That's unfortunate. I have a few videos which seems to have been forgotten even by their uploaders. Those videos would probably not be updated. I guess I need to back them up manually.
If you can back them up.
I wish youtube would at least keep the title there so you know what it is that has been lost.
Welcome to the alzheimic future.
Where?
Other sites keep the metadata (and even allow new comments on) deleted posts.
When a user asks to delete a video it’s deleted, with it goes the title and description.
Also I seriously doubt that all those missing videos were requested to be deleted by the user. I'd be willing to bet that 90% of them were taken down by youtube's ridiculous and mostly broken takedown bots. There should be consequences for frivolous takedowns.
We maintain a list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from youtube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content. It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived.
We are currently organizing some efforts to find and download unlisted videos.
Feel free to check us out here: https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf
Searching for a video's URL might let you find some metadata about it. Unfortunately YouTube encourages social media insulation so a video might have only ever been referenced inside of YouTube with no inbound links from the web.
It's the uploader's video, and they retain ownership of it. If they want it gone, it'll be gone. Since they own the IP, their interests matter more than some random viewer who happened to add it to a playlist some time in the past.
I don't recall the creator, but I do recall a video series that used links in the videos that pointed to other videos for a basic quiz or choose your own adventure.
Too many times I have gone back to reference something only for the site to be dead, or the user been banned from the platform.
This applies to logical places on the internet too.
Of course, you don't need to keep a copy of everything you see on the internet. But if you have a dependency you might want a copy.
wget was the thing back then, maybe something similar with youtube-dl now?
We maintain a list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from youtube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content.
It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and occasionally direct efforts to preserve specific content- like unlisted videos right now.