Some don't want their old posts archived for eternity, for privacy reasons.
Yahoo had a nice interface to allow everyone that was a member of any group to download everything for their personal and private use, and it worked fine. Random external parties republishing other people's old posts though is not OK at all and is a massive breech of privacy, and is a violation.
Because of the threat that one's opinions may be archived and forevermore propagated by random third parties, at this point in history one would have to be insane to express a genuine opinion publicly. Therefore these efforts have a chilling effect on free speech and are inimical to democracy.
If Yahoo Groups wasn't going down your posts would be forever accessible anyways. What does it matter if they are archived by first party or third party?
Mostly because you've entered into an agreement with the first party (however dubious, that's another argument) and have consented to their terms to use their platform. There wasn't a checkbox that said "I consent to third parties storing all of my information after we decide to shutdown the platform".
Consent is paramount to privacy, and archiving everything without consent is a breaking a huge privacy and trust boundary.
Going into this, we did understand that this could be a concern. We are committed to working with group moderators as we work to make what we've saved available, and will be honoring valid take-down requests for content that people that prefer the content to not be online.
Would you mind clarifying your objection for me? Don't authors of posts assume the risk that third parties will copy and reuse the content when they publish it?
Yahoo had a nice interface to allow everyone that was a member of any group to download everything for their personal and private use, and it worked fine. Random external parties republishing other people's old posts though is not OK at all and is a massive breech of privacy, and is a violation.
Because of the threat that one's opinions may be archived and forevermore propagated by random third parties, at this point in history one would have to be insane to express a genuine opinion publicly. Therefore these efforts have a chilling effect on free speech and are inimical to democracy.