I'm not sure what Storify is/was. I attempted to find out by clicking the "About" link in their footer, and got redirected to Adobe. Looks like maybe they got a buyout!
So what's the end-game here? Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with?
This feels religious; Oh, just upload it all to digital Heaven! I'll never "die" and people can continue to revere me and my cats forever!
Just because we can doesn't mean we should care about preserving every bit and byte. Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.
> Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.
Of all the arguments against archiving information like this, "environmental costs" has to be the least convincing one. Storify posts are just a bunch of links to tweets, and those are already intended to be archived by the Library of Congress. A static database dump of Storify content has negligible cost and is highly compressible.
If you want to talk about the environmental impact of tech, let's talk about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, or the usage of rare earth metals in non-recyclable hardware that gets replaced every year[0].
[0] This is generally non-recoverable. Even Apple, which claims to recycle their hardware, recovers very little from the process.
You never know what has historical relevance until it is history. That lesson was learned the hard way and so now if something can be preserved at low cost we'd do well to at least attempt to keep it around until history can judge it.
I clearly don't agree with this guy, but I don't see any reason to downvote/flag him into oblivion. I both upvoted and vouched this comment, not because I agree or think it's valuable, but because it doesn't deserve to be disappeared. Comment if you feel like it, or page on by if you don't. Ironically, his words will live on forever.
IIRC, this isn't a collection of all tweets, etc (though the Library of Congress is already doing that), it's a curated collection of tweets, many important enough that some journalist somewhere bothered to write an article about them.
Yeah, it's a shame! The Internet Archive does some twitter archiving -- I helped a little by finding a listing of government social media accounts -- but it's not enough.
> Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with?
That seems kind of dumb, but with Moore's Law still mostly working for storage, it's also cheap -- certainly cheaper than building actual libraries. There's also currently no way to mark URLs as temporary, so we can't distinguish the permanent from the ephemeral. Finally, it's far cheaper than having everyone who wants to save URL content archive it on their own personal box (plus however many backups), which is what I do now if I really want to use something again.
Given that it was used by a lot of news websites, there's a lot of legitimate history in there, whether we see it as such or not. That's worth preserving.
Libraries "weed" books all the time, and most of them are pulped. Which is about like burning them, only the carbon doesn't end up in the atmosphere. So this is probably not the best comparison.
This is a totally wrong analogy. Books were burnt for religios/political reasons. Storify is giving up because of lack of financial instreams for the owners.
Tons of valuable books and records have been burnt because someone thought they weren't valuable or didn't have the money to house them. It's true, it's more likely they were just thrown on a trash heap and left to rot, but trash incineration is a thing.
It was a tool for putting together decent looking, embeddable lists of social media posts.
As far as I know, mostly news sites used it to capture online opinion about a topic without having a big number of separate embedded tweets, Instagram posts, etc.
> As far as I know, mostly news sites used it to capture online opinion about a topic without having a big number of separate embedded tweets, Instagram posts, etc.
So, will a lot of these stories break (unless a lot of effort is taken to save them by exporting the storify content)?
> After May 16, 2018, Storify.com accounts and their content will no longer be accessible
Storify was pretty useful as a curation tool, and I remember using it to sort through the information/disinformation around the Japan quake (https://storify.com/boheekim/collaborating-to-storify-japan) back in 2011. There is a definite need for an embeddable/centralized stream of updates during times of disaster or crisis. Folks often whip up a collaborative Google Doc on the fly, but a lighter weight mobile friendly solution would be awesome.
Distilpost, my own startup is a more than adequate alternative. It is all machine curated at the moment and super accurate. Beats twitter moments easily.
https://distilpost.com/
Pardon me if i am unfamiliar with the ways of the community but the down votes are simply far removed from what i expected as i only sougth to offer those deeply affected a possible alternative and something to cheer for.
Your comment is pretty unashamedly self-serving and not entirely on topic. Storify was curated, yours intentionally doesn't overlap on the heart of this product.
I don't think there's anything wrong with unashamedly self-serving. All plugs by developers are self-serving, and trying to enforce the veneer of modesty will just cause people to be more subtle and tricky. Better to allow so long as the interest is disclosed (which he did).
So really, the only possible reason to down vote is being off topic (which could definitely apply to this case).
I understand the rationale behind your comment but I think it expresses a form of emotion when including something like "unfortunately" to an already negative statement. It feels like an expression of regret. Personally, saying something like "unfortunately, my grandmother passed away this year" instead of just saying "my grandmother passed away" feels a bit more emotional.
