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Comment by brm | Hacker News Reader

This whole thing reads weird. From shutting down, to acquisition, to shutting down again and seemingly blocking exports.

However, as this is the internet, until news breaks otherwise I will continue to believe that Hanlon's razor applies here...

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

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Either way, I wonder if the twitpic guys fully understand the damage they may be doing to their personal reputations. Do they expect to be able to run a web service in the future? Because if the current situation persists, no one will ever trust them again.

If we're being honest, the vast majority of their users don't know who was behind Twitpic. The HN crowd is probably a lot more likely to know/care than your typical Twitpic user.

They'll probably be able to start new things without most people noticing. And they probably know this.

Well, yeah, but it's the HN crowd that they will likely want to work with/hire from, so reputation is actually important.

Well, a few things. First off, a lot of people on here probably understand that when you don't have money to pay for bandwidth, banning people who use a lot of it might be reasonable. It's not like you have a whole lot of other options. Passing around the hat isn't likely to work, and if they could get additional funding, they already would have.

Second, even if people didn't understand that, the HN crowd is a tiny slice of the good hackers out there. Most of the best people I know do not read it, or even actively disdain it. "Cesspit" and the like are a terms I have heard in person or on newsgroups used to describe the comments section here.

Third, I'll bet most HN people don't even know the names of Twitpic's founders. I don't. I wouldn't be able to identify whether another company, down the line, was founded by them.

Lastly, I doubt most HN people are so principled that a year or two from now they would turn down an otherwise compelling job offer because the founders of the company were once associated with banning Archive Team's IPs. It's mildly annoying at worst.

If someone thinks hacker news is a cesspit of comments on the internet, then I can only imagine that someone hasn't really spent any time on the internet. It's not always sunshine and happiness here, but HN is definitely among the top sites in terms of comment quality, especially considering the broad variety of topics covered here. You really only end up with better quality comments by going to sites that only cater to special interest communities.

Now if only there was a global infrastructure where those people could communicate this. Maybe it would only take 140 characters. Then I bet, those people could use it to warn others.

I would bet a big chunk of the users think twitpic IS twitter.

But that's the beauty of hiding behind a company name. Only the people who have their ear to the ground during this fiasco will know not to trust the founders when their next company is named FaceFlick.

If you make enough enemies on the internet, they'll follow you around to your next endeavor and make sure people know what you did...

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case where it's most needed. For example with systemd, after having written the awful pulseaudio, you'd think Lennart would not be able throw any weight around even at Red Hat.

There's the chance that their next venture (if there is one) would have a lot of vocal criticism referencing how they handled this situation if there were similar risks with the new one.

This could impact a launch significantly, but of course there's no guarantee the masses would notice.

It didn't stop the owner of Justin.tv. They said two weeks and gave 24 hours to get all archived videos.

Anyone boycotting twitch.tv? Anyone????

TwitPic has always done things like this (such as preventing users from mass-exporting their own photos) but everyone forgets once the news cycle moves on.

System overloaded because of poor DevOps? Absolutely possible. But not talking to Jason about exporting a dump to the Internet Archive? That's "take your ball and go home" stupidity.

System overloaded? The pictures are on S3 buckets no?

Cloudfront, actually (cdn.twitpic.com). I haven't tried to manually scrape URLs from there yet though. Discovery requires the dynamic app.

"Take your ball and go home" isn't always stupid. Perhaps more stupid is to entrust a random website to store all of your pictures indefinitely, especially when that website has no clear revenue model. Don't put yourself in a situation where data will be lost by someone taking his ball back.

We very well could be having the same situation in a few years when Twitter is in the process of turning off the servers.

If you want to keep your data, make backups. Don't trust cloud providers to be there. If you're the Internet Archive, make backups/dumps/archives before people start turning the servers off.

False. Malicious actions are often intentionally disguised as stupidity.

What's often missed with Hanlon's razor is that people want to believe something is malicious vs just plain stupidity. You need a succinct expression like this to help repudiate people's inclinations.

Not nearly as often as stupid actions are believed to have malicious underpinnings, they aren't.

It's possible they've made a last ditch deal to sell the media to someone (perhaps even Twitter). That would make it important to keep the data private.

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