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Comment by arsalanb | Hacker News Reader

Youtube is more than just a tool, it's a store of culture almost. Imagine Youtube suddenly disappeared. A wealth of information and video would be lost, like rare videos which are only on youtube. Sure, someone somewhere will have a copy but on the whole you can't access them seamlessly like you can with Youtube.

Of late I have began to think this is too much power for a company to hold. I trust Youtube to not fuck up so bad that all videos are gone, but I would sleep a bit sounder at night if it was decentralised.

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If you're worried about rare videos going away, don't just watch them on YouTube. Archive them yourself. You are the one who sees value in them, so do your part to keep their storage decentralized. Just a thought.

I never understand this “If you’re so worried, take action” argument. We all have concerns about thousands of things. I’m concerned about kids’ education in the whole world, I’m concerned about animals getting killed for fun, I’m concerned about Comcast being my only realistic ISP, I’m concerned about thousands more such things. I should be able to have and show concern even if I can’t actively do much about them due to my focus on other, even greater concerns (even if they’re selfish concerns like taking care of my family).

You don't understand him suggesting a completely straightforward and easy solution to the problem?

If you don't want a solution and just want to talk about it that's fine. But his comment was productive and useful.

I use youtube-dl almost daily to archive interesting videos locally.

a completely straightforward and easy solution to the problem

But it isn't, due to the lack of coordination or standards. That's why protocols get established in the first place; without them, valuable stuff tends to get lost.

The original post said, "(YouTube is) a store of culture almost. A wealth of information and video would be lost, like rare videos which are only on youtube."

Archiving a store of culture and almost infinite rare videos is definitely not a straightforward and easy solution. Yes, you can save few interesting videos locally. But, that's not the point of the original post.

You gotta be the change you want to see even if you know it won't be enough to completely solve everything.

>> I never understand this “If you’re so worried, take action” argument.

I never understood the lazy people of the world who want someone ELSE to make everything better for them. The greater your concern, the more likely no-one else cares more about it than you.

Saving a copy of rare footage on Youtube is literally a couple clicks and letting it save in the background while you sit on your butt watching it.

I'm glad to hear that all the problems in the world you see, you take charge and solve them. On your own. Always!

The original post said, "(YouTube is) a store of culture almost. A wealth of information and video would be lost, like rare videos which are only on youtube."

So, they should just save ALL the videos on YouTube that they think represent the culture of our times. Got it. If they think there are few petabytes of videos that are worthy of archiving, they should buy storage for them all. If they don't do so, then they are lazy. They weren't talking about one video, mind you.

ps, this comment of mine is not as polite as I want my comments to be. But, when you're calling people lazy and sitting on their butt, I think it's okay to write a not-so-polite comment.

>> ps, this comment of mine is not as polite as I want my comments to be. But, when you're calling people lazy and sitting on their butt, I think it's okay to write a not-so-polite comment.

Oh I understand. I held back a bit too. You're being an extremist with your comments about taking charge, and Always! And no, I don't propose the OP download the whole of what he sees as "culture to be preserved" from YouTube. Why do you insist on taking a simple concept to such an extreme?

We can all try to change the world a little bit. I'd prefer the world to be certain ways. While I can't make it that way for everyone I can set an example and influence the small area around me. In a similar way, if someone thinks a set of videos should be preserved they can save some themself - that does not mean they become an archivist for the Smithsonian.

While I was being a bit snarky, the sitting on their butt comment was meant to point out that a person watching YouTube is literally doing that. Most things people want to change do take more effort than that.

I'm taking the time to write for the same reason - I don't like when people are such extremists in their thinking (all or nothing) so I'm hoping to change a small part of the world (you) in a tiny way. If you still think people can't be the change they want I'll offer you this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp7E973zozc

And no, I didn't save a copy for myself ;-) But I am doing my part to promote something I think has some value.

I don't want just me to have these videos, I want them to be on the internet for everybody to have whichever video they want. Just stashing away MY videos is a tad bit selfish but work, no doubt.

Also leaves us with no way to discover future "favorites"

Yeah that's nice but telling individuals to be curators doesn't help them solve any coordination problems, and no individual can reasonably curate more than a tiny sliver of what they might find valuable, not least because there is great content that a person might value but has yet to become aware of.

You can copy the link to your favorites playlist and give it to youtube-dl. And it will automatically download all of them (or at least the last dozen.) I find a decent percent of my favorited videos get removed with time, so this is worth doing regularly.

There are two course of action for dealing with the problem. One is for every single person who is concerned about a particular tiny subset of the innumerable rare videos out there to store them personally, and then somehow let anyone else in the world know they have them.

The other is to come up with a collective solution, like a p2p solution.

I think the latter solution is about a million times as likely to work.

The latter solution is an implementation of the former solution.

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