[HN Gopher] Shirky.com is gone
___________________________________________________________________
Shirky.com is gone
Author : lkrubner
Score : 229 points
Date : 2022-04-15 10:49 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| chubot wrote:
| I also noticed recently that Philip Guo's site is gone, and was
| taken down on purpose. I remember a few great articles that
| showed up on HN. My interpretation was that the ratio of effort
| to reward just started to skew, which is understandable and sad
| embit wrote:
| I was one of very early subscribers of his NEC mailing list. Just
| found this article he had sent out and now on archive.org. It's
| another prescient article which now seems obvious
|
| https://perma.cc/9ESH-V2YE
| donohoe wrote:
| The site has been effectively down since November 2019 when it
| started showing up as parked
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20191130082649/http://shirky.com...
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Calls my attention that the most valuable content on the web is
| designed with simplicity, in HTML, without moving bells and
| whistles.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Aw, man.
|
| Clay Shirky's stuff was a regular "go-to" for me.
| legrande wrote:
| Same. Watched many of his talks on Youtube. Refreshing to hear
| an academic grade description of Internet & blogging culture.
| uwagar wrote:
| crikey clay shirkeyed on his duty to keep up a
| webshitey
| [deleted]
| eric4smith wrote:
| I suppose we can look at this with nostalgic eyes.
|
| I was a big Shirky reader back in the day.
|
| But the truth is that all kinds of things disappear all the time
| in all aspects of life. The web is no different at all.
|
| Take my dad for instance - a quite profilic and famous mid level
| artist. It's coming to the point where not much people remember
| him. And when my siblings pass on that will be that.
|
| Let's not get too nostalgic. If someone is interested they should
| try to preserve the writings and keep them going.
|
| That's why certain groups have taken it upon themselves to
| preserve old important films. And as we know they are always
| fighting for more donations to keep things going.
|
| Because in the end... no one really cares.
|
| 50 years from now children will be asking who was Van Gogh.
| hvs wrote:
| I don't think Van Gogh is a good example. There are certain
| artists whose work outlives them by centuries, not many, but we
| still talk about Michelangelo, da Vinci, Monet, etc. The rest
| of your post is accurate, though.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Who was the most famous artist of Mesopotamia?
|
| No one really cares.
|
| We simply haven't had enough time pass. Eventually, some day,
| people will forget who Julius Caesar was. It may take 50,000
| years. It may take 500,000. They'll forget.
| feoren wrote:
| Counterpoint: an ancient Babylonian copper merchant is
| remembered to this day for being a no-good swindler due to
| complaints against him recorded in stone tablets [1].
| Remembering things is only getting easier with better data
| storage. I guess you could just move the timeline out to
| the heat death of the universe, though.
|
| [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea-
| nasir
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The Mesopotamians were more preoccupied with writing down
| contracts in cuneiform than writing down historical fiction
| to last through the ages. Maybe because they were one of
| the first civilizations to thrive and to invent writing at
| all, they didn't know their oral traditions and history
| would be lost to the sands of time without writing them
| down.
|
| We do have more insight into ancient Egyptian pharaohs and
| architects, however, as these details were more carefully
| preserved.
|
| That being said, I'm sure 500K years from now, these
| details will all be buried on some thumb drive in an
| underground archive and our descendents will lack the
| drivers to decode them.
| [deleted]
| legrande wrote:
| > But the truth is that all kinds of things disappear all the
| time in all aspects of life. The web is no different at all.
|
| Glad we have the Wayback Machine then. But if you don't want
| your blog mirrored by Wayback you can declare that in your
| `robots.txt` file. Do this: User-agent: *
| Disallow: /
|
| But that doesn't mean crawlers/bots will honor that request and
| presume any content you post publicly will be backed up
| _somewhere_. If not somewhere on the net, then on someone 's
| hard-drive!
| hexis wrote:
| The Internet Archive does not respect robots.txt -
| https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-
| sea...
| dewey wrote:
| The blog post you are linking is outdated. They are
| honoring robots.txt files. From the FAQ:
|
| > Some sites are not available because of robots.txt or
| other exclusions. What does that mean? Such sites may have
| been excluded from the Wayback Machine due to a robots.txt
| file on the site or at a site owner's direct request.
|
| If you exclude them in your robots.txt file they will also
| absolutely retroactively remove your site from the index.
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965575
|
| - https://help.archive.org/help/using-the-wayback-machine/
| hexis wrote:
| I hope you're right! The lack of an update on that post,
| combined with the FAQ saying the opposite thing, makes it
| even harder for me to know what their policy is.
| Respecting robots.txt is a civilized thing to do and I
| hope they do it.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Take my dad for instance - a quite profilic and famous mid
| level artist. It's coming to the point where not much people
| remember him. And when my siblings pass on that will be that.
|
| Why not say his name here, to give him a bit more memory?
|
| > 50 years from now children will be asking who was Van Gogh.
|
| This seems a strange cut-off. Van Gogh is an artist who died
| 130 years ago; why should the next 50 years be the ones that
| forget him? There are plenty of artists today whom we remember
| from earlier than 200 years ago.
| mkl wrote:
| > Van Gogh is an artist who died 130 years ago; why should
| the next 50 years be the ones that forget him?
|
| Indeed. I think he will more likely become even better known
| as people use style transfer and such to generate many new
| pictures in his style.
| enobrev wrote:
| One thing I always loved in any old sci-fi that dealt with
| internet-like spaces was that most of them had a concept of a
| public internet. They generally sort of felt like the "slums" of
| the internet filled with trash and spam and stashes for hackers,
| but the concept of a public space to which anyone could post
| anything always appealed to me. I'm quite sad that we don't have
| something like this.
|
| We've had plenty of things that had that general appeal, but
| they've always been owned, run, and eventually shut down, but
| companies of some sort. I'm not opposed to companies having
| websites, but I'd love to see a public space as well. The idea
| that we could post our content to that space and expect it to
| live far longer than us would be a huge deal.
| otachack wrote:
| IPFS is one way, I believe. Archive.org has been pretty
| dependable too so you can technically post on Twitter or a blog
| post then have Archive take a version of it.
|
| I still see your point, though. Maybe mixing in IPFS with some
| public solution, like a guest book, might be something?
| dgellow wrote:
| I don't really see what stops you from having your own site
| with static content you want to publish. Get a domain for like
| 10 years, with auto renewal enabled. Get a box somewhere, serve
| you static content. You can publish whatever you want for
| almost no maintenance for decades.
|
| (Of course, that's unless you're talking about sharing the type
| of content that would make interpol want to track you down)
| enobrev wrote:
| And once I'm dead, broke, or have simply moved on from the
| tech universe?
|
| The ephemerality of the thing is the issue I'm speaking to.
| We've lost something here.
|
| The requirement for books to last is physical space, and
| those shelves and boxes continue to exist far longer than the
| publishers, authors, illustrators, etc. We don't have that
| with this medium (except, of course, archive.org which is
| excellent and not nearly enough). We've built something
| that's lighter than books and easier to store in smaller
| spaces, but we've [collectively] given no thought to
| maintaining a proper archive.
|
| The freedom to publish to the world in an instant is as
| magical as it is fleeting. On a longer scale of time - and
| not a very long one - it's practically worthless.
| bityard wrote:
| Why do you say archive.org is not a real archive?
| enobrev wrote:
| I didn't say it's not a real archive, I said it's not
| enough
| Fwirt wrote:
| You can even use a box on your home network (or even your
| router itself with a little elbow grease...) Many routers
| support popular DDNS providers, and most ISPs don't block
| port 80 or 443. It may be against your ISPs TOS because they
| don't want you hammering their upload capacity, but if you
| put it behind a free-tier CDN that soaks up the spikes (e.g.
| Cloudflare) then they're unlikely to care. Setting the whole
| thing up only takes a couple hours (if you're inept like me)
| and you're in complete control.
| legrande wrote:
| > Get a box somewhere, serve you static content
|
| Good luck having a VPS 'box' that has an uptime record of 10
| years. I know through personal experience that your VPS
| instance _will_ go down, no matter how much you try to
| mitigate that. There will be bots and bad actors either
| trying to DDOS it, or trying to brute force ` /wp-admin`.
|
| You could go for some obscure CMS to try and thwart that, but
| you run the risk of having vulns in that software because it
| doesn't have the eyeballs of vanilla Wordpress. You could
| always go for the shared hosting approach but the caveat
| being: there is no guarantee the shared provider will provide
| 100% uptime either. (And it will go down at the worst
| possible moment, like during a HN hug of death)
|
| Your best bet is to have your content distributed and
| mirrored across multiple services such that any attempt to
| take it down is impossible. I would go into details about
| that, but due to op-sec reasons I won't. Tip: Plaster your
| content all over the web such that a removal of one piece of
| content does not affect the others.
| keerthiko wrote:
| um...we still have, like, the internet? You can make some html
| file, post it on a computer exposed at a port, connect it to
| the internet, assign it to a static IP, and tell other people
| the address?
|
| Unless you are specifically referring to someone providing
| general purpose hosting that you don't need to think about
| administering -- well that isn't a feature of our present-day
| landscape simply because it wouldn't be a profitable venture
| given the risks and liabilities from the messed up things
| people _could_ stash there, along with the inherent costs of
| admin and hosting.
|
| But if you are willing to set up your own box and procure
| sysadmin for it, what you suggest exists.
| enobrev wrote:
| How are libraries a profitable venture? And why is setting up
| my own library the only reliable answer? I'm speaking to the
| lack of posterity.
| bityard wrote:
| So you want a thing, but only if somebody else will provide
| it?
| enobrev wrote:
| Yes. I also like subways, buses, indoor plumbing, garbage
| collection, libraries, streets, sidewalks, police, fire
| safety, postal service, and all sorts of things that we
| share as members of a society.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Check out Arweave: https://www.arweave.org/. It allows for
| 200-year storage of data, compatible with IPFS. It uses an
| endowment-funding model to achieve this:
| arweave.org/technology#endowment
| webmaven wrote:
| _> One thing I always loved in any old sci-fi that dealt with
| internet-like spaces was that most of them had a concept of a
| public internet. They generally sort of felt like the "slums"
| of the internet filled with trash and spam and stashes for
| hackers, but the concept of a public space to which anyone
| could post anything always appealed to me. I'm quite sad that
| we don't have something like this._
|
| Usenet still exists, and it is definitely filled with trash and
| spam. There are various projects working on similar sorts of
| public (or sometimes private but open) spaces without those
| downsides, it remains to be seen what will end up filling this
| niche.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| does anyone know why he took everything down? I noticed this when
| I was looking for one his presentations last year
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Most of the time it is time and/or money.
|
| Vulins found every other day in some obscure package you
| thought you were one and done with. You get to spend a couple
| of hours fixing it. Oh new update on the java core you are
| using few more hours. Oh that update breaks 2-3 things. More
| time. You float the idea that someone else takes it. But those
| who step up have 'other ideas' what they want the site to be.
| Oh and your base OS is 2 releases back better get on that.
|
| Then the actual cost. While you can get a cheap site up and
| going for not much. If you get even slightly popular you are
| now looking at a decent amount of money for many people. You
| may not see a couple hundred a month as 'no big deal' but many
| people do. You can pay a provider to take some of that patching
| work out of your hands but you pay for that.
|
| The programming world is very ephemeral. We get bored easy. We
| move on quickly. Sometimes we are just cheapos. Things that
| cost time and money get left to rot or turned off.
|
| What I find interesting in my 'internet' life. Is I always seem
| to find out about the really interesting places as they are
| being closed out :(
| BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote:
| > Then the actual cost. While you can get a cheap site up and
| going for not much. If you get even slightly popular you are
| now looking at a decent amount of money for many people. You
| may not see a couple hundred a month as 'no big deal' but
| many people do. You can pay a provider to take some of that
| patching work out of your hands but you pay for that.
|
| Agree with the whole message and tone of your comment but
| wondering about this bit. We run a bunch of Wordpress sites
| with decent traffic and a bunch of badly optimised front-end,
| heaps of old plugins from decades passed: we can hit 20k
| uniques and a million requests per day, with nightly backups
| for $30/mo. It could be less if we didn't care about
| completely surviving every traffic spike and bot crawl.
| mattlondon wrote:
| This is where static sites help a lot.
|
| No maintenance upkeep, minimal server costs.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Not even server these days. One can dump it on S3,
| configure a CDN in front of it and pay pennies a month to
| never have to think about it again...
| bombcar wrote:
| Even having to pay pennies a month is something that has
| to be maintained (do you remember to update your credit
| card info, are the emails correct, etc).
|
| It would be nice for something like the Internet Archive
| to offer "perpetual hosting" where you pay upfront for
| enough to fund hosting "forever". $100 would generate $1
| a year in interest which would be enough to host small
| data.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| On AWS you can pay in advance and forget it. [1]
|
| The provider of your choice probably has a similar
| billing feature.
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-
| center/prepa...
| MandieD wrote:
| Surprisingly, endowedhosting.com was available, so I
| bought it. If IA or comparable ever decided to offer such
| a service, I'd happily hand the name over to them.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| How about enrapturedhosting.com?
|
| https://www.wired.com/2008/06/service-lets-yo/
|
| >Website Lets You Send a Post-Rapture E-Mail to Friends
| 'Left Behind'
|
| >If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the
| face of the Earth as the opening act for Armageddon,
| Threat Level thinks most nonbelievers will be too busy
| freaking the hell out to check their e-mail. But if they
| do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture
| needling from their missing friends and loved ones,
| courtesy of web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com.
|
| [...]
|
| Good thing the sysadmins are loving trustworthy
| Christians:
|
| >Users can also upload up to 150 megabytes of documents,
| which will be protected by an unidentified encryption
| algorithm until the Rapture, then released to up to 12
| nonbelievers of your choice. The site recommends that you
| use that storage to house sensitive financial
| information.
|
| >"In the encrypted portion of your account you can give
| them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables,
| and powers of attorneys," the site says. "There won't be
| any bodies, so probate court will take seven years to
| clear your assets to your next of kin. Seven years, of
| course, is all the time that will be left. So, basically
| the Government of the Antichrist gets your stuff, unless
| you make it available in another way."
|
| There was a pretty good Law and Order episode where one
| of those sites accidentally triggered, sent an email
| confessing to somebody's crimes prematurely, which led to
| an unfortunate chain of events and salty remarks.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343619/
|
| >The owner of a Rapture website is killed by a man
| working to return Soviet Jews to Israel to fulfill
| Biblical prophecy. However, the killer seeks shelter at
| the Iranian embassy, leaving the DA's office in an
| unenviable position.
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/LawAndOrderS
| 19E...
|
| >Van Buren wonders why the emails were sent at all.
| "Yeah, but the Rapture didn't occur." "As far as
| we can tell." "I'm still here." "You
| mentioned." --Anita Van Buren, Cyrus Lupo, and
| Kevin Bernard
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Do not disagree at all...
|
| It is just setting it up. Also sometimes people just lose
| interest in it. Even a couple of bucks a month would be
| not worth it. Then if you stand it up and 'forget about
| it'. What happens when your CC expires? It goes away. You
| do not care anymore so it is probably not something you
| care to fix.
|
| For me 50-100 bucks a year is not something that is that
| big of deal. But if I have totally lost interest in it.
| It would be on the list of expenses to get rid of. It is
| one of those things a lot of clean up your financial
| problems people talk about. Look at all of those little
| charges. They add up to decent money sometimes. Not
| saying that happened here. But it probably does happen?
| rmbyrro wrote:
| AWS allows you to pay in advance. [1]
|
| A static website hosted on AWS S3 and CloudFront would
| need to serve a LOT of traffic to generate a $100 bill
| per year.
|
| But if you pre-pay for the next 50 years, will AWS exist
| until there?
|
| Will the internet exist?
|
| Would Putin have already f** humanity up before that?
|
| Hard to guarantee...
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-
| center/prepa...
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > why he took everything down?
|
| I think that's a good question. It's just a bunch of articles
| and perhaps there were some videos linked to youtube? I find it
| hard to believe that Shirky just abandoned it given how media
| savvy he is, but stranger things have happened.
|
| There's some weird stuff on it if you look at Aug-3 2019:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20191102024012/http://www.shirky...
|
| Looks as though it's been defaced with cialis garbage copy?
| clay_shirky wrote:
| Yep, it became a spot for all your erectile dysfunction
| needs. And the constant pattern of "I fix it, spammers break
| it' wore me out, so, despite media savvy, I just stopped
| caring (though this thread convinces me that was the wrong
| answer...)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I can't seem to find the erectile dysfunction solutions on
| your web site any more, can you link me to a reputable
| reliable source, please? I so miss your site. Good luck
| getting it back up.
| zackmorris wrote:
| I hadn't read this before, but I think I have a new guidepost for
| innovation: real tech flattens the power law for everyone,
| whereas phantom tech amplifies the power law.
| elevation wrote:
| Clay Shirky's essay, "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and
| Worldview:" [0] is a powerful warning about the pitfalls of
| global efforts to categorize information.
|
| In the early 2000s I had a manager who evangelized "the semantic
| web" to our team as being just years from taking over the world.
| He was convinced that we needed to integrate RDF into every
| product to remain relevant. Shirky's essay persuasively
| articulated why this would have been a waste of effort for us.
|
| Years on, these ideas still influence my analysis of elevator
| pitches, business plans and requested features.
|
| edit:
|
| Thank you, Clay!
|
| [0]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150323162650/http://www.shirky...
| [deleted]
| geuis wrote:
| Its not like the guy passed away. Given the community, I'm sure
| someone here can get in touch with him and let him know that his
| site is down.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| I pinged him on Twitter a few hours ago about this discussion
| and he acknowledged. Still not sure what the situation is
| though.
| VectorLock wrote:
| I was scrolling down looking for some comment on what happened
| to him or what he was up to now a days.
| lkrubner wrote:
| I read this essay in 2003 and it influenced how my business
| partner and I built our startup. It influenced what possibilities
| we chased after. But Shirky.com is now off-line:
|
| http://www.shirky.com/
|
| I'm not sure when this happened but I see that Wikipedia has
| adjusted to this and now links to the archive.org link:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky
|
| This is yet another example of the history of the early Web
| disappearing. Shirky's early essays were fundamental to way we
| understood the potential of the Web back in 1999-2008.
|
| I actually discovered this while looking for another old Shirky
| essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the
| Web.
| clay_shirky wrote:
| This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll
| tell you how it happened.
|
| I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since
| the early 90s (alt.culture.usenet and alt.folklore.urban ftw),
| but by the middle of last decade, all anyone wanted to talk to
| me about was marketing on Facebook, which was the boringest
| possible topic.
|
| At the same time, my wordpress host had lousy security, and my
| site was getting frequently disabled because of some malicious
| javascript uploaded through some hole they hand't patched. I
| wasn't writing there anymore, so it was pure cost at that
| point, and cost of my time, not just dollars.
|
| Then I moved to Shanghai for several years, working on other
| stuff, and fixed the site a couple of times again, and one
| time, my host was like "We disabled your site!" because of
| their own security flaws had let it get hacked again, which,
| the whole thing had entered 'ugh field'territory.
|
| I never decided to let the site lapse, I was just tired of
| dealing with it, and the political circumstances in both China
| and the U.S. seemed much more urgent than rescuing some
| historical essays, so one day at a time of not dealing with it
| became years.
|
| And here we are, me reading my own eulogy. Which is incredibly
| flattering and touching, I have to say.
|
| I'm not even sure what of it can be resuscitated -- maybe if I
| want it back, I'll have to copy it from Wayback (and will say
| "Thank you Brewster", not for the first time), but if anyone
| here has advice about competent and secure hosting for an old
| Wordpress blog, hmu at cshirky@gmail.com, because reading this,
| it makes me embarassed not to have just fucking fixed this a
| year or two ago.
|
| And thanks, all, for this thread. -clay
| lathiat wrote:
| You'll never maintain a Wordpress site long term securely.
| Need to convert it to static html one way or another.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| WP security has come a long way. I've had a site up for
| over a decade, and while I used to be VERY nervous, now
| with automatic updates and a fair amount of code-hardening,
| it really hasn't been a problem.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 10y of http://egypt.urnash.com running on Wordpress with a
| small set of plugins, including one for security, says
| otherwise.
| karjaluoto wrote:
| Another approach might be to toss it on blot.im. (I'm in no
| way affiliated with Blot, but I like how simple the product
| is.)
| wolrah wrote:
| > You'll never maintain a Wordpress site long term
| securely. Need to convert it to static html one way or
| another.
|
| I'm in favor of static HTML myself where possible, but it's
| not hard to maintain a secure Wordpress install. Keep
| automatic updates enabled and don't install any third party
| plugins.
|
| It's that second part that most people screw themselves
| with.
| rob74 wrote:
| It may not be _very hard_ to maintain, but you still have
| to maintain it. Whereas if you just have a collection of
| articles that you want to keep around as an archive, if
| you convert them to a static site, you can basically
| forget about them afterward...
| wolrah wrote:
| > It may not be very hard to maintain, but you still have
| to maintain it.
|
| When the maintenance is "ensure auto updates are on, and
| don't do anything that would not get updated
| automatically" it's not like it requires regular effort.
|
| > Whereas if you just have a collection of articles that
| you want to keep around as an archive, if you convert
| them to a static site, you can basically forget about
| them afterward...
|
| Your web server, your operating system, etc. still
| require at bare minimum the same level of maintenance.
|
| You can outsource that maintenance to someone else of
| course, but you can do the same with WP as well.
|
| --
|
| My point is that WP alone doesn't massively increase the
| maintenance burden, it's what people tend to do with
| (to?) WP that increases the burden and eventually leads
| to unmaintained sites.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >When the maintenance is "ensure auto updates are on, and
| don't do anything that would not get updated
| automatically" it's not like it requires regular effort.
|
| no dog in the fight here but I felt impelled to point out
| that ensuring auto updates are on solves almost all
| security holes except for the security hole it opens up.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >it's not like it requires regular effort
|
| More effort that you'll be able to exert when you're
| dead.
| davidandgoliath wrote:
| I assure you it'd be a whole lot easier for your
| survivors to manage a WP install than it would be to
| figure out your Jekyll configs.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Considering Jekyll's deployable assets are just static
| assets, there's no reason they'll have to learn any
| configs at all.
|
| Although I highly doubt learning a jekyll config would be
| harder than managing a PHP daemon, web proxy and mysql
| database.
| cossatot wrote:
| If it's just a collection of essays, what about a static
| site? You can set one up on Github Pages or Gitlab Pages with
| a minimum of coding. There are also virtually no security
| concerns and maintenance is minimal.
|
| You'd have to take all of the text from the Wordpress blog
| and format it into Markdown but that shouldn't take a huge
| amount of time unless there is a lot of weird formatting or
| different media types.
| cxr wrote:
| > You'd have to take all of the text from the Wordpress
| blog and format it into Markdown
|
| No you wouldn't. Just dump it in as-is.
| JPKab wrote:
| Clay,
|
| Just want to thank you for your great work.
|
| I used to work on a lot of US Department of Defense projects,
| mostly stuff I can't talk about. One very notable project I
| CAN talk about was an initiative (pushed by utterly clueless,
| insular, and frankly corrupt academics) to spend billions of
| dollars in 2008-2010 timeframe on implementing Semantic Web
| technologies in various military business systems across the
| DoD.
|
| As an actual technologist who knew how to build things, I was
| perpetually in the awful position of having to explain to
| leadership that these highly credentialed academics were
| selling garbage. I had tried to implement systems according
| to their design. The graph databases they pushed (they hated
| Neo4J, for reasons of purity because it didn't actually use
| RDF/OWL in the database...... i get a headache just talking
| about this...) were slow piles of dogshit that couldn't
| scale. No amount of reality could dissuade the academics.
| They had their theories, and any collision with reality was
| merely an implementation detail that I and my team were
| simply too incompetent to overcome in their eyes. Almost none
| of them had actual technical experience. A smattering of Comp
| Sci folks, and a ton of "Library Science" idiots.
|
| Your essays on why the SemWeb was utter bullshit were a
| potent weapon I used with the generals the academics were
| pushing, and I eventually got the generals funding the
| project to see the light. Got them cancelled, and sent the
| idiot egg-heads packing. I still see them on LinkedIn to this
| day. They desperately continue trying to push that rock up
| the hill, and only recently warmed to more practical graph
| database solutions.
|
| They HATED YOU. It was hilarious, watching them try to refute
| your obvious points and clear writing with jargon and hand-
| waving. Utterly unconvincing to the generals.
|
| Thanks for your essays saving my ass back then!
| Kye wrote:
| Library Science is what librarians learn. It's a real thing
| for a real job. Like most credentials and like most jobs,
| some people try to over-fit experience and knowledge in one
| field to another.
|
| You see the same with CompSci/tech people treating data
| like there's no bias in its collection.
| JPKab wrote:
| As I learned from the people on that project with lib sci
| degrees, the employment prospects are predominantly low-
| paying, but these ones found a new boondoggle to employ
| them as "ontologists" where they could get 6 figure
| salaries to sit around and build models all day in a
| piece of software called TopBraid Composer. (GUI program
| built in Eclipse, where users would create diagrams that
| would then be translated to an XML offshoot called OWL, a
| W3C standard that's never been successfully used in any
| meaningful project I've seen) I witnessed these people
| sit around and create business models and knowledge
| graphs of arcane Air Force business processes for 3 years
| (there were literally 9 of them doing this) before the
| project was cancelled due to its technical impossibility.
| The ontologies they created were never used once, and
| when I actually tried to provide them (in PDF form) to a
| separate project where Air Force personnel were trying to
| map out business processes, the personnel stated to me
| (in writing, with a Colonel CC'd) "These are so
| inaccurate that they are frequently misleading, and
| cannot be trusted." The Colonel later pulled me into his
| office and stated (rather comically): "You mean to tell
| me I've been paying people to draw cartoons for 3 years?
| We're not goddamned Disney here."
| mdavidn wrote:
| You could scrape the site, either from Wayback or from
| WordPress, if you manage to get it working just briefly, and
| then host the site statically out of an S3 bucket. wget has
| an option to recursively crawl and save a site, but there are
| other tools.
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Websit.
| ..
| teddyh wrote:
| If you don't want to talk about marketing on Facebook,
| letting your own web site lapse and disappear seems like the
| _last_ thing that you'd want to do.
|
| (See https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021)
| notRobot wrote:
| > while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I
| can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web.
|
| Do you remember the title or subject or any key words/phrases?
| rwmj wrote:
| I don't know if it's the one that the GP has in mind, but
| this is a classic:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky.
| .. _" Help, The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't
| Get Up"_
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Wow this guy was straight up prescient. I've never read his
| blogs until today - thanks for sharing this.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| I would honestly start with his presentations, they are
| amazing:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky
| rwmj wrote:
| I wasn't quite sure when he wrote this. The earliest
| capture in the Internet Archive was January 2000, but it
| could be from earlier than that maybe? I do remember that
| it was quite prescient when I first read it, although
| it's sort of obvious in 2022.
| jp57 wrote:
| The title of that article is now itself a comment on the
| passage of time and the fading of things. How old do you
| have to be today to get the "I've fallen and I can't get
| up!" reference?
| _jal wrote:
| Sitting on the elbow of the curve describing the risk of
| not getting back up after a fall.
| Vivtek wrote:
| My 27yo ("reference Millennial") even has a mental image
| of the video (although has never seen it on a Tele-Vision
| Device). It may have entered the meme reservoir on its
| own at this point.
| lkrubner wrote:
| He explained that an expanding __________ (I can't remember
| this word. Maybe he said "network"?) meant that each person
| in the __________ was exposed to a greater variety of
| choices, however, the total number of choices decreased. His
| point was that separate niches each maintained some unique
| offerings, but when everything was combined together into a
| single market, and attention focused on certain items, there
| would be a winnowing effect. The paradox was that everyone
| could legitimately feel they were enjoying an abundance of
| options, greater than ever before, while the total number of
| options decreased.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Good summary. The other day I was hearing a political
| example mentioning that every little local detail, now with
| social-media, it becomes potentially "a national issue" but
| that never happen before. Surprisingly, the Founding
| Fathers were aware of this issue back then and tried to
| solve (actually mitigate) the problem by keeping the
| central power as small as possible.
| clay_shirky wrote:
| Was this it:
|
| https://www.wired.com/2006/11/meganiche/
|
| "Now that more than a billion people have access to the
| Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and
| specificity. The basic math is simple: A tiny piece of an
| immense pie is huge. A decade ago, reaching one-tenth of 1
| percent of Web users amounted to 36,000 people, a number
| that compared favorably with the circulation of, say, the
| daily newspaper in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Back then,
| reaching a million users required a decidedly mainstream
| offering (Amazon.com and MSN come to mind). Now, getting
| niche can be the path to getting big; one-tenth of 1
| percent of today's Web audience is a million people."
| bombcar wrote:
| I was just thinking about this - I can go to the store and
| have fifty variations of peanut butter at my fingertips -
| but I get basically the _same_ fifty variations anywhere in
| the US, and much of them anywhere in the world.
|
| Whereas in the past, my store might have 1 or even 0
| options on peanut butter, but travel 10/50 miles away and
| there'd be an entirely different option.
|
| We have a little bit left of this with beer, as most places
| have a "local" beer available.
| teddyh wrote:
| Someone once described the general difference between
| European and U.S. grocery stores: They said that in
| Europe, a store would have every kind of product, but not
| very many brands of any particular thing, maybe 2 or
| three for most non-staple products. But in the U.S., a
| store would either have like 20 brands of something or
| have _none_ of them; i.e. not carry that kind of product
| at all. It seems to me like this points to "choice" being
| an important scale by which stores are measured in the
| U.S., but no, or little, negative associations are made
| with no products of a particular kind being available at
| all.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Ever stopped to ponder the laundry detergent aisle at
| your local grocery store? Or the potato chip aisle?
| Especially on detergent, what's there is a huge
| proportion of the shelf space devoted to a couple of
| brands (which may, in fact, be from the same parent
| company) with very large containers taking up a lot of
| space for relatively little actual product, but lots of
| different choices for those brands. Or, as I like to say,
| 31 flavors of Tide Pods. Same goes for potato and corn
| chips. Lays and Ruffles dominate, which oversize bags
| that are half air, relegating other brands to lower
| shelves on one end. But consumers can "choose" from half
| a dozen different flavors of the same brands.
|
| And it's the same all over the US. The only variation
| tends to be that some flavors Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle or
| Wasabi Ginger, e.g., appear more often in some markets
| than others.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Sadly most places outside the US get one, two maybe 4
| options but that leaves room for other products.
| influx wrote:
| Great essay, how did it influence your startup?
| lkrubner wrote:
| We focused on the "unfairness" and we thought there might be
| a technical fix, so we focused on new discovery mechanisms.
| But our solution did not get traction, so we eventually
| pivoted towards tools for building commerce sites, and there
| we had more success.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| NOTHING on the web can be trusted to last very long. It's the
| deep flaw of digitalization of paper.
| mxmilkiib wrote:
| Also fairly hidden these days is Many-to-Many (also sometimes
| referred to as Many2Many)
| http://web.archive.org/web/20081229123241/http://many.corant...
| where Clay Shirky, Liz Lawley, Ross Mayfield, Sebastien Paquet,
| David Weinberger and danah boyd posted.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| This is terrible. But the upside is that most of them have
| really good books you can still buy on Amazon, so if not the
| actual historical essays then at least most of their ideas will
| be preserved indefinitely.
|
| Clearly a lot of them have been looking back at that period
| with mixed feelings over the last few years (and have said as
| much), but even still it's shocking that something like Clay
| Shirky's blog would disappear when he's very much still alive.
| The fact that we apparently now have to worry about whether or
| not something like Danah Boyd's MySpace vs Facebook essay could
| disappear though is ridiculous; even with all the known
| technical and social problems with the web it's hard to imagine
| that it's come to this.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| > But the upside is that most of them have really good books
| you can still buy on Amazon
|
| I am wondering, are there any organizations that actively
| scan and archive books, even if they don't share them because
| of copyright laws? Amazon is almost a monopoly when it comes
| to books, and we cannot rely on it to preserve the books for
| the next 50+ years, and not every purchased copy is
| guaranteed to be around by then.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I am wondering, are there any organizations that actively
| scan and archive books, even if they don't share them
| because of copyright laws? Amazon is almost a monopoly when
| it comes to books, and we cannot rely on it to preserve the
| books for the next 50+ years, and not every purchased copy
| is guaranteed to be around by then.
|
| The University of Michigan and Google Books have something
| like this, at least for the UM library:
| https://publicaffairs.vpcomm.umich.edu/key-issues/google-
| set... . I can't find much about whether it stopped
| completely, or just went quiet, after the lawsuits.
| Mezzie wrote:
| In addition to the national libraries, it's extremely
| common for librarians and archivists to keep things in a
| personal collection on the DL regardless of copyright.
|
| I have every ROM released for pre-2000 consoles + a ton of
| old software, OSes, and PC games on hard drives that I keep
| backed up. I have friends who prefer to specialize in
| keeping/archiving zines. Someone else does fanmade ROMs.
| Etc. Most of us have a good understanding of copyright law
| even where we disagree with it, and it's common to archive
| 'grey' material off the record and then fight for the right
| to make it official.
|
| Books are even easier than digital assets since the laws
| around book archiving and preservation are much kinder to
| archivists. So yes, there are definitely DRM-free, digital
| copies of MOST books floating around and will continue to
| be for quite some time. The main issue is whether or not
| we'll be prosecuted if we open up our personal archives or
| distribute them.
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| Sweden has the Royal Library, US has the Library of
| Congress. I believe most developed countries have national
| libraries, archiving books and newspapers as they are
| published.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| That's good to hear. Thank you!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I am wondering, are there any organizations that actively
| scan and archive books, even if they don't share them
| because of copyright laws?
|
| The Internet Archive definitely does this. It's what powers
| their controversial book borrowing feature.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Just curious, why didn't you capitalize danah boyd? :)
| samastur wrote:
| Because that's how she preferred (prefers?) writing her name.
| mxmilkiib wrote:
| Aside; 'member Technorati?
| http://web.archive.org/web/20060509060807/http://www.technor...
| the site gives me a you're-not-seeing-this-due-to-GDPR message
| now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati
| platz wrote:
| The observable universe is also disappearing.
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