Classic Google Sites shutting down by September 2021

A few things to consider:

- The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops projects without a good reason from the users' point of view.

- A bare-bones deletion/flagging UI does not seem like a huge undertaking (though as an engineer I realizing it's not exciting work); working things out with a non-profit such as the Internet Archive or a museum could be an even lower-cost solution.

- 90's websites are also hideous ("worse user experience") by today's standards, yet they have charm and are a product of their times. I don't think anyone would argue that they should be deleted on account of that, just like ancient pottery often has "badly drawn" human figures yet the value is in the cultural expression. There are digital conservation efforts by museums (e.g. restoring 80's arcade games); I'm sure that consulting with a digital conservator would have arrived at a very different treatment of this data.

“””Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”””

That content is old does not make it worthless. That it's not receiving visitors (much less for as little as 2 years) does not make it worthless.

If you're ever looking for the historical reason of something, the answer is probably going to be in a source that nobody's laid eyes on for several, several years.

If you're looking for content to remove from the internet because it's old and static, why not start with Shakespeare? Seems to fit Google's definition of "worthless."

In general, I see this type of dismissiveness way too often - e.g. "What's the big deal? I could build this in a weekend." or "Why doesn't big company X just do this simple thing?" It's only when people actually try to build a business around even the most trivial of problem that they realize the complexities involved with long term support.

It's a different situation here. A lot of cultural objects' survival is now contingent on whether their continued existence happens to be profitable for whatever tech firm happens to be maintaining their material infrastructure.

Turning off a web server on its own isn't removing web history

When Google targets sites that are least likely to have a backup anywhere else, least likely to have active admins, least likely for an admin to notice an email notification in an old inbox, I'm pretty sure that's deleting web history.

Huh, must have been about something else.

Whether or not a site has had visitors recently isn't a fair measure of the importance of those sites -- for instance, there were examples of digital shrines in GeoCities and Yahoo still decided to eradicate them all. It was only thanks to projects like the Internet Archive that we haven't lost that period of internet history just to free up some disk platter space.

EDIT: I also am struggling to understand what this means:

> To me, archiving those sites doesn't feel like destruction, it feels like backing up unused content and protecting it for the user.

What does "archiving" mean here? Will the sites still be accessible or not? Is "archive" here a euphemism for "delete" -- in which case, how is it not like destruction and how is it like a "backup"? I'm not sure most people would consider "rm -rf" to be a backup strategy, but it definitely does have very good storage density.

I'm having a hard time understanding why that would justify deleting that information forever. If anything, that suggests that providing static access would be enough and nearly zero-cost. Storage costs are a fraction of what they were.

I do a lot of searching for computer-related historical information, e.g., looking for rationales of "why something happened". Once information is destroyed it's often impossible to recover. No one might look at it for 30 years, and then there's only one retrieval but it was an important retrieval.

We've had a tremendous loss of recent information. This isn't the only example, but it's an important one. I'd like to see information retained, not lost.

I had forgotten about my Google site until seeing this posted. The last update of any kind was early 2013; most content was from 2011 or earlier. Some of the information on the site is wrong, a lot irrelevant, and worst of all, someone might not find my real site because of that one. I'd much prefer a dead site stop working to leaving it out there.

Yet when I visited the Classic Sites Manager it shows nothing. ("0 owned by you" and 0s all the way down the rest of the suggested filters.)

False positive, maybe? The email sounded like y'all were pretty certain: "We’ve identified that you own one or more ACTIVE classic Sites."

In this particular case, with Google Sites, maybe the decision was totally justified, I don't know. But, as a general trend across the technology industry, this type of explanation really bothers me, and I think it speaks to a serious mindset problem.

The fact that X is old and Y is new is not a reason to replace X with Y. Hammers are old, but they're also exceedingly useful tools. Users are familiar with how hammers work, and companies have become good at manufacturing them.

The question should be whether the new tool is better than the old one, and if it is, whether it's so much better that forcing every user to re-learn the new tool will be worth their while. And even then, it's worth asking why some of the largest companies in the world can't let both tools coexist, perhaps with the older one kept semi-hidden to avoid confusing new users.

Anyway, sorry for picking on you, I appreciate your willingness to pop into a somewhat-hostile thread. :)

Anything I can say would only detract from this.

This is modern Google.

What should have happened is to turn Classic Sites (and new Sites) itself into Squarespace competitor.

I just see this as a massive failure of vision and execution.

Why didn’t they improve classic sites and added yet another product called Sites? May be I am seeing some internal politics surface as fragmentation of product line.