I am increasingly worried about the valuable content on YouTube. There are so many old live concerts, useful how-to videos and other cultural treasures amidst all the junk. I suspect that one day, they will make their ads unblockable by embedding them in the video files. I sure hope that some people are downloading the valuable stuff and stashing it away to load onto YouTube's successor.
How many how to videos, memes, concerts, etc, are really that important? In fifty years how many people will care? How many people should care because it would mean ignoring the huge volume of newer stuff? A hundred years? Two hundred? I haven't even read or seen many of the existing cultural artifacts we have from past decades and centuries, what would I do if orders of magnitudes more of them had been preserved? In…
You might have a better understanding of the culture that produced them. You might appreciate a work of art that would otherwise not exist. We have graffiti from Pompeii, we know Ea-nasir sold cheap copper in ancient Ur 3700-odd years ago, but we've lost countless works of literature, music and film, some by the greatest masters of their age. What artifacts of culture survive the scouring sands of time is often a matter of happenstance, rather than quality.
Chances are almost everything our species has produced culturally, scientifically and artistically - the whole corpus of our knowledge output over the last century - is going to vanish within a generation or two anyway, simply because the digital foundation into which we've transferred so much of it is brittle and ephemeral. If we want to leave anything behind for future generations at all besides climate change, pollution and nuclear waste, we should save as much as possible rather than only what we consider to be relevant.