Jason Scott: "A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it." | Hacker News Reader

Jason Scott: "A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it."

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70 pointsunalone41 comments

summary: some blog/site hosting shut down on short notice (one month) and a lot of users (especially not tech savvy) got hosed because they did't understand or couldn't react in time. "Digital eviction" should have rules in place to balance interests of "landlords" and "tenants".

With plenty of added effing and jeffing for no apparent reason.

Personally I do not care much about profanity, it's the excess of words that annoys me the most - it steals my time. I wish people learned to write succinctly.

Loose profanity is a direct cause of peoples inability to communicate succinctly. Frequent profanity becomes a verbal crutch people fall on in order to lend force to there words. Instead, they weaken the use of profanity and limit there vocabulary.

damnit, "their". That's the second time today.

Just edit the original.

I don't see that option. I also can't vote people down, so I think I have yet to earn full privileges.

PS: Did everyone down-vote me because of the hypocrisy/irony? I thought it was a bit tongue in cheek.

I am ammused that you complained about people's inability to write without swearing and then immediately followed up with a comment starting with a swear word.

Right, as I commented. I thought it would be a bit humorous, so I left it, but it was just down-voted for the hypocrisy. Fair enough. I used to curse too much when I was a kid, there are some short term gains at a young age, but I observed that it seemed to hurt my vocabulary. Unfortunately I still have a slight habit. I'm glad at least one person found it amusing.

Profanity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers.

Are you sure you want to stand by that? Do you think the government could get involved in this issue and manage to do more good than harm? More than likely we'd end up having to get permission from some bureaucracy before being allowed to delete spam.

I am not advocating anything, I only relay the content of the article. That's why I put "summary:" in front.

Oh, sorry. I parsed the precedence of "summary:" as binding only to the first sentence :-)

Point taken. I'll try to quote the whole thing next time around to make it clearer.

Though I agree with the main gist of the article, the tone leaves something to be desired. For instance, the author seems to think that somehow free culture supporters such as myself dupe people into using Creative Commons licenses. Free software and free culture are about very specific sets of issues, so the Hometown shutdown doesn't really fall into the same area of responsibility.

Sure, many of the same people would be supportive both of free culture and data eviction measures, but that doesn't mean that the FSF should take up the cause. One may as well blame Greenpeace for failing to take action with respect to the Hometown evictions.

I like the idea of legally imposing some responsibility on data storage/hosting services. Not just minimum eviction notice but mandatory export functionality would not be unreasonable.

A site like Facebook should allow me to retrieve all of my data in a single action, in some reasonably convenient format, and should be required to give me notice if my data will become inaccessible to me.

The details of this legislation would need to be carefully thought out to avoid imposing absurd requirements on well intentioned sites.

While I agree those features would be nice, I strongly disagree that the federal government should write laws requiring it. If you're putting your data on someone else's servers, it's up to you to have a backup, and to understand what export ability, if any, is offered.

That's what has worried me most about google docs. There's no easy way to just "do a backup". Wish they'd get around to that.

http://code.google.com/p/gdatacopier/

I don't think that a new law is the correct way to address the problem. I think that such regulations would decrease progress and productivity by raising the bar to entry.

Perhaps in the future web services will start to make user contributed content easily backupable and transferable as a form competitive advantage. This wouldn't protect users from the situation where the company unexpectedly pulls the plug though.

Should blogger make users save a full backup of their blog to their local disk every time they write a post? Would users see this as a reason to use blogger vs some other service?

I don't see how AOL did anything wrong here. They offered a free service that millions enjoyed, and when it came time to close it down, they notified users using the email addresses the users had given them.

It's not AOL's fault if people didn't keep their contact information up to date, and two weeks is ample notice.

What could they really have done differently, save not closing the service or never offering it in the first place?

1. Make it read-only and keep around for 3 months. It's not like hosting a static site costs a lot of money these days.

2. Take the site down for a month and bring it back online for one final month. This should get everyone's attention.

Above and beyond all, they could actually start caring about the impact they make on people. When driving down the road I slow down to avoid splashing pedestrians with water - they never paid aything to me and it slows me down, yet I try to be conscious of the impact I could make.

It's true: People don't keep their contact information up to date, don't make backups (or do so infrequently), and don't always read (or act on) that super important e-mail until too late. To me, that's precisely what makes AOL's actions inexcusable. These are predictable, human faults. If some users are stupid/lazy/inattentive, then AOL needs to deal with that fact. Acknowledging reality doesn't excuse you from dealing with it!

And dealing with it doesn't seem that hard or expensive. It will take some effort (== money), but this can be made up for by happy users, placing ads on shutdown messages, and/or other means.

1. Give users more time to export their data and send reminders for any users that have not exported their data about the impending shutdown.

2. On the date of the shutdown, replace the public side of the sites with a message about the service's discontinuation.

3. After the date of the shutdown, retain the ability for site owners to login. When site owners login, just send them the export of their content. Leave the service in this "export-only" state for at least another month.

4. Continue to send reminders for anyone who still has not availed themselves of the opportunity to export their data.

5. Finally, cut a full backup of user content and shutdown the hardware. Replace the whole site with a message telling site owners to contact customer service if they need their data. Customer service can explain that the data is still available, but will take time to recover from backups. Keep a queue of the stragglers, and every two weeks or so, spend a little time to recover data for these users.

I have once gone for 30 days without logging into my hotmail account (vacation and all). When I came back it was erased, along with 10 years worth of emails and contact information. Needless to say I will stay away from anything MSN - they have proven that they don't care.

Odd. I had a hotmail account several years ago and left it abandoned for about 8 months & when I finally checked it, it hadn't been deleted.

It happened in 2005 I think. they might have chnaged that policy since then.

I had my account prior to 2005, so it's likely that there have been significant changes since then, hehe.

They could have just emailed everyone their sites in zip files.

"What do I do with a dot zee eye pea file?" ...

To the same, out of date email addresses?

Did "hometown" pages end up in the internet archive's "way back machine"? Presumably everyones not completely out of luck if this is the case.

I've been thinking a lot about this issue recently. Hometown is a relatively small site, but what if for some reason Google decided to shut down Blogger tomorrow? There's huge swathes of the useful internet on that domain, and no legal recourse right now if Google lose all that data -- it's a free service, with no guarantees.

It seems like maybe some very lightweight legislation guaranteeing some level of access to data would be a good idea, for services above a certain size -- maybe 1m+ users or something.

I've lost data 3 times due to host cock-ups and I didn't have the correct back-ups in place to fix it. It sucks, I learnt to back-up properly, and I moved on. Certainly didn't require anyone to "take a stand" on my behalf, and I fail to see the need for anyone to take a stand now.

I had a news.yc that covered a similar topic. If the company actually knows what it's doing they should allow for about 6 months where people can get their social graph / other data from the website.

He makes a good case, but will anyone actually take it up?

How many people making web services and tools actually care about their community or their contributions, long-term? I'd bet, in all honesty, very few. For instance, if you're building to be bought, why would you give a shit?

Wouldn't the content of the blogs be availabe in the internet archive? Not sure about the url, maybe archive.org?

Apparently not. Last indexed by the Wayback Machine January 15, 2008, and then only the first few pages; actual blogs seem to be missing. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://hometown.aol.com

Google cache, perhaps?

As was pointed out in comments on the original article, that's only of small comfort, as archive.org doesn't capture scripts or some images. Besides, because someone else can help repair the damage doesn't mean that it's OK to deal the damage in the first place.

Title should be, "A terrible thing happened recently, You might not care"

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