Storify End-of-Life | Hacker News Reader

Storify End-of-Life

storify.com

104 pointscemerick51 comments

Twitter just released 'native' threads an hour ago: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/...

I'm not sure what Storify is/was. I attempted to find out by clicking the "About" link in their footer, and got redirected to Adobe. Looks like maybe they got a buyout!

Storify was acquired by Livefyre ~4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354835

Livefyre was acquired by Adobe last year.

Whatever the route they've taken, the upshot is a helluva lot of content going poof (per usual).

At least they seem not to have blocked the Internet Archive bot, so some history may have been preserved: http://archive.is/storify.com

So what's the end-game here? Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with?

This feels religious; Oh, just upload it all to digital Heaven! I'll never "die" and people can continue to revere me and my cats forever!

Just because we can doesn't mean we should care about preserving every bit and byte. Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.

While everyone would agree with this, everyone doesn't agree with what should be thrown away.

Burning books because they aren't "valuable" is dangerous ground. Safer to store everything.

This is a totally wrong analogy. Books were burnt for religios/political reasons. Storify is giving up because of lack of financial instreams for the owners.

Parent's comment is about the internet archive, not storify.

Tons of valuable books and records have been burnt because someone thought they weren't valuable or didn't have the money to house them. It's true, it's more likely they were just thrown on a trash heap and left to rot, but trash incineration is a thing.

Libraries "weed" books all the time, and most of them are pulped. Which is about like burning them, only the carbon doesn't end up in the atmosphere. So this is probably not the best comparison.

Given that it was used by a lot of news websites, there's a lot of legitimate history in there, whether we see it as such or not. That's worth preserving.

> Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with?

That seems kind of dumb, but with Moore's Law still mostly working for storage, it's also cheap -- certainly cheaper than building actual libraries. There's also currently no way to mark URLs as temporary, so we can't distinguish the permanent from the ephemeral. Finally, it's far cheaper than having everyone who wants to save URL content archive it on their own personal box (plus however many backups), which is what I do now if I really want to use something again.

You never know what has historical relevance until it is history. That lesson was learned the hard way and so now if something can be preserved at low cost we'd do well to at least attempt to keep it around until history can judge it.

I think you're misunderstanding the context.

IIRC, this isn't a collection of all tweets, etc (though the Library of Congress is already doing that), it's a curated collection of tweets, many important enough that some journalist somewhere bothered to write an article about them.

The Library of Congress Twitter firehose archive never got off the ground: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-t...

And it's too bad, now that Twitter is actually affecting history.

Yeah, it's a shame! The Internet Archive does some twitter archiving -- I helped a little by finding a listing of government social media accounts -- but it's not enough.

Twitter's policies make it worse, since if you have firehose access you are required to delete tweets when the account deletes them.

This is a well known tactic of many bot-net operators, and has made investigating them much harder.

Even worse, Twitter went and deleted the Russian accounts (and tweets) which Facebook had identified for them...

That makes it bad for the Library of Congress, yes, but they're already not succeeding.

IA doesn't have firehose access.

Trump's presidential library is going to be a Twitter archive.

I imagine this future institution will be called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.

Yo,

I clearly don't agree with this guy, but I don't see any reason to downvote/flag him into oblivion. I both upvoted and vouched this comment, not because I agree or think it's valuable, but because it doesn't deserve to be disappeared. Comment if you feel like it, or page on by if you don't. Ironically, his words will live on forever.

> Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.

Of all the arguments against archiving information like this, "environmental costs" has to be the least convincing one. Storify posts are just a bunch of links to tweets, and those are already intended to be archived by the Library of Congress. A static database dump of Storify content has negligible cost and is highly compressible.

If you want to talk about the environmental impact of tech, let's talk about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, or the usage of rare earth metals in non-recyclable hardware that gets replaced every year[0].

[0] This is generally non-recoverable. Even Apple, which claims to recycle their hardware, recovers very little from the process.

Storify is a social network service that lets the user create stories or timelines using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storify

It was a tool for putting together decent looking, embeddable lists of social media posts.

As far as I know, mostly news sites used it to capture online opinion about a topic without having a big number of separate embedded tweets, Instagram posts, etc.

> As far as I know, mostly news sites used it to capture online opinion about a topic without having a big number of separate embedded tweets, Instagram posts, etc.

So, will a lot of these stories break (unless a lot of effort is taken to save them by exporting the storify content)?

> After May 16, 2018, Storify.com accounts and their content will no longer be accessible

This is going to cause an awful lot of dead links. I don't suppose anyone has a plan to archive the content?

Maybe something with the internet archive?

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/940627577059778560

Keep an eye on http://archiveteam.org/ on how to participate in archiving it.

Storify was pretty useful as a curation tool, and I remember using it to sort through the information/disinformation around the Japan quake (https://storify.com/boheekim/collaborating-to-storify-japan) back in 2011. There is a definite need for an embeddable/centralized stream of updates during times of disaster or crisis. Folks often whip up a collaborative Google Doc on the fly, but a lighter weight mobile friendly solution would be awesome.

Storify was a good product, used it in the early days. Shame to see it going down.

Distilpost, my own startup is a more than adequate alternative. It is all machine curated at the moment and super accurate. Beats twitter moments easily. https://distilpost.com/

I think you could have been a bit more tactful there.

Pardon me if i am unfamiliar with the ways of the community but the down votes are simply far removed from what i expected as i only sougth to offer those deeply affected a possible alternative and something to cheer for.

Your comment is pretty unashamedly self-serving and not entirely on topic. Storify was curated, yours intentionally doesn't overlap on the heart of this product.

I don't think there's anything wrong with unashamedly self-serving. All plugs by developers are self-serving, and trying to enforce the veneer of modesty will just cause people to be more subtle and tricky. Better to allow so long as the interest is disclosed (which he did).

So really, the only possible reason to down vote is being off topic (which could definitely apply to this case).

Think Twitter Moments was the beginning of the end for Storify - testament to how well Moments has worked for Twitter, despite its early critics.

I still don't understand how to use Twitter Moments. How do they compare to Storify?

You can create a Moment and string together any number of tweets from any number of accounts into a cohesive narrative. Similar to Storify.

If you want a laugh, check out what I think is the funniest Storify story ever - https://storify.com/ahchrissawyer/the-peanut-factory-sex-bur... (The Peanut Factory Sex Burglars)

Website is essentially plain html with firefox tracking protection. Nice.

Mandatory: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

It's a no nonsense page with simple account related questions and answers. No incredible journey bs on there at all.

Please don't do stock comments here, especially when their best-before date was so long ago.

Please delete my comment

It's a lazy comment, but that blog is the closest thing we have to a modern day Fucked Company site.

I understand the rationale behind your comment but I think it expresses a form of emotion when including something like "unfortunately" to an already negative statement. It feels like an expression of regret. Personally, saying something like "unfortunately, my grandmother passed away this year" instead of just saying "my grandmother passed away" feels a bit more emotional.

it's a common colloquialism that means "I'm sad that ..."

This is pretty well executed. Straightforward presentation of the impact and plan, ample time to deal with it, and no BS.

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