Updating a fifteen-year-old side project is harder than building a new one
/Sal Marchetti, running a request line all day, reads Andy Baio's Supercut.org refresh for what it takes to keep an old community project alive instead of shipping something new.
TL;DR: Andy Baio spent real time refreshing Supercut.org, a video-compilation archive he first launched in 2011, took offline after a 2015 server hack, and revived in 2020. The July update replaced a Bootstrap-era design, cleared a submission backlog, pushed the collection past 580 videos, and dealt with the fact that roughly one in five of its Vimeo-hosted clips had gone dead since Vimeo changed its legacy account policy on May 29. No new product, no launch post, just a fifteen-year-old thing kept alive. That’s the harder discipline, and nobody throws a party for it.
Andy Baio runs Waxy.org, and this post is a maintenance log dressed up as a refresh announcement: what he touched, what he had to remove, what broke since the last time he looked. I run a request line for a living, which means I read the whole thing the way I read a support queue. Baio’s queue just happened to sit untouched for the better part of a decade.
Supercut.org started in 2011, a side project built alongside a Seven on Seven collaboration with Michael Bell-Smith, meant to catalog every supercut, those compilations of a single word or gesture cut from a hundred different films, that Baio could find. It went down at the end of 2015 after his server got hacked, and stayed down for five years. He brought it back in 2020 after auditing his old PHP for holes, then mostly left it alone again until this July.
What he did this time isn’t glamorous. He retired the Bootstrap theme and made the site responsive. He cleared a submission backlog that had been piling up, worked in new entries pulled from Max Tohline’s “A Supercut of Supercuts,” and got the live archive past 580 videos. He added sorting by date and view count, a Featured category, a search box so people can finally look up every instance of a specific word across the whole collection. None of it reads like a launch, more like a Tuesday nobody bothers photographing.
Here’s the part that landed for me specifically, because it’s the part of any long-running project nobody wants to own: link rot. Baio allowed submissions from both YouTube and Vimeo back when Vimeo was where filmmakers and editors actually put their best work. On May 29, Vimeo changed how it handles legacy Basic accounts, cutting off anything over old storage limits unless the owner upgrades or gets classified as a business. About one in five of the Vimeo links on Supercut.org died as a direct result, and Baio’s own guess is that’s an undercount, since the well-known videos he tended to post are the ones least likely to disappear.
I spend my day in a reply thread, so I watch this exact thing happen in miniature, constantly. Someone posts a video, a screenshot host link, a doc into a community thread, it gets forty replies over two years, and then one policy change at a platform nobody in the thread ever chose kills it. Multiply that by every thread that’s ever existed and you get Baio’s twenty percent, except most of us never go back and count it, let alone fix it one link at a time.
That’s the actual weight sitting inside a post that reads like release notes. Baio says outright that it “feels a little silly to update a 15-year-old site devoted to a meme format that peaked in popularity long ago.” He says it and does the work anyway, because Vimeo’s shift didn’t arrive as a single announcement he could brace for. It happened, in his words, “gradually, with a series of increasingly stringent requirements instead of a single cutoff date,” which he points out is exactly how a platform avoids a public backlash. Conferences lost their talk archives this way. Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything Is a Remix” got pulled for “consuming too much bandwidth,” a fact Baio drops in without much comment, because by that point in his post you don’t need him to editorialize.
Nobody launches a product to fix that kind of decay. You just open the old project back up, see what died since you last looked, and start replacing links one at a time, the maintenance nobody schedules, done anyway, by somebody who still likes the thing enough to keep it from quietly disappearing. Somewhere in a thread I run right now, a link is dying the same way, and I haven’t opened the tab to check yet.
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