alt Hacker NewsBack in the 2000s there was an implicit social contract that websites would treat your uploaded data with respect. You weren't putting your stuff in Chad's garage, you were putting it in a professional seeming storage business that just happened to be free because none of us really understood how to monetize the net.
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I will say personally I didn't feel this way in the 2000's, and I was a child at the start of that decade. Maybe I am cynical.
Back in the 2000s I think a much larger fraction of the web was running out Chad’s garage.
You got a Pentium III and a DSL connection? Run a website! Run an IRC server!
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks
2004 is when that was typed. I'm not sure that that social contract ever existed. We just didn't understand how "free" services worked.
That works when you are the product and they have customers who want to use their humans for some other business activity. If they have viable customers, you are useless as a product.
social contracts stop working when they're not between individual people with a shared experience
when you make a contract with facebook or any other large site you're making a contract with a legal team tasked with protecting their money
at a certain point scale only works through oppression
> websites would treat your uploaded data with respect
Are you saying that the free websites in question owed their users completely free storage of that data, in perpetuity?
How is that a reasonable expectation, regardless of how one viewed "Chad"?
I can agree that that would certainly be nice. But like, with the exception of those who remained in continuous profitable operation, most free sites will end up shut down or sold, so either the data will be deleted, or someone is going to be paying for servers continuously to preserve that data forever. No one will do that and expect $0.
I'd also add that I am pretty sure of all random things uploaded to random sites 20 years ago, 99% of it is either content no one cares about today, or content that the uploader kept on their own disk or their paid cloud storage.