Like I mentioned yesterday, I’ve quietly spent the last few months dusting the cobwebs off some long-dormant side projects of mine.
Today’s refresh is Supercut.org, a site I first launched in 2011 as part of Seven on Seven with Michael Bell-Smith, and redesigned later that year as a browsable archive of every supercut I could find.
Over the years, videos slowly became unavailable, either deleted, privatized, removed for copyright infringement, or made inaccessible by Vimeo (more on that later). Even as the submission backlog grew, I ended up taking the site offline entirely at the end of 2015 after my server got hacked.
I migrated to a new server, but Supercut.org didn’t make the transition and stayed offline for five years. After auditing my ancient PHP for security holes, I finally brought it back in 2020.
The Changes
I gave the archive a long-overdue design refresh, finally retiring the basic Bootstrap theme and making the site responsive while keeping the overall layout.
All of the old unavailable videos were removed, and I replaced deleted videos with alternatives if I could find them. I cleared the long backlog of submissions, and added quite a few new supercuts to the database, many from Max Tohline’s A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases. That was a lot of tedious work, but it brought the live collection to over 580 videos. (You can use the “Add” link to suggest more if you have them!)
I also added new ways of browsing the archive: by the date the video was created and the number of views, instead of just alphabetically by name and date added. You can now see some of the oldest supercuts in the database, going back to Christian Marclay’s “Telephones” from 1995 and of Oz the Wizard, two of my all-time favorites.
I added a Featured category, with some of my all-time favorites, and added new categories for Politics and Music, which outgrew the “Real-Life” category.
I updated the About page to talk about the history of the “supercut” term, including the obligatory reference to Lorde’s song and its inclusion in (most) English dictionaries.
Finally, I added a basic search feature, so you can finally find every “dude” or every “fuck”.
Frankly, it feels a little silly to update a 15-year-old site devoted to a meme format that peaked in popularity long ago, but also, I still love the format and I felt like it deserved a better home.
404 Vimeo Not Found
When I first launched this site, I allowed submissions from both YouTube and Vimeo. Vimeo was particularly popular with filmmakers and editors, so it wasn’t unusual for the best videos to appear exclusively on Vimeo.
Sadly, those days are long gone. About one in five Vimeo videos from Supercut.org are now unavailable after the company’s policy changes over the last few years, and I’d guess that’s a dramatic undercount since I mostly posted well-known videos. More obscure personal, non-commercial videos seem much more likely to be affected by their forced shift from a social video app to premium business-to-business services.
Two months ago, on May 29, Vimeo changed its policies on legacy Basic plans, making videos inaccessible that exceeded storage limits imposed long after account creation, displaying the error above when played. If they determine you’re a business, they’ll force you onto expensive higher tier plans, and make your videos inaccessible if you don’t pay. Accounts that are inactive for a year may be deleted entirely.
Because all of this happened gradually, with a series of increasingly stringent requirements instead of a single cutoff date like Flickr, it seems like Vimeo successfully managed to avoid major public backlash.
The r/Vimeo subreddit is filled with horror stories for years of surprise fee increases, removal of core features, age verification, and videos irreparably deleted without notice.
Conferences that had their videos hosted on Vimeo, like Build, GEL, and Webstock, have had the vast majority of their videos forcibly removed from public view. The original Everything Is A Remix series, viewed millions of times on Vimeo, was deleted for “consuming too much bandwidth,” according to creator Kirby Ferguson.
About 20% of the Vimeo links that were on Supercut.org died with these changes, in line with the number of now-dead Vimeo video links I’ve posted to Waxy.org over the years. I expect that number to keep ticking up as Vimeo keeps locking down and removing legacy accounts. I’ve found many replacements on YouTube for videos that were removed, but some are likely gone forever.
None of this is a surprise to anyone who was paying attention to the company, which had been enshittifying for years before their acquisition by Bending Spoons in September 2025 for $1.38 billion, shortly before laying off much of its staff this year.
This is a very old story, but it’s still painful to see.
If you have videos there, or know anyone who does, try to move them elsewhere as soon as you can.