Eh. The Internet is too full of useless crap thst costs energy to keep alive. No one needs endless swathes of boring videos. If there are some valuable recordings there, then they can preserve those.
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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I agree in this case but this is what they thought at the dawn of computing, too and we lost a lot of history.
True but at the dawn of computing we were too naïve. We couldn't imagine people would record everything.
I think the point is that you can't know what you don't know. They weren't naive back then, they were ignorant and limited by the technology of the time.
We preserve stuff precisely because we don't know how it might be useful in the future.
We have a name for things we know for sure won't be useful in the future: Trash.
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Who gets to decide what’s valuable?
There's definitely a spectrum, but I would hope creators themselves could do that.
Hopefully the content creator instead of the platform.
Once again reinforcing the fact that "the cloud" is still someone else's computer. If you want control over your data, you really need to look into self hosting. Otherwise, don't be surprised when that someone else decides to change the rules for using their computer. I also can't help but think that the more the internet matures, the more the version we had in the 90's makes sense. Web 2.0 was a mistake.
The cloud is one of the worst industry terms ever created. Old people still have zero concept and ability to understand how it works. Just had to deal with this with a grandmother who "backed up everything to the cloud before I reset it!"
It basically started out as a literal cloud for "everything else" in network diagrams.
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We have all got very accustomed to the notion that we can put content on a website and it will stay there forever, permanently available, as if that site somehow has an obligation to look after it. But they don't.
It sucks, and there will be a lot of stuff lost, but it's also good to have a reminder that if there's data you really care about, you need to look after that data yourself.
It seems like since my generation had "If you put something on the Internet it'll be there forever" drilled into us as kids, many of us feel entitled to "the internet" preserving our data for us. Most people don't realize how much labor and resource usage goes into preserving data forever.
Did you genuinely interpret that as a child to mean "If you put something on the Internet will be safe forever"?
As I'm sure you are now aware as an adult, the intended meaning is very much "If you put something on the Internet which is embarrassing to you or damaging to your reputation, then it will be around forever"
It's a warning that the things you don't want to stick around could end up being precisely the things which do.
In announcing the change, Twitch cited the "costly" indefinite storage of these highlights, which it says are responsible for "less than 0.1% of hours watched" across the site.
I don't know how many hours are watched on Twitch, but I bet it's so many that 0.1% is still a fuckton of hours.
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speedrun.com leaderboards are going to be a wasteland of dead links. What do we do with records that get lost?
Download them and host them yourself.
A month's notice just isn't enough time to archive this much history.
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I'm particularly worried about all the historical records. Summoning Salt & similar channels are gonna have problems after this, especially after the policy has been in place for several years and stuff made in this very era expires.
I wouldn't be surprised if Archive Team tries their best at archiving the current situation (difficult as it is) but nobody is going to bother doing it on-going and a WR obsoleted for months is interesting material only when edited into a documentary.
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they should just build and maintain more datacenters to store millions of hours of useless video instead
I'm way more surprised that Twitch even has video storage that old.
I have streamed a bit, and my videos were limited to one month? Maybe even less.
Twitch was never meant for video storage, so this move is not unexpected.
If you want to keep a video, download it, always. Even on Youtube you are not guaranteed to have videos forever. They still have my vid, which is almost 20 years old, nobody watches it... and it's helping no one.
Which is to say we need better preservation methods for digital content.
VODs do expire automatically, but Twitch has explicitly said in the past that if you want to archive something, highlight it. Highlights WERE meant for storage. So this feels like they're suddenly reneging on that.
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I'm surprised Twitch hasn't done this sooner honestly. Considering some users have tens of thousand of hours worth of 1080p full length streams, I can only imagine how many terrabytes of data these users have been utilizing on their servers.
This should be a cautionary tale for anyone that relies too much on the cloud. You need to have your own local backups for when, not if, this eventually happens to other cloud providers in the future.
I once received 1TB free 'lifetime' storage from a hoster. After gladly using it for 5 years, I suddenly had to start paying €5 per month because "they could not maintain the operating costs".
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A hot and uneducated take: nothing of value will be lost. Nobody will ever go searching through a defunct twitch account's 142 hours of Minecraft speedrun attempts. If it's valuable, back it up locally
I think this can be true for large swaths of the information that will be lost, but there's also a lot that will be lost that nobody is currently backing up. For instance:
- Recordings people think are backed up simply because they're misinformed, only to realize all their old, say, childhood gaming videos are now lost forever
- Clips that show damning behavior about a popular public figure that weren't caught before, but could become evidence in a future investigation
- Clips previously thought to not be relevant, that then become relevant later on for some kind of general historical context (e.g. Campaigns started trying to figure out if something was in a game at a given time in a game with very little actual software backed up, devlog streams that contained lost features that could explain why a game then developed the way it is today, etc)
nothing of value will be lost
I'd argue the opposite: there's actually a lot of stuff out there that's actually interesting: old-school lets-players who'd have done actual informative playthroughs of games. It's kind of a dying art, but it's also exactly the kind of content that's going to get purged by this kind of action.
It's interesting to spend, say, 10 hours watching some guy play Sierra games and actually talk through shit about the game and whatnot, and it'd be a shame to have that vanish.
But not entirely unexpected since that's not profitable content in the way that the current morons babbling about bullshit reaction videos, totally-not-camgirls totally not showing their tits, and whatever other brainrot nonsense most of twitch is. (Also alt-right propaganda, but eh.)
The people complaining about this in the article are largely hysterical and delusional.
Perfect embodiment of 'always online' brain.
They genuinely believe Twitch is some kind of public good, some kind of default level of infrastructure like plumbing, that just works, forever, with no problems, because magic.
Hosting videos almost no one watches is a waste of money, and deleting them is among the least worst things Twitch can do to keep the lights on.
Twitch is a massive loss leader in a hyperprofit oriented conglomerate megacorp, in a shit-tier economy thats primed to become a burning-dumpster-of-shit-tier economy very soon.
Amazon is giving people months of warning.
But people are freaking out.
....
If you want to save some videos... go buy a 1 or 2 or 4 TB HDD, internal or external, and start saving shit to it. 4 TB HDDs look like they're going for between roughly $80 to $150, or about 4 to 8 chipotle burritos delivered via personal chauffeur.
The vast majority of Twitch streams and thus highlights are in 1080p, 60fps, 6K bitrate.
Thats roughly 4.5 GB per hour, and thats rounding up.
These people complaining about 'oh it'd be a full time job to save 5,000 of footage'...
Come on.
Thats 6 of those 4 TB HDDs, for 5000 hours.
https://github.com/ihabunek/twitch-dl
This has been around since 2018, and there are batch downloader clis that people have built off of it.
You wanna save 5000 hours of your shit?
Buy some HDDs, learn how to run some python.
...
The level of entitlement is ... just comical, basically.
The alternatives Twitch would be looking at, instead of reducing cost by axing tons of videos almost no one watches, would be things like:
Making watching streaming in higher resolutions/frame rates a premium tier cost for viewers,
Dramatically amping up the presence of unskippable advertisements,
Dramatically altering the revenue splits from ad revenue and how much of a streamer subscribers payment actually goes to the streamer,
Or keeping that split the same but jacking up viewer subscription/bit costs.
It sucks but I understand the reasons. Anything of true importance to someone should have been downloaded and/or upload somewhere else as it happens.
it's not as easy as it sounds. The hosting on Twitch wasn't just for videos but for the chat logs synced to that video as well. So you can't just download the videos and upload them somewhere else you have to download them using Twitch's shitty tools so that you get the chat as well.
That takes a lot of time but they only got about a month to do that. And that assumes that one actually has the time, energy, access and expertise to download the stuff. What about disabled streamers? What about families of deceased streamers? They now have a month to figure all this stuff out if they even receive the news at all.
That is mainly an issue caused by the fact that the whole chat synchronization thing never got developed into an open format since everyone who cared about it was just fine with companies using their own proprietary format for it.
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Streamers can host it themselves. From what I hear around Lemmy hosting and streaming video is so cheap it can be done without money from ads ;)
"cheap" is relative.
While I don’t particularly care about this specific thing, I have read articles and what not suggesting that the times we live in…. In the future, are going to be similar to the dark ages because there won’t be much data that survives from all of these companies deleting everything…
MySpace is another example… geocities before it…. We have paper zines that were printed in small quantities from before the internet was around, but stuff on the internet just disappears…
I think that’s why they even started the internet archive.
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It’s time to use Peertube and Owncast!
Peertube won't cut it. Those people in the article have thousands of hours of videostreams there. If you're streaming at 1080p, that will be around 1.5GB of storage per hour. 4k will be worse. So if you have 5000 hours of videos like the one guy in the article, that is a neat 7500GB or 7.5TB of video. There is no instance around that will allow you to save that amount of videos.
So hosting your own instance would be the only way. Looking at Hetzner storage box, 10TB of data will cost you 25€/month or 300€/years. That is money, but should be possible to pay out of your own pocket.
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.
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I look at a channel like Kitboga and I see immense value in keeping g over a thousand multiple-hours-long videos.
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Good, that's a part of the internet that brought more brainrot than anything.
Well, yes.. there's a lot of brainrot and useless content there, but also a lot of fond memories for people. Not all streamers are made equal. You're also forcing all the GDQs, esport tournaments and all the individual moments from over the years to find a new hosting source..most likely youtube.. whose monopoly we're also trying to get away from. (at least I hope they can download and upload somewhere else, because if not...)
Again, server space and app stores are the new feuds of the modern feudal lord. The sooner all that dies and we can rebuild a decentralised model, the better. It's a shame for the fond memories, however, how pathetic one's life has to be that its fond memories are on Twitch surrounded by ads for gfuel and hello fresh...
How pathetic does one need to be to only have surface experience of something before they decide to judge it and insult people over enjoying aspects of it... You're literally wasting your time on the internet belittling someone else's life.. how is that not pathetic?
Cry me a river. It will still disappear and the overwhelming majority of people won't miss it. Next time don't rely on digital feuds to store your fond memories.
Smash that subscribe button and don't forget to buy some gfuel using the code imaregard, it will make you more alert and better at your video games. Afterwards you can jump to our friend streamer who's selling shit to kids from an inflatable pool while wearing only a bikini. Such fond memories.
I've watched under an hour of twitch streams in my entire life and even I know your opinion is ignorant
You made up your mind years ago after seeing a couple of shitty streamers. Did you even form the opinion yourself or was it based on a reddit thread?
I've watched under an hour of twitch streams in my entire life
Of course you have...
The only "streamer" I've watched is Emily Hopkins playing harp.
I'd suggest that you check it out but the community is really nice and I don't think you'd fit in
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Another win for peertube and owncast.