[Spivak]

If you mark something as 'Not Secure' you're effectively telling users not to access it. It doesn't matter in practice if the content is still accessible when the browser tells people that accessing it is dangerous.

A lot of content that exists on the unmaintained web is going to effectively be lost, and maybe that's okay because the benefits are worth it, but that's the argument that needs to be made.

[tylerhou]

A lot of content which exists on the unmaintained web is going to be lost anyway, regardless of HTTP. Hosting sites shut down after a while. There's a ton of content that was on Geocities, for example, which is now inaccessible.

A migration of newer websites to HTTPS is no more a loss to data than deprecating old versions of HTML in newer versions of Chrome or upgrading newer servers to HTTP/2. The old ones will still exist. And if they cease to exist, it's almost certainly not going to be because a browser displays a "not secure" warning on the top left corner of the scene.

There are also entire websites and communities built upon the archival of data:

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

https://archive.org

[Aaron1011]

> It doesn't matter in practice if the content is still accessible when the browser tells people that accessing it is dangerous.

It certainly does matter. There's a fundamental different between people being discouraged from accessing a website, and said website being completely inaccessible.