When I was 14 years old, my parents talked about how there was a music video for D.J. Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince's Nightmare on My Street. I would soon discover that the video that they had seen was later caught up in a lawsuit, with every copy, supposedly, being destroyed after the verdict.
I was already a pretty inquisitive kid, loved old things, loved figuring things out and being really stubborn about it, so I decided to write an article about this in the Lost Media Wiki, a website dedicated to documenting such things lost to the public. Around that time, I discovered they had a Discord server, and that server, for better or for worse, would make a large impact on my life for the next six years.
When I was a part of the Lost Media Wiki it was a server filled with people interested in the same stuff I was. Me, being a 14 year old, constantly annoyed the mods, actually getting banned at one point and having to plead my case. I was rambunctious, blunt, and outspoken. Some of that isn't all that different from who I am now. Regardless, due to my activity, I became a fairly well known member there. I would gain a little notoriety in writing about Hanna Barbera's Rock Odyssey, triggering interest in it that would later lead to its recovery years later.
A lot of things happened while I was in that server. I had a panic attack and deleted half of my messages years ago because of some drama with another user, I helped facilitate the fallout that was the discovery of Turn On, which was the result of digital theft, and I met a ton of amazing people that I've been friends with for years. My later success of Drawing for Nothing, I credit, partially, to the encouragement of the LMW. Without that server I don't think I would've thought my interest in such things would've been worth pursuing.
These days, a lot of the time you see the lost media community mentioned, it's in a negative light. Too often do I see people complain on Twitter or Reddit or whatever about how the community only searches for "baby shows" and nothing of "importance." These complaints are far from new, but they've been growing louder. The issue with all of them is that the people saying these things don't usually care about whatever they think the community should search for. And if they do, they have no idea how it could actually be found. Silent films usually aren't found on purpose, they're found by accident. This goes for most lost media that's near a century old. When it isn't nearly a century old, most people won't care about it anyway. This is the difference between a fool who "cares" and a preservationist. A preservationist will take care of and respect anything that's saved from obscurity. Someone who "cares" and complains on Twitter won't give a shit if you tell them a cartoon that nobody watched 60 years ago was uploaded on YouTube. It isn't mainstream and they haven't been told it's important, so why should it matter?
"Baby shows" aren't a bad thing to look for. Just because a show was designed for preschoolers in mind doesn't mean it's worthless. Sesame Street was written for children in the 1970s and is one of the most groundbreaking pieces of television of all time. Just because you're not interested in something, doesn't mean it doesn't matter. It's just not for you. The only real complaint these people can have is that there are too many "baby show" hunts compared to other things. The cause of this isn't entirely prevalent, but if I had to guess, it's likely just due to the amount of people that've come in. When the server was still relatively young, there was a wider variety in things people were looking for. If someone came into the server and talked about what they were interested in, usually someone else would chime in and talk about it with them. These days, there are so many people, your message will likely fall into the abyss unless it's related to something "hot" that the only casually interested people want to find for clout. Ever since content creators like LSuperSonicQ and blameitonjorge have proven that it pays to be a "lost media researcher," people want in on that spotlight. It doesn't help that over time the definition of "lost media" online has become cloudy. Too many times do people come in asking about something that isn't lost; it's just something they forgot about.
I became a moderator of the wiki, forum, and server a little over a year before I left. I only lasted as a moderator on the forum for a few months. The problem is, the internet is available to anyone. Children can very easily create a forum account and talk about whatever they want. Adults who are interested in said children, gore, or whatever else we don't want to be affiliated with can do the same. The amount of stubbornness and foolishness that one had to witness in that forum is unbelievable. So much so, the staff of the wiki have essentially abandoned it, leaving me and another moderator to oversee it. That isn't their fault, it's a wasteland, a wasteland not of our design but of the people it attracts. I have yet to meet someone who moderated that forum and didn't have it weigh on their mental health.
Nobody is being paid to run the wiki, forum, and server. It's all volunteer work. Very hard volunteer work. It's one of the biggest most active servers I've ever been in, scoring at over 16K members, all chattering away. There is no obvious solution. The rules are stern and enforced, and yet the community, it seems, is changing. This isn't something anyone can fix with a new set of rules and a brand new bat, it's a change within the people and the internet itself. One could ask if there's even a problem here, if simply this is just change that is neither good nor bad, it's just the passage of time.
Regardless, being there for 6 years, I had realized I was only staying there for the friends I had gained when I was there for so long. I didn't have anything to gain from the other channels anymore. It was either because the community had changed, I had gotten older, or both. It was a lot of straws that broke the camels back. From too many people being focused on being part of the "next big hunt" to one of the biggest content creators having a rather public outburst in the main channel instead of speaking to the staff. I decided to leave. I gave my peers a heads up a day ahead, and out I went.
By the time I had left I had noticed that the state of the community had also left a scar on my peers. We all have our own lives to tend to, some more stressful than others. This community does not make that load any lighter. No staff team on a community this large is perfect. There wasn't a shortage of times that I thought something could be done better. But the meat of it is that everyone cared and got shit done. That's a lot more than I can say about other places I've been in. The LMW is an incredible passion project that a lot of people need to give more credit to and actually think to themselves how can they help. Not for themselves, but for the wiki. Selflessness is a fading concept, especially on the internet. I had never seen so many stubborn and egotistical people in one place. I'm not much of an exception, given that I'm writing this whole blog post about a Discord server.
I guess the point of this is to get it straight as to why I left. It wasn't a specific person, a specific reason, I just grew out of it. It wasn't all just because of the state of the server or whatever, I also have a lot of other stuff to do. I didn't have college to pay for when I was 14.
In the end, I wouldn't trade my experience there for anything and I really hope the community gets their shit together and helps the wiki out instead of weaponizing against it. Something I've seen happen more and more often without any reason. Too often do new users jump to conclusions about the community or have the misconception that whatever they want isn't interesting. It doesn't matter if nobody else is interested, what matters is that you are. That's what the whole place was built on, it was built on people having interest in small things. Not for the attention, but because they cared. There's beauty in people searching tirelessly for a logo from 40 years ago.
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