this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Storing so many videos has a financial and ecological cost. When you reach thousands of hours of videos, it's time to ask yourself if it's really useful to keep them all.
Exactly. When video recording was expensive stuff would get thrown out or overwritten a lot. Films had to be stored in the correct environment, video tapes were expensive and got reused. Stuff was lost that arguably would have some value now. But, the world isn’t going to hell for lack of early films or some episodes of a TV show.
Nowadays, it’s just too cheap to make videos and the volume has made the average quality go down. We don’t need to hoard Twitch streams and cat videos. Nothing will be lost that will be missed in 50 years. Conserving some might be interesting but it’s not going to impact people’s lives or history all that much.
Yeah, I can sort of understand the impulse that everything must be preserved no matter what because we don't know what will be useful or interesting, but it's not realistic. Embrace ephemerality! It's fine!
Even if you are in favor of preserving "everything", streamers produce a lot of crap that really is completely useless like a 30 minute start of the archived video that is just an image with a timer ticking down or just a static image.
Those aren't typically included in highlights.
I think what a lot of people are missing here is that this isn't just raw VODs, those already do expire automatically. But the highlight function was explicitly supposed to be for long-term archival, Twitch told users to highlight anything they want saved, and now that rug is getting pulled out from under them.
Want to bet it is largely a few idiots who took that to mean "highlight everything" who ruined that for everyone?
I'd imagine the bulk of this is speedruns. Those add up to a lot of hours worth of VODs, but they are absolutely worth keeping. As I've said in another comment above, speedrun.com is suddenly going to be a graveyard of dead links.
Why are they all worth keeping? Wouldn't it be enough to keep something like the top 20 or top 100 in each category for every game? Should be easy to archive those with a month of time for each particular game's community.
Well it's not just the current records that need to be preserved, historical records matter too. And even non-top runs may still matter, for examples like the discovery of a new technique or glitch, or the first person to achieve it in a run.
If you've ever watched something like SummoningSalt's world record progression documentaries, those are made possible by the fact that all of this footage is available for him to comb through. And we do need all of it, because who's to say what could turn out to be important later that we'll only realize is missing after it's gone?
I look at a channel like Kitboga and I see immense value in keeping g over a thousand multiple-hours-long videos.
And what is the immense value in that? Barely anyone will watch any of those videos. For most of those multiple-hour-long videos you can probably count the number of views after the initial week or so (when people watch who didn't see it live) in the single digits per month if not per year or overall.