Comment Re:No it won't break the internet at all (Score 2) 61
The internet is full of forums. These forums have instructions on how to repair old cars, rebuild a radio, repair your HVAC, whatever. Many of the instructions were written by people who are now dead and illustrated with photos that were on public image hosts.
When Photobucket collapsed hundreds of thousands of man-hours evaporated.All those tutorials became useless.
The web routed around that and rebuilt some of that information, and new information, using Imgur.
It's about to disappear in the same way.
The internet proper may not notice much, it's true... the ancient world didn't notice that much when the Library of Alexandria burned either. And yeah, a lot of the stuff in the Library of Alexandria wasn't all that important at the time, or maybe ever. But once it's gone it's gone.
At least with these image hosts the Internet Archive tends to rush in and try to preserve as much of that history as it can. Ok, fine.
What happens when Google pulls the plug on Youtube? The *last two decades will disappear* with respect to cultural history. TikToks and snapchat already do.
We are heading into a corporately induced Dark Age, living in a time that will not be part of any consistent historical record.
That's a big deal. It's a big "part of the internet" on a historical scale.