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Comment by Smithalicious | Hacker News Reader

This makes me sad, I remember quite a few unlisted videos going around for one reason or the other over the years. Videos meant to be watched, mind.

There's lots of old stuff on YouTube from long dead small channels. This stuff rots and disappears over time with nobody around to maintain it. I guess it's a good reminder that everything needs maintenance.

Something similar, but much more dramatic, happened once they got rid of annotations - lots of old stuff that no longer works the way it was intended.

It seems like nobody particularly cares about preserving this kind of stuff. It's a big downside to having content that only lives on the web - video files on my local storage don't just change retroactively. Things might still need maintenance, like getting old flash files to work again, but information doesn't get lost as easily.

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It's been clear to me we're at the tail end of the golden age of online videos and I and many others have been furiously downloading in preparation for the inevitable.

Not just videos, any online content is subject to loss. If you see something and like it, save it locally and back it up, whether its a video, image, text post, or an entire website.

Yeah bitrot is way worse than people imagine. About ten years ago (wow time flies) I ran an experiment to validate hyperlinks and measure bitrot and even then, links older than a few years did not work. This is why we will be leaning ever harder on stuff like the Internet Archive (thank you Jason!) as big ass media companies keep turning the screws to confine our attentions to their content while spending considerable effort to attack outside content.

More than anything I think the web of hyperlinks is dead. We have collectively decided that anything that isn't "news" isn't valuable, so the old web of interlocking hyperlinks has made way for a new web of content feeds.

It makes me sad, too.

I think it is going through a pupation period. :)

How? where do you save it all and how do you find the time?

Hello! Data hoarders [0] like myself use tons of automation for this task. For online videos specifically, I watch them locally so as to avoid as much telemetry as possible, and when I see a video I want to watch, I save it to a playlist. Then I have youtube-dl set up so that it will sync with the playlist and download any new videos that it doesn't already have. Your question about finding the time is on the money: The "choice" we are given is a complete farce, and time is the main way the monopolies turn the screws on getting you to behave the way they want. They make it exceptionally time-consuming to NOT give them everything they want. I spend an infurating amount of time not trusting my phone or my computer, and refusing to allow telemetry of any kind. I'm not married and have no children, and those things certainly make the problem that much more difficult. People seem to not give a shit about this nightmare dystopia we've built, they just want to connect their iPhone to your wifi network to they can shovel more data into tiktok or whatever. The more people you have in your life, the harder it becomes to "choose" not to give up (an inevitably insane amount of) your telemetry. It fucking sucks!! I am slowly feeling more and more helpless and now I even feel like I might have some understanding about that guy who flew a Cessna into that IRS building "lol".

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

Thanks for the explanation. Saving it when it comes up makes sense, I somehow imagined someone specifically going out there to download it all like a madman.

Probably should do the same when I get around it. You're absolutely right about the way the internet has developed. In addition to the privacy concerns now it looks like data availability will be an increasing issue with sites removing or limiting access left and right.

I run a discord server for others downloading youtube content.

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

[1] https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w

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