Comment by bradknowles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradknowles | Hacker News Reader

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ArchiveTeam has their own "Warrior" tool they run, but it does effectively farm out the equivalent of wget to a bunch of client machines. Their tool is very careful to preserve the content exactly as it was and in an archival format.

The problem I had with ArchiveTeam is that they are very insular, and don't accept help quickly or easily from someone who is not already inside their inner circle. I'm guessing they've been burned more than a few times.

There are publicly available versions of their tools, but those aren't the versions that actually get deployed. You have to know or be told the private locations for the tools that actually get deployed.

What's important to them is not how much resources you could help bring to bear to solving this problem that you care about right now, but are you still going to be here in a year to help them with the 99th problem that you don't care about?

I can't say that I blame them for being insular in the face of whatever their past experiences were. I just wish that they had let me join and help them, because I do think they have a good mission and they deserve to be helped. But if they won't let you help, then all you can really do is sit on the sidelines and watch. Or not, as you choose.

I chose not to stick around.

I sympathize with both you and AT on this. I spent a ton of time archiving geocities when it went down and that got a lot of attention, some of it seemed to be more to social engineer the other party into being able to access what I'd already crawled rather than to help out as they pretended.

But when you genuinely are trying to help it can be pretty frustrating to find a party skeptical or non-responsive. Eventually I turned the project over to someone else. It's still alive ( https://geocities.restorativland.org/ ) and the reocities.com domain still redirects there so at least it wasn't for nothing.

> It's still alive ( https://geocities.restorativland.org/ ) and the reocities.com domain still redirects there so at least it wasn't for nothing.

This is amazing, thanks for sharing!

It was pretty interesting to do that on such short notice.

Ironically, the only place the story lives on is at Archive.org :) :

http://web.archive.org/web/20170110032949/http://www.reociti...

> The problem I had with ArchiveTeam is that they are very insular, and don't accept help quickly or easily from someone who is not already inside their inner circle. I'm guessing they've been burned more than a few times.

Consider also: they're just flawed; they're cliquish and irrational and require you to figure out a way to ingratiate yourself to them ahead-of-time/out-of-band. They don't have to be the victims of past harms.

That's possible, yes.

But I think Occam's Razor tells us that it is more likely that they are victims of past harms, which is why they have become so insular.

In the absence of more authoritative evidence from the parties in question, your guess is as good as mine.

> Occam's Razor tells us that it is more likely that they are victims of past harms

That doesn't follow. That explanation is hardly parsimonious. If anything, Occam's Razor favors an explanation like the one I gave, which is far less complex.

Sure, they could just be clique-ish and resistant to outside parties wanting to help. But what's the reason for that behaviour?

I still think it makes a lot more sense if they have actually perceived harm from others coming in from the outside, which now explains the behaviour we see today.

But as I said, without more authoritative information from the parties in question, your guess is as good as mine.

You don't seem to be truly open to the possibility that I have laid out.

Asking "what's the reason" to try to explain something irrational is a dead end. There is no reason by definition.

Taking the position that a person themselves is authoritative on matters concerning them leaves you vulnerable to an unreliable narrator.

IMO, it's not an irrational behaviour on their part. It may seem irrational to us, but I believe it's much more likely to be a rational response to events that have happened in the past. We just don't know what those events were.

I think that's where we differ. You see it as a purely irrational behaviour on their part that doesn't need explaining, whereas I see it as a rational response that does actually have one or more trigger events in the past.

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