If one day, the wind and rain swaying notes close down, what will your notes do?
Editor’s note: This article is from “ love child norm “, Author: Di Zhang Fan.
Recently, Australian software company Atlassian announced that BitBucket (original address hg.io) will stop supporting Mercurial and will remove all source code for Mercurial-managed software on the platform. This has forced everyone to ask another question: In the 21st century, is the website closure the biggest enemy of human knowledge preservation?
The answer is yes.
For Ai Fan, BitBucket’s support for Mercurial’s support will have a certain impact – since 2010, Ai Fan’s main source code has been hosted on BitBucket. Although technically, Fan Faner can (and will soon) set up his own Mercurial server, the impact of such decisions is far more than just a company that loves Fan, or that some individuals and groups have an impact.
Can the community use Mercurial DVCS projects, such as PyPy, etc., can you find alternatives? Will some personally maintained projects and code snippets be lost? Even if most people eventually find an alternative, those who can’t find an alternative, or those that are considered “not important”, will disappear forever on the Internet. If a programmer has passed away, the data will disappear forever – this may be his contribution to the world. Moreover, it must happen that links to BitBucket in a large number of articles, blogs, and books will be completely invalid.
This kind of problem is not limited to the computer industry. There is no need to think too much, there are many examples in front of us. Baidu completely shut down Baidu space in 2015, resulting in a large amount of Chinese content – some of which are extremely high quality content – disappeared in this world. Although Baidu may have 10,000 reasons to believe that this is an excellent business decision – I will not doubt it – but it is undeniable that this is another kind of book.
Another example is that Baidu recently deleted everything from Baidu Post Bar before 2017. Perhaps this is a product manager’s decision to reduce the labor intensity of the operation, perhaps this is to make a decision to cure the spam, but this cannot be overshadowed by the fact that this is a very stupid decision. In addition to the long tail traffic caused by the historical content of Baidu Post Bar and the loss of angry users lost to other platforms due to the deletion of historical data, the quality discussion of the once impetuous Chinese Internet community has disappeared. .
Other Internet users may remember Renren. In business, it was a success in the intranet period and it has failed. Recently, Renren has turned off the logging function — the platform that has caused countless battles and has a lot of good content. The entire logging feature has been completely offline, leaving only Tengine’s default 404 page.
The decision to make this decision is also limited to Chinese Internet companies. Microsoft is no exception. He quietly removed the old software download from MSDN, and deleted the FAQ “Q” article, KB and MSDN documentation, and shut down the FTP server earlier.
For example, today, if you want to know how to compete with devices when running DOS programs under Windows 95 – Sorry, unless you have a paper FAQ document with me, you can’t check it out. Q130402 “Device Contention in Windows” This document is looking for an answer (the answer is the value of Com[n]AutoAssign in the [386Enh] field of system.ini).
For another example, if you want to verify that your FAT32 file system checker is compliant with Microsoft’s actual implementation – you should go to MSDN to download a copy of Windows 95 or MS-DOS 7.00 and then perform CHKDSK.EXE verification. However, this is not possible – because Windows 95 has been removed on MSDN. The latter example is a recent trouble with FreeBSD’s committer dephij.
Even academia cannot avoid losses caused by the loss of artificial or non-human data. Peking University Chinese Forum is an academic forum for discussing Chinese, among whichThe discussion of Chinese literature, phonology and Chinese information processing is quite valuable. The forum was closed and everyone’s mental work was lost.
So, can this problem be solved? The answer is yes, but it is no.
First of all, some websites can be retrieved from the Internet Wayback Machine even if they are closed. However, this only applies to sites that do not use complex front-end technologies – which means that the availability of Internet time machines will become worse and worse in the future, as new single-page applications/rich interactive applications/requires logins are available. The application is not included in the Internet time machine. Moreover, for the App, if it is lost, it will be permanently lost – it cannot be included in the Internet Time Machine.
Secondly, technically, the retention of Internet data in the 1980s and 1990s is now much higher than the current Internet data retention rate. At the time of the Internet, the mainstream of the agreement was USENET and Fidonet. Thanks to its natural transfer advantage, archives can be read until today.
However, in the context of the Internet in China or the Internet, few companies in the Internet have a purpose for the benefit of mankind. In contrast, the most typical model for Internet companies is VC investment. It is run by private companies with the ultimate goal of profitability. In this mode, free access to information outside the platform is naturally contrary to most entrepreneurs. Instead, leaving the exclusive content on the platform to attract users to the platform so that there is more traffic can make the platform develop better (Ai Faner may be an exception, as a content producer, our content is CC Authorized by the BY-NC 4.0 protocol, and sitemap.xml is available for human-driven machine fetching).
It seems that this is another question of circular dependence – if there is no quality platform, what about quality content? If the platform is not sticky and unique, how can the platform survive? But if the service can’t continue, these high-quality content and knowledge will be permanently lost because of the platform lock.
Observing trends in recent years, from the decline of RSS feeds to the death of Google Reader to the current state of the super-application as the absolute core of people’s lives, knowledge and data are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. Even if we technically have distributed computing such as IPFSForce, but in fact due to its inconvenient use of features (and more critical – people are not aware of the seriousness of this problem), its popularity is about zero.
Finally, ask a hypothetical question – if one day, the stormy Evernote closes, what will your notes do?