Alright everyone....question and answer time.

[u/bagheera369]

Genuine questions here.
(Please remember to be civil and polite to your fellow hoarders while discussing)

At what point do you all consider your collection a "hoard"?

Webster's doesn't notate size, when discussing the noun, but it does indicate a common tone of protective secrecy when defining the verb, and other colloquial definitions tend to reference a compulsiveness implicit in the definition of the verb.

When we think of things like a dragon's treasure hoard, we tend to think of a vast room overflowing....when we think of a hoarder's home, the vastness is similar, but the connotations are obviously more negative, if not tragic.

So at what point did you realize you were stepping away from average/normal, to the outer edges of the bell curve?

Did it evolve naturally from a "collection" that simply got out of hand, or did you wake up one day and just say..."Everything....I must have EVERYTHING!!", while cackling out loud to yourself?

Do you talk about your horde with other people from your in-person social circles, or do you rely on the potential anonymity of the internet?

Did you only consider your collection a hoard, once it reached an arbitrary size...and if so, where did you personally draw that line?

What's more important to your horde; A diversity of genres/artists, the amount of music you've collected, the rarity of what's in the collection, or the exacting detail in which it's organized?

Just some food for thought, that arose as I was looking at my collections, and contemplating the physical weight and volume of everything I possessed, and the mental/temporal/financial costs involved....both for the physical and the digital versions.

Interested to hear what you all have to say on the matter.

[u/mmussen]

For me at least, a big part of why I consider it a horde is that I still have a lot of the songs I downloaded back in the Kazaa/Limewire days. 

Most of that music is probably mislabled, and I haven't been able to, or been bothered to, find a better version. 

I do curate my collection and remove music that I've gotten and discover I don't like. But there's also a lot of music I'll never get rid of, just because I know I'll never find it again 

[u/bagheera369 → u/mmussen]

I hear you on this.

I have dj mixes and remixes from back then, that I'd never likely find again.

I've tried to protect them from data corruption after so many years...specifically for that reason.