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Comment by collinmanderson | Hacker News Reader

If chad is really struggling and asks to partially pay for his gas costs to meet halfway for getting my stuff* back, I would understand and not be mad at him.

[*] assuming chad doesnt lie about having my stuff as OP claims in this case

Life really is a series of xkcds, it turns out!

Back in the 2000s there was an implicit social contract that websites would treat your uploaded data with respect. You weren't putting your stuff in Chad's garage, you were putting it in a professional seeming storage business that just happened to be free because none of us really understood how to monetize the net.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks

2004 is when that was typed. I'm not sure that that social contract ever existed. We just didn't understand how "free" services worked.

This really seems like the exception that proves the rule, given how few Facebooks came out of that era. We had a social contract, but it turned out that being sociopathic is a winning strategy when everyone else is playing by the implicit rules. See also: modern politics.

Indeed. The 2004 chat snippet is notable because it displayed attitude that was uncommon at the time. Zuck made it mainstream.

Wasn't Google's business model to slurp up literally everything on the web, and everything users would give them to sell eyeballs to advertisers?

Gmail also dates to 2004. If reading your email to sell ads to third parties based on the content of your private correspondence doesn't fit that attitude, I don't know what does.

I stand by my assertion that this shit was always going on, we just weren't wise to it in the 2000s.

Google's early business model was to make something cool and figure out monetization later, like many firms from that era. When they got acquired by Doubleclick, they pivoted to advertising but still took time to get it to the evil stage.

Adsense was 2003, 5 years before the doublclick acquisition.

You could claim that google in the 90s was about building something cool and making money later, but not 2000s google.

As an aside, "make something cool, monetize later" is exactly the problem. It's deferred evil. The people who wrote the check to have youmake something cool aren't paying you to make something cool, they are paying you to figure out the monetization down the road.

The dominant business model that decade was monetization via getting people to fork over their data.

That's basically what Web 2.0 was.

I will say personally I didn't feel this way in the 2000's, and I was a child at the start of that decade. Maybe I am cynical.

Back in the 2000s I think a much larger fraction of the web was running out Chad’s garage.

You got a Pentium III and a DSL connection? Run a website! Run an IRC server!

I took a tour of the CBOE in 2011. The old trading pits that were no longer used were filled with a random assortment of desktop PCs running as servers for the exchange. At least that’s how it look and what they told us. I hope it isn’t still that way.

That works when you are the product and they have customers who want to use their humans for some other business activity. If they have viable customers, you are useless as a product.

social contracts stop working when they're not between individual people with a shared experience

when you make a contract with facebook or any other large site you're making a contract with a legal team tasked with protecting their money

at a certain point scale only works through oppression

> websites would treat your uploaded data with respect

Are you saying that the free websites in question owed their users completely free storage of that data, in perpetuity?

How is that a reasonable expectation, regardless of how one viewed "Chad"?

I can agree that that would certainly be nice. But like, with the exception of those who remained in continuous profitable operation, most free sites will end up shut down or sold, so either the data will be deleted, or someone is going to be paying for servers continuously to preserve that data forever. No one will do that and expect $0.

I'd also add that I am pretty sure of all random things uploaded to random sites 20 years ago, 99% of it is either content no one cares about today, or content that the uploader kept on their own disk or their paid cloud storage.

I don't know how long respect lasts for keeping abandoned data but it's not more than five years.

And I expect a professional business to protect my items less long than Chad.

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