Hacker News Reader

Comment by djloche | Hacker News Reader

Seeing as they're shutting down the company/service in a week, they're probably out of cash. While it sucks for your customers, that's what happens when you run out of money. It sucks for everyone. I'm guessing they were floating the company on personal funds in hopes the acquisition would go through, but it did not - so now they're doing everything they can to stop this turning into a personal financial bloodbath from the bandwidth costs spiral due to everyone rushing to get their photos before the shutdown.

Just an ugly situation for everyone.

View on HN

Here's a solution: https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/523215681412546562

Dustin Curtis: "Can anyone put me in touch with the founder of Twitpic?(I'll pay to backup all of the photos, and even host them. Ridiculous situation.)"

This Noah guy (the founder) is really hard to get in contact with. If anyone can make an intro--hi@dustincurtis.com

Why are people worrying about backups? Certainly people had no expectation of recoverability of photos hosted on a free service? Or was TwitPic promising that?

They're straight-up refusing to talk to Jason about giving Archive Team a data dump. There's an ugly situation, but only one side is precipitating it.

Maybe they are holding out that someone will purchase still? They lose all their value the second the archive team gets all their data right?

Edit: On second thought, I agree that it's probably related to the bandwidth cost.

It's not about cost. AT members and Dustin Curtis have offered to pay for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472998 https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/523215681412546562

Deleted comment

True, but this isn't the first time AT has offered. It's not the first time Noah Everett has gone radio silent either.

Deleted comment

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512041630816555008 and https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512040672527138816

Sneakernet could be a cost effective option especially for large volumes of data, and its often overlooked.

I wonder if the Archive Team has considered sending twitpic a hard drive and asking them to just rsync the data over?

Edit: This assumes that they keep backups of said data outside of EC2. Walking a hard drive over to your local Amazon DC.. won't quite work.

Amazon will provide drives for their export feature. People have already offered to foot the bill to have it done.

There are hundreds of TBs of data.

Deleted comment

I realize there's some harshness to it, but you make implicit promises when you set up a public service. Twitpic chose to make themselves an important part of the Twitter ecosystem, and they have a moral obligation to not be assholes when they need to close up shop.

Not getting with Jason and the rest of archiveteam very much falls under "assholes" in my book, especially when other people are offering to pay for the data you're happy to destroy.

I may be speaking out of turn but wouldn't this be an object lesson of 'if you like something, pay for it'? Going out of business hurts everyone and frankly I think it's OK for customers to share some of that pain. I honestly am not familiar with their revenue model so perhaps that is not apropos though.

I do see the sadness of all that bitrot though so I understand your point of view.

Why should your users be unable to pay you to back up their data just because you failed at business and now have to stop your service?

That's the epitome of petty spite.

Because he's not in the data recovery business. And who are you to tell him how to run his life and his career path?

What moron has been using their service for years and for free without a contingency plan? What idiot/geek/nerd in today's world doesn't keep triplicate backups of important data? Hell, I keep encrypted backups at home AND in the cloud/offsite. Just because you failed at LIFE and protecting your assets does not mean the next person is being petty or owes you a favor.

> And who are you to tell him how to run his life and his career path?

A member of the public who, collectively, trusted him with an irreplaceable part of the historical record. You take on that responsibility in the pursuit of profit, you don't get to discharge it when it goes under.

I've never uploaded anything to Twitpic. But parts of our history are there, and that's important. Blowing off fine folks like Archive Team/dcurtis/toomuchtodo when they're not even asking you to pay for the retrieval of those historical archives is simply antisocial.

> You take on that responsibility in the pursuit of profit, you don't get to discharge it when it goes under.

You're misusing the word "discharge." You actually want him to discharge his responsibility in this case.

Sorry, good call. Abrogate.

I didn't have any data with Twitpic, I just think his attitude shows a clear lack of good business sense, and I'm here for the public spectacle.

That being said, I'll publicly call out displays of bad behavior when they happen in public - and throwing away your customer's data out of spite when they offer to pay for it to be backed up is bad business and incredibly petty behavior.

I see good business sense here.

the company is going under and they are most likely out of cash. They don't want to go into debt/get stuck with a huge bill.

Justin.tv did the same thing. They closed up shop in pretty much 24 hours.

A business isn't a charity to make you feel good. Sometimes you need to make tough decisions like this.

They provided a free service for many years. Be happy that someone put the time and effort into giving you that. I also don't know why some people decide to use it as a backup service, because clearly it isn't.

..and the guy trying to archive all of the customer data? Why would any business hand over all of their Dara like that? It's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

This is the problem with demanding everything is free/cheap: the service doesn't last.

> the company is going under and they are most likely out of cash. They don't want to go into debt/get stuck with a huge bill.

Two separate people have offered to cover the bandwidth and other costs of transferring the files to some other place.

Three.

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/523509876560257025

This is meaningless.

I wouldn't just transfer pictures and customer data to the highest bidder either.

Do I need to keep mentioning Justin.tv? It seems nobody listened to me in the first place (or use conveniently ignored the facts).

It's obvious most people here have never run a business and wouldn't make the right decision.

I've run a business.

But I put being decent above making money. And, hopefully, I always will.

Yeah, I think they just don't want or can't pay for the bandwidth. Or, perhaps they are trying to make Twitter feel bad and buy them. Either way it's a bad situation, but isn't necessarily evil on their part to not want to put anything more into a dying venture.

For those downvoting this - why don't you try paying for 800M images to be leached from the server of a failed company of yours with no hope of recouping a single dollar.

You're getting downvoted because you somehow missed that multiple people have offered to carry the cost of export from S3.

Random people from the Internet offering to pay a bill likely to be in the low five figures. That sounds like it would work out well. "I sent him a copy of the bill and he's not responding. I don't understand.....he said he would pay. He even gave me his Twitter handle!"

Those "random people from the Internet" you are dismissing include a number of well-respected site owners, operators, and entrepreneurs.

Any such cost would be several orders of magnitude smaller than the millions of dollars of advertising revenue those images have been pulling in for twitpic over the years.

Let's not pretend that Noah is down to his last packet of ramen noodles, here. Twitpic is a long way from being a "failed company" by any reasonable definition of the term.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com