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Comment by gazzini | Hacker News Reader

They chose a 1-time payment model (which funds an interest-generating endowment), which seems a lot weirder than a subscription.

This actually makes sense -- if the goal is long-term set-it-and-forget-it, it solves the problem of getting a new credit card every few years & forgetting to change this service. It also eliminates any recurring payment-processing fees.

The back-of-the-napkin math checks out: accounting for storage, data-transfer, and business overhead, if they pay around $0.20 / GB / year, and they charge $10, then with 0 interest they would still have your files for 50 years, which is probably longer than your children will have your password to this service.

I still wouldn't trust it -- I have a pavlovian response to the combination of "permanence" and "give all your data to this new internet service". Maybe it's irrational here, but still, this product is at the wrong layer of abstraction for me personally :)

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Flip the script in a different way:

How many people have their Geocities site pulled from them?

I think this foundation's mission is great. I'm not expecting things to be "permanent". I already know that there is no such thing as anything that is permanent, including our lives and our health. If there is no such thing as absolute permanence in anything, then I can throw that idea out and look at the rest of what they are offering. To me, it is irrational to think that just because someone _doesn't_ say their stuff is "permanent" doesn't mean you can trust them as well.

What I see in this foundation is something that supports the internet that is not controlled by Big Tech. I think about my children and where we are going in our society, and I think that is something that I value. I valued it enough to have already pledged a donation for the price of two latte.

Geocities never claimed to be permanent

It's indeed better than that: storage costs decrease over time (probably at an exponential rate), which means that, in theory, you can pay upfront to have your data stored until the end of time (or our civilization). Well, at least if they can protect the money from inflation. (I've played with the numbers a few years ago when I got upset that my bank won't preserve my records nor my statements, at least in an accessible form, for more than 6 months.)

Hmm, if it supports static web hosting this might be a good way to make my blog permanent...

Yes, nothing is forever, but with some luck this could live as long as our civilization..

Assuming some interest on the endowment is one way this could work out, falling costs of cloud storage is another.

Who knows what S3 prices will look like in 50 years?

I'm curious as to what pavlovian means here

https://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html

The concept of (consumer-grade?) permanent data storage triggers some response from him.

I think the idea is to convey that just like a bell has no natural link to food anticipation of which causes salivation, the fact that x has always (at least as far as we remember) come with y which causes z means when we see x, we fear z will happen even though x and y need not necessarily have to come together?

I believe there are people who won’t forgive text drive / Joyent for their dishonesty and sincerely we must never trust the leadership at Joyent with anything as long as they roam the earth.

https://www.chargebee.com/blog/lifetime-plans-its-time-rethi...

Pavlovian conditioning [0]: "a learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus (e.g. food) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g. a bell)."

In my case:

food: losing all my data (or it becoming incredibly difficult to access / control / afford)

bell: uploading all of my data to a new internet product.

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Most companies have unsustainable business models (grow forever).

For startups, this is especially true (rapid growth forever).

This is a new internet company, but their whole shtick is that they have a sustainable business model. Given that data, maybe my bias is unfair.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning

They mean they've been conditioned to question or be suspicious of such a claim, likely through past experience.

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