52% of YouTube videos live in 2010 have been deleted | Hacker News Reader

52% of YouTube videos live in 2010 have been deleted

datahorde.org

109 pointsoidar56 comments

It's probably time to start saving the videos you like if you haven't already.

I still remember when Key and Peele's whole catalog (or a lot of it) was available on youtube back in 2015-2016. For a brief window of time.

Some of my favourite songs with 10s of millions of views have been taken down. Many niche videos don't get reuploaded.

No guarentees that youtube will keep your unique or exclusive videos publicly available. Every video is fair game for deletion at any moment.

>I still remember when Key and Peele's whole catalog (or a lot of it) was available on youtube back in 2015-2016. For a brief window of time.

Is there a lot of stuff missing on Comedy Central?

I've discovered them on Youtube(I'm european), it seems like there is a tooon of content from them, is it just a small part of what they did?

Their show also included standup comedy/overarching plots in between the skits that are not available on YouTube

> No guarentees that youtube will keep your unique or exclusive videos publicly available. Every video is fair game for deletion at any moment.

TFA is about reuploads and other kinds of user content, that was not kosher in the first place. These may be deleted by YouTube.

Your examples are about IP and content ownership changing leading to video being removed by the channels themselves. That’s a different problem, not solvable by YT.

And as the platform ages creators will start to pass away, what then?

Presumably an inactive account wouldn't be removed by default. (Unless you have manually configured this)

It will still get DMCA claims and since it's inactive there won't be anyone to counterclaim. Defacto it will lead to the removal of content. Bitrot by DMCA.

Would love to crowdsource an effort to buy enough disk space to backup YouTube to the Internet Archive and have ArchiveTeam perform the archival op.

Assuming ~35PB of content stored at YT, should cost roughly $70M for IA to buy the necessary storage infra and maintain it into the future (their costs are ~$2/GB for perpetual storage).

As of 2013, I calculated the YouTube catalog is ~375PB. It's probably closer to 1EB now, if not 2-5x that much.

http://www.autonomoussystem.net/2013/07/youtube-slowness.htm...

Sad trombone.

would tape be cheaper? it'd be a lot more annoying to use, but at least you'd have a backup, even if you have to queue a request to access.

Tape (~$6/TB) is cheaper than archival storage (~$14/TB) but I'm not sure it's worth the cost of having another "offline" system that needs robots or humans in order to access for rebuilds, maintenance, verification etc.

I'm surprised by how magnetic storage continues to decline in price as densities continue to increase. I wonder where the end actually is.

You might be surprised to see the scale of LTO tape consumption by FAANG companies.

Because at this scale the lower cost is worth it. For smaller scales the infrastructure and management overhead of tape is never repaid.

Maybe someone should do a Kickstarter for it ;)

If you've spent any time on YouTube, it's painfully obvious much of it is not worth archiving at all. Clearly if you had some critera to select videos that are worth preserving, this task would become a lot more doable.

But what could those criteria be?

You can't just select out all those fast-talking "influencers" that shill and lie their way through hours worth of video just because they're shit, because sometimes those videos have thousands of people that DO like them, making them perhaps interesting to a sociologist 300 years from now.

2000-year old Roman shopping lists, personal letters and obscene graffiti are intensely interesting to historians now, but would have been worthless to their owners even a couple of days later.

> 300 years from now

That's really unlikely, given it's all just digital and electricity. Ignoring that our pseudo-global society will have collapsed long before that and ignoring that the digital era unlikely lasts that long ...

... assuming humanity actually keeps going as it is ...

... there is no way people in 300 years will be able to read any device from today. Hell, the CD-ROM is dying and that's young.

You have to, however, also consider the multi-domainness of YouTube videos. Yeah sure, there's billions of hours of clips not one person can watch in a single life-time. But unlike your 2000-year old Roman shopping lists, we have footage of events that are anchored to a particular time-period. Or location.

One of the most impressive things you can do is, try searching up a landmark. My personal favorite is the [Jumping Stone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1TtMN8nXTM) on the Nias Island of Indonesia. What would have otherwise just remained a novel tourist attraction, forgotten by the modernity of the 21st century, is now essentially a "tag" which has hours of footage associated with it. Thousands of tourists travelling back and forth, locals growing old, new people being born, buildings being built and demolished around it. You can even just study how video quality improved in that particular region. That there IS something wholly unique to this era and definitely worth preserving. YouTube as a company has figured the logistics of storing it, but the question of how humans can hope to read such data remains yet unanswered.

Like so many questions of this type, I think the Internet Archive is the answer. They are not a warehouse of stuff stored on media/formats that are forever becoming obsolete -- they store data, keyed by timestamp, sometimes with metadata. How they store it and serve it up is irrelevant, and they will upgrade as needed (I assume this is a continuous process).

If the IA didn't exist, we'd have to invent it.

I suspect if the IA ever decides to properly archive YouTube, they'll interface with the folks that run it directly. Archive Team is, to put it as diplomatically as I can, not a good organization.

> If the IA didn't exist, we'd have to invent it.

You know, a part of the original company vision for YouTube prior to the Google acquisition was really something akin to the IA, in that they did pride themselves with hosting footage of the Indian Ocean Earthquake:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Indian+Ocean+ea...

Now, acting as diplomatically as I possibly can, I can say that your suggestions of the IA and YouTube interfacing together were at a previous point in time a continuous process. But a number of factors have made direct cooperation between the IA and Google (thereby YouTube) come to a screeching halt.

At this current point in time, we stand at a historical crossroad. And I'm only here to just act as a humble messenger ;)

I don't think that's a complete answer though. The article lists ContentID as the major reason videos get deleted, meaning that copyright trolls could go after IA if they want to. What we desperately need is copyright law reform.

I'm not 100% positive, but I recall a conversation we had on TheEye a while back with some IA reps and they simply can't archive YouTube. I recall a private project to archive just the video Metadata ended up in the hundreds of Terabytes. The videos themselves must be a gargantuan collection. Most YouTube archiving thus far is pretty much done and maintained by private individuals.

The Internet Archive has a lot of stuff they don’t make available over the internet.

A couple of months ago, they sent me a thumb drive of some stuff I requested (for a nominal processing fee).

I'm surprised to hear that, what's the point of keeping stuff they don't make available? What sort of stuff is this?

Well, they do make it available, just not over the internet, I assume for legal reasons.

In my case it was some TV footage broadcast on the evening of September 10, 2001.

YouTube is deleting pre-2010 videos, meanwhile anything is still possible at https://www.zombo.com

I've clicked that.

There's a circle, with circles around, with something around one of these smaller circles. All of it is spinning. I've managed to click the spinny thingy and it turned into quadratic spinny thingy.

That's all.

What the fuck?

Please explain!

Exactly.

(You're not missing anything.)

Thanks!

Did you forget to turn sound on?

You knew what you were signing up for. Your imagination is the only limit at zombo.com

How old are you? It's possible that you may be outside of the generation that would've appreciated it during it's peak.

I'm over 40. Never heard of it. It happens, I'm not really following anything or keeping up with internet "culture". Haven't for decades.

It's revolutionary tech, web 5.0 at least, not everyone understands.

The web of the future needs to be beyond numbers entirely.

That's it. It's Zombo com. The difference is it's been reliably the same since 1999.

Zombo is supposed to parody. You know things are rough when it's better than some popular websites!

Was better as an auto looping gif with auto playing music. This is zombocom 2.0

Twitter used to provide all Tweets to the Library of Congress for archival, until the library decided it wasn't worth the effort to continue adding that much data. I'm not sure who would be in a position to archive YouTube for the future. Does the Internet Archive make snapshots?

Natively, not to my knowledge. Tooling is available though.

https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup

There was something of a brokered agreement between Archive Team/Twitter to upload a fraction of Tweets to the IA. That too, unfortunately, ceased some time last year. Either way you might want to take a look at https://archive.org/details/twitterstream

aka 52% of youtube from the era where it was fun have been deleted.

badger badger badger badger mushROOM MUSSHROOOMM!!

That specific video actually predated YouTube itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badgers_(animation)

And it’s still up on YouTube: https://youtu.be/EIyixC9NsLI

That started as a flash animation, right? So. many. wasted. hours. watching flash animations. It's amazing how quickly flash disappeared after the dominos were set in motion.

I guess you can say that it FADED LIKE A FLASH :}

RIP

if you can get your hands on the swf you can still run flash locally. Adobe even provides the launcher.

An excellent self-hosted tool for data hoarders that want to preserve YouTube content:

https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

I am a former technical YouTube explainer, active 2007-2010. Two videos had 1m+ views, and dozens of other low-production / highly-technical DIY guides.

Google implemented several changes to their ad / revenue - sharing products, so I decided to remove my digital contributions from YouTube (flatteringly, another YTer re-posted my most-popular video). A few years later, they lost custody of my DIY Technical Manual Website URL (some ICANN snafu), so I left their platform entirely.

The entirety of Google's properties now reside on my DNS blacklists.

Which is why consumers should start encouraging creators not to be putting all their eggs in one basket and to start embracing alternatives

"Everything posted online is there forever" is one of the biggest lie.

I use yt-dlp quite a bit for that reason...

Youtube also does its best to prevent you from downloading videos, to leave no record of the past.

If you’re comfortable in the terminal the following works great for archiving: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

I had issues with youtube severely capping my download speeds using youtube-dl, but had success with https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Doh. This is what I initially wanted to link to in the comment. yt-dlp definitely is the better fork, and they seem to address YouTube breaking changes faster than youtube-dl.

Don’t give them ideas :D

They will start selling the past to us. YouTube Archive Plus.

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