What is one thing you hate about lost media hunting?

3 years later & more than ever is this true, especially after some ultra political bs show that shall not be named garnered loads of attention for being cheaply made crap.

I have a lot to say about this. A lot of it compounds with what's been previously said in this thread.

When it comes to lost media hoarding, sports organizations are bad at this. The tides are changing but lost sports media is tricky because copyright holders will strike down content quickly. The good news is that things are changing for the better; for example, FIFA+ is uploading content (for free!) that was long lost and hadn't been seen in decades (albeit slowly), and they are implicitly open to requests through their contact portal. However other organizations such as the IOC seem much slower to change. For example, most of the women's soccer matches at the 2008 Olympics are lost; ideally the IOC would create a streaming service that provides unlimited access to past events for a fee (that I wouldn't mind paying, because it's a service I want), but they haven't done this. My assumption is that this is partially due to contractual obligations with networks such as NBC, but it's a missed opportunity. Besides, it's not like old VHS uploads on YouTube really hurt the brand anyway.

It's even more frustrating because what has been archived is in 480p, 360p or even 240p which is unacceptable by today's standards. It would be nice to see lost sports events at the best quality possible or even remastered (a remastering of an old tape done right is great). Once again I'm happy to pay a subscription service for lost content, but the sports organizations seem reluctant to embrace this idea. I want to see old sporting events that I saw glimpses of as a kid, and I'm sure many others do too.

Another thing that's bothersome is the ungodly amount of link rot when doing/assisting these searches. BadgerGoodger is a well-known Grand Theft Auto lost media content creator (though loosely) and this video is a good example of what I mean. The video is meant to document fake Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas "leaks" and speculative maps/art. Unfortunately, most of that content has been lost because the servers to these image hosting sites went down so many years ago, so all the content has been nuked. Anyone who has scrolled through a forum thread made in the mid-2000s knows how much of a nightmare this can be.

Even worse is the death of Flash. I recently found a Web Archive version of a video streaming site with stuff that I have wanted to see since 2013 (I think the content went down in 2012) and everything requires motherf*ckin' Flash Player. This means that the original video files may be lost forever because of that damn Flash requirement. I know Ruffle is supposed to fix this issue but it doesn't work in this case. If something ran on Flash, you can kiss it goodbye.

You know another problem that these lost media searches bring attention to? That both Google and YouTube search functions have become absolute garbage. YouTube content search is so bad and represents so many problems with minimalist design. The "related videos" feature isn't obvious anymore and is watered down from what it used to be. YouTube "shorts" make searching through pages a nightmare, the user doesn't have many customization options when refining a search, you're constantly bombarded with videos you've already seen and the "don't show videos I've watched" option isn't always available and YouTube search only lets you choose one or two options at a time. The worst part is that now YouTube searches aren't even separated by page; instead everything bleeds into one page, so you have to keep scrolling down before the browser becomes a hog on the computer's resources. Who thought any of this were good ideas? It's like YouTube wants searching for content to be as tedious as possible. Even worse, this type of design is spreading onto other websites as well. Websites are trading functionality in for sleak minimalist design and I hate it.

Those are things I dislike about lost media searches. The dead ends, no reply contacts, etc. are annoying, but it's these little things that drive me nuts.

Sifting endlessly through sites and leads you've already been through a million times only to find either dead links or nothing, and search engines keep shoveling them in repeat at you despite sorting them out.

That too. 

Now I’m not trying to put anyone fascinated with discontinued snacks and menu items to shame, I am fascinated by them too I’ll admit, but I feel it’s best to keep that topic separate from Lost Media.

HOAXES!!!!! i love digital girl i hate how its a hoax i hate it i hate it

When a lead who clearly has things from what you're looking for, but only responded once and then ghosts you afterwords.
(Ok, this only happened to me once. It was still annoying that this happened since he was the biggest lead who still had things from the project.)