this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025

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177

Twitch’s new storage limits will purge huge swaths of Internet gaming history (arstechnica.com)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

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.)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I don't care if its seen as entitled as someone else said. If companies want to make money as a monopoly they should be held to a higher standard. They have to give us a bonus for selling data, why else am I going to use their service.

Regardless I do think it is a sign of the times, going dark on data will do nobody besides oligarchs any good.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Attract people with free, then try to charge them when you reach sufficiently large user numbers. Tale as old as the tech bubble.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Well to be honest; the original hoster was amazing. But they got bought by a big hosting group and it turned to shit after that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

Ah, the slightly different strategy of offer a great deal to lure in the user count, and then sell it to someone else who will turn on the monetization.

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