Why do people delete their line rider videos?

Prominent trackmakers who have at one point or another deleted or made private the majority of their line rider videos (not counting ZNF because it was out of his hands):

.LRD
PainLobster
MartinJulenissen
kraettz
kramwood
Moizut
mtgtopdeck
shotoku
ClosedDoor
iamsorrydude
Helios Pavonine
Holcomb227
Nollez
ilT
Absox
daugystik
djkooo
batistick13
redcap
inukaza
CaptainSlug
willster092

Why does this happen so often? What do people stand to gain by deleting their own tracks?

When I personally fell out of the niche I stopped feeling like explaining line rider and hardly could get through it without feeling embarrassed. It also felt like nobody cared (and for me, nobody did, my tracks were garbo), so I just removed my tracks.

That's the insight I have.

It's like deleting your blog posts from when you were in middle school. As Lone said, it's kinda embarrassing to have your old stuff out in public. Personally, I would just make the content private since I don't like deleting stuff, but I can see why others would just delete it.

Never explained why I did it, so here goes.

It were quite hectic times with loads of flamewars, debates, criticism etc. I didn't feel at ease in the community at all. So when I was making Eden 2 I changed the song because 1) it fit better and 2) in a strange way it conveyed my feelings about the way people looked at tracks. Originally Eden 2 was supposed to be the better version of the 'world of quirk', but it didn't meet my expectations so I made it into an omni halfway through. It was never supposed to be super controversial or anything, just an experiment that got out of hand (the ending was like a last-minute decision).

When it was eventually done, I was really, really proud. I think anyone would be proud of something he or she had spent hours upon hours on. Released it, positive comments started pouring in, but unfortunately also negative ones. There was controversy. I had the feeling I was being attacked personally for the choices I made in the track and I had to defend myself. As most of you probably know I have (had) the habit of hyping up my tracks... a lot. Maybe my defense was also an attempt to justify the self-created hype of Eden 2, idk.

Fast forward a few days. At night, I was thinking about the community... the comments, the hatred, the often pointless discussions... Had I actually gained anything from Eden 2? Had it been worthwhile to pour my heart in something for months that would be watched by just a few people? Moreover, isn't Line Rider doing me more harm than good? Finally, what if I deleted my videos? Yeah, it was a very conscious choice. I knew I would erase all my work, but did it even matter? Line Rider was breaking me up emotionally. The community was a rotten apple anyway. They wouldn't care. The following morning I went to YouTube and deleted my channel, videos, anything on my computer that was related to Line Rider. I wanted to leave it all behind me, start anew, and make something of my life. Obviously what followed didn't go according to plan.

Roflmaoqwerty released Handlebars. /faith in community restored. No really, it was the nicest gesture. I came back. I saw people cared about my work, even if I didn't. Recently I've begun recovering and remastering everything I've made. In retrospect, the whole affair has definitely taught me valuable lessons. As an artist, you make art. Art gets criticized. That's basically how it goes. You gotta deal with it, reflect on your work, not curse all that's good and bad. To erase your art means you can't handle opinions. At least I couldn't.

Generally speaking, I believe people can have several reasons for deleting their work, but they come down to the feeling of not wanting to be part of it anymore, which results in a lack of care for the community, fans, followers, whatever. It's also very easy and tempting to erase your past with a few clicks, as if it had never happened or existed. I thought I could fix my problems. For a few days, I was relieved. Then I started having my doubts. Then I felt guilty. At last, determined. It was a rollercoaster I won't easily forget and how strange it might sound, I'm glad I deleted my videos. I am, though, very sorry about how much work went into recovering my work and ever grateful to Rabid and everyone involved.

Sorry for my long disjointed ramble reminicent of my past long rambles, but I wanted to get some things off my chest. Oh, did I say I? Yeah, sorry for the self-centeredness... It's a flaw I know of. Figured someone might want to hear this story though, as I'm one of few to tell it. Lastly, I wanna end on a positive note: I hope 2016 will be a great year.

Protip: make an lr-centric youtube channel that you dont tell your friends about

HP, I just want to say thank you for typing up that huge personal post. You're the first example I know of of someone who deleted their account/videos who has taken the time to write about the experience with all of the messy emotions and intentions involved, and that's super valuable. For me particularly, as an admin who wants to understand how I can make WRTL a place that welcomes people and also challenges people to make art they can be proud of, it is incredibly valuable and I just want to say thanks again.

EDIT: also I am super happy you are making stuff again and I also hope 2016 will be a great year.

JealousCloud wrote:When I personally fell out of the niche I stopped feeling like explaining line rider and hardly could get through it without feeling embarrassed. It also felt like nobody cared (and for me, nobody did, my tracks were garbo), so I just removed my tracks.

That's the insight I have.

This is why everything I have is unlisted now, and the link to the tracks is in my forum sig.

Why I deleted everything before, addiction problem with LR, I needed to remove myself for some time (didn't succeed very well at that time) and felt the way to do that would be to leave nothing to come back to. Kind of regret it, but honestly the only things that really mattered have been recovered, everything else, honestly I miss it a little bit but it wasn't anything that great or influential honestly. I would take it back if I could, but at that time I was having a lot of trouble in school due to the huge distraction of LR. Also, I was still not grown up completely and didn't handle things like that very well.

Deleting all of my Line Rider tracks is actually one of my biggest regrets of my life. All of my hard work and memories made into videos, gone. After dealing with some drama on .org, things in my life not going how I wanted them to, and starting to get depressed, I decided to quit Line Rider and delete all of my YouTube videos. This was the end of 6th grade, 2008(or 2009 I don't really remember). I am now a sophomore in college, and I still think all the time about all of my art that I deleted off the face of the earth, just because I was upset and things weren't going my way. All the time I spent playing and getting lost in creating scenery and I have nothing to show for it now. And since the old forums are gone now, and the hard drive with all my .sol files is corrupted, there's nothing left of that time of my life besides my memories. Line Rider taught me a huge life lesson. Now I keep pictures and copies of all of my art that I make and never dream of destroying any of it.

limesfar wrote:Deleting all of my Line Rider tracks is actually one of my biggest regrets of my life. All of my hard work and memories made into videos, gone. After dealing with some drama on .org, things in my life not going how I wanted them to, and starting to get depressed, I decided to quit Line Rider and delete all of my YouTube videos. This was the end of 6th grade, 2008(or 2009 I don't really remember). I am now a sophomore in college, and I still think all the time about all of my art that I deleted off the face of the earth, just because I was upset and things weren't going my way. All the time I spent playing and getting lost in creating scenery and I have nothing to show for it now. And since the old forums are gone now, and the hard drive with all my .sol files is corrupted, there's nothing left of that time of my life besides my memories. Line Rider taught me a huge life lesson. Now I keep pictures and copies of all of my art that I make and never dream of destroying any of it.

I like your stories bro! Anyway, there's one thing left from all this: Your skill! So start creating new stuff that's better than anything else you've made!

Really, this issue just provokes the next question:

If it matters to the community that people can delete their own tracks, why have we not created a license for trackmakers that explicitly and irrevocably allows archival copies of the work to be made?

We could make it under the condition that these copies not be made public unless there are no other publicly available copies of the work. If the creator were to re-post their track after deleting it, the archived copies would need to be made private again.

We could either force people who post their tracks here to agree to such a license, or just allow people to opt-in to it.

mhenr18 wrote:If it matters to the community that people can delete their own tracks, why have we not created a license for trackmakers that explicitly and irrevocably allows archival copies of the work to be made?

We could make it under the condition that these copies not be made public unless there are no other publicly available copies of the work. If the creator were to re-post their track after deleting it, the archived copies would need to be made private again.

The only reason we haven't done this is because this sort of agreement isn't needed for other archival mediums, it just happens.

I looked up a page talking about the copyright purposes of libraries and archives, and you're absolutely right about needing to make the archived work private after re-uploading the work, which we plan on doing starting with Shotoku's tracks after we come to a conclusion on that mess. But legally, we don't need an agreement on the artist's part to do something like this.

Unless you want to deal with a hodge-podge of variation between countries you need an explicit license if you want to redistribute your own copies of someone else's work. Even the Internet Archive requires that content uploaded to it is either in the public domain (i.e really old) or the uploader owns the rights to it. https://archive.org/about/faqs.php#Uploading_Content

It doesn't matter if the holder of the copyright has decided not to make the content generally available - if they have not licensed their content under any other terms then it's "all rights reserved" by default and they have the exclusive ability to dictate the terms of redistribution (which includes just not distributing it) until the copyright expires in however many years your jurisdiction allows for. Just deleting something from YouTube does not cause its copyright to expire.

You *do* need an agreement on the rightholder's part to do what you're proposing - it's why you can't legally host movies while they're generally unavailable in between them finishing in cinemas and coming out on DVD and streaming services. My suggestion is that it would be futile to attempt to redistribute Shotoku's work given that he clearly has not given you the rights to do so (there would be some wiggle room with collaborations though).