The Black Boxes of Discord and YouTube
Really dug this piece from Set Side B about loss of information, both from black boxes like Discord, and from videos being removed from YouTube.
On Finding and Preserving Discord and Youtube
It does a lot of drum-beating about the fact that so much of the internet world has moved to Discord, where it is unsearchable to those outside of the servers in question, and inherently impermanent. But also the problem of preserving YouTube:
But Youtube has always been a time bomb for all this content. It’s inevitable that Youtube will someday begin deleting things. If not sooner, then later. Yet there are few entities capable of preserving all of it, or even most of it. All of this will [get destroyed] like [crying] in [a downpour].
There's no solutions here, really. Just the frustration that so much of the world can just go away. Maybe that, in itself, is a call to action for better methods of preservation.
-kosmo