Everything Disappears

The internet eats its own. Delicious just proved it again. Yahoo’s bookmark service—which somehow became important to people—is getting shut down. Cue the panic. Suddenly everyone’s running scripts to export their links, hunting for alternatives, signing petitions like a petition is going to matter. It won’t. But I get it. You build something on someone else’s server for years and then one day they decide it’s not worth it anymore.

I’ve watched this happen enough times that it barely registers. AOL. Lycos. MySpace. Google Reader. Flickr started dying the moment Yahoo bought it. YouTube probably won’t exist forever, though it feels too big to kill. But nothing’s too big. Nothing’s permanent. That’s just how it is.

What gets me is how surprised people act, like Delicious was some public utility, like Yahoo gave a shit about their bookmarks. Yahoo’s hemorrhaging money. Google owns search. Of course they cut loose whatever isn’t generating revenue. Of course services disappear. This isn’t tragedy. It’s just the machine.

I’m not innocent about it. I’ve uploaded photos to Flickr thinking they’d be there forever. Stored links, bookmarked articles, built on services that turned out temporary. You do it anyway because the alternative is keeping everything on your own machine, and nobody does that. We need the cloud, or think we do, because it’s free and convenient and asking almost nothing of us except maybe once, when they flip the switch.

Around year ten of watching this, you stop panicking and start accepting. Delicious is gone. Thousands of other things will disappear too. The smart move is never getting attached, never letting your life sit on someone else’s server. The practical move is accepting it happens anyway. I’ll export my bookmarks if I remember to care, and I probably won’t look at them again.