[aimazon]

Headline: 2.6M posts

Reality: the forum has negative 358 posts in the last month. The forum has negative ~2k posts over the last 12 months. The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them. 8 people have created accounts in the last year.

The forum has been long dead.

[pembrook]

Apparently any piece of informational older than a year has no value to you?

Thankfully you aren't writing the laws in my country.

Creating a law that makes internet creators want to delete all historical record for fear of potential prosecution under extremely broad terms -- doesn't seem like it's in the interest of the greater good.

[aimazon]

The law has absolutely nothing to do with historic content, it has no provisions for or relevance to content published decades ago. Even in the most cautious response to this law, there is no reason to take content offline.

[phendrenad2]

Counterpoint: I read the law and it seems to me that it absolutely does apply to historic content. Ultimately you may be right, but the fact that there isn't a clear answer means nobody without thousands of dollars to throw at lawyers can take that risk.

[Barrin92]

this is a strange framing because Britain had internet and content laws before these recent changes and people were just fine with the risk that came with running them.

Let's be real, for most dead sites this is an excuse for old admins to close the thing down because they got tired of running it. For sites with fewer than millions of users you basically needed to add a contact form and report button. These places are just deserted, and instead of having a few angry oldheads screaming at you, you can just blame the government

[phendrenad2]

> Britain had internet and content laws before these recent changes and people were just fine with the risk that came with running them

I think it's equally likely that people didn't take them seriously, but each new law has had increasingly dire consequences AND has been increasingly difficult to decipher. So there's that.

[ziddoap]

I'm not sure why you're comparing total posts to monthly new posts. The tragedy here is that 2.6 million posts, potentially full of great content, is being deleted.

>The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them.

They've been in read-only mode, more or less, for awhile. Primarily, again, due to the (at the time proposed, now passed) law.

Not to mention, this comment is missing the forest for the trees. This is not the only forum or website to shutter operations in the wake of the UK Online Safety Act.

[aimazon]

The forum has had less than 100k posts in the last 10 years.

Forums and small websites have been killed off by changing consumer behaviour, the shift to big social media platforms. Using big numbers to suggest that the UK Online Safety Act is responsible for killing off these smaller independent websites is disingenuous.

If you do the same exercise for the other forums, you’ll find they’re all long dead too.

[ziddoap]

I posted another example in this thread of someone running forums with 275k monthly active users that also decided to shut down. That does not qualify as "long dead".

That's just one other example. I can assure you that it is not just long-dead forums deciding to shut down, despite your preconceived notion.

[aimazon]

You’re falling for the big numbers that do not stand up to scrutiny. There’s no such forum shutting down. Are you referring to lfgss? First, it’s not shutting down, second, the user numbers are completely wrong. As is the claim that the platform supports over 300 forums. You’re an order of magnitude off. Go and visit it and look at the activity, it’s clinging to life. 275k active users? Pure fiction.

[ziddoap]

I'll avoid searching for other examples, as you seem to want to latch onto the example itself rather than the broader message the examples communicate. The fact is that some people are shutting down operations of websites, deleting data, etc. in response to this law.

Just considering that the law is forcing people to think about shutting down operations is a sign that the law is having a chilling effect. Both for existing websites and the potential creation of new ones.

Just because you believe yourself to be the sole arbiter of which websites are valuable and which can be deleted without worry doesn't change the fact that this law is having a negative effect on small websites.

Perhaps with better communication about the law, rather than the hundreds on hundreds of pages of vague guidance, the law could remain as-is and small website operators wouldn't be as concerned. However, that is not the case.

[aimazon]

Some people are protesting against this law by threatening to shut down their websites or by deleting content. The founder of lfgss explicitly said they’re against the law on principle.

I think historic content is very valuable which is why I am offended by this absurd response on hacker news where people are conflating the actions of a protest with the consequence of a law.

If someone chooses to protest this law by deleting their website then more power to them but we must be honest about what it is: protest.

People should be considerate about the consequence of the services they release onto the internet. We can debate the specifics of whether certain requirements are reasonable/fair/beneficial but it’s patently absurd to label choices these website owners are making as being caused by this law. The law has zero to do with historic content, there’s not a single risk to anyone who leaves a website online in read only mode as an archive.