OK, I’m very late to this news, but it’s still worth recording. Some four months after Nine announced plans to shut down Lifehacker Australia, the site has officially disappeared.
If you visit lifehacker.com.au you just end up redirected to au.lifehacker.com. Despite that subdomain, it’s essentially identical to the main US page (minus a few coupon codes), and nothing I wrote for Australia has been migrated as part of that shift. Visiting my old Australian author page just gives a 404 error.
The same goes for Gizmodo Australia and Kotaku Australia. Everything’s gone.
This is no shock. When the news was first announced, I wrote that “the odds are good that the site will soon disappear altogether”. It was actually more shocking that, after I complained about my name being removed from 11,000-odd still-live articles, there was a temporary reprieve. But only temporary, it turns out.
The moral issue is subtly different to my original complaint. No site has the right to lie and say someone else authored work that I wrote, and I will actively seek to fix that. But if a new owner decides to shut down a site altogether?
That’s ultimately just a business decision, and it happens all the time. Literally thousands of articles I’ve written online have gone down that plughole, across multiple publishers. The Internet is not as permanent as we like to think.
So I’m thankful I’ve long kept copies of everything I write. As I never tire of telling Mark Serrels and anyone else: Never write in the CMS.
So now what? I will revive some of the most notable articles I wrote for Lifehacker (and Giz and Kotaku) as part of my ongoing Unpublished series, so expect a few spurts of that over the next few months.
And yes, Lifehacker really did used to have a Chumby feed.
Lead image: Wayback Machine
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