
The Ruins of Dead Social Networks (2011) - benbreen
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-ruins-of-dead-social-networks/245397/?single_page=true
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sdrinf
This thread might be as good as any to point out:

* There is an enormous quantity of culture locked into Facebook posts

* Since Facebook's graph API have been shut down, there exists no API-based way to export _other people's data_. You can get whatever you personally have posted to FB, but none of what _other people_ have posted.

* Individual posts might be scraped, and present in archive.org ,but people's / pages' indices are not available for non-logged-in users

* Social networks have a typical lifecycle of 5-10 years; and their shutdown can happen in a very short timeframe, see eg. geocities ; but imagine that without any accessible index, making full archiving impossible

* This implies, that if/when FB goes down, so will a major slice of Internet Culture circa 2008-2016

* If you have any suggestions, or partial solutions to this, please kindly post it to [http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/37036/self-h...](http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/37036/self-hosted-front-end-for-social-networks) .

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pmoriarty
I often wonder what's going to happen to all the great information that's on
sites like HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow, or other popular forums when the
companies that run them finally bite the dust or stop being interested in
running these websites. It would be a real shame to lose all the advice,
howtos, solutions, opinions, conversations, etc.

I'm hoping these sites have archives, and that those archives would be made
publicly available in case of such a disaster. But maybe even then they'll be
buried behind a shitty web interface such as Google's web interface to old
Usenet archives. Or maybe they'll just disappear completely, which would be a
huge waste.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Similarly, you might be interested in the "Save Page As..." feature of web
browsers along with the bookmarking one. I too was worried the best stuff
would go away. Plus, Archive.org is sort of a single point of failure, isn't
it? So, I just started copying best comments into text files or bookmarking
their info if they suited my purposes. Could straight up save the whole
thread. If it ever goes down, we upload our collections to one or more
repositories in a similar format.

Note: I'm ignoring the complexity that copyright law would introduce into this
to just focus on keeping the key info.

~~~
Endy
The moment that copywrong stops us from keeping a full and accurate record of
history, it's time to eject the broken and destructive system entirely.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Sounds nice but masses dont care that much.

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phmagic
Will we see a "myspace" museum? That would be neat.

I think the digital form of the artifacts left over from social networks and
the vast amounts of data retained is something we've not seen before and don't
know how to catalog just yet.

This new historian job that can handle large amounts of unstructured data
sounds perfect for a machine.

~~~
tunap
I'd like to see a team of digital archaeologists find and reassemble the lost
Digg pre-4.0 database. Lots of gold lost in that upgrade.

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fernly
The Computer History Museum has an exhibit based on the salvaged 650GB backup
of GeoCities. It's a big touch-sensitive monitor that lets you pinch-stretch
zoom your way into the data, eventually (with patience, which few museum
visitors have) you can drill down to individual pages.

[http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/deletedcity/](http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/deletedcity/)

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Paul_S
"Will Facebook fade out like MySpace?" ...in our lifetime? Not sure actually.
Unlike those that came before them they somehow managed to get a monopolistic
position. Seems to have done the trick for Microsoft.

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noelrock
Fitting that the link to the Wired story about Asheron's Call 2 in this is
pointing to a page on Wired that no longer exists.

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elcapitan
The most important part about the ruins of dead social networks is to properly
dance on those ruins.

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gxml
[http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-
historiography/](http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/)

An excellent talk on this subject from 2010.

