Like for the past few years, browsing reddit is basically a daily routine for me. Now Reddit is dying, I feel like a part of me died. A website filled with many years of content… will soon be gone. I heard rumours that they are planning to purge the site of “undesirable” content before their IPO. I fear same thing will happen to youtube. I don’t have the resources to save all the content online, and watching sites die is painful. Reddit’s death triggered my fear for losing all those amazing youtube channels that I occasionally binge rewatch. (Does anyone else rewatch youtube videos over and over on a weekly basis? Maybe I’m just weird.

So this is what the internet is? Just a cycle of sites being born and dying, just like humans being born and dying. Omg whats the meaning of life…

Umm… sorry for the weird existential monologue. Lol

  • OrangeSlice@lemmy.mlMEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Some of us have been through this sort of thing before. At the end of the day, it’s a normal and predictable result of using a corporate/walled garden website. The great news is that there is a shift for many toward alternatives in the fediverse. Not to say that content loss is never going to be an issue again, but since everything is open-ended, it should be a bit more resilient to various “business decisions” that can cause it to be lost.

    I hope it motivates many to become web archivists. If anybody is able to financially invest in digital storage, I encourage them to join up at [email protected] and keep copies of all the good stuff you find, including YouTube channels!

    I think that when it comes to video content, that is generally the most difficult to store and distribute. Peertube exists and the fediverse equivalent for free as in freedom and beer content, however creators who want to monetize their content are also finding paths that they are in control of which is also great. By that I mean services like Nebula and CuriosityHub. Paywalls aren’t so bad if everyone behind it is putting out premium level content (although I do have some bones to pick with those services in their existing state).