The link rot resulting from this will be pretty bad all over the internet.
Sad they didn't manage to be sustainable.
Sad they didn't manage to be sustainable.
There is something funny about Snap buying a company and then setting a timer to delete all the videos. Shame about the data loss.
For instance, smash melee used gfycat heavily. There is in depth analysis of the game using gfycat as visuals. There will be knowledge loss in that community in Sept 1.
Honestly, I expected most of the information to be locally hosted on smashboards or their wiki. (And if not now, they will be soon).
I'm worried about other communities though.
"technologically adept" and "uses gfycat instead of wiki or forum" is mutually exclusive
If gfycat provided them with an ideal - for what they and their users wanted - and free (I assume) way to host their clips that the community liked then apart from the eggs in one basket issue can you really say they made a bad decision? If (and sure it's a big 'if') they made sure everything was backed up and ready to easily move should something like this happen, then it could well have been an idea decision that worked well for years?
At a minimum, the smash community members who built that data have an expert-level understanding of Gamecube graphics programming, Gamecube assembly language, and Super Smash Bros's internal scripting language to create those posts.
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Yes. This is a very technically adept community. I'm not very much a part of them, but I can see the expert-level reverse engineering work needed to get this working.
And the knowledge won't be forever lost if it is lost. The importance of hitbox / hurtbox reverse-engineering is common in all fighting games (Blazblue, Guilty Gear, Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom, Super Smash Bros). The various communities always work on reverse-engineering all the frame-data and hitbox/hurtbox information ASAP whenever new fighting games come out, so that expert-level fighting game players know what their training routines should be.
Actually this was possible before Dolphin existed. They did it on raw hardware. The devs left an extensive debug mode in with various displays like hitboxes. So a little Action Replay cheat was enough.
I can assure you melee uses Youtube much more heavily. Anything not currently hosted on YouTube can be reupload fairly easily.
I agree rehosting isn't hard. But there will be information loss by the deadline without serious effort.
EDIT: This is reminding me to back up some niche twitter melee analysis given that whole situation.
EverythingGPT, generate a 140-minute movie containing this clip, Oscar for best supporting actor, clever twist in the end, stilted dialogue in parts, 4k.
If only a single copy was obliterated I would be just as dismissive because any of the destroyed material can still be accessed and archived by using another copy.