{"id":599,"date":"2024-03-03T16:58:40","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T00:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/?p=599"},"modified":"2024-03-03T16:58:40","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T00:58:40","slug":"files-are-underrated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/2024\/03\/files-are-underrated\/","title":{"rendered":"Files are underrated"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Owing to a recent crusade of mine to start dispensing opinions to companies who may or may not want want them, I found myself corresponding earlier this week with a software company that\u2019s turning an app I love from being a document-based app that saves good old fashioned files on your computer, to being an app where there are no files and everything is managed in a database\/iCloud.<\/p>\n<p>It might seem like a benign difference (in a lot of ways everything still behaves like a file in the app), but this is a big regression, and it&#8217;s becoming an increasingly common move in software companies&#8217; enshittification playbook. Files are great! I shared with this company the things I love about files, and here\u2019s an altered version of that list:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If I have files, I can sync them in any web service I want. Dropbox, Box.com, iCloud, doesn\u2019t matter. Hell, I can even sync them using git!<\/li>\n<li>I can choose <em>not<\/em> to sync files if I want to, keeping them privately on my own hard drive.<\/li>\n<li>I can make backups of files, and I have full control over the tools and strategy. I can use Time Machine, or a cloud service like Backblaze, or I can do something even simpler and just make extra copies of files whenever I\u2019m about to make major revisions. I can use some combination of the above.<\/li>\n<li>I can organize files however I want. I can have lots of different folders that are organized by whatever I like, and I can keep files in them. Hell, I can even alias\/shortcut files and let the same file virtually be in more than one location (in fact, in macOS I can have hard links where they aren\u2019t even shortcuts to each other; the same file can literally be in multiple places at once!)<\/li>\n<li>When I\u2019m working on a project and I have files I made with different apps, I can put all those related files into the same folder for that project instead of having to remember every app I used and then trying to find the file in each of those apps.<\/li>\n<li>If I want to share a copy of something with someone, I can just email them a copy of the file. Or a link to the file in Dropbox, or put it on a flash drive, or use AirDrop, or one of countless other ways a file can be shared with someone.<\/li>\n<li>If I stop paying a subscription fee to the app I use to make a file, the files I made with that app are still mine and there and accessible to me.<\/li>\n<li>If the company that makes an app I\u2019m using shuts down, my files remain intact.<\/li>\n<li>I don\u2019t have to worry that an app maker holding my file in the cloud lost it or corrupted the data; I and I alone am responsible for the safekeeping and backup of my files.<\/li>\n<li>If I have a file on my hard drive, I can open it using any app that is willing and able to read that file. I don\u2019t have to go through some rigamarole of exporting the file to the other app or sending a copy, or using a share sheet. I can just open a file in place with the app of my choice.<\/li>\n<li>If I have a file from a completely different computer platform, even from decades ago, there\u2019s still a very good chance I can open it with a modern app, maybe with some conversion. Data stored in some custom app database or online service is not likely to be accessible in the future.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Storing files isn&#8217;t the right choice for every app (a reminders app probably shouldn&#8217;t keep your to-dos as text files in a folder), but as a default, I love files. Files have withstood the test of time as a great abstraction of data, and the concept has persisted for decades, across a lot of different tech transitions.<\/p>\n<p>The modern tech world is increasingly hostile to the concept of files though. Instead things live in web services as records in a database. Your Spotify library isn\u2019t a folder of MP3 files; it\u2019s a list of references to songs in Spotify\u2019s catalog (and if Spotify loses the song in the catalog, you lost that song). Your documents are often not files anymore; they\u2019re Google docs and they\u2019re a pain in the ass to manage. Your phone might have a Files app but it sucks as a file manager.<\/p>\n<p>And all these modern platforms are worse as productivity platforms for it, because we never really did improve on the file as the core of this kind of computer productivity.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, some stuff is harder to do with files. You can\u2019t easily do Google Docs-style real-time document collaboration with a plain old file in your hard drive. <\/p>\n<p>But a file is something tangible that I can trust. I don\u2019t know that Google will still be running Google Docs in 100 years, or even that Google will be around in 100 years. But I know that a text file I save today will be completely accessible in 100 years; I just have to keep and preserve the file.<\/p>\n<p>PS: To the aforementioned company&#8217;s credit, I did get a response from their CEO, and although my message didn&#8217;t singlehandedly change his mind, the response was personally written and thoughtful, and I can at least appreciate that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Owing to a recent crusade of mine to start dispensing opinions to companies who may or may not want want them, I found myself corresponding earlier this week with a software company that\u2019s turning an app I love from being a document-based app that saves good old fashioned files on your computer, to being an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}