BBC to shutter H2G2
Posted in Ubuntu on January 24th, 2011 by doctormoThe BBC has announced massive cuts to it’s online department, with lots of community websites getting the axe. One of the sites facing the chop is the venerable Douglas Adams site H2G2 (Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy) which was pretty much wikipedia, before wikipedia ever existed.
The BBC had successfully smothered the h2g2 community for years, driving down it’s usability and disfiguring it with hard to use single sign-on systems (take note ubuntu one developers!). It didn’t do much to help the ailing community, by investing more in new themes and less in fundamental code changes, required to remove cruft. It’s impossible, for instance, to recover locked user-accounts, remove/deactivate images or link to media.
The H2G2 community has always been special to me, it was my very first online community and a very vibrant one at that. I went to a number of meetups, and had a really great time with other hootooers. Perhaps this is why I’m so sad to see it finally go.
I’m not too surprised of course that the BBC is cutting it’s online budget. As the Register points out, the BBC invests a lot of money into online content. Most of the money for these community sites went on wages of editors and managers of the communities it likes to curate, or on overly complex and siloed computer systems. I get the feeling that the BBC doesn’t really *get* automatism in it’s communities, or even consolidation of systems.
Could you imagine the Ubuntu community if we decided that you couldn’t run a mailing list without at least one paid staff member? Couldn’t start a project without an Ubuntu editor’s nod? We just couldn’t function like that because it’s so damn inefficient to mistrust everyone except staff all the time. Perhaps this is one piece of good news, that we have another nail in the coffin for the old authoritarian thinking that heavily curated communities are best because they have order and regiment.
What are your thoughts or memories of h2g2?
