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It's more about having a moral obligation to history. Twitpic has been a home for hundreds of millions of images for a good chunk of a decade during which the m

It's more about having a moral obligation to history. Twitpic has been a home for hundreds of millions of images for a good chunk of a decade during which the most monumental shifts in communication and expression have occurred. Unique and irreplaceable moments have been captured in this place. To turn around and delete it all just because you didn't get the trademark application you wanted (and apparently can't be bothered to just think of a new name instead) is nothing other than an unprecedented act of wanton, petulant vandalism against history. It would be like the world's biggest art gallery turning around and saying 'Oh, sorry, they won't let us call our gallery McDonalds, so we're shutting down and burning all your pictures. After all, easy come, easy go.'

idlewords 12y ago
Okay, but we keep getting burned by these irreplaceable droves of stuff going offline (see GeoCities), and all our indignation doesn't bring them back. At some point we have to learn this lesson for good, and stop trusting random entities to be good stewards of things we find meaningful.
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  As I understand it, GeoCities actually cooperated to some extent with the backup team that was trying to preserve the content, and didn't take steps to keep people from backing up content.
  - db48x 12y ago
    GeoCities was entirely unmaintained; there was apparently only one person at Yahoo who was paid to do anything with it at all, and who couldn't even answer questions such as how many users there actually were. The primary pain point when spidering it was that each GeoCities user had a tiny hourly bandwidth cap; to do the job right the spiders had to keep track of the error responses that they got so that they could go back later in the hope of getting the real content rather than the error message.
- eropple 12y ago
  "We" aren't the problem. The problem is that startups need non-technical users to use their stuff. People who aren't qualified to, nor remotely interested in, managing a tech stack simply are not going to care about how random that entity is. You can't make them care. It falls to awesome people like Jason and the rest of Archive Team to keep that sort of historical record for posterity. Because it's important. Trying to thwart them, as Noah Everett is doing, is just straight-up not good.
  - cookiecaper 12y ago
    The Internet Archive should archive stuff before a company enters financial hardship and can longer afford the outgoing bandwidth costs to have their entire dataset replicated online. It makes sense to block those attempts. It strikes me that a similar fate would most likely have occurred if Everett was hit by a bus and his bank accounts eventually ran dry. We should identify historically significant single points-of-failure and make archives before the failures occur, insofar as is possible.
    - eropple 12y ago
      Sure, but it's important to note that I'm not talking about blocking the scrapers. I'm talking about "we're willing to pay for an S3 export, Amazon will mail out a bunch of hard drives." Everett has steadfastly avoided contacting Archive Team or anyone else who wants to do this and I can't think of an ethically not-icky reason for that.
      - cookiecaper 12y ago
        The not-icky reason is that he doesn't want to. He's not under any obligation to do it. Maybe we'd like it if he did this, but I don't think it's fair to assume bad or even just "ethically icky" motives. If all of twitpic's data is exported or copied elsewhere, he can no longer effectively profit off of it. We don't know that his intention is to just nuke the data and be done, he may be trying to salvage what he can monetarily (and the "we're getting acquired, just kidding" thing is probably good evidence that something like this is going on behind the scenes). I don't think there's anything wrong with this either. It's his service, and if his motive was profit, it makes perfect sense to shop the data around instead of just accepting a total loss. There's no reason twitpic should have to be run for altruistic purposes. Maybe dcurtis et al would have better luck getting a response if instead of saying "We'll cover the bandwidth costs", they said "We'll buy the data from you at a price commensurate with the years of effort and upkeep you've invested into an apparently massively important historical archive". I don't think it's fair to pretend like Noah Everett is obligated to sell his archive for the cost of bandwidth. In any case, at this point he's made it clear that he wants to wash his hands of the project in one way or another. It's his personal project and he is and should be free to do that. This is the worst possible time to try to do a bulk archive. I understand that we can't see into the future and can't always predict when something like this is going to go down, but I'd think we can probably improve our heuristics so that something as seemingly significant as twitpic can't just vanish into the ether next time.

idlewords 12y ago

Okay, but we keep getting burned by these irreplaceable droves of stuff going offline (see GeoCities), and all our indignation doesn't bring them back. At some point we have to learn this lesson for good, and stop trusting random entities to be good stewards of things we find meaningful.

ObviousScience 12y ago
As I understand it, GeoCities actually cooperated to some extent with the backup team that was trying to preserve the content, and didn't take steps to keep people from backing up content.
- db48x 12y ago
  GeoCities was entirely unmaintained; there was apparently only one person at Yahoo who was paid to do anything with it at all, and who couldn't even answer questions such as how many users there actually were. The primary pain point when spidering it was that each GeoCities user had a tiny hourly bandwidth cap; to do the job right the spiders had to keep track of the error responses that they got so that they could go back later in the hope of getting the real content rather than the error message.
eropple 12y ago
"We" aren't the problem. The problem is that startups need non-technical users to use their stuff. People who aren't qualified to, nor remotely interested in, managing a tech stack simply are not going to care about how random that entity is. You can't make them care. It falls to awesome people like Jason and the rest of Archive Team to keep that sort of historical record for posterity. Because it's important. Trying to thwart them, as Noah Everett is doing, is just straight-up not good.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  The Internet Archive should archive stuff before a company enters financial hardship and can longer afford the outgoing bandwidth costs to have their entire dataset replicated online. It makes sense to block those attempts. It strikes me that a similar fate would most likely have occurred if Everett was hit by a bus and his bank accounts eventually ran dry. We should identify historically significant single points-of-failure and make archives before the failures occur, insofar as is possible.
  - eropple 12y ago
    Sure, but it's important to note that I'm not talking about blocking the scrapers. I'm talking about "we're willing to pay for an S3 export, Amazon will mail out a bunch of hard drives." Everett has steadfastly avoided contacting Archive Team or anyone else who wants to do this and I can't think of an ethically not-icky reason for that.
    - cookiecaper 12y ago
      The not-icky reason is that he doesn't want to. He's not under any obligation to do it. Maybe we'd like it if he did this, but I don't think it's fair to assume bad or even just "ethically icky" motives. If all of twitpic's data is exported or copied elsewhere, he can no longer effectively profit off of it. We don't know that his intention is to just nuke the data and be done, he may be trying to salvage what he can monetarily (and the "we're getting acquired, just kidding" thing is probably good evidence that something like this is going on behind the scenes). I don't think there's anything wrong with this either. It's his service, and if his motive was profit, it makes perfect sense to shop the data around instead of just accepting a total loss. There's no reason twitpic should have to be run for altruistic purposes. Maybe dcurtis et al would have better luck getting a response if instead of saying "We'll cover the bandwidth costs", they said "We'll buy the data from you at a price commensurate with the years of effort and upkeep you've invested into an apparently massively important historical archive". I don't think it's fair to pretend like Noah Everett is obligated to sell his archive for the cost of bandwidth. In any case, at this point he's made it clear that he wants to wash his hands of the project in one way or another. It's his personal project and he is and should be free to do that. This is the worst possible time to try to do a bulk archive. I understand that we can't see into the future and can't always predict when something like this is going to go down, but I'd think we can probably improve our heuristics so that something as seemingly significant as twitpic can't just vanish into the ether next time.