6 ms·

I am increasingly worried about the valuable content on YouTube. There are so many old live concerts, useful how-to videos and other cultural treasures amidst a

I am increasingly worried about the valuable content on YouTube. There are so many old live concerts, useful how-to videos and other cultural treasures amidst all the junk. I suspect that one day, they will make their ads unblockable by embedding them in the video files. I sure hope that some people are downloading the valuable stuff and stashing it away to load onto YouTube's successor. <and please skip the tired argument that I should just pay a subscription fee to avoid their ad crap - we are already paying them with our data. My data is worth far more to me than the value they provide for it. Plus - I won't give money to a company who forced this Faustian bargain on me.>

robotnikman 5y ago
I set up a server specifically for downloading Youtube videos from all my playlists on a daily basis just for this reason. At some point I got fed up at seeing all the missing videos on my playlists (and not even knowing what was removed)
- floren 5y ago
  What do you use for automation? My first instinct is cron jobs running youtube-dl scripts against a set of playlist URLs, but I'd be interested to hear more.
  - robotnikman 5y ago
    Yep, you basically just described the setup, nothing super fancy :) Cron job which runs a batch script at midnight which feeds youtube-dl some playlists URLS's which it downloads to a HDD. I also have nextcloud running which has access to the directory the videos are saved to, so I can easily share them if I want to.
majormajor 5y ago
How many how to videos, memes, concerts, etc, are really that important? In fifty years how many people will care? How many people should care because it would mean ignoring the huge volume of newer stuff? A hundred years? Two hundred? I haven't even read or seen many of the existing cultural artifacts we have from past decades and centuries, what would I do if orders of magnitudes more of them had been preserved? In fact, I'm incredibly greatful that I grew up before all the random shit that I threw out there as part of my youth was subjected to obsessive cataloging and archival efforts.
- codingdave 5y ago
  If you grew up before the internet, surely you remember all the DIY manuals that lived in everyone's home. Everyone had that same big hardbound book of how to do basic home repairs. Many people had sewing books, electrical books, Chilton manuals for their cars. Cookbooks, too. We have valued how-to information for decades, and that interest and need far pre-dates the internet. So while I get what you are saying that much of the pop culture videos do not hold long-term value (which is also questionable considering how many of us older folk still have collections of vinyl)... there absolutely is valuable content out there that deserves preservation.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    There will probably always be niche sources for specific "how to" information. YouTube is currently a low-effort way to make that generally available in video format, but it's certainly not the only viable solution, and the information you can get from a specific enthusiast site or forum is often better and more detailed.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    Sure, and nobody is going to the library or other archives to check out those old how-to books, they're using contemporary sources on Youtube instead. And the same will be true of old vs contemporary sources in fifty years. I don't expect my own collection of books - which includes some that are valuable to me primarily for nostalgia - to have much value past the death of myself and the rest of my generation. It might temporarily have a lot of monetary value near my death - when other copies have already been lost - but to someone born fifty years after me? What use would pulp fiction from the 80s be to many of them? My parents and uncles are in a bit of disbelief of how little even I care about the Beatles already, after all.
    - BatFastard 5y ago
      Well not caring for the Beatle is like not caring for Mozart. Bad taste is always an option in a free society.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 5y ago
https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup
varispeed 5y ago
I download everything I like. Storage is cheap now. Plus smaller sites will start disappearing because of regulatory capture. It will not be possible to run a forum or similar site in few years.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  We say that a lot, but it's not that cheap if you're using redundancy and backups. It's cheap if you don't care too much about the data.
  - Thrymr 5y ago
    Cataloging and indexing and searchability are also not cheap if you are doing all of that on your own time.
redisman 5y ago
It’s really up to you who cares about something to archive it. I managed to find a torrent of early days video games from my region that has almost been lost to time. Luckily I found a discord and could coax someone to hop on to seed it. If I had waited 10 more years they might have been gone for good. Everyone’s assuming that data now stays on the internet forever because it’s so massive. It’s usually one or two people who keep the flame alive
blooalien 5y ago
> "and please skip the tired argument that I should just pay a subscription fee to avoid their ad crap - we are already paying them with our data. My data is worth far more to me than the value they provide for it. Plus - I won't give money to a company who forced this Faustian bargain on me." Not only this, but many of the largest companies these days would never remove advertising even from a paid service. It's like cable TV. They wanna charge you and advertise at you for more money.
- anoncake 5y ago
  Paying signals that you have disposable income, making advertising to you more profitable.
sp332 5y ago
The 2014 Vulture interview with David Milch, where he reads form an unreleased Boss Tweed script, may be gone for good. https://twitter.com/mattzollerseitz/status/1409622969282875398 https://twitter.com/mattzollerseitz/status/14096229692828753...
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
you're worried about....the ads? Having ads around doesn't make the content any less valuable. We're talking about the content itself still being available, who cares if there's some ads keeping the system up if all those live concerts and how-to vids are preserved forever
- gentleman11 5y ago
  The ads make content less valuable. They distract and mislead and manipulate emotions, especially when the youtuber sponsors something during the video itself. The content isn’t abstract and isolated, the content and the ads come as a bundle. The digital procedural product placement on the way will make this 10x worse
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Who is going to watch live concert footage with ads jammed into it? For those of us who grew up in the age of TV, advertising was clearly a slippery slope where they constantly increased the ad content until it was beyond unbearable (they even deleted parts of shows to make room for more ads!) YouTube will likely do the same when they decide to force all of us to watch unblockable and unskipable ads to access content that they didn't even create or curate. All they have done is provide a network effect monopoly that hoovered up the majority of content.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    Commercials are also important media that must be archived. I watch some old TV show, old TVCMs that reflects old days are also interesting to see.
gentleman11 5y ago
They won’t stop collecting your data even if you pay them
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
> I am increasingly worried about the valuable content on YouTube. Download it? This continues to be not difficult for YouTube. > I suspect that one day, they will make their ads unblockable by embedding them in the video files. That's fine. I honestly wish they would because most of the hangs in YouTube I experience when the stream changes to an ad, and then changes back. If it was embedded in the video then the stream wouldn't be interrupted. If I hate the ads that much one can edit them out after it's downloaded.
a1369209993 5y ago
> that I should just pay a subscription fee to avoid their ad crap Fuck no. Do not do this. Use youtube-dl[0], and maintain local copies of anything useful you can find. 0: http://youtube-dl.org/ http://youtube-dl.org/
- azinman2 5y ago
  I’m happy to give YouTube my money to provide a real alternative to ad-supported models. Plus the vast majority of videos I watch id never want to see again.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    You're not really providing YouTube an alternative to ad-supported model - you're only proving that lots of obnoxious ads can convert people into paying customers.
    - ip26 5y ago
      Yes, and how dare a business desire paying customers.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        My point is that converting is a signal promoting more ads, not less.
      - bruce343434 5y ago
        > we are already paying them with our data
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Good news, you can block ads embedded in youtube videos: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ It skips sponsors (even from the youtuber itself), jingles, intro, etc. It's awesome.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
What I hate about youtube the most is their deleting of videos AND metadata... I make a "watch later" playlist, with stuff that i must watch, two weeks go by, and there is a "[Deleted video]" in my playlist... not even a title left behind (so i'll be able to find it elsewhere).

robotnikman 5y ago

I set up a server specifically for downloading Youtube videos from all my playlists on a daily basis just for this reason. At some point I got fed up at seeing all the missing videos on my playlists (and not even knowing what was removed)

floren 5y ago
What do you use for automation? My first instinct is cron jobs running youtube-dl scripts against a set of playlist URLs, but I'd be interested to hear more.
- robotnikman 5y ago
  Yep, you basically just described the setup, nothing super fancy :) Cron job which runs a batch script at midnight which feeds youtube-dl some playlists URLS's which it downloads to a HDD. I also have nextcloud running which has access to the directory the videos are saved to, so I can easily share them if I want to.

majormajor 5y ago

How many how to videos, memes, concerts, etc, are really that important? In fifty years how many people will care? How many people should care because it would mean ignoring the huge volume of newer stuff? A hundred years? Two hundred? I haven't even read or seen many of the existing cultural artifacts we have from past decades and centuries, what would I do if orders of magnitudes more of them had been preserved? In fact, I'm incredibly greatful that I grew up before all the random shit that I threw out there as part of my youth was subjected to obsessive cataloging and archival efforts.

codingdave 5y ago
If you grew up before the internet, surely you remember all the DIY manuals that lived in everyone's home. Everyone had that same big hardbound book of how to do basic home repairs. Many people had sewing books, electrical books, Chilton manuals for their cars. Cookbooks, too. We have valued how-to information for decades, and that interest and need far pre-dates the internet. So while I get what you are saying that much of the pop culture videos do not hold long-term value (which is also questionable considering how many of us older folk still have collections of vinyl)... there absolutely is valuable content out there that deserves preservation.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  There will probably always be niche sources for specific "how to" information. YouTube is currently a low-effort way to make that generally available in video format, but it's certainly not the only viable solution, and the information you can get from a specific enthusiast site or forum is often better and more detailed.
- majormajor 5y ago
  Sure, and nobody is going to the library or other archives to check out those old how-to books, they're using contemporary sources on Youtube instead. And the same will be true of old vs contemporary sources in fifty years. I don't expect my own collection of books - which includes some that are valuable to me primarily for nostalgia - to have much value past the death of myself and the rest of my generation. It might temporarily have a lot of monetary value near my death - when other copies have already been lost - but to someone born fifty years after me? What use would pulp fiction from the 80s be to many of them? My parents and uncles are in a bit of disbelief of how little even I care about the Beatles already, after all.
  - BatFastard 5y ago
    Well not caring for the Beatle is like not caring for Mozart. Bad taste is always an option in a free society.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

toomuchtodo 5y ago

https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup

varispeed 5y ago

I download everything I like. Storage is cheap now. Plus smaller sites will start disappearing because of regulatory capture. It will not be possible to run a forum or similar site in few years.

pessimizer 5y ago
We say that a lot, but it's not that cheap if you're using redundancy and backups. It's cheap if you don't care too much about the data.
- Thrymr 5y ago
  Cataloging and indexing and searchability are also not cheap if you are doing all of that on your own time.

redisman 5y ago

It’s really up to you who cares about something to archive it. I managed to find a torrent of early days video games from my region that has almost been lost to time. Luckily I found a discord and could coax someone to hop on to seed it. If I had waited 10 more years they might have been gone for good. Everyone’s assuming that data now stays on the internet forever because it’s so massive. It’s usually one or two people who keep the flame alive

blooalien 5y ago

> "and please skip the tired argument that I should just pay a subscription fee to avoid their ad crap - we are already paying them with our data. My data is worth far more to me than the value they provide for it. Plus - I won't give money to a company who forced this Faustian bargain on me." Not only this, but many of the largest companies these days would never remove advertising even from a paid service. It's like cable TV. They wanna charge you and advertise at you for more money.

anoncake 5y ago
Paying signals that you have disposable income, making advertising to you more profitable.

sp332 5y ago

The 2014 Vulture interview with David Milch, where he reads form an unreleased Boss Tweed script, may be gone for good. https://twitter.com/mattzollerseitz/status/1409622969282875398 https://twitter.com/mattzollerseitz/status/14096229692828753...

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

you're worried about....the ads? Having ads around doesn't make the content any less valuable. We're talking about the content itself still being available, who cares if there's some ads keeping the system up if all those live concerts and how-to vids are preserved forever

gentleman11 5y ago
The ads make content less valuable. They distract and mislead and manipulate emotions, especially when the youtuber sponsors something during the video itself. The content isn’t abstract and isolated, the content and the ads come as a bundle. The digital procedural product placement on the way will make this 10x worse
wintermutestwin 5y ago
Who is going to watch live concert footage with ads jammed into it? For those of us who grew up in the age of TV, advertising was clearly a slippery slope where they constantly increased the ad content until it was beyond unbearable (they even deleted parts of shows to make room for more ads!) YouTube will likely do the same when they decide to force all of us to watch unblockable and unskipable ads to access content that they didn't even create or curate. All they have done is provide a network effect monopoly that hoovered up the majority of content.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Commercials are also important media that must be archived. I watch some old TV show, old TVCMs that reflects old days are also interesting to see.

gentleman11 5y ago

They won’t stop collecting your data even if you pay them

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

> I am increasingly worried about the valuable content on YouTube. Download it? This continues to be not difficult for YouTube. > I suspect that one day, they will make their ads unblockable by embedding them in the video files. That's fine. I honestly wish they would because most of the hangs in YouTube I experience when the stream changes to an ad, and then changes back. If it was embedded in the video then the stream wouldn't be interrupted. If I hate the ads that much one can edit them out after it's downloaded.

a1369209993 5y ago

> that I should just pay a subscription fee to avoid their ad crap Fuck no. Do not do this. Use youtube-dl[0], and maintain local copies of anything useful you can find. 0: http://youtube-dl.org/ http://youtube-dl.org/

azinman2 5y ago
I’m happy to give YouTube my money to provide a real alternative to ad-supported models. Plus the vast majority of videos I watch id never want to see again.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  You're not really providing YouTube an alternative to ad-supported model - you're only proving that lots of obnoxious ads can convert people into paying customers.
  - ip26 5y ago
    Yes, and how dare a business desire paying customers.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      My point is that converting is a signal promoting more ads, not less.
    - bruce343434 5y ago
      > we are already paying them with our data

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Good news, you can block ads embedded in youtube videos: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ It skips sponsors (even from the youtuber itself), jingles, intro, etc. It's awesome.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

What I hate about youtube the most is their deleting of videos AND metadata... I make a "watch later" playlist, with stuff that i must watch, two weeks go by, and there is a "[Deleted video]" in my playlist... not even a title left behind (so i'll be able to find it elsewhere).