Warning
It has been 328 days since this piece was last updated, so some of the details may have changed.
This may come off as a little sentimental.
But change does not always need some grand symbol. You do not have to look at oceans turning into fields to notice that time has passed. Sometimes a few small things are enough.
Sorting through an old favorites folder
This started with something simple: cleaning up my Bilibili favorites.
Over the past few years, more and more videos have been trimmed, taken down, or lost because the uploader deleted their account. So before it gets too late, I wanted to save the things I once genuinely liked—and would still want to revisit someday—to a hard drive. That way, if the online version disappears, at least I would still have something left.
While going through the folder, I kept opening different creators' profile pages. That was when it really hit me how much time had passed. So many things were still technically there, but they were no longer the same.
What usually happened to those old uploaders
A lot of the accounts in that favorites list ended up fitting into a few familiar categories:
- They are still uploading, and people still watch their recent videos.
- They are still uploading, but almost nobody notices anymore.
- They stopped uploading; the only activity left is a post or two from one or two years ago, usually holiday greetings.
- They stopped without explaining anything and simply vanished.
- Their account was banned, for reasons unknown.
Some of them did answer questions from viewers in their latest posts or in the comments under an old video. The reasons were usually very ordinary: I got a job, I ran out of ideas, or just I’m stepping away for now, maybe I’ll make videos again later.
And once that pause begins, nobody knows when—or whether—it will end.
Life wears people down, and that includes creators
There is no avoiding life. That is true for everyone.
Life is like a field of gravel. Stones tumble down from a mountain and slowly get worn smooth.
A lot of people who consistently make this kind of content seem to do so somewhere between the ages of 16 and 40:
- When they are younger, especially in college, they often have more creativity, more odd ideas, and more chances to turn them into videos.
- A little later, if they are still living alone, they may still have enough time for it.
- Once they start dating or get married, some of them can keep going because they already built up a fanbase and can still ride that momentum.
- But after settling down, starting a career, and having children, daily life gets heavier and busier, and eventually they leave the place they once loved.
When their enthusiasm was at its peak, they gave other people a lot of joy. When the weight of real life settled onto their shoulders, many of them quietly stepped into the background.
There is nothing wrong with that. They are real people.
And that includes me. I cannot honestly say when I might slow down or even stop updating my own blog, because I am not exempt from the same pattern.
Time never turns around. It only keeps moving forward. And with everything happening in the world right now, I have to admit that the old dramatic phase of youth no longer belongs to me. What belongs to me now is confusion about entering society, and the much more practical question of how I am going to support myself when that time comes.
Even hobbies have an expiration date
An interest is something that brings a person happiness.
But like many other things, interest can fade. It can disappear. Something you once loved may sit untouched for years, gathering dust. If a hobby lasts four or five years, that alone is probably enough to call it real passion.
I am not trying to turn this into some grand life lesson. I have gone through the same thing myself—loving one thing intensely, then gradually leaving it behind a few years later. Or to put it more simply: I moved on.
The most obvious example for me is anime.
Around 2017 to 2018, I started watching anime seriously. Even now, I can still name some of the shows from that period. The screenshot includes Eromanga Sensei—the first anime I ever watched—and Is the Order a Rabbit?, which I rewatched several times and even spent a fair amount of money supporting back then.
At some point, though, that part of my life just stopped.
Maybe it was because boarding school left me with no time to keep up with new seasonal shows. Maybe the cost of a premium membership started taking up too much of my already tiny—possibly nonexistent—allowance. Maybe study pressure and health issues made me give it up bit by bit.
Whatever the reason, I stopped watching anime, and I have not really gone back since. Even now, I do not feel especially motivated to revisit it.
The way I relax has been replaced by other things: different videos, different games, chatting with online friends. If you ask whether those still bring me enjoyment, of course they do—otherwise I would not have stuck with them. But it is obvious that the way I find joy now is not the same as it used to be.
What disappeared matters, but that is not really the point
That is probably enough for now.
What I really wanted to write about was not the missing videos themselves, but the uploaders who no longer update—the ones who used to fill that old favorites list with energy.
The vanished videos are a separate topic and could take much longer to unpack. Some were removed because of copyright. Some disappeared for more opaque reasons—sexual content, “bad influence,” or something else equally hard to pin down. But today I do not really want to get stuck on that side of things.
Maybe it is time to set aside a moment and revisit some of the life I used to think was brilliant.
At the end, here is the batch script I used to help with downloading. It only calls yt-dlp, and you still have to paste links in manually, but it saves the trouble of typing the full command every single time:
@echo off
:run
set /p VideoURL=请输入视频链接：
rem 需要预先在运行目录下放好bili-cookies.txt文件
rem 以便下载1080P或更高画质
rem cookies可以使用浏览器扩展Cookie-Editor获取
rem 选择导出格式为Netscape即可
yt-dlp --cookies "bili-cookies.txt" "%VideoURL%"
echo.
goto run
If you want to automatically pull an entire Bilibili favorites list and download everything, one possible route is to look into SocialSisterYi/bilibili-API-collect and use its API to fetch the full video list. It does work in practice—I tested it—but I was too lazy to write the code myself.