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Comment by goodside | Hacker News Reader

The moral of the story here is that you shouldn't invest your time and emotional energy into things that actually belong to other people.

You didn't own a website here. You didn't write code, you didn't set up servers, and you didn't sit around worrying about whether you were monetizing well enough to keep the site from imploding under its own popularity. You volunteered to be the curator of an entry in a database owned by a multi-billion-dollar company, you took an abnormal amount of pride in your work, and after a few years they decided your services were no longer needed.

You are owed nothing. Be more careful with how you invest your time from now on.

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The same argument could be flipped on you! I believe you post a lot on Hacker News, but you don't own the code, servers, etc. You are a volunteer commenter. What if someone blocked and deleted all of your comments? Wouldn't you feel the slightest bit of loss?

I would feel freedom. At that moment, my involvement in HN would come to an end, and I would find another way to use the 2 hours or so a day I spend on it. Think about what I could do with 700 hours/year.

Indeed, I would embrace that deletion.

That's good for you, but most likely the average HN user would cry foul and over zealous moderation.

This is why I create a new throwaway account whenever my HN karma gets too high. No attachment, no loss.

Er, you can have that freedom now, if you want it.

That's like telling an alcoholic they don't have to drink. There's a reason why I've _never_ even glanced at Reddit. And I also took the plunge and deleted my Facebook Account. I lost three months of my life to Tribal Wars. I keep my time on HN to a couple hours a day - and it is my principal news source (No Techcrunch/engadge/verge/gizmodo - unless they are linked) - but if a moderator came and said "Deleted, return never again!." - I would embrace it. Not saying that's true for anyone else. I am implying that someone who spent the better part of two years managing a sherlock fan site, only to have it go "poof!" - shouldn't feel bad whatsoever.

Actually, that is one of the things I rather like about HN. The "loss" is built in: after a couple of days, nobody is going to read or respond to any of my comments. Everything I write here will effectively disappear several days from now. And that, somehow, is very refreshing: I don't have to worry about posterity or the future.

HN is my way of indulging in the present. No plans, no worries, no future. Very relaxing.

It's also a way of tricking myself to write. In high school, I never liked writing much and, consequently, was never much of a writer. Now I like it more; hopefully my writing improves correspondingly. HN is obviously no way to become a writer, but that is not my goal: I just want to be able to write clearly, nothing more, nothing less.

If I was doing something more lasting, I would not want to trust a single entity. This is why all my code on GitHub is also backed up at home with the most important projects also backed up on my school account: losing that would actually be painful. Losing my comment history here? Trivial.

It depends; more than once I remember reading something on here from some time ago and I do a site:news.ycombinator.com search.

It's sort of interesting to see discussions about technology that has long since moved on.

I actually came to write that the big takeaway for me was to care about things that actually exist. Pouring your life into a fan site that can one day disappear seems incredibly depressing. In that time others have built companies, relationships and a happy life and you have built: a collection of fan art for an obscure tv show.

Isn't there something better one could be doing?

A more Zenlike takeaway would be to realize that everything has an end and to accept that. There is nothing that can't be taken away from you.

Precisely, I thought the "Feel free to enjoy nothingness for a minute:" quite apt. :x

Accepting that everything has an end and nothing can't be taken away from you is fine, but this doesn't mean you should not focus more on things that can't be taken away from you easily (i.e. until you die).

I read that as "there is nothing that can be taken away from you"

Same frame of mind I think, slightly different way of expressing it. :P

“Music is the space between the notes” – Claude Debussy

It seems harsh to judge somebody like that. It is, after all, a hobby, and it's not like it keeps him from doing other things (like having a relationship) as well.

Besides: your company? It'll probably fail before having more than a couple thousand customers. This page? It certainly had more people interested than that!

So it's not just a viable hobby, but one at which the author was relatively successful.

Wow. Not only is this totally insensitive, and completely fucking rude.. it's also widely naive.

He obviously built value for a lot of people. In addition I'm sure developed some very portable skills. Helping to curate a site that brings that many people joy? We should all be so lucky.

The idea that the rug could be pulled out is indeed a significant lesson, but it's frankly one that both sides of the coin need to learn. Platform sites that encourage users to invest in and create content for will suffer if that content isn't taken good care of, in the long haul.

I don't think the point here is how time was spent but rather how the process was conducted by facebook. There should be a better way for this to handled.

I hate not to sound empathetic but, this is a very good point. You basically just built a sand castle on somebody else's private beach for 2 years and are now crying that it's gone. It's sad & I'm sure it's depressing, but... you owned absolutely nothing you were creating.

The funny thing is that this reminded me instantly of the Twitter API cutdowns. It's the extreme case where really, at the end of the day, the site decides what goes where, a business version of "the government has a monopoly on the use of force."

I feel the exact opposite. The trend in SV seems to be building communities around your product. This is an example of a product that did it very well...someone was so entrenched in the community that it became a huge part of their life. To take that away seems to go against the idea of community.

And what was his product? Somebody else's trademark? show? product?

Or any of the IP. He was fine with the actual IP owner also coming and taking it away from him. But either way he has no claim to any of it.

I don't downvote often, but I've downvoted your comment here because it's just sanctimonious empathy-free wankery that adds nothing at all to the conversation.

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