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Ask HN: Is it time to start hoarding content?

by wayoverthecloud on 5/5/24, 8:09 PM with 4 comments

I have liked some pages in Instagram and Facebook where they share philosophy/science related bytes and clips. They do take the clips out of Youtube videos but it helps me know if the whole video is worth watching since they cut out the best parts. There's a philosopher called Alan Watts I usually listen to and there was this video of him some saying stuffs. I hadn't checked the comments but there seemed something off, like it felt something not Watts-like. After a week, I decide to go through one of the video's comments and people were mentioning how they hated AI generated voice. Then it clicked. I had been listening to AI-generated Alan Watts voice. It icked me. Anything AI generated icks me, not sure why.

This scared me. Because I could tell from the comments that lots of people were fooled. And if, me, who has been listening to Watts for so long cannot tell the voice after a week, I am worried that someday Youtube search results will start pushing the AI generated Watts videos to the top. And how much do I dig to find real stuff? And who's to say one can tell the difference?

I was not a big data hoarder. I hoard only series, music, and songs I really like but these past days I have been considering hoarding seriously.

Have you considered seriously hoarding?

Thanks!

  • by jslabovitz on 5/6/24, 1:22 AM

    I work on a lot of projects related to vintage/obsolete technology. It's not at all uncommon for me to research something and find that all the links are broken, and the data is long gone. So developing a sense of information fragility is a useful skill, so you can get a sense of whether to save something.

    Specifically about Alan Watts: There's a great podcast called 'Being in the Way' that I believe is produced by his son. One of their goals is to have a canonical & permanent archive of Watts' talks. Might be a good thing to practice your archiving skills on. :)

    https://beherenownetwork.com/category/alan-watts/

  • by s1k3s on 5/5/24, 8:15 PM

    If the issue is only that YT might push AI-generated content into search then all you need is playlists / bookmarks.

    But I generally agree that if you really want access to something in the long term, you should back it up yourself.

  • by talldayo on 5/5/24, 8:11 PM

    Yes. Hard drives are cheap (~$10/tb in bulk refurbished) and yt-dlp still works perfectly fine. Export the channels you subscribe to and back them up if you want guaranteed access to it in the future.

  • by Hatrix on 5/5/24, 8:28 PM

    yes, hoard before it is put behind a paywall or removed.