Linkrot is always a problem for the web, but please let’s not purposefully destroy our own content when it’s easy to keep it going. John Gruber on 538 shutting everything down:
Why not keep the FiveThirtyEight site up and running — at least for a while, if not in perpetuity? It costs practically nothing to run a website serving a static/archived website. I don’t get it. It betrays a profound level of disrespect for the work that the site hosted.
Seth is a Perpetual Startup ⁂ @manton Totally agree. It's history too! People/companies/corporations just don't get it! Yuck!
Ιωνας i was not familiar with the site in question. generally if it’s intellectual property / copyrighted that it makes sense that they would shut it down, as it is theirs to make free/paywalled/removed.
also generally there is a balance between archival of those things abandoned, and the right to have data deleted (per EU and California)
Manton Reece @jonah It’s their right to take it down, but especially in this case there was a lot of valuable data (for elections and polls) that was freely available. I think a magazine is the best comparison, it’s just a loss for the web if all those articles are now gone.
Mike Gunderloy There’s a business risk to being the site that people could continue to link to showing Trump approval ratings sinking fast. Don’t know how significant a factor that was, but given that ABC just handed Trump a $15M payoff a couple months ago I’m certainly suspicious.
Manton Reece @ffmike That’s an interesting point. If it was me, I would’ve spent a little time making the site have some kind of “archived” banner… But if they fired everyone, no chance to change anything.