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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/AshleyUncia on 2024-01-22 14:44:54+00:00.
This is just something that's been on my mind but before I start, I wanted to say that obviously I realize that the vast majority of the users here don't fall into this, but I think it could be an interesting discussion.
What one may call 'Tech Literacy' is on the decline as companies push more and more tech that is 'User Friendly' which also means 'Hostile to tinkering, just push the magic button that does the thing and stop asking questions about how it works under the hood'. This has also leaned itself to piracy where users looking to pirate things increasingly rely on 'A magic pirate streaming website, full of god awful ads that may or my not attempt to mind crypto through your browser, where you just push the button'. I once did a panel at an anime convention, pretending on fandom level efforts to preserve out of print media, and at the Q&A at the end, a Zoomer raised their hand and asked me 'You kept using this word 'Torrent', what does that mean?' It had never occurred to me as I had planned this panel that should have explained what a 'torrent' was. I would have never had to do that at an anime convention 15 years ago.
Anyway, getting to the point, I've noticed the occasional series of 'weird posts' where someone respectably wants to preserve something or manipulate their data, has the right idea, but lacks some core base knowledge that they go about it in an odd way. When it comes to 'hoarding' media, I think we all agree there are best routes to go, and that is usually 'The highest quality version that is closest to the original source as possible'. Normally disc remuxes for video, streaming rips where disc releases don't exist, FLAC copies of music from CD, direct rips from where the music is available from if it's not on disc, and so on. For space reasons, it's also pretty common to prefer first generation transcodes from those, particularly of BD/DVD content.
But that's where we get into the weird stuff. A few years ago some YouTube channel that just uploaded video game music is getting a take down (Shocking!) and someone wants to 'hoard' the YouTube channel. ...That channel was nothing but rips uploaded to YouTube, if you want to preserve the music, you want to find the CDs or FLACs or direct game file rips that were uploaded to YouTube, you don't want to rip the YouTube itself.
Just the other day, in a quickly deleted thread, someone was asking how to rip files from a shitty pirate cartoon streaming website, because that was the only source they could conceive of to have copies of the cartoons that it hosted. Of course, everything uploaded to that site would have come from a higher quality source that the operates just torrented, pulled from usenet, or otherwise collected.
I even saw a post where someone could not 'understand' handbrake, so instead they would upload videos to YouTube, then use a ripping tool to download the output from YouTube, effectively hacking YouTube into being a cloud video encoder... That is both dumbfounding but also an awe inspiring solution where someone 'Thought a hammer was the only tool in the world, so they found some wild ways to utilize a hammer'.
Now, obviously 'Any copy is better than no copy', but the cracks are starting to show that less and less people, even when wanting to 'have a copy', have no idea how to go about correctly acquiring a copy in the first place and are just contributing to generational loss of those copies.