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Comment by t0mbstone | Hacker News Reader

I find it really irritating when project like this decide to just shut down without any alternative. Why not give your users some options? After all, your users are the people who generated all of the free content for your site. It's the least you can do.

For example, instead of shutting down, you could open source it, or at least allow people to download and host their own mirror.

If you aren't willing to do that, then why not offer some kind of paid option or donation option?

I get it. Their dream was for the site to be free and ad supported. But if their hosting costs are that high, at least give people the option of pitching in! It would take 5 minutes to post a paypal link or a bitcoin link. But nope, they haven't even done that.

Ugh. So irritating.

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If only it were as easy as that.

Open sourcing it might be the most straight forward option, but there could be complicated intellectual property issues behind the scenes that make that prohibitively difficult, or expensive.

A paid option? Isn't that what every single commercial business attempts to do? The option of using a product or service in exchange for paying money. The failure rate for businesses is huge. What makes you think a paid option would actually work? It isn't a sure thing, nor are donate buttons, and in the time you need to take to test pricing models, tweak copy, increase conversion etc, you continue to lose money each month, and have no guarantee of success.

I think you drastically underestimate the effort involved in "post a paypay link or a bitcoin link".

What about the cost of compliance? The cost of accounting? Customer service? Cost of mitigating risk? There are a heap of costs to running a business. How do you know if the donations you (probably won't) get will cover them? Then what? You've lost more money.

At some point you just have to call it a day.

While I understand your frustration, shutting down a service — especially if you have no money to spend a lot of time on the shutdown — is always hard. It looks like these folks have provided an export option and a reasonable shutdown window, which is worth commending.

I am planning on doing a site rip for my personal reference, in case I need to leverage any of these documents in the future. I've never used the site before but it seems like a nice resource that I would like to have.

If I do the site rip are you interested in obtaining a copy?

EDIT - in case it wasn't obvious, I am only interested in and referring to the publicly available documents aspect of Docracy, which is what I assumed you were talking about. But I realize you may be using their other, private features like holding private contracts and digitally signed documents. If you are interesting in my pending rip of the freely available documents, let me know.

I'd be interested in that! I wonder how much it would cost to just host and serve via s3...

I don't see a direct/private message feature here on HN, but I see your email in the about section of your profile. I will follow up with you when I get the script together over the next week or so. The HTML looks very straightforward. Should be easy for me to adapt another script I have for another site.

Sure! I'm definitely interested! Thank you for doing that work. I was thinking about doing it myself, to be completely honest...

Would you mind putting your contact email in your profile? The other commenter intersted in this (manglav) already has this in their profile. I need a way to contact you.

FYI - this should be done very shortly. I ran the script last night to scrape the site of all the relevant info. The actual download of all the files is running right now.

I'd rather not publicly tie my email address to my hacker news profile... Is there any way you could reply to this comment with a download link?

I would also be happy to tip you some bitcoin for your trouble, if you give me a bitcoin address

No need for the BTC, but I appreciate the offer.

https://www.4shared.com/zip/AdAKc8akca/Docracy_Site_Rip.html

You'll need a (free) account to download from that site if you don't already have one. You can create one just for the site or you can use Facebook, Twitter, or Google to log in. I recommend creating a regular, unlinked account.

The main Excel excel file is the actual HTML scrape for the data I pulled. It's pretty self explanatory. The documents directory holds all the files. The filenames match exactly what is in the Excel file except that they are also prefixed with the unique ID the site assigns for every document to avoid filename collisions. 200mb unzipped. There are 12 "documents" on that site that were actually just pages that contain mini-blog entries that are links to multiple contracts because they are, for example, things like "contracts for your personal life" and "top legal documents for freelancers". I added "topic, group, multiple" to the tags and keywords columns in Excel to identify these items.

This comment provides a different perspective:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16478166

Reply on news.ycombinator.com