Justin.tv ending archiving, deleting all archived videos after June 14
help.justin.tv
help.justin.tv
In the meantime, programs like youtube-dl and livestreamer are your friends.
http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/documentation.html http://livestreamer.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
It's easy, and the more people who run the machine, the more power the ArchiveTeam has at their disposal. I encourage everyone to give it a look.
You can get the virtual machine here: http://tracker.archiveteam.org/
You might think that this is all useless information, but I guarantee we'll look back in likely only a few years and think in horror at all that we've destroyed.
The best art blog about a half decade including a kid who's dead now just disappeared. When Myspace deleted all of their content, I lost all the content of my dead high school friend (turns out you need to back up everyone and thing you care about, not just yourself[1]) and @maxfenton mentioned "The best art blog about a half decade including a kid who's dead now just disappeared.". It's not an isolated problem.
I almost feel like we need a name-and-shame registry and/or public awareness campaign. I'd love to see this written into the user rights of a website when it launches.
"If the website is to be shut down, all publicly accessible content will be sent to the Internet Archive. If you would like to opt out, tick this box."
[1]: http://smerity.com/articles/2013/deleted_digital_tombstones....
During the Hyves.nl rescue in late 2013, ArchiveTeam did accept donations to cover Amazon instances earmarked for that project, so it's possible they may do something like that again this time.
In case people are curious, the Warrior code and seesaw code are here:
https://github.com/archiveteam/warrior-code2 https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/seesaw-kit
I'm not sure why it should. When did we get this strange idea that when you make some piece of content, no matter if it's quality or not, it deserves to pollute the cyberspace forever.
I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but one of the reasons nature "works" is that everything old is allowed to dissolve and become the base ground for the new that will come after it.
People naturally copy content that they find interesting. And content which isn't that interesting naturally gets lost. Maybe that lost content stuck around enough to inspire someone to do something in that spirit later or (which also counts), but it doesn't survive itself.
Imagine if everyone gets Glasses one day and starts doing non-stop 1080p video stream of their lives. Are we going to be "pissed off" at that being deleted too?
If you do the stats you'll notice that over 99.99% of the content in archive.org is never accessed. Nobody cares.
And that's how it should be. We should really allow content to die. I have the firm belief that information doesn't just "want" to be free. It also wants to be allowed to die gracefully at some point.
Recently the BBC has been asking people to search attics and sheds for home recordings (taped from tv or radio broadcast) or "lost" tape (probably meant for erasure and reuse that got ahem 'lost' on the way and ended up in a BBC technician's collection).
I find it weird that mega had petabytes of poorly de-duped content (very many copies of the same pirated movie in different rips) yet we're talking about deleting content because, well, because.
Having said that I'm not giving them any money to keep it archived let alone online so perhaps I need to shut up or put up.
We can't just keep everything forever. First it was text files, then html files, then html files with images, and now videos.
Without pruning, the task of archive.org will become impossible, so the question of what's important and what isn't will have to be decided at some point.
Important things will be copied and preserved. That's the natural order of things.
Despite I expressed myself very clearly, I expected two types of reactions: knee-jerk reactions like yours, which argue against something I didn't say; and getting down-modded, because the currently accepted wisdom of HackerNews is that we should hoard any type of information regardless of its merit.
Even though it's explicitly against the rules to down-mod to disagree with someone's opinion, every scoring system gets abused this way eventually. I find this sad.
But then you redefined it as 'popular' and 'interesting' content. While something that is popular and holds the interest of people might also be quality content the reverse is not necessarily true. How many quality on maths or chemistry or history or engineering or some remote tribal language or what have you are popular? (Lets assume some arbitrary popularity metric like a million views) Sure you might be able to popularize the 1-2 minute nugget of incomplete/dumbed-down information but I don't consider that quality. And I'm quite sure that you won't be able to actually do anything by knowing some random formula/effect/trivia without the multi-hour lectures associated with their fundamentals.
>Important things will be copied and preserved. That's the natural order of things.
I disagree. We've lost countless important historical documents because they were neglected/destroyed/etc. What you're defining as the natural order is just the 'winners' re-writing history. Its already easy to alter history by altering Wikipedia or buying a news publication and making certain articles un-crawlable. What if Google deleted the cache or Wikipedia did not keep a history of changes? "If you can't Google it, it doesn't exist" is pretty much how the future might unfold. I think its important to preserve even unimportant things.
You might have a point or two in what you're trying to say, but you should really consider the broader argument. Oh and I did upvote you. :)
Someone should contact the Archive.org and see if they can get copies of all the public archives of these videos.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/may/07/shareholders...
1. Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ZTmuX3cog
In order to fully archive a stream "permanently", a user needs to view each archived recording individually and select an option from that page to save it forever.
At least Google had acted partly responsibly by providing ample notice and allowing users to download their data before shutting down Google Reader.
In the case of Justin.tv, I would propose they at least take a measured approach and start by deleting videos that haven't received a single view in over a 6 months then work their way from there.
OTOH:
>We found that more than half of our VODs are unwatched (with 0 or 1 total views), while the vast majority are rarely watched (with 10 or less views).
The reality is that there is an increasingly indescribably volume of user-created "stuff" out there and it's pretty impractical to preserve all of it. And when it's not on a well-known site that's shutting down (think Geocities) it mostly sinks beneath the waves without anyone really noticing. I could probably name any number of online magazines/sites which went away or restructured and whose content is no longer available. I'm not saying that's a good thing but it's hard for me to get too worked up in most of these cases.
Isn't this the standard for content? Anyone know similar statistics for image hoster, url minifiers, youtube, appstore etc?
Then for their post, they answered the question they wished they were asked, like a politician does in an interview.
Justin.tv is not a profit center for Twitch Interactive, so they need to cut costs. If 50% of VODs are viewed <= 1 time, and most viewed <=10 times, why not just leave them there? Obviously storing them costs money, but there probably isn't a lot of bandwidth costs associated with it.
I don't have anything against what they're doing as much as the sugarcoating of "focusing on live video"
This also lends more credence that they're getting bought out soon and want to look good on the cost sheets.
Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner!
Seriously, there can be no explanation for the ridiculously short notice other than YouTube said, "You look good, but your costs are just too high." (Or, if not YouTube, somebody else Twitch is trying to get into a bidding war with YouTube.)
Any other reason and management would have looked at the costs and said, "We need to transition out to save money," and provided a reasonable runway for their customers. As it is, this has nothing to do with making things better for their customers.
As in Google saying they can't deal with these videos without proper acceptance of their terms of service.
The timing seems to indicate they are trying to offload the content ASAP.
From a cost perspective, they are already paying for it and 1 week vs 1 month would not make that much of a difference if it was a "product feature"
Having an additional recording is convent, now people have to record locally at the same time as streaming.
I feel like justin.tv's peak was 5+ years ago, twitch seems to have been their real business in the last 3 years.
Two weeks is freaking desperation.