Say au revoir to all the content that was ever posted Yahoo Groups. Will that content cease to exist entirely? Who knows? . . . Maybe that content and all the data that somebody might have harvested from it will continue to exist in somebody’s archive somewhere; it just won’t be available to the those individuals who were induced to use this forum, “one of the world's largest collections of online discussion boards” (according to Wikipedia) lulled by the sense that the services there were supposedly free and so convenient.
Now it’s far from convenient if that’s where you trusted to have your data reside. The content people offered up to the Yahoo platform’s care taking will evanesce in a wholesale deletion on December 14th. If you want to try to save all your own content yourself, Yahoo says there is a process you can follow to try to do so, but, according to Ars Technica “It can take up to 30 days for the request to finish processing and the download to become available.”
For more information, the deletions which are imminent have been written about here: Goodbye, Yahoo Groups — Yahoo is deleting all content ever posted to Yahoo GroupsYou have until December 14 to download files before they're permanently removed, by Jon Brodkin, October 17, 2019, Deleting Yahoo Groups will leave a permanent stain on Yahoo’s legacy- The once-popular community site is part of internet history. Now Verizon plans to bulldoze much of it, by Harry McCracken, October 17, 2019, Yahoo Groups Is Winding Down and All Content Will Be Permanently Removed, - Users won't be able to upload new content to the site after October 28 and have until December 14 to archive their content, Yahoo said in an announcement, by Jordan Pearson, October 16, 2019.
One of those articles, Fast Company’s, observes that:
deleting a couple of decades of existing material, Verizon is eradicating a meaningful chunk of the internet’s collective memory. The Yahoo Groups archive is an irreplaceable record of what people cared about in its heyday. If it survived, it would only grow more valuable with time.The Vice article notes:
This isn't the first time that Yahoo has turned the switch off on an important, if niche, platform and left users in the lurch. In 2009, Yahoo shut down GeoCities, taking roughly 7 million personal websites with it. At the time, digital archivists raced to save what content they could.
"These guys found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse," archivist Jason Scott told Time soon after it was shut down.The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away. We’ve been saying that already in other contexts. For instance, we just pointed out how the New York libraries were replacing DVDs with internet streaming of films from Kanopy (the internet giveth). . But now the libraries are discontinuing the Kanopy film streaming service (the internet taketh away). See: Kanopy, The Internet Movie Streaming Service That Was Being Used By NYC Libraries To Help Make Up For Elimination Of DVDs Is Now Being Abandoned!- The internet giveth! And The internet taketh away!
Or consider this National Notice article by Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White: There are about fifteen different ways to get your news from Democracy Now; just one of them is safely not through the internet (the internet giveth) and safely immune to its shut down and censorship (internet taketh away). That alternative to the DN pipes that all flow through the internet is WBAI terrestrial radio. . . .
National Notice: How To Listen To “Democracy Now”- A Mind Boggling List of Possibilities For A Program That Was Incubated By Terrestrial Radio In NYC: Plus, Part II, A Few Cautions About Internet “Generosity”. . . But, right now, a minority rogue faction of individuals, including some that managed to get on the Pacifica radio network’s national board, executed an unauthorized, stealth-attack shut down of WBAI. Who knows who encouraged and supplied resources to these renegades? The Pacifica board, having voted to reverse their destruction, is still working to get WBAI back on the air. The excuse for the WBAI shutdown?: The internet has bled financial resources from all of the five Pacifica terrestrial radio stations, so its time to engage in some disaster capitalism tactics to corporatize and privatize Pacifica Network assets (the internet taketh away).
The rogue faction shutting down WBAI seemed very intent on destruction and removed from the internet all of WBAI’s archives, an Orwellian move that overnight banished all of WBAI’s history as well as recent, topical shows from the public access (the internet taketh away).
Back to Yahoo: Did you know that when Verizon, which owns AOL, acquired Yahoo, Yahoo became an identical clone of AOL? The internet taketh away. Did you know that AOL and Yahoo then simultaneously imposed new rules severely limiting the number of people you could include in your email group lists? The internet taketh away. That meant that existing group email lists you may have been using to communicate, for instance, with active and involved members of Citizens Defending Libraries could no longer be used as before. Did you know that this is at a time when sending out such emails with curated information has become an especially important tool to cut through the noise and manipulation of the internet? . . The internet taketh away.
In some respects, the ability to put up and share content via Yahoo Groups was viewed as an alternative to Facebook. Another alternative to Facebook, Google+, was taken down and all its content disappeared with its takedown. Everything that Yoko Ono had posted there disappeared. The internet taketh away. It was taken down at the same time that Facebook was launching a censorship campaign working with the NATO war group, the Atlantic Council. By going down just at the same time as the Facebook censorship campaign was launched, no one needed to try to observe whether the Google+ “competing” site would run a parallel censorship operation to Facebook’s.
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