About[]
Imgur recently announced that they are deleting all anonymously uploaded images (which is most of them). A lot of the Minecraft developers have shared a lot of anonymously uploaded images on Twitter and Reddit and probably elsewhere, and a lot of them are of some importance to Minecraft history, and a lot of them are not uploaded here or archived elsewhere.
Gfycat also recently announced that they are shutting down in September, which of course means that all gifs on the site will become unavailable unless archived elsewhere, including gifs linked by developers on other platforms.
Photobucket also recently announced that they are going to delete all free accounts and all images associated with them (which is, again, most of the images on the site). Lots of historical screenshots and other images are hosted on Photobucket, and those too will become unavailable.
Twitter is also making some odd decisions, like their plans to delete "inactive" accounts, and the new requirement to be logged in to see anything on the site, and if their rapidly deteriorating financial situation continues, the whole site may also be at risk.
Ongoing Reddit drama has caused many subreddits to go dark (at least temporarily) and it's possible that further contreversial decisions by Reddit staff will cause more drastic protest efforts in the future that may permanently render much content inaccessible.
All in all, major problems are currently affecting a large number of the social media sites and image hosting services that contain much of the internet's history, and unless efforts are made to preserve media from these websites, most of it is at risk of disappearing for good.
What to do[]
Here’s what needs to be done:
- Go through the Twitter and Reddit and other social media accounts of all the Minecraft developers to look for Imgur/Gifycat/Photobucket links, as well as images hosted directly on Twitter and Reddit. Twitter’s advanced search (https://twitter.com/search-advanced) and the custom Reddit search tool (https://camas.unddit.com/) are good tools for doing this.
- Save all the image links and source tweets/comments on the Wayback Machine. Make sure to check the "Save outlinks" option when doing this.
- Upload relevant Minecraft-related images to the wiki, with links in the file description to the original image page and the comment that the image link is from.
- Find image links that are already on the wiki and archive those too. (Special:LinkSearch/*.imgur.com) (Special:LinkSearch/*.gfycat.com) (Special:LinkSearch/*.photobucket.com)
- Lower priority, but still useful, is also archiving and uploading developer images hosted on other services.
Contributors[]
- --AlienAgent124 (talk) 3:08, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
- --TreeIsLife (talk) 19:00, 22 April 2023 (UTC)