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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

I guess it's a fair post-mortem for G+ the product, but I'm personally more interested in what happens to content on G+. For example, Linus Torvalds blogged on it (eg. dead link https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCY... about why he switched away from Suse), and many others as well. The content is why I occasionally went there, and why people outside Google posted there (assuming a big name won't let them down); certainly not a generic group chat/mail site.

We're being told on https://plus.google.com/ that [Google] are in the process of deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts and Google+ pages. but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?

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98%+ of all Google+ public content was archived and was / will be posted to the Internet Archive.

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google%2B

You'll need to know, or track down, the user or content page to find it. E.g.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190102053619/https://plus.goog...

Raw archive dumps:

https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_googleplus

Excellent. Thanks for sharing.

> but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?

I might be misremembering, but wasn't the decision to completely kill Google+ made soon after a Google+ bug exposing account data was revealed (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/google-bug-expos...)? Given how integrated Google+ was with the rest of Google, keeping it alive, even in read-only mode, could be a security risk even for unrelated Google services.

Or just maintain the dang thing and leave it alone. I know that's not free, but what the heck even was their original plan for paying for it if it wasn't ad revenue?

It's not static content. It would have been expensive to keep the services running. Not just in terms of computing and storage, but also for the headcount. Speaking of the latter, who would want to work on maintaining a read-only version of a project frozen in time? (The enterprise version will evolve, etc.) I am not even going into the legal implications.

As dredmorbius posted, the content is going to live on at the Internet Archive just fine (Google could maybe redirect to them, don't they?).

Your post begs the question, though, why it had to be served as dynamic content in the first place (if it actually was which I'm not sure it was) when it would've been the obvious thing to use just plain HTML. I'm thinking about authors putting in considerable effort into publishing content on G+ (or other platform for that matter). Why would they use an authoring tool that is exclusive to that platform when we have HTML? Why wouldn't they care about their docs being inaccessible if the platform dies?

What IA is doing is their business. I don't see Google linking or redirecting to them ever, for many reasons: security, (mostly) opening themselves to litigation from random users, etc.

Why shouldn't it be served as dynamic content, if that's how the system works? All social networks and even most blogging platforms are built like that. I'm not talking about just the contents of individual posts, I'm also thinking of their ranking, as well as smaller details such as user names hyperlinked from the post body. All the data and metadata is stored across a large number of databases. I don't know of any products similar in scope that consist of pre-rendered HTML. Sure, you can scrape or render the HTML at a point in time, but that opens a new can of worms.

Fair points, but I guess I'm just puzzled how we've come to be fascinated by the business and technical side of Google+'s demise more than being worried about loosing almost all digital history of our times (not with Google+ specifically ;). Rendering HTML in web browsers seems like a problem solved 25 years ago, and so does authoring and server-side rendering (eg. SGML can pull metadata and compose fragments out of databases or whatever you want). But the 2010's have, I dunno, "educated" us to see script-heavy approaches and "platforms" as progress when in reality they're anything but, neither technically, nor from the PoV of author independence, nor for publisher syndication, nor for readers suffering through ads and tracking. Maybe dynamic content is the first we're going to loose, so with a 2010's media blackout, in 2035 we'll all be wondering what this decade was like.

> who would want to work on maintaining a read-only version of a project

For money? Lots of people.

Does Google have a fascination with only hiring people that want to write dissertations about their project of the month?

There is still access, just not public access. This is google, not a nonprofit.

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