The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…
The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. As Youtube makes a much better places for publishing and archiving content than the rest of the Web. With Youtube you don't have to worry about URLs changing or domain names expiring or anything like that. You just publish your video once, get a unique video-id and don't have to worry about anything else. Google's monopoly worked here in our favor for once and they have been reasonably good in not breaking old content (not perfectly, as video annotation got crippled pretty badly).
I think that's where the rest of the Web fell short. The Web has no concept of "publishing". There is no ISBN when you write a blog, no library were you could look up that ISBN. It's all just a file on a server or an entry in a database, that will get mangled and lost in the coming years. Worse yet, the article itself isn't even accessible from the Web, it's mixed together with a user-interface, ads and other stuff or spread across multiple pages. All this makes it quite tricky to keep old content readable and archived for the future.
This also leads to a weird situation that a lot of publications are still avoiding the Web after 20+ years. They publish as ePub or PDFs instead, which you can somewhat access from the Web, but really aren't well integrated into it. But it's by far the easiest way to ensure that a text document published today will remain readable a decade down the line.
IMO, they made the wrong call - it would have been better for the internet as a whole to notify all users that "We have a new 'share by link' option, and no longer consider the old links private. Please update all old links and then click this button to disable the old URL. If you don't click the button, videos shared by URL may be discovered by others in the future."
I use two methods to recover deleted video titles:
1) google videoId part of the URL
2) look up cleaned up (with removed playlist-related parameters, just "youtube.com/watch?v=[videoId]" form) video URL in web.archive.org - sometimes it even has an archived video itself!
Most of these are not information but amusing, random, short videos, and of course some of it is account deletions/disabling - copyright strikes - and people taking down their own stuff, but still, a lot!
When they delete videos, they don't even list the title of the video anymore, they remove the thumbnail and everything, so you won't even know that something you added months ago is no longer available.
They're not, though.
Because Youtube re-encodes videos every couple of years, with new "better" lossy compression algorithms. And each time the videos get successively worse.
Watching a 2008 Youtube video will not only look grainy because it's 360p, but it'll look actively *worse* than it did in 2008 because of all the lossy compression that was applied to it over the decades.
And yes the new codecs really are better. Same quality at lower bitrate.
It seems to be at least as bad as the rest of the web as far as data/link rot goes.
The problem is that Youtube is bitstarving 240p and 360p streams. That makes sense when a video is available at a higher resolution, and the 240p version is for people stuck on dial up or whatever. But in cases where 240p is the highest resolution available, Youtube should provide a high quality 240p stream!
Do videos survive account deletion ?
In particular, GDPR has provisions about deleting account info after years of inactivity, and Youtube is apparently not an exception (https://qr.ae/pv9o9j)
So except the chunk of accounts that will stay active for the years to come, a big part of youtube videos should be disappearing progressively.
Roughly 1/3 of my YouTube bookmarks are dead and most of them are much more recent than 10 years. They purge videos at an alarming rate.
An ISBN is a string of characters, much like a URI/URL, and offers no more "protection" for long term access and the latter. Books get mangled and lost too; their only benefit is that it is harder to mangle and lose them, and there is likely to be more than one of them.
Tons of them aren't. I've run into many linked from wikipedia footnotes that no longer exist, particularly digitized film from the 20th century. A ton of wikipedia pages still cite old films, documentary footage, linking to videos which were uploaded by Jeff Quitney, who was banned from youtube a few years ago because some of the old films he uploaded contained material that ran counter to modern values (I think the one that eventually got him banned was an old christian film warning children about homosexual predators.) When they banned him, they took down a ton of completely innocuous videos because a tiny minority were offensive.
One example: https://news.google.com/newspapers
I think you forget or may not have grown up with the microfiche.
The reality of the internet is that everyone has a voice and things will only be archived if someone gives a damn to archive them. And that's fine. Some information deserves to be transient. Hell, we've survived millennia without this level of information storage. Does every single YouTube video, Reddit post, and Flickr photo really need to live forever? No. Would it be nice? Sure.
Paper is great, because it doesn't just evaporate when you look away. Although it does degrade, it's a slow process—slow enough that you can notice that it's happening and think to yourself, "Gee, I maybe ought to do something about this." It's not the same for transient digital media. There are bonafide news items and other digital content that are now no longer accessible because they were digital-first but the business incentives were so misaligned and/or their legacy has been so mismanaged that, perversely, it's easier to access to the content of a 50-year old news article than it is for others that are 5–15 years old. People can always trawl through their parents' and grandparents' belongings and come across the only known surviving copy of something and donate it to a library or sell the collection in a yard sale or eBay. (Whether they know it's the only one known to exist or not isn't a precondition.) That's not just less likely with the Web, but it's drastically less likely. No one's gleaning much from the unevicted entries in someone's browser cache.
I use UK news sites. BBC Guardian and Telegraph all have their old articles online
For example: https://www.chipublib.org/resources-types/newspaper/
Much has been digitized, I hope they kept the microfiche for longevity.
For web based newspapers, good luck trusting longevity there, just because the library has a free interface to an api...
I am not sure why you replied to my comment l, with talk about not using the web, google, etc.
After all, I specifically said that trusting web bawed properties is an issue.
And you seem to have missed a key part of my comment, the state of paper based newspapers today.
They're dying.
Huge, multi-millon dollar, national newspaper corps, which used to have Saturday newspapers 2 or 3cm thick, when I was a kid, are now a mere 1/2 cm if lucky.
Many local newspapers are gone. Just gone.
The ones which remain, are barely standing on their feet.
So my comment, re archival, is that old methods of scanning phycial newspapers are not viable, and getting worse yearly.
Assuming you live in a place where public libraries are well-funded and can provide such amenities.
Isn't most of it on the wayback machine?
From August 30, 1856. Goes back even further but point mmade. Needs a payment to read but it's there.