I don't download YouTube videos, but my grandmother's cousin does. I'm trying to get her to stop. Anyway, she has a strategy of downloading the 720p version of videos if the content is something that doesn't merit the full 4K resolution. Typical cases would be commentary consisting of mostly someone talking, comedy, or old TV shows.

> I'm trying to get her to stop.

...what? Why? Do you feel the videos she likes should be allowed to just vanish into the mists of time? To me that sounds like saying 'my sister takes pictures at her daughters' birthdays and I'm trying to get her to stop'.

>> I'm trying to get her to stop.

> ...what? Why? Do you feel the videos she likes should be allowed to just vanish into the mists of time? To me that sounds like saying 'my sister takes pictures at her daughters' birthdays and I'm trying to get her to stop'.

Anything, even good things, can be done to excess.

[delayed]

Just to be clear, they've named the subreddit after a mental disorder, which I think sorta proves his point :P

Maybe hoarding is the name of a mental disorder, but it's also like, a verb.

In defence of data-hoarding, it's relatively benign apart from maybe costing time and money, but then so do a lot of hobbies. Hoarding seems to be celebrated when it's billionaires hoarding wealth, even though the billionaires typically use their wealth in the most harmful and damaging way possible.

To be sure, I am probably more like a casual data hoarder—only hoarding files I will revisit (I have a TV app I wrote that plays these videos on a schedule—a lot like these "HN TV" sites we've been seeing vibe-coded lately).

But it does take a non-zero amount of time to copy/paste a URL and then move the files to external storage when my laptop gets heavy with data.

And while it does feel a bit like a mental sickness (really, sickness?) I have other behaviors like spending too much time on YouTube in general that unfortunately would persist whether I was hoarding or not.

I do try to walk away from the browser more these days—limit it to a few hours in the morning and then when I am eating lunch or whatever during the day.

I don't think that really counts as hoarding.

Hoarding is more getting hold of data/films/tv/music that you're not expecting to get around to watching, but feel like you want a copy or that it is of cultural relevance.

e.g. I grabbed a copy of Sátántangó due to it's fame/importance, but I'm unlikely to sit through 7 hours of it.

Or more recently, I grabbed a better quality copy of the original Green Hornet series that I'm not going to bother watching.

"My grandmother's cousin" is probably the new "SWIM."

Data hoarding is a deep rabbit hole that can consume a lot of time, money and effort. Used to hoard rare stuff but had to stop for my own good.

If you're grabbing lots of things because they meet some definition of rare, yeah.

If you're grabbing 720p of things you actually watched, then at 4 hours at day and 1.5Mbps an entire year of recordings would be less than a terabyte. So I'd estimate this as a $1-5 per month hobby and the time/effort shouldn't be too bad either. If they reach small NAS territory then that's a useful thing to learn.

However, it's satisfying to be able to smugly watch/listen to content that becomes unavailable due to it being old or unpopular or even complicated by rights issues.

Just yesterday, I was watching Digging The Greats on YouTube, discussing De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising. He can't even recreate the beat/mix on YouTube as it would get flagged for copyright. It was unavailable for streaming/download until 2023 due to licensing issues.

My go-to example of disappearing media is the third season of Monkey Dust that ran into problems with music licensing and so it was never available on DVD and will never be screened again. (Available through nautical methods)

Yeah, just like collecting stamps or other similar hobbies. So what?

I didn't used to think this was so obvious, but I'm so annoyed with the absolute frequency of ads on chromecast that I'm about to try and force my chromecast to look at some local jellyfin server or whatever and just pre-download every video I want to watch.

That being said, up until literally a week or two ago, I had a data cap of 1.3TB/mo. It'd take me a while to hoard much data after all of my normal data usage. If you stream a lot of video, 1.3TB is shockingly little.

They're not that big especially if you download in a low quality level.

Can't do that. Archives demand the highest quality source material. Lossy processes cannot be reversed.

It's better to have a lossy copy than no copy.

What are you trying to archive? Is it the words the person is saying, or the arrangement of his freckles? Even the lowest video quality is sufficient to convey all of the information content of most videos. Sometimes the audio alone is sufficient.

It begs the question and depends on the purpose whether you actually need the whole video. I believe most YouTube videos have a short expiration date.