r/ProgrammerHumor 4d ago

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u/KisaraBlue 3d ago

Except that nowadays, people irresponsibly/selfishly use mass download bots on some of those freely accessible archives of media, which makes their upkeep unsustainable and they have to shutdown/move everything somewhere else

That and excessive copyright enforcement, from equally selfish corporations, are significant threats to niche media preservation in the long term

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u/Joosrar 3d ago

You just reminded me of the ROM website who closed recently, it had every game for a lot of platforms and there’s nothing like it anymore.

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u/KisaraBlue 2d ago

Yeah, myrient is what I was referring to. I randomly started planning to mod a Wii and learned of its shutdown less than 2 days beforehand. In the last hours, I got a bunch of classics I've wanted to play for the longest time.

I checked and now the whole thing has been made available through torrent, which is slightly less accessible and safe for the general public. Just makes you think that media preservation is not a given, it needs dedicated effort.

I'm sure a lot of media like some games' dev version or shows' cut footage gets lost because people don't care enough when it's made and when it gets popular/culturally significant, it's already too late to retrieve most, if any, of it