jacquesm 5y ago
That's interesting timing I just posted this on Twitter: http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky.... And noticed that the site was down.
mvkel 5y ago
I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I like the idea of the internet being organic where things rot and die, truly forgotten. On the other hand, it's much easier for future historians to look back a hundred years and see the actual content that's posted at any point in time. In both instances I think we overestimate how important any one piece of content is. If an idea dies when a site goes down, it probably wasn't a very good idea. So are we talking about accurate attribution of ideas, or the loss of good ideas per se?

331 points by lkrubner 5y ago

I also noticed recently that Philip Guo’s site is gone, and was taken down on purpose. I remember a few great articles that showed up on HN. My interpretation was that the ratio of effort to reward just started to skew, which is understandable and sad

lkrubner 5y ago

I read this essay in 2003 and it influenced how my business partner and I built our startup. It influenced what possibilities we chased after. But Shirky.com is now off-line: http://www.shirky.com/ http://www.shirky.com/ I'm not sure when this happened but I see that Wikipedia has adjusted to this and now links to the archive.org link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky This is yet another example of the history of the early Web disappearing. Shirky's early essays were fundamental to way we understood the potential of the Web back in 1999-2008. I actually discovered this while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web.

notRobot 5y ago
> while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web. Do you remember the title or subject or any key words/phrases?
- rwmj 5y ago
  I don't know if it's the one that the GP has in mind, but this is a classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky.com/writings/information_price.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky... "Help, The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up"
  - Forgeties79 5y ago
    Wow this guy was straight up prescient. I’ve never read his blogs until today - thanks for sharing this.
    - Alex3917 5y ago
      I would honestly start with his presentations, they are amazing: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky
    - rwmj 5y ago
      I wasn't quite sure when he wrote this. The earliest capture in the Internet Archive was January 2000, but it could be from earlier than that maybe? I do remember that it was quite prescient when I first read it, although it's sort of obvious in 2022.
      - Forgeties79 5y ago
        Yeah that’s sort of what I’m driving at. He called a lot of stuff that wasn’t exactly an easy take.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Highly recommended: http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky....
      - walterbell 5y ago
        Classic essay. > People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done. > And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  He explained that an expanding __________ (I can't remember this word. Maybe he said "network"?) meant that each person in the __________ was exposed to a greater variety of choices, however, the total number of choices decreased. His point was that separate niches each maintained some unique offerings, but when everything was combined together into a single market, and attention focused on certain items, there would be a winnowing effect. The paradox was that everyone could legitimately feel they were enjoying an abundance of options, greater than ever before, while the total number of options decreased.
  - sebastianconcpt 5y ago
    Good summary. The other day I was hearing a political example mentioning that every little local detail, now with social-media, it becomes potentially "a national issue" but that never happen before. Surprisingly, the Founding Fathers were aware of this issue back then and tried to solve (actually mitigate) the problem by keeping the central power as small as possible.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I was just thinking about this - I can go to the store and have fifty variations of peanut butter at my fingertips - but I get basically the same fifty variations anywhere in the US, and much of them anywhere in the world. Whereas in the past, my store might have 1 or even 0 options on peanut butter, but travel 10/50 miles away and there'd be an entirely different option. We have a little bit left of this with beer, as most places have a "local" beer available.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Sadly most places outside the US get one, two maybe 4 options but that leaves room for other products.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      Ever stopped to ponder the laundry detergent aisle at your local grocery store? Or the potato chip aisle? Especially on detergent, what's there is a huge proportion of the shelf space devoted to a couple of brands (which may, in fact, be from the same parent company) with very large containers taking up a lot of space for relatively little actual product, but lots of different choices for those brands. Or, as I like to say, 31 flavors of Tide Pods. Same goes for potato and corn chips. Lays and Ruffles dominate, which oversize bags that are half air, relegating other brands to lower shelves on one end. But consumers can "choose" from half a dozen different flavors of the same brands. And it's the same all over the US. The only variation tends to be that some flavors Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle or Wasabi Ginger, e.g., appear more often in some markets than others.
influx 5y ago
Great essay, how did it influence your startup?
- lkrubner 5y ago
  We focused on the "unfairness" and we thought there might be a technical fix, so we focused on new discovery mechanisms. But our solution did not get traction, so we eventually pivoted towards tools for building commerce sites, and there we had more success.
clay_shirky 5y ago
This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll tell you how it happened. I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since the early 90s (alt.culture.usenet and alt.folklore.urban ftw), but by the middle of last decade, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was marketing on Facebook, which was the boringest possible topic. At the same time, my wordpress host had lousy security, and my site was getting frequently disabled because of some malicious javascript uploaded through some hole they hand't patched. I wasn't writing there anymore, so it was pure cost at that point, and cost of my time, not just dollars. Then I moved to Shanghai for several years, working on other stuff, and fixed the site a couple of times again, and one time, my host was like "We disabled your site!" because of their own security flaws had let it get hacked again, which, the whole thing had entered 'ugh field'territory. I never decided to let the site lapse, I was just tired of dealing with it, and the political circumstances in both China and the U.S. seemed much more urgent than rescuing some historical essays, so one day at a time of not dealing with it became years. And here we are, me reading my own eulogy. Which is incredibly flattering and touching, I have to say. I'm not even sure what of it can be resuscitated -- maybe if I want it back, I'll have to copy it from Wayback (and will say "Thank you Brewster", not for the first time), but if anyone here has advice about competent and secure hosting for an old Wordpress blog, hmu at cshirky@gmail.com, because reading this, it makes me embarassed not to have just fucking fixed this a year or two ago. And thanks, all, for this thread. -clay
- lathiat 5y ago
  You’ll never maintain a Wordpress site long term securely. Need to convert it to static html one way or another.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    10y of http://egypt.urnash.com http://egypt.urnash.com running on Wordpress with a small set of plugins, including one for security, says otherwise.
  - karjaluoto 5y ago
    Another approach might be to toss it on blot.im. (I’m in no way affiliated with Blot, but I like how simple the product is.)

mxmilkiib 5y ago

Also fairly hidden these days is Many-to-Many (also sometimes referred to as Many2Many) http://web.archive.org/web/20081229123241/http://many.corante.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20081229123241/http://many.corant... where Clay Shirky, Liz Lawley, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet, David Weinberger and danah boyd posted.

Alex3917 5y ago
This is terrible. But the upside is that most of them have really good books you can still buy on Amazon, so if not the actual historical essays then at least most of their ideas will be preserved indefinitely. Clearly a lot of them have been looking back at that period with mixed feelings over the last few years (and have said as much), but even still it's shocking that something like Clay Shirky's blog would disappear when he's very much still alive. The fact that we apparently now have to worry about whether or not something like Danah Boyd's MySpace vs Facebook essay could disappear though is ridiculous; even with all the known technical and social problems with the web it's hard to imagine that it's come to this.
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  > But the upside is that most of them have really good books you can still buy on Amazon I am wondering, are there any organizations that actively scan and archive books, even if they don't share them because of copyright laws? Amazon is almost a monopoly when it comes to books, and we cannot rely on it to preserve the books for the next 50+ years, and not every purchased copy is guaranteed to be around by then.
  - yesbabyyes 5y ago
    Sweden has the Royal Library, US has the Library of Congress. I believe most developed countries have national libraries, archiving books and newspapers as they are published.
    - Bilal_io 5y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Aw, man. Clay Shirky’s stuff was a regular “go-to” for me.

legrande 5y ago
Same. Watched many of his talks on Youtube. Refreshing to hear an academic grade description of Internet & blogging culture.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

does anyone know why he took everything down? I noticed this when I was looking for one his presentations last year

sumtechguy 5y ago
Most of the time it is time and/or money. Vulins found every other day in some obscure package you thought you were one and done with. You get to spend a couple of hours fixing it. Oh new update on the java core you are using few more hours. Oh that update breaks 2-3 things. More time. You float the idea that someone else takes it. But those who step up have 'other ideas' what they want the site to be. Oh and your base OS is 2 releases back better get on that. Then the actual cost. While you can get a cheap site up and going for not much. If you get even slightly popular you are now looking at a decent amount of money for many people. You may not see a couple hundred a month as 'no big deal' but many people do. You can pay a provider to take some of that patching work out of your hands but you pay for that. The programming world is very ephemeral. We get bored easy. We move on quickly. Sometimes we are just cheapos. Things that cost time and money get left to rot or turned off. What I find interesting in my 'internet' life. Is I always seem to find out about the really interesting places as they are being closed out :(
- mattlondon 5y ago
  This is where static sites help a lot. No maintenance upkeep, minimal server costs.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    Not even server these days. One can dump it on S3, configure a CDN in front of it and pay pennies a month to never have to think about it again...
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Even having to pay pennies a month is something that has to be maintained (do you remember to update your credit card info, are the emails correct, etc). It would be nice for something like the Internet Archive to offer "perpetual hosting" where you pay upfront for enough to fund hosting "forever". $100 would generate $1 a year in interest which would be enough to host small data.

embit 5y ago

I was one of very early subscribers of his NEC mailing list. Just found this article he had sent out and now on archive.org. It’s another prescient article which now seems obvious https://perma.cc/9ESH-V2YE https://perma.cc/9ESH-V2YE

rmbyrro 5y ago

Calls my attention that the most valuable content on the web is designed with simplicity, in HTML, without moving bells and whistles.

oblio 5y ago
Data is forever, systems are temporary.

platz 5y ago

The observable universe is also disappearing.

eric4smith 5y ago

I suppose we can look at this with nostalgic eyes. I was a big Shirky reader back in the day. But the truth is that all kinds of things disappear all the time in all aspects of life. The web is no different at all. Take my dad for instance - a quite profilic and famous mid level artist. It’s coming to the point where not much people remember him. And when my siblings pass on that will be that. Let’s not get too nostalgic. If someone is interested they should try to preserve the writings and keep them going. That’s why certain groups have taken it upon themselves to preserve old important films. And as we know they are always fighting for more donations to keep things going. Because in the end… no one really cares. 50 years from now children will be asking who was Van Gogh.

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legrande 5y ago
> But the truth is that all kinds of things disappear all the time in all aspects of life. The web is no different at all. Glad we have the Wayback Machine then. But if you don't want your blog mirrored by Wayback you can declare that in your `robots.txt` file. Do this: User-agent: * Disallow: / But that doesn't mean crawlers/bots will honor that request and presume any content you post publicly will be backed up somewhere. If not somewhere on the net, then on someone's hard-drive!
- hexis 5y ago
  The Internet Archive does not respect robots.txt - https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
  - dewey 5y ago
    The blog post you are linking is outdated. They are honoring robots.txt files. From the FAQ: > Some sites are not available because of robots.txt or other exclusions. What does that mean? Such sites may have been excluded from the Wayback Machine due to a robots.txt file on the site or at a site owner’s direct request. If you exclude them in your robots.txt file they will also absolutely retroactively remove your site from the index. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965575 - https://help.archive.org/help/using-the-wayback-machine/ https://help.archive.org/help/using-the-wayback-machine/

geuis 5y ago

Its not like the guy passed away. Given the community, I'm sure someone here can get in touch with him and let him know that his site is down.

virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
I pinged him on Twitter a few hours ago about this discussion and he acknowledged. Still not sure what the situation is though.
VectorLock 5y ago
I was scrolling down looking for some comment on what happened to him or what he was up to now a days.

enobrev 5y ago

One thing I always loved in any old sci-fi that dealt with internet-like spaces was that most of them had a concept of a public internet. They generally sort of felt like the "slums" of the internet filled with trash and spam and stashes for hackers, but the concept of a public space to which anyone could post anything always appealed to me. I'm quite sad that we don't have something like this. We've had plenty of things that had that general appeal, but they've always been owned, run, and eventually shut down, but companies of some sort. I'm not opposed to companies having websites, but I'd love to see a public space as well. The idea that we could post our content to that space and expect it to live far longer than us would be a huge deal.

otachack 5y ago
IPFS is one way, I believe. Archive.org has been pretty dependable too so you can technically post on Twitter or a blog post then have Archive take a version of it. I still see your point, though. Maybe mixing in IPFS with some public solution, like a guest book, might be something?
dgellow 5y ago
I don’t really see what stops you from having your own site with static content you want to publish. Get a domain for like 10 years, with auto renewal enabled. Get a box somewhere, serve you static content. You can publish whatever you want for almost no maintenance for decades. (Of course, that’s unless you’re talking about sharing the type of content that would make interpol want to track you down)
- enobrev 5y ago
  And once I'm dead, broke, or have simply moved on from the tech universe? The ephemerality of the thing is the issue I'm speaking to. We've lost something here. The requirement for books to last is physical space, and those shelves and boxes continue to exist far longer than the publishers, authors, illustrators, etc. We don't have that with this medium (except, of course, archive.org which is excellent and not nearly enough). We've built something that's lighter than books and easier to store in smaller spaces, but we've [collectively] given no thought to maintaining a proper archive. The freedom to publish to the world in an instant is as magical as it is fleeting. On a longer scale of time - and not a very long one - it's practically worthless.

donohoe 5y ago

The site has been effectively down since November 2019 when it started showing up as parked https://web.archive.org/web/20191130082649/http://shirky.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191130082649/http://shirky.com...

deleted 5y ago

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zackmorris 5y ago

I hadn't read this before, but I think I have a new guidepost for innovation: real tech flattens the power law for everyone, whereas phantom tech amplifies the power law.

mattcwilson 5y ago
I think you’re drawing the exact wrong conclusion from the article? Increased access to choice amplifies the effect of the power law. From the article: > Now, thanks to a series of breakthroughs in network theory by researchers like Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Duncan Watts, and Bernardo Huberman among others, breakthroughs being described in books like Linked, Six Degrees, and The Laws of the Web, we know that power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options. We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot. Unless your real tech equates to censorship or control or something, I am not sure how it would help reduce power law effects?

elevation 5y ago

Clay Shirky's essay, "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview:" [0] is a powerful warning about the pitfalls of global efforts to categorize information. In the early 2000s I had a manager who evangelized "the semantic web" to our team as being just years from taking over the world. He was convinced that we needed to integrate RDF into every product to remain relevant. Shirky's essay persuasively articulated why this would have been a waste of effort for us. Years on, these ideas still influence my analysis of elevator pitches, business plans and requested features. edit: Thank you, Clay! [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150323162650/http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150323162650/http://www.shirky...

uwagar 5y ago

crikey clay shirkeyed on his duty to keep up a webshitey

deleted 5y ago
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xyzzy21 5y ago

NOTHING on the web can be trusted to last very long. It's the deep flaw of digitalization of paper.

Vexs 5y ago

Recently I was trying to look for some documentation on TK. I had remembered an older site, the book on TK, all very good information if slightly dated. Took me a decent amount of searching to remember- effbot.org, which also somewhat micro-famously went down recently due to the author's death. Makes me wonder what other very high quality resources will be lost in the next two, three decades as developers age... RIP shirky.org, your insights then are just as good today

Rich_Morin 5y ago

Clay- I strongly encourage you to find a way to make your writings available once again. Many of the things you wrote are as true today as they ever were and the rest are valuable as historical reminders. FWIW, GitHub Pages might well be the simplest and best solution.

jacquesm 5y ago

That's interesting timing I just posted this on Twitter: http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky.... And noticed that the site was down.

mvkel 5y ago

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I like the idea of the internet being organic where things rot and die, truly forgotten. On the other hand, it's much easier for future historians to look back a hundred years and see the actual content that's posted at any point in time. In both instances I think we overestimate how important any one piece of content is. If an idea dies when a site goes down, it probably wasn't a very good idea. So are we talking about accurate attribution of ideas, or the loss of good ideas per se?