TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Instagram, Reddit, Wikipedia (including the Talk pages), KnowYourMeme and Urban Dictionary. Probably Discord too.

Those persist only at the whim of a corporation. There is nothing that preserves them, as they were at a given time, or keeps them in existence if their owner goes out of business or is cast out because of political feuds.

Not that there is a perfect record of every cultural artifact before the digital age of course, maybe it'll all work out somehow.

Indeed, a lot of potentially interesting physical media has no doubt been destroyed, and more still is surely sitting somewhere inaccessible to those who would like to access it. But there is arguably a higher risk in a world where everything sits on servers controlled by for-profit corporations. Which is why organisations like the Internet Archive are so important. If you are concerned about this stuff I would suggest donating to IA, or at least making offline backups of the data you consider to be important (both personally and culturally).

> for-profit corporations

Non-profits go dark when they run out of money, too.

Correct, but if you’re trying to capture today, these are the lion’s share of what you want to capture.

There won’t be any except whatever is output from some llm and it will be unverifiable.

The specific context of video game history comes up now and then in “indie game journalist” scenes like aftermath. Games journalism in particular has gone through a consolidation and with it comes the destruction of archives both physical and digital.

With modern games no longer playable once the servers go offline, the only recorded history of the modern era of gaming will soon be on the hard drives of YouTube and Twitch servers. For as long as that survives.

Related to games becoming unplayable, we're trying to stop that: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

For gaming, we have hours and hours and decades of let's plays for games - but those could disappear in an instant if Youtube decided they weren't profitable.

Archive things. It's easier than ever to keep local copies of media, and it could be quite valuable someday.

Videos made by random people aren't the same thing. Better in some respects - let's play videos show games comprehensively - but I don't think they properly replace the professionally made magazines which cover many topics and of opinions, have easily skippable ads and are more suitable to self-paced exploration.

I'm also concerned about not being able to run the software at all due to the complexity emulating modern systems (even for non-gaming applications) which rely on servers for functionality and licensing (DRM).

Are those Let's plays valuable because of games or because of personality of gamers?

If it comes to games, they have nearly 0 value and they can disappear - that would not change the value of the game, as they are derivative works and not the ones that are leaving influence. They have hardly any representation of culture around the game, and those who does not talk can be easily replaced with AI playthrough, so I would not care that much. Also, we are forgetting that gamers enjoy to discover new things - and those let's plays are there for a different reason - to stake a place of being there as the main source to generate income from ads and they are aimed at long investments, so they won't disappear as soon as I would like.