I'm very tired and irrtated with this community

I broadly agree that things like pilots aren't technically lost media but ultimately I'm just sick of the semantic debates surrounding what the term means. "Lost Media" definitely carries sensationalist connotations but to actually split the community based on whether media is unreleased or undocumented and so on would IMO just be impractical and far more hassle than the current solution, which is to simply ignore topics you aren't interested in and engage with the ones that grab your attention. 

I've been thinking about this a lot recently because I see a lot of complaints here and on Twitter and I came to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter all that much. Many examples of lost media considered historically important are way beyond the reach of even professional researchers and archivists, let alone hobbyists (AKA most of us here). I'm talking about things like London After Midnight; discussions about them wind up going round and round in circles because the resources/connections just aren't there for the vast majority of people who participate. I get that it's fun to speculate but eventually this just gets stale and repetitive. 

In all honesty:

I would rather this community spent its time looking for media which might be out there and in need of better preservation/documentation than beating the dead horse of something that has little chance of being found.

I much prefer seeing these kinds of requests than the same few "legendary" topics getting brought up over and over again.

Maybe my standards are lower because I predominantly focus on commercials (a genre considered pointless ephemera to many people) but I have no metric for how "important" a piece of lost media is. Many lost/unidentified media cases mean the world to the person reporting them, and if it piques my personal curiosity or I think I've got a chance of digging up something helpful then I'm more than willing to give it a shot. Helping people out is what matters to me and I enjoy going on long internet deep-dives which almost always turn up other things of interest along the way. I think engaging with these kinds of smaller requests is a far more rewarding and productive way to enjoy the community than spectating on the big and famous searches, as well as being far more accessible to most people in this community.

Something being findable online also doesn't mean it's a couple minutes of Googling away, or that media which turns out to be online after all is safe from being lost in the immediate future. Commercials are a good example where I can speak from experience. Sure there's a good chance it's on YouTube somewhere, but a large proportion of channels uploading commercial breaks don't label their content. What if the OP doesn't know the brand name? Time to spend another couple hours scouring the internet using keywords to see if anyone else does. And so on.

On the other hand I've seen plenty of requests which could have been solved in seconds if the OP had used search operators, but this is far from the majority.

If fans of a TV show want to see the pilot, I see no reason they shouldn't document it here even if it's something they weren't supposed to see in the first place. Pilots have been found, as well as countless other examples of production media that was never intended for public release to begin with. I don't think we need to find or document the production materials of every film ever made, but if something is of particular interest to an individual or community I see no reason they shouldn't try. 

Another ridiculous argument I've seen lately is that any and all media held by corporations shouldn't be considered lost, i.e. a show that aired on public TV but isn't known to have been recorded, with the only confirmed copy in the company's possession. Which is crazy to me, especially with the faith you're putting in said corporations to take adequate care of their own archives.

I do draw the line at death footage/other morally questionable or outright illegal material. There's more than a few things in the NSFL category which have no business being documented on this wiki. Even if you somehow took the moral implications out of the equation, the relevant authorities are never going to release things like the Chubbuck tape. Discussion is ghoulish and an utter waste of time. I really don't see how people can denigrate "lesser" media but think participating in a topic like that is somehow more productive. 

Wow this is exactly how I've been feeling lately. I haven't been able to pinpoint what's making me/why I feel this way about the community but I think this summed it up perfectly.
And don't get me wrong, I love a good pilot if it's actually something worth seeing. Like a pilot that's different than the first episode of a show (like Invader Zim, even though it's not lost) but SO many people are just "The Search for [insert early 00's preschool show] Pilot" and it's like almost identical to an existing episode, with just maybe a different color palette.

There have been several searches I got interested in this year, all of which are not the "popular" stuff, I got into American Dog, Noah Knows Best, and a certain weird recalled toy boat. Most updates to the American Dog post are from me finding stuff off of tumblr than reverse searching creators of the art for more. In some ways, I am proud to have found so much from something so obscure to help widen the story, however in others its a little discouraging to share my findings with people, how it may be possible to find more, get a response of "that's cool", and then for the community to go off and look for some spongebob milk commercial. I guess its different strokes for different folks, for people like me and a few others, a recalled toy boat is the most interesting lost media in the whole wide world, but for others its not and may not even count as lost media (I count it as "lost audio" personally, but again up to the person).

I feel you. I’ve been interested in the search for the deleted scenes of “The Land Before Time”, and even made a thread about it to drum up attention and revive hype for it being found, but unfortunately, I’m too scared to just contact people. There have been times where I thought something over like, 100 times, and it would still somehow manage to come out bad, and this has happened irl too. 

Sadly, that seems to be why the search revival kinda died down. I have no problem looking for leads (in fact, I just found an email for one of the crew members a few days ago), but contacting is where I pussy out, and sadly not many other people seem interested in finding it. I guess some people prefer finding shit that’s easier, and that’s ok, but it’s basically become like, 80% of the community. 

Actually, I already put the new crew members email in the thread. Also, sorry for the dumb question, but what does PM mean?



I’ll give you the info in the private “emails” message thread.

Oh, right. 

I was gonna post this in the 'What's one thing you hate about lost media hunting?' thread but this thread seems a bit of a better fit for this (since it's not really about lost media hunting itself), but I really wish people in the lost media community would understand that just because something isn't freely available to view or download on the internet that doesn't make it 'lost media'.

If you can go onto eBay, Amazon, or any other online marketplace and find physical copies of something for sale, then it is objectively not lost.