3 ms·

Fire in the Library

42 points by FluidDjango 15y ago

pavpanchekha 15y ago
Perhaps I'm more paranoid than most, but I'm young, and I've seen services I relied upon shut down several times. The problem, however, is that letting users rescue their user-generated content /hurts/ the company doing the hosting. Only a few companies, such as Google, let you actually export your data; fewer let you keep it in active sync. But I wish more companies would realize that the loss due to not boxing in your users is usually minor; and the gain is also minor, unless your site shuts down, which it likely will, in which case an export feature is something you'll have to build no matter what; better build that before-hand.
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  Google's user engagement model is to send visitors away as quickly as possible, in such a manner that they want to come back soon. The Yahoo/Facebook model, on the other hand, is to create a big enough garden that visitors want to stick around. The former model is not afraid of users being able to extract their stuff, whereas the latter loses much of its value when users can access their stuff outside the garden.
  - eCa 15y ago
    That was the old search-centric Google, not the Google of Gmail and G+ etc. The more time you spend in Google's Garden, the more ads you'll see and the more they are based on the data you bring into the Garden. They no longer want you to leave.
    - gwern 15y ago
      I recently tried out the G+ exporting functionality; it seemed to work fairly well for everything I had posted. (Not sure if it pulled my comments on other peoples' posts - didn't check that.)
sdoering 15y ago
I lost my content once, when a site, also related to poetry disappeared here in Germany. As I was not using the email addy, I had used years before, when I registered, I only detected the shutdown, as I was searching for one of my texts and finding a "Sorry we are gone" site. I was royally pissed and would have wished, that these raiders had this site raided and torrented before shutdown.
kiba 15y ago
The internet is the world greatest printing press but it is also have a tendency of having its content burn now in little fires everywhere. It's like the Alexandria library copying only some of the work a lot of time and then there are little contained fires on some unimportant books. We are less likely to forget fundamental knowledge of civilization than to lose pictures of our family.
CodeMage 15y ago
Why does everyone compare this kind of situation to a library being burned down? Look, not everyone can go into a library, leave their stuff around and expect it to be available to everyone else all the time, for free. Not everything in the world is worth preserving. To be precise, it's not equally worth to everyone. If you publish something that is of great worth to you, it doesn't automatically make it valuable to everyone else. What's reprehensible in this story is the attempt by Poetry.com to fight the Archive Team. The rest of the stuff seems completely reasonable. Bear in mind that the company notified its users. If you published something somewhere for free and couldn't be bothered to keep your contact information correct, why would you complain about losing the stuff you published?
- jka 15y ago
  Broadly agree, although I would say it's hard to decide which artifacts will have future value - many of the fascinating things about ancient Roman culture come not from the great works of art, but from the basic bowls and tools which people used to prepare food or for other daily rituals. In the same way, future historians (or perhaps data archaeologists, to frame it another way) might find a lot of value in the things we might consider mundane or don't feel 'compelled' to digitally preserve.

42 points by FluidDjango 15y ago

Perhaps I'm more paranoid than most, but I'm young, and I've seen services I relied upon shut down several times. The problem, however, is that letting users rescue their user-generated content /hurts/ the company doing the hosting. Only a few companies, such as Google, let you actually export your data; fewer let you keep it in active sync. But I wish more companies would realize that the loss due to not boxing in your users is usually minor; and the gain is also minor, unless your site shuts down, which it likely will, in which case an export feature is something you'll have to build no matter what; better build that before-hand.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago
Google's user engagement model is to send visitors away as quickly as possible, in such a manner that they want to come back soon. The Yahoo/Facebook model, on the other hand, is to create a big enough garden that visitors want to stick around. The former model is not afraid of users being able to extract their stuff, whereas the latter loses much of its value when users can access their stuff outside the garden.
- eCa 15y ago
  That was the old search-centric Google, not the Google of Gmail and G+ etc. The more time you spend in Google's Garden, the more ads you'll see and the more they are based on the data you bring into the Garden. They no longer want you to leave.
  - gwern 15y ago
    I recently tried out the G+ exporting functionality; it seemed to work fairly well for everything I had posted. (Not sure if it pulled my comments on other peoples' posts - didn't check that.)

sdoering 15y ago

I lost my content once, when a site, also related to poetry disappeared here in Germany. As I was not using the email addy, I had used years before, when I registered, I only detected the shutdown, as I was searching for one of my texts and finding a "Sorry we are gone" site. I was royally pissed and would have wished, that these raiders had this site raided and torrented before shutdown.

kiba 15y ago

The internet is the world greatest printing press but it is also have a tendency of having its content burn now in little fires everywhere. It's like the Alexandria library copying only some of the work a lot of time and then there are little contained fires on some unimportant books. We are less likely to forget fundamental knowledge of civilization than to lose pictures of our family.

CodeMage 15y ago

Why does everyone compare this kind of situation to a library being burned down? Look, not everyone can go into a library, leave their stuff around and expect it to be available to everyone else all the time, for free. Not everything in the world is worth preserving. To be precise, it's not equally worth to everyone. If you publish something that is of great worth to you, it doesn't automatically make it valuable to everyone else. What's reprehensible in this story is the attempt by Poetry.com to fight the Archive Team. The rest of the stuff seems completely reasonable. Bear in mind that the company notified its users. If you published something somewhere for free and couldn't be bothered to keep your contact information correct, why would you complain about losing the stuff you published?

jka 15y ago
Broadly agree, although I would say it's hard to decide which artifacts will have future value - many of the fascinating things about ancient Roman culture come not from the great works of art, but from the basic bowls and tools which people used to prepare food or for other daily rituals. In the same way, future historians (or perhaps data archaeologists, to frame it another way) might find a lot of value in the things we might consider mundane or don't feel 'compelled' to digitally preserve.