Personally, I've spent thousands of hours lovely crafting publication-quality opinion pieces. This is what I do for a living, and I gave my time and labor over to Google+ for free.
Now, Google is going to flush all my work down the toilet.
This is hyperbolic. Unless I'm misunderstanding, the thing this person does is write words and words are easily transported to some other publishing platform.
Publishing words also involves a bit of typesetting; not much, but some. It may need to be re-done on a new platform.
Exporting a large body of work is not trivial if you don't know how to do it programatically. Heck, even a blog migration from Blogger to Wordpress isn't flawless, for me it failed to import comments correctly so I lost those.
So, while I agree with your overall sentiment, I can't avoid feeling a bit of pain on behalf of the authors that need to move their work now.
Comments
This is hyperbolic. Unless I'm misunderstanding, the thing this person does is write words and words are easily transported to some other publishing platform.
Publishing words also involves a bit of typesetting; not much, but some. It may need to be re-done on a new platform.
Exporting a large body of work is not trivial if you don't know how to do it programatically. Heck, even a blog migration from Blogger to Wordpress isn't flawless, for me it failed to import comments correctly so I lost those.
So, while I agree with your overall sentiment, I can't avoid feeling a bit of pain on behalf of the authors that need to move their work now.