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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Urgh, cultural vandalism.

The challenge here is that there are people out there who just do not understand the inherent value of this kind of old content. If any company exists for long enough eventually some of those people will cycle into positions of decision-making authority where they get to "save costs" or "clean things up" by delete-hammering some invaluable artifact like this one.

The correct way to handle this is to add a BIG banner on top of older content like this warning "This post is from 12 years ago, and may no longer reflect the most recent version of our software".

Flattening a bunch of dynamic pages to static HTML can also be useful, if the concern is maintaining old forum software.

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This isn't about cost reduction. It's about eliminating any assistance for people who want to continue to use old versions of the software. Adobe is in the cloud/subscription business now, and it wants to make life for people holding on to their local, licensed copies as difficult as possible.

this seems true and explains my inability to locate the plugin tooling for the latest version of Acrobat to develop some local extensions. My next move was to contact Adobe and ask directly where the corresponding SDK is to be downloaded for the latest local version of Acrobat. Sometimes companies give you some internal link that you can't find publicly or can't navigate to from the present version of their website.

Indeed; if this was a profit and not a cost, there's no way they'd've gotten rid of it.

It's not that they don't understand, it's that they don't care, more often than not. Sadly there has been a societal shift in my view that will be hard to reverse, just think of Boeing as an extreme example. We've created incentive structures that not only reward short-sighted decision making, but also created social norms that punish people who try to push for long-term goals or things that are not in one's immediate self-interest. Corporate sees you as a headache for not thinking about nothing but line going up, and your peers will deride you as a fool for not "getting it" and giving up like they have.

Always Be Archiving. Never trust the platform.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/

Spend half an hour perusing that site and you'll truly see the pathetic state of preservation on the web. Outdated information, an endless list of failed projects... it's a self-referential call to action that documents our collective inaction.

If you preserve "everything," you're sort of asking for a lot of those things to be outdated or no longer relevant. That's sort of the problem and why companies tend not to do so.

A lot of the failed projects are not really due to inaction on behalf of archivers, but because the website being archived cut off the firehose too early, for example by adding a captcha. Most of the projects that have a page on that wiki have at the very least been added to the Warrior at some point and yielded a significant amount of data that was later uploaded to Internet Archive.

I'm a big archive team fan but gotta go with the ABC acronym such as "always be collecting" or "always be capturing"

Calm down, Alec Baldwin

Coffee is, indeed, for closers.

* Alec Baldwin, calmdown.

FTFY

When Oracle bought Sun/Solaris, they took down the public Solaris forums which made my job working with illumos forks very difficult without all the years relevant Solaris 10 questions and answers. In that case, it was a naked attempt to force people to license the then new Solaris 11.

Oracle is anti-consumer in a ton of ways, I'm not sure why they have so much money to be able to buy and ruin so many other things.

First-mover advantage (or close to first) has a lot to do with it, I imagine. Ellison has been resting on his laurels for over four decades.

They sell to people who buy. I realize that sounds like a tautology, but most of us don't buy software (at least, not often) and instead we primarily use software. People who primarily buy software care about and optimize for very different concerns than people who use software. There's a market built around selling a large product, which will be used by many different kinds of users, to just one specific kind of user, one who has been empowered to make organization-wide purchasing decisions. This is typically done by presenting to that kind of user a curated subset of the application's features, that subset usually being wholly disjoint from what most users will see. These software-buyers will be shown a pretty picture taped to an ugly mess, and since it meets their needs (to whatever extent they have needs for it), will decide to buy based on the pretty picture (and, sometimes, the accompanying sweet-talk lunches).

In another generation, the term "nobody got fired for buying IBM" was coined, and this is the kind of people it was talking about. Buying Oracle doesn't create controversy among their peer group.

Oracle's reputation is bad enough that buying it should result in a firing though. At least if it can be avoided. Remember all the unnecessary work they generated throughout the whole industry when they turned the Java license into a extortion trap for unsuspecting companies?

Yeah, I think their reputation isn't what it used to be. But it takes a long time for these things to percolate up from developers and lawyers to management, and another long time for them to spread from IT-focused businesses to other industries.

When I build a Javascript compiler, it used a lot of ActiveX interfaces. In the code that used a particular interface, I'd include a link to the Microsoft documentation on it.

One day, all those links went to dead ends.

> Urgh, cultural vandalism.

This was probably intentional. Those posts are no longer available to feed an AI. Now only Autodesk has access to those posts.

People need to understand that the free ride is over. If you aren't hosting or archiving, it's going to disappear.

Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support instead

> Why offer knowledge for free if you can offer premium support instead

Because it is mostly not knowledge, but tips to make their software work.

Ye I hate this. I work with a processor that TI manufactures and a huge part of the "eco system" was referring to a now defunct forum and wiki. It is a mess. At some point they just deleted it and replaced it with nothing. Links to download of tools and libs are broken. And support don't have them. I was just lucky I found them on arhive.org ...

According to some sources, this is what happened to Google Search.

How are these old posts invaluable? Do you think a paywall would have generated enough revenue to pay for serving them? If nobody is willing to pay for access, doesn’t that mean they are in fact not valuable at all?

Such an insane paperclip optimizing way of thinking. The marginal cost to serve static content is very low as well - if they really didn't want to pay anything they could give it to a third party.

So what is the value of the old forum posts? To whom is it valuable? Is there somebody out there who would be willing to buy it?

In case this isn't trolling, it's valuable to any users who have a question that was previously answered on the forums, and to any users who invested time and energy answering said questions. Neither of these show up as a revenue stream, but instead impact customer retention and onboarding - the absence of community support is a major negative when making a purchasing decision as a new customer.

These things are not monetizable but are foundational to monetizations. It's like office ceiling lights. You might as well forgo buildings and gather naked employees with laptops in parking lots from such perspective.

Things can have value without the need to bring money into the equation.

Autodesk made almost 5 billion dollars in 2023. You can host a vBulletin forum with incredibly high traffic for a couple thousand a year. Stop making excuses for shitty companies.

And that forum also provides an enormous amount of value to a company, saving them many multiples of that cost in reduced support expenses.

Deleting this is madness.

> And that forum also provides an enormous amount of value to a company, saving them many multiples of that cost in reduced support expenses.

The calculus has changed a bit. They are losing sales from people using older versions of the software that they wouldn't have provided support for anyways. In Adobe's mindset, for example, Photoshop CS6 is the poison that is holding back subscription sales, not their competitors. So an easy way to frustrate users into subscribing to the latest version... delete the old forum posts!

See I want to say you're right, but also the newer versions have all the same bugs the old ones do.

But the user pays forever with new version! (Some manager wants bonus now)

Not this user! One of my 2024 goals was to get off Adobe, and off I am. And creating hasn't felt this good in years, I shit you not.

I’m not in a field where I use any Adobe software, so asking as a bystander: what did you end up switching to?

Replaced Photoshop with Affinity Photo. I didn't say it was a big goal for me ^^; But yeah. It was an adjustment but I cannot get over how fast AF is compared to PS.

I've gotta say that I love Photo. I'm not a professional and I can't speak to professional needs, but for my own simpler needs, it's so much easier and faster than PS. I imagine that's what happens if you don't have 30 years of users screaming if you change their workflow by a single pixel, and can re-invent UIs based on newer ideas.

A paywall would make them useless, because you wouldn't be able to find them using Google.

As an example, when I used to work in embedded development I'd come across some weird undocumented behaviour of a peripheral in a device. Inevitably there'd be a post on a manufacturer-hosted forum where someone else had hit and hopefully solved the same thing. To me at the time these were very valuable, but the actual information was created by the community rather than the manufacturer.

As to who would pay for it, that's a tough one - my employer wasn't willing to. I suppose it acts as a commons

To give another perspective, from a company perspective, companies are mostly not really in the business of providing an archive. And if you provide a bunch of outdated information--banners flagging it as such or otherwise--you're mostly not doing most people any favors when they encounter that info when doing a search. Most companies pretty aggressively remove info more than a year old or whatever.

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