People are informing me of e-mails coming from MEDIAFIRE today about how they're going to start classifying accounts as "abandoned" if they don't meet certain criteria, and the offered content of those accounts will be deleted, starting January. 
For decades on the Internet, we've had this situation where a company "helpfully" offers to be the image/sound/file-sharing platform, "generously" allowing users to host important and not so important stuff. In doing so, they become, essentially, libraries, storehouses, archives.
And then you know what happens? It turns out the "free" service functioning "helpfully" and which has driven out any competition or a fair price-oriented business that could compete, itself closes down or switches to jacking up its prices in a death of competition.
Which, you know, whatever, right? Except these sites often contain an entire strata of cultural information. Communities tend to use their own preferred services. When ImageShack/Yfrog changed their policies, years of technical information went poof overnight.
Years and years of information about subjects were completely lost. Here's the top image sharing sites on MySpace in 2006. How many of those are gone?
So, Mediafire it is this time. Who will it be next time?
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