I've been at it for months
Nothing is permanent
My dad sometimes asks me to help him find some movie from the 70s or 80s and it simply doesn't exist anymore. The internet promised me I'd never be in that situation myself. The internet lied.
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2026
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Everyone told me, why are you keeping all those harddrives with old movies and media and porn and comic books and books and audio lectures and all that shit. Why you hoarding it?
And after thirty years I was like, you know what, maybe they're right. I'm just hoarding at this point.
But then I check online and shit is disappearing forever. I knew it would happen 30 years ago, and took precautions. It may not be much but I did my part.
All of us already pay for it. It's time to stop sucking corpo dick. Building a company out of garage, to exploit every angle isn't something to celebrate. That data center and that power line and power plants everyone pays for isn't a bastion to stand on. Everyone is paying for it. It's not magic, the content creators are being grifted as well.
Been doing it for more than a decade... and never stop
There are yt-dlp GUIs with SponsorBlock built-in.
Warning: after using SponsorBlock and uBlock Origin for a while, using YouTube or Invidious without them is horrific.
It was a bummer for me when Trash Discourse nuked their own channel without warning. I disagreed with them on many topics, but their essays on sex work, sex history, and queer history were great. I wish I had downloaded them.
This one makes me chuckle every time. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=asgfeRXdjxc&pp=ygUkYmF0aHJvYmUgZGFuY2UgaW4gYSBwc3ljaGlhdHJpYyB3YXJk
Still trying to get all my favorite flash videos...
Harry Potter vs DBZ on Newgrounds two decades later is still funnier than everything YouTube pushes out.
Was it archived by flashpoint? I know their focus was games, but they did have some videos too.
STACHER7 FOR YT-DLP
yt-dlp is the gold standard for ripping YouTube vids (as well as vids/music from damn near anywhere else). However, yt-dlp is not particularly user friendly, like, at all. There is a GUI wrapper called Stacher7 that makes it a whole lot easier to use. It's one of the better things I've installed on my computer.
There's also Parabolic which is nice.
yt-dlp is such a great little app
whot? there's a website for it https://www.ezmdl.com/ it doesn't allow you to query massive downloads, (you can do playlists, but to do multiple playlists at the same time you gotta duplicate the window and put each playlist in a new tab) but it has no ads and is super simple, a kid could use this one (limited to mp4 and mp3 with no quality options, but still)
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It only takes a couple of times to realize how quickly something you care about can be taken away and you'll never see/hear it again. Netflix brought on such convenience. I remember I watched Scrubs front to back multiple times, until one day I was told that it was leaving and suddenly I couldn't watch it anymore.
Youtubers and creators come and go, if there is something you care about it's on you to preserve it. No one else will.
I wish there was a legal way for me to create a "backup" version for others to watch like a PeerTube instance, but to creators they would see it as not fair to them, so unfortunately my collection remains private.
Since you brought up Scrubs, there's another funny thing about syndication. Oftentimes the music is not paid for in perpetuity, meaning only a couple seasons can contain the original music. Scrubs is one of these, if you watch streaming now it will not have the music it had then. Another example is The Wonder years intro song.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/225-television-broadcast-tv/60153113
Sometimes they can‘t even get the rights to some localized anime so they either re-dub the entire thing or just upload it without a dub. The whole IP mess that has been created decades ago really comes back to bite them in the ass big time with shows like One Piece. The only way to watch it properly in some countries are unofficial ways.
Just upload it to the IA it's unlikely to be DMCAd
You can buy Scrubs on DVD and Blu-Ray. It‘s not a Netflix exclusive thing. I don‘t even know if it ever was on Netflix in my region to be honest. Just saying, because I think your example is off.
Fewer and fewer people even have physical media players these days.
The only reason I have a modest collection of Blu-Rays (mostly Criterion Collection) is because I have a PS5 with the disc drive. Otherwise, I'd have no means of playing them.
Remember the community D&D episode, then they pulled it forever because of the blackface joke with the dark elf face paint?
Is not even licensing, it’s just some exec had an opinion that maybe this is the least bit controversial or not in the current political zeitgeist.
Same with the Simpsons Michael Jackson episode, 30 Rock and It's Always Sunny also had black face jokes that ironically were meant to make the viewer feel extremely uncomfortable and realize how racist the character was being that are now gone.
Whether you agree with the jokes/premise or not, I believe we shouldn't pretend like none of that happened. To me that makes it worse. The fact that we feel so uncomfortable with it now proves that we are marching forward, and that doesn't mean we blindly hide from our mistakes. I like what WB did with Looney Tunes, they put a disclaimer warning that it was there, and that it was from it's time, and that to remove it would mean removing the evidence of how far we've come.
were meant to make the viewer feel extremely uncomfortable and realize how racist the character was being
The Diversity Day episode of the office comes to mind as something matching this exact description that has been excluded on streaming platforms.
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Not just YouTube. Download everything. No exceptions.
Will do.
clicks "Accept all cookies"
It's silly how "the internet remembers" saying gets repeated. That was true pre-2010 roughly. These days it's evidently not that difficult for someone to be disappeared or disappear themselves from the internet.
Unless you're high profile enough or you've really angered a crowd. Nobody is going to be archiving you. Certainly nobody is dedicated enough to ensure that your content is perpetually hosted somewhere.
There are some Youtubers from the 2010 era who I used to watch. It's as if they never existed. They made their ad money and vanished.
It’s silly how “the internet remembers” saying gets repeated. That was true pre-2010 roughly. These days it’s evidently not that difficult for someone to be disappeared or disappear themselves from the internet.
Sayings like this are about threat modelling (worst-case scenarios). If you post something to the internet you need to assume that it will be preserved for eternity. If you want to preserve something on the internet, you need to assume that it will disappear.
The internet remembered back in those days ironically because stuff was harder to get and less accessible. People downloaded stuff because they weren't sure when they might be on a slow connection or not have a connection at all, and once it was downloaded, it would sit there collecting dust until someone realized that it had vanished from its original source and like a hydra, two people who downloaded it would later upload it again. Always-online broadband and streaming basically killed that whole mentality. People just assume it will always be available from the original source... until it isn't, and then it's too late.
I do this again now. I use YouTube as just a frontend and copy links into yt-dlp to watch without ads at my leisure. If I like it and think I'll watch it again I simply don't delete it after I've watched it. They're like 80mb videos each.
In days of yore, I did this because I wanted to rewatch the same videos over and over. It was hugely wasteful and also frustrating to do this on a dial up connection.
My favourite part is I get "real" 1080p, rather than whatever Google thinks I'll believe is 1080p.
I agree on principle, but on what storage? Who's with me in planning a data center heist?
Get a low-power GPU for 50 $ on ebay. Still faster than your poor iGPU at converting your videos to a more recent format with 1/3 the space requirements.
Also, does the cat-funny video need to be in 4k? yt-dlp -F to list and -f to choose (accepts '+' combinations).
It's not as bad as people are saying. Storage has gotten more expensive, but: 1h of YouTube at 1080p is around 3GB. Storage is currently sitting at 25-30€/TB. That allows you to save 330h of YouTube content, which is a lot.
Im down
You son of a bitch, I'm in
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I'm downloading DBZ Abridged
Well yeah, that's the canonical version
In tje past years I have downloaded and archived about 200 GB of my favorite YouTube videos using yt-dlp. Most of them are short or low resolution for storage reasons, so it's a lot more videos than you'd think. Now they can't be taken away from me and I can watch them whenever I want.
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I give you all permission to download mine.
Please just credit anything you might use and tag my channel. Cheers.
I usually have to download YouTube videos just to watch them… YouTube doesn’t like my browser set-up or something and purposely makes things difficult
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