YouTube’s new leader announces new priorities (AI tools, shorts)

A bit like hearing that your copilot's plan to stop the plane crash is to dive even steeper.

YouTube has always been a fair-weather friend, and the weather has been fair for a while. It does beg the question of how long it will be profitable to store these videos, and what the future of an online video archive looks like. For the past couple years I've been backing up channels I like to my NAS with yt-dlp. The ride was fun, and the utility was great, but I wouldn't take it for granted much longer. Storage is cheap right now, so I highly recommend starting your own backup if you want to keep this stuff post-YouTube too. With any luck, a user-sustained IPFS-style replacement might exist in a decade, and we can rebuild a public video archive the way it should have been.

They're still trying to make shorts A Thing, huh?