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.

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.

Want to bet it is largely a few idiots who took that to mean "highlight everything" who ruined that for everyone?

True but at the dawn of computing we were too naïve. We couldn't imagine people would record _everything_.

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.

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

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.

I'd love a future where everything is decentralized and federated. But in the here and now, it's just not pragmatically feasible for any independent non-commercial service to challenge the sheer amount of bandwidth and infrastructure a service like Twitch needs. Look at how many competitors have already tried to take on Twitch and failed miserably, and those were commercial startups with VC money. Furthermore, even in the utopian future where ActivityPub streaming takes over, I still wouldn't want all this history to be lost. Like this is such a devastating blow to speedrun.com leaderboards, for example, so many records will now be dead links.

I can't relate. If it is/was important someone has archived it. These companies are an arm of the oligarchy, if losing these memories is the first step to their demise, then I'm all for it.

Yes, absolutely, but we also preserve everything because separating the wheat from the chaff is too much work. For example, most people store all the pictures they take because it's easier than selecting the ones we might want later. But we kmow some of them are useless.

Who has the space to archive all of speedrun.com's leaderboards?

So fuck them, for something they had no control or voice over?

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.

I look at a channel like Kitboga and I see immense value in keeping g over a thousand multiple-hours-long videos.

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.

Well, they chose to stream on a huge company's website and were entirely content to rely on that company for access to that data, so yes.

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.

Well I guess they could download them all?