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Comment by IAmNotACellist | Hacker News Reader

Cultural rot caused by YouTube taking down old videos is a serious problem.

There was a YouTube channel I was following for about 15 years, of an older woman who had pet foxes. Her health started declining and she always had on her channel something like, "I'll leave these videos up forever." She passed away and YouTube deleted all her content.

The problem is 100x worse for any political content. My YouTube bookmarks from just the past few years is a graveyard of information that's not convenient to have around. It's even true for politics-related jokes, songs, and memes. They seem to be selected for deletion more often than not, within a few years.

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I have a playlist with 285 videos, and youtube just says "Unavailable videos are hidden".

It's the worst, I have no idea what is missing. I don't even know how much is missing and I am sure the number will keep increasing over time, not even sure they will bother to tell me that there are missing videos at this rate.

If you view your playlist on a desktop browser you can make it show you the unavailable videos in the list. Then you can grab those IDs and try to find them via the Wayback Machine, etc. Hope this helps.

hum I don't see how to do that anymore

It's in the ... menu at the left.

Also Filmot has a userscript for this that searches their archive for metadata and shows thumbnails from the Wayback Machine: https://filmot.com/moresearch

https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup

Docker: https://github.com/etnguyen03/docker-tubeup

Content uploaded to the Internet Archive is stored as <service>-<identifier>. Please don’t abuse, use judiciously. When in doubt, contact Patron Services (info at archive dot org) prior to archival ops. They can also assist with establishing a collection for multiple items if warranted. It costs the Internet Archive $2/GB to store bits in perpetuity; consider donating if it is within your means.

(content uploaded with this will be excluded by Archive search due to spammers and other bad actors, you will have to reference the identifier directly to access or use tools like this post; anything flagged by a copyright holder using the DMCA will be made unavailable, so keeping a local copy might be prudent)

Now you've learned the hard way that bookmarking is not enough, you need to save a local copy as well.

I have, but it's not easy to share those with others, and of course no one is discovering them now

I hate to do the HN thing, but nextcloud has a feature to use yt-dlp (or whatever), feed it a url, it will put it in your folder. You can share the folder or the file, even with the same URI (the hash yt gives videos, I mean).

I've done this by hand a lot - I have probably a half TB of 480p rips from YouTube and Twitter, as well as a bunch from reddit - though reddit has always been a pain in the ass.

I say use something like nextcloud because there's turnkey Linux images available, so you only need a host that supports that feature to get started. Furthermore, once you have the video "local", in the future if some decentralized video sharing service launches you'll be 90% of the way there by merely having canonical links to content available publicly.

Peertube can also do some fanciness: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use/channel-sync

A while back there was a hacker news story about someone who used AI to clean up the long lost Steely Dan song "the second arrangement". I was looking for it again on YouTube and it's now private, I presume thanks to a complaint from the record company. (There's still a wav file out there thankfully.) I feel like if the company was smart they'd put the track on all the streaming services, maybe even print a 7" 45 of it (vinyl boom anyone?) or include it on a Gaucho remaster... Then it could make some revenue.

What happened to the foxes.

Now we'll never know what they say

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