SubRocks

» see subrocks.aesthetiful.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

There is a whole category of site that exists to put an old interface back on the internet, and YouTube is the most reconstructed of all of them. People who were twelve in 2012 are in their twenties now. Most of the videos they remember are still online, so what the revivals actually rebuild is the page around the video: the chrome and the layout, down to the comment box sitting exactly where it used to sit.

SubRocks was one of these, and by the standards of the genre it was taken seriously. It went up on 22 January 2023, built and run by one person using the handle Aesthetiful, and it aimed to be a working video host instead of a screenshot. You could actually put videos on it. For about five months it was, in its author's own phrase, the chosen YouTube revival, which in a small scene means the one people were using.

At around 10pm on 16 June 2023 the SubRocks directory was abruptly deleted through an exploit. There was no backup. That sentence is the entire ending. No business failed and no bill went unpaid. A security hole in one person's self-hosted project was found and used, the files went, and no copy existed anywhere.

The farewell page went up on 4 July 2023 and is still served today at subrocks.aesthetiful.com. It is short and clearly written by somebody upset, and it carries the two dates that matter on one line: January 22nd, 2023 to June 16th, 2023. There is an audio player embedded under the text. At the bottom, an update says the author had begun a new YouTube 2012 revival, unrelated to SubRocks and unrelated to a thing called SubRocks Rewritten.

~ the case file ~

~ 146 days ~

That is the whole life of it. Short enough that the site never got to have a decline, which makes it unusual in this archive. Almost everything else here spent years getting quieter before somebody switched it off and wrote a notice. SubRocks was working normally on the evening of 16 June 2023 and did not exist on the morning of the 17th.

~ wrong nostalgia ~

I have no claim on this one at all. In 2012 I was twenty-eight and YouTube was a utility I used rather than a place I had feelings about. The nostalgia SubRocks was built to serve belongs to people who were in middle school then, and it is every bit as real as mine is for the sound of a 33.6k modem negotiating a line. It is simply somebody else's.

~ what a backup is for ~

The lesson is so obvious it feels rude to write down, and it is worth writing down anyway, because the people who build these revivals are usually one person with a hosting account and a great deal of enthusiasm. A revival site is a labor of love by definition. Nobody is paying for it, which means nobody is paying for redundancy either, and the operator is the only human being in the world who could have made a second copy.

ArchiveTeam has no rescue of SubRocks. Its wiki entry is a stub and the archiving status reads lost. A site that existed to preserve the look of an older internet left behind a farewell page and a logo.

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