[jotaf]

> significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience

A few things to consider:

- The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops projects without a good reason from the users' point of view.

- A bare-bones deletion/flagging UI does not seem like a huge undertaking (though as an engineer I realizing it's not exciting work); working things out with a non-profit such as the Internet Archive or a museum could be an even lower-cost solution.

- 90's websites are also hideous ("worse user experience") by today's standards, yet they have charm and are a product of their times. I don't think anyone would argue that they should be deleted on account of that, just like ancient pottery often has "badly drawn" human figures yet the value is in the cultural expression. There are digital conservation efforts by museums (e.g. restoring 80's arcade games); I'm sure that consulting with a digital conservator would have arrived at a very different treatment of this data.

[john-shaffer]

> The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops projects without a good reason from the users' point of view.

That ship has sailed. Google's reputation for instability can't get any worse. At this point, it would take a complete 180° and a good 5-10 years of angelic behavior from Google for me to even consider relying on them in any capacity.

[thaumasiotes]

I was going to say the same. The reputational damage is significant if Google is actively trying to change their reputation, but zero if not.

[lizardmancan]

gmail is still nice. I wonder when they are going to "work" on that.

i stll giggle at my ignorance thinking they wouldnt do youtube and search.

i really mis search, it was such a nice product. Now it is so bad that internet natives who could slap together a website in 20 min dont understand when i ask them why they have no website of their own. "you mean like a resume?"

they are right of course. no one would ever find it.

[quest88]

Just a quick rebuttal to your second point:

Implementing flagging and deletion is easy-ish, the maintenance is hard.

There's maintenance for unit, integration, and web driver tests. Someone needs to be oncall when they fail or become flaky. Someone needs to keep them up to date as tools and infra are deprecated. What's the SLA and SLO? Someone will have to maintain that. Who responds to monitoring?

Regulatory changes require effort, tests need to be updated, legal needs to sign off, UX may need to be involved. Who will make sure the sites maintain regulatory requirements?

You're right that it may be better to partner with someone else for archiving.

[wikibob]

And yet Amazon Web Services manages to STILL support SimpleDB. Many years (nearly a decade?) after being deprecated.

This sounds like a money problem to me. The argument is that people have to do boring work.

Yes they do, and isn’t that what money is for?

[joshuamorton]

The effort required to maintain a single non-changing binary, while nonzero, is far, faaar less, than the ongoing effort required to maintain user facing tools with regulatory compliance issues.

[zwily]

Why do you say SimpleDB is a single binary?

[lizardmancan]

have someone else put the dump behind a paywall.