Trusting third-party services with your data, a cautionary tale

Quoting [Nelson’s weblog][3]:

Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.

Ouch. A lesson learned the hard way:

My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like [Tom does][2].

One of the many reasons I don’t write my reviews on Goodreads and host them on my website instead is precisely the risk of losing them all one day¹. The same with Twitter. I have been on Twitter since 2009 and was very active there. I [witnessed][6] the BBS era. Since then, I’ve seen oh-so-many “too big to fail” services coming and going, I could fill a book.

Tweeting is quicker and faster, yes. So is writing a review on Goodreads. If I don’t feel like opening vim to write something, though, then it’s probably not worth sharing in the first place.

Posting on Goodreads or Twitter grants more visibility, that’s for sure. I understand that clicking a link to leave the platform is an effort that not everyone is willing to make. I’m probably losing followers on Twitter and ‘friends’ on Goodreads. That’s fine². Those remaining are likely to be more interested in my content and, ultimately, in me as a person.

Most of the stuff I write here is meant for myself anyway. If what I write happens to also be interesting for other readers, that’s cool, but it’s not the primary goal. I feel much better now that I own my content. The switch from social media content production to [POSSE][4] was beneficial and is something I advise everyone to do.