I disagree. Gyfcats don't really contain anything of value in my opinion. It's much different compared to other image hosts which can contain the only copy of something. Most gyfcats are illegal reproductions of other material.
You're wrong. There's wealths of information on gfycat. Maybe just not for things you know about.
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.
Some of the most skilled tech people I know have had some of the most low-tech tech solutions in their non-professional lives (and sometimes similar on the professional side too), imo because they had the experience to spot ideas that were perfect for a simple use case despite seeming like a silly idea.
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?
Those .gif animations were built by hacking a Gamecube emulator to display the hitboxes and hurtboxes of animations. Then playing those animations in the hacked emulator with the circles (red for hitbox, blue for hurtbox) overlaid with the characters and their animations.
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.
> 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.
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.
A lot of this niche stuff isn't hosted anywhere else. Smashboards doesn't have extensive content hosting and has always relied on other services. No way it's all archived by this deletion deadline.
The community relied on part on gfycat to host content about the game. There's a wealth of knowledge about the game outside of the game. As is standard for any competitive video game.
The dismissal of Internet culture as frivolous and of no value is both disturbing and just factually wrong, especially when internet culture is increasingly just all culture. If somebody decided to just abruptly obliterate a large chunk of all the books and music and television produced from 2010 onwards I assume you wouldn’t be so dismissive of it, and I think the fact that you apply different standards to the Internet is indicative of a mindset that may have been valid in the 90s and early 2000s, but does not represent how the world works today.
>to just abruptly obliterate a large chunk of all the books and music and television produced from 2010 onwards I assume you wouldn’t be so dismissive of it
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.
Okay, but I don't see it as bad as the source material being lost. You can always remake those clips. The reverse can't be done to go from clips to the original.
And the people that put significant effort into their work will reupload it to other services, if they haven't already. Similarly, exceptional work is probably saved by random folks elsewhere.
> The reverse can't be done to go from clips to the original.
EverythingGPT, generate a 140-minute movie containing this clip, Oscar for best supporting actor, clever twist in the end, stilted dialogue in parts, 4k.
