Not all superheros wear capes and even fewer know how to preserve hundreds of terabytes of internet history. But for the revolving cast of digital librarians in Reddit’s data hoarding community, saving as much of our digital detritus from destruction as possible is just another day on the net.
People come to the data hoarding subreddit to learn about storage set ups, how to scrape data, or to float a new archival project, which can often seem like a never ending game of one upmanship in terms of the scope of the proposals. In July, a Redditor called “traal” posted a short note to r/datahoarders suggesting a hoard of all YouTube metadata, such as the title, description, thumbnail image, and subtitles.