[basisword]

As physical media has been replaced with digital I've come to miss those walls filled with books, videos, and records. Stores (and homes) seem much more sanitised without them. You could tell a lot about a person from a glance at the various media items displayed in their home. Given there are a lot of people who buy vinyl records that don't own a record player, it seems this feeling is common.

[rvense]

I always joke that I'm from an in-between generation in that I'm quite digital but still attached to stuff... I do genuinely cherish the bad AVI rips of the Simpsons and X-Files I got off Pirate Bay in 2008.

[rainbowzootsuit]

Do you have them well cataloged in zip up DVD binders?

[felixg3]

There was usually a 700mb version available of films and one which was made for two disks. The quality difference was crazy!

[grishka]

That and also the physicality of the process of playing that media. Opening a file or a stream just doesn't feel the same as taking a cassette or a disc out of its box and inserting it into the player. Vinyl records take that aspect to the extreme because the songs themselves are visible on the surface of the record and you yourself put the needle next to the song you want to play.

[petard]

In addition to that, the physical experience works almost always. In the digital world, you might have a connection problem with your router, Spotify app (replace with your app of choice) freezes and so on. The reliability is what I miss most.

[daveoc64]

I think that there might be rose tinted spectacles in use here.

Tapes (both audio and video) wore out over time and could get chewed up.

CDs and Vinyl records could get scratched or could crack.

I can recall spending a long time trying to sort out problems with CDs or VHS in the 1990s or 2000s, but can't think of a time where Spotify didn't work for longer than a few seconds.

[GauntletWizard]

Most of all they got lost. My family had an entire spindle for lost DVDs, that we'd set the cases down somewhere and couldn't find where. When we did find those cases, we usually just replaced one DVD on the spindle with another that was misfiled in the discovered case.

[BlueTemplar]

That sounds more like a local vs non-local problem.

[everforward]

I think this still exists, as the items that filled the space the books took. Eg the younger D&D folks I know fill their bookshelves with minis and action figures instead of adventure guides.

It does seem diminished, though I wonder how much of that is being converted to digital and how much is “the average person is too poor for a personal library now”.