The Death and Life of Great American GeoCities
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We need to change the culture of the tech industry to view users' data as belonging to the users. Until then, consider donating to the Internet Archive https://archive.org/donate/
Here's a random example: www.geocities.com/scythemantis
This means there's no limit on the size of gifs created, nor any limit on their length. Additionally, a user can make as many gifs as they like. I think one can imagine where this is going.
Since it's inception, people have made tens of thousands of gifs, and now I have hundreds of gigabytes of gifs I have to host. Recently, to save space I had to go through and delete pretty much all the gifs that had been created before a particular time. I downloaded them to my personal computer to ensure that some record of them remains, but still, I potentially broke tens of thousands of links.
In the future, I'll be putting all sorts of limits on user creations, but I'm curious how bad action like this is?
edit: As a general note, this is IMO one of the fundamental technical deficiencies of the Web today. Keeping website information around shouldn't require active maintenance by the publisher. Imagine if everyone could no longer read the contents of a book once the publisher stopped printing it - what that would do to our access to historical culture? In an era where most users have abundant storage at least by the standards of text, it wouldn't be that hard to invent a protocol where visitors to websites automatically mirror them (the text at least) and mirror them to other clients, forming a decentralized filesystem. Compared to this, the WayBackMachine is an impressive effort, but it's limited by its centralized nature, managed by a single, relatively small non-profit organization.
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Generally shutting down a service means you won't have access to it and the data on it anymore.
It would be helpful to have an RSS feed on the main blog. RSS is still widely used too!
It did a fantastic job for what I needed it for and was surprised that Yahoo managed to completely fuck it up.
I agree that articles like this one are a pain. They are pitching a misplaced nostalgia. The "good ol' days" weren't good. Even then, we knew that these sites were bad. We just didn't know what else to do.
I used to be torn on the Tumblr blogs that create the content that ends up in articles like this. On one hand, link-baity articles that keep hammering on one subject, over and over again, wouldn't exist without them. But on the other, I understand that need to explore and create things, even things that aren't a good aesthetic. I did an entire series on taking cellphone photos of prisms that had lasers passing through them. Hundreds of photos that were mostly junk. But there was something in there that I couldn't articulate, and the process of posting helped me figure it out. I did it for the same reason I played Sudoku for a year straight, but haven't touched it again in 7 years: I had a need to figure it out.
It's one of the reasons why I think there is no meaningful distinction between art and science. Your brain subconsciously recognizes that something is there, gets snagged on it, and you use the tools at your disposal to test, test, test and figure it out.
I know very few working, successful (even if marginally so) artists who make exactly what they want. Most of them are trend following on how the market reacts, and they aren't exactly cognizant of the precise elements that make their work popular.
It's our fault for continuing to buy it.
But regardless, I also don't think it deserves such a flippant reply. HN gives you all the characters you could want to write a reply.
I don't think that this aesthetic is stupid or anything, it's only that what's represented in this article is the same kind of content you would see when tumblr had almost just been created. People were very attracted to these aesthetics, some focusing more on the uncanny aspects while others presented a more quaint and nostalgic picture. It gave rise to a whole plethora of visual and even musical sub-genres. People developed sometime very fine and subtle aesthetics.
Reading this article makes me feel the same way an average HN'er would feel reading a 2015 article praising the merits of that new paradigm shift called Object Oriented Programming. You would expect at least one or two sarcastic comments.
Even *ing Rihanna 'borrowed' the style 3 years ago [1]. And we're talking about the most mainstream US singer since Michael Jackson. Still I know techies aren't exactly the most art-voracious demographic so maybe I'll try to dig up some google stats to prove my point.
[1]: http://www.spin.com/articles/azealia-banks-rihanna-seapunk-b... (2012)
But, I guess that's the nature of youth. We're supposed to be a bit embarrassed of ourselves, or else we never grew.