16 ms·

This isn't a great specific example (it's "just" a meme and not even a particularly culturally significant one in the grand scheme of things), but in general th

This isn't a great specific example (it's "just" a meme and not even a particularly culturally significant one in the grand scheme of things), but in general this is why projects like youtube-dl are important. It might not be glamorous, and it might be a little stupid, but damnit this is our culture, for better or worse! And we should preserve it. Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce, and they're also exactly the wrong ones to be hosting our collective shared culture for posterity. It's a shame a torrenting-based youtube wouldn't really work for various reasons, both legal and social. So, short of that, at least being able to download stuff important to us as individuals is an important right to preserve. My personal stake in this fight is a video of "Scotland the Brave" that I used to listen to a lot, which featured an older Scottish gentleman standing in the beautiful highlands, loudly and proudly calling down through the glen. It got randomly copyright-removed recently and I've been unable to find it elsewhere. I don't even know who the person in the video was.

mensetmanusman 5y ago
I also lost access to a most beautiful poetry recitation from an older fellow who has passed. In hindsight, I wish I was more active in saving videos.
- DelightOne 5y ago
  It should be automatic.
  - knicholes 5y ago
    Can't it be? Like at the router level, maybe?
    - DelightOne 5y ago
      The router has the issue of traffic and the path being encrypted. It does not see the paths that are browsed and so cannot backup or replace/URL with the new one?
      - knicholes 5y ago
        Oh dang, you're right. You'd have to give it the key your browser is using to decrypt the file. Aaaand that's beyond what I can do.
  - ZetaZero 5y ago
    I don't have enough disk space to archive every video I've every watched.
    - rewma 5y ago
      > I don't have enough disk space to archive every video I've every watched. You don't need to. It would be enough to allow users to download all videos by default as a sort of local cache, have settings for max cache size and cache policy with LRU by default, and also support pinning. Heck, doing what Google already does with Google Play updates would already be a step up.
    - DelightOne 5y ago
      One option is to use cloud storage and to pay for it. If thats not an option, how should an add-on decide what video to archive? A button besides the video, how often you watch it or whether you paste it somewhere else?
    - Retric 5y ago
      You can probably do it just fine for every video you watched twice.
      - JKCalhoun 5y ago
        Having also seen cool videos in my YT playlists disappear over time, I've been "caching" the ones more precious to me.
    - robjan 5y ago
      This is a problem that decentralised protocols such as IPFS theoretically solve. You reserve x GB on your storage to cache the content you consume and can optionally "pin" content to keep it on your disk indefinitely. The problem is there are privacy concerns with this type of system as it's possible for anyone to find out who has consumed particular content.
    - throwaway09223 5y ago
      You probably do. Let's say you watch new and unique youtube videos for an hour a day, or 365 hours a year. (This is a lot more than I watch, btw) Let's say we have 5Mbps videos, or half a megabyte per second. 365 * 60 * 60 * 0.5 = 657G/year A 1TB disk is about $50, for about $25/year to store it at home. If you upload your videos to S3 Glacier it'll run around $8/year (per year, so after a few years this is more expensive than buying drives). For comparison, YT premium is $144/year. I only watch about 10 minutes of unique youtube videos a day on average, so I'm looking at around $1/year cost if I want to archive every single youtube video I've ever seen. It's pretty affordable.
mindslight 5y ago
> Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce Definitely not. It's an addressing problem. I guarantee plenty of people have the youtube video downloaded with more redundancy than Google, and the OP even has the source files. The problem is that Youtube became the canonical URL for referencing the video, assuming singular power to control that address based on the flawed protocol of http(s), and now there's going to be a lot of strife and damage as we readjust at a higher level.
- filleokus 5y ago
  Ooh. Crazy, not at all thought through, probably bad, legislation idea popped in to my head: EU Data Address Ownership Directive: All services that allow users to upload data that is then made publicly available, MUST have a method for the user to create a 301 redirect to another location where the content is available. (Maybe allowing for a "Are you sure you want to follow the link to https://alternative.com https://alternative.com and leave Youtube? We have no responsibility nor control for the content on alternative.com")
  - soco 5y ago
    For basically such a redirect The Pirate Bay got taken offline - many times.
  - j16sdiz 5y ago
    The one uploaded the content may not be the one who care.
- nradov 5y ago
  Maybe we need a new URI scheme and associated address resolution system for videos and other user generated content?
  - janandonly 5y ago
    The proposed solution of a different URI scheme exists. It's called IPFS.
dylan604 5y ago
> Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce, If you are producing videos at such a rate that you as the producer cannot actually save the content, then maybe you're doing it wrong. If you are producing content for the exclusive use/distribution by a private company that is known to have draconian automated decision making processes, you have to expect that you will one day run afoul of those decisions. The majority of content produced in mass quantity is also content that is such banal quality that it deserves to be lost to the ether.
- derefr 5y ago
  > If you are producing videos at such a rate that you as the producer cannot actually save the content, then maybe you're doing it wrong. You can film 8K video on a smartphone these days… but only about 15 minutes of it before you fill up the phone’s internal storage. If you don’t have a computer with a big hard drive to dump the video off on, you’re basically stuck shoving the video out to “the cloud” and then deleting the local copy so that you can film more. Whether that means pushing the raws to a private object store with an online video editing system hooked up to it, vs. uploading to YouTube where they transcode the raw to lower quality and then throw away the original, it still creates a dependence on the continued existence of some cloud provider.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Comparing an object store provider to YouTube is just pointless. It's not even close to being the same thing. If you cannot understand this difference, then we really cannot have a discussion. If you are shooting 8K video and don't know what to do with it, that is on you. Just because you can does not mean you should.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    When you can get 10TB [ EDIT: 4TB ] external drives for around $100, this is totally absurd pathway to take towards "preserving your own culture".
    - 5y ago
dotancohen 5y ago
> It's a shame a torrenting-based youtube wouldn't > really work for various reasons, both legal and social. https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/
- spijdar 5y ago
  I'd take "wouldn't really work" in this context to mean "not be very successful/widely used", a bar that PeerTube has yet to pass IMO.
- plainnoodles 5y ago
  Yeah, I know they exist. But they're never going to replace youtube in the foreseeable future, so having tools like youtube-dl, which would allow us to load content from youtube into peertube, for instance (or to archive it anywhere else), is important.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    You can mirror Youtube channels with Peertube. No need for the extra step.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    The two are not contradictory.
newswasboring 5y ago
I wonder if this could be solved with having several YouTube's. The storage can be central but maybe there can be several legal and sanctioned ways to access the videos. We already have YouTube kids. Why not also open up the market to license YouTube storage and allow other companies to make clients. It's a half baked idea but I think it can work. Right now there is no difference between premium and non premium YouTube apart from lack of ads. Everything else like background playback is an artificial barrier introduced by yt which they charge to remove. There is no creativity in this space because nobody can innovate apart from youtube. And honestly YouTube is shit at innovating.
- Zambyte 5y ago
  Peertube is the way to go.
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    I have not tried it out extensively but it has the same two problems that youtube competitors have. Library is smaller and it's not the same speed/quality. YouTube has a hold over our internet culture at this point and I think only a anti monopoly lawsuit can fix this.
    - jrm4 5y ago
      Sure, but it's not our job to pick -- we just try everything and fight from all angles.
      - newswasboring 5y ago
        I'm not sure what you want to pick.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Vimeo. Anti-monopoly won't make video hosting free.
sarbaz 5y ago
As copyrighted material, it should be required that a copy be stored with library of Congress. It used to be that LoC submission was part of the deal with copyright, but somehow we forgot that and important history has already been lost.
- lukifer 5y ago
  It’s oft forgotten that U.S. intellectual property constructs were created not purely for the natural rights of individual creators, but as an incentive for public benefit: “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    It was common in the late 18th century to provide a rationale for the passage of a law, but the law itself by its very passage becomes legitimate irrespective of whether it fulfills its stated purpose. The rationale doesn't restrict the scope of the law, it's simply a belt onion: there because "it was the style at the time". Courts have ruled that the justification in the Second Amendment, of establishing and protecting "a well-regulated Militia", does not bind the amendment to apply only to the establishment and protection of a body designated as the militia (e.g., the National Guard). Similarly, IP laws need not "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts" to be legitimate. If Congress passes IP laws to protect large cartels with no public benefit, and maybe even public harm, those laws are in full force and 100% constitutional.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      > does not bind the amendment to apply only to the establishment and protection of a body designated as the militia It does, but only because US code says that there's two militias. The organized militias (the National Guards), and the unorganized militias consisting of every able bodied man 17-45. Since the 14th amendment was written later, that bit of code is now interpreted to mean all adults. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246
silicon2401 5y ago
> but damnit this is our culture, for better or worse! And we should preserve it. I couldn't agree with this more. It's our culture and it's our life. Is it sad that so much of our lives is defined by consumption of media and staring at screens instead of being in touch with nature and living off the land or pursuing our own passions? Yeah, it is. But it is what it is. We are defined by our experiences, memories, and stories, and the only way to preserve digital media is to have a copy. This is what got me into digital hoarding. I hated having so much emotional investment in things that I couldn't even access like old cartoons and movies, videos from youtube, or websites. Even worse when it's an old forum with conversations and activity from your teenage years, and the forum goes offline (this has happened to me with Bungie.net, though thankfully I was able to archive at least my gameplay stats). I got 3 12TB hard drives this year (1 primary, 2 backups) and already see myself running out of room soon. It probably cost around $600 total, but it's been 100% worth it. I plan to expand in the near future to make sure I have plenty of room for everything I want without having to leave out anything that's really special. I love being able to re-live media experiences from my life, share them with loved ones, and even revisit moments that were defining for me in some way or another. It's a shame that our culture is so based on consuming media. But the bright side is that it's the easiest kind of culture to preserve, compared to things like a physical book or dance, so I highly recommend others to check it out and be a part of the digital preservation world.
- romwell 5y ago
  > Is it sad that so much of our lives is defined by consumption of media and staring at screens Oh, come on. A Youtube video is culture just like ancient Greek plays are culture, or Sumerian cuneiform tablets. There is an overconsumption problem, but even if it wasn't there, that'd still be the culture that we'd want to at least archive.
  - silicon2401 5y ago
    I disagree entirely. This quote explains my view better than I could word it: > The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.[1] Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.[1] The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
SkyMarshal 5y ago
Time repost such cultural heritage videos on Peertube it seems. https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/
dr-detroit 5y ago
Youre literally advocating theft from Scottish Gentlemen. Im about done with you HN...
nunez 5y ago
To be fair, tons of TV shows have been wiped from history as well. I learned recently that many game shows from the 60s and 70s are mostly gone, including early episodes of Wheel of Fortune!
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Yes even public state sponsored broadcasters didn't take archiving seriously in the beginning of television. Of course before the widespread adoption of videorecorders in the 80s the public could never rewatch anything. Nothing was meant to last.
causi 5y ago
Indeed. I began obsessively downloading and archiving every video I think worth watching more than once. My catalyst was noticing many of my favorite content creators removing their old content after deciding it either didn't match their current audience or decided it was too edgy for the current climate. One guy deleted a decade of videos after someone pointed out he said f*g in one of them.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

I also lost access to a most beautiful poetry recitation from an older fellow who has passed. In hindsight, I wish I was more active in saving videos.

DelightOne 5y ago
It should be automatic.
- knicholes 5y ago
  Can't it be? Like at the router level, maybe?
  - DelightOne 5y ago
    The router has the issue of traffic and the path being encrypted. It does not see the paths that are browsed and so cannot backup or replace/URL with the new one?
    - knicholes 5y ago
      Oh dang, you're right. You'd have to give it the key your browser is using to decrypt the file. Aaaand that's beyond what I can do.
- ZetaZero 5y ago
  I don't have enough disk space to archive every video I've every watched.
  - rewma 5y ago
    > I don't have enough disk space to archive every video I've every watched. You don't need to. It would be enough to allow users to download all videos by default as a sort of local cache, have settings for max cache size and cache policy with LRU by default, and also support pinning. Heck, doing what Google already does with Google Play updates would already be a step up.
  - DelightOne 5y ago
    One option is to use cloud storage and to pay for it. If thats not an option, how should an add-on decide what video to archive? A button besides the video, how often you watch it or whether you paste it somewhere else?
  - Retric 5y ago
    You can probably do it just fine for every video you watched twice.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      Having also seen cool videos in my YT playlists disappear over time, I've been "caching" the ones more precious to me.
  - robjan 5y ago
    This is a problem that decentralised protocols such as IPFS theoretically solve. You reserve x GB on your storage to cache the content you consume and can optionally "pin" content to keep it on your disk indefinitely. The problem is there are privacy concerns with this type of system as it's possible for anyone to find out who has consumed particular content.
  - throwaway09223 5y ago
    You probably do. Let's say you watch new and unique youtube videos for an hour a day, or 365 hours a year. (This is a lot more than I watch, btw) Let's say we have 5Mbps videos, or half a megabyte per second. 365 * 60 * 60 * 0.5 = 657G/year A 1TB disk is about $50, for about $25/year to store it at home. If you upload your videos to S3 Glacier it'll run around $8/year (per year, so after a few years this is more expensive than buying drives). For comparison, YT premium is $144/year. I only watch about 10 minutes of unique youtube videos a day on average, so I'm looking at around $1/year cost if I want to archive every single youtube video I've ever seen. It's pretty affordable.

mindslight 5y ago

> Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce Definitely not. It's an addressing problem. I guarantee plenty of people have the youtube video downloaded with more redundancy than Google, and the OP even has the source files. The problem is that Youtube became the canonical URL for referencing the video, assuming singular power to control that address based on the flawed protocol of http(s), and now there's going to be a lot of strife and damage as we readjust at a higher level.

filleokus 5y ago
Ooh. Crazy, not at all thought through, probably bad, legislation idea popped in to my head: EU Data Address Ownership Directive: All services that allow users to upload data that is then made publicly available, MUST have a method for the user to create a 301 redirect to another location where the content is available. (Maybe allowing for a "Are you sure you want to follow the link to https://alternative.com https://alternative.com and leave Youtube? We have no responsibility nor control for the content on alternative.com")
- soco 5y ago
  For basically such a redirect The Pirate Bay got taken offline - many times.
- j16sdiz 5y ago
  The one uploaded the content may not be the one who care.
nradov 5y ago
Maybe we need a new URI scheme and associated address resolution system for videos and other user generated content?
- janandonly 5y ago
  The proposed solution of a different URI scheme exists. It's called IPFS.

dylan604 5y ago

> Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce, If you are producing videos at such a rate that you as the producer cannot actually save the content, then maybe you're doing it wrong. If you are producing content for the exclusive use/distribution by a private company that is known to have draconian automated decision making processes, you have to expect that you will one day run afoul of those decisions. The majority of content produced in mass quantity is also content that is such banal quality that it deserves to be lost to the ether.

derefr 5y ago
> If you are producing videos at such a rate that you as the producer cannot actually save the content, then maybe you're doing it wrong. You can film 8K video on a smartphone these days… but only about 15 minutes of it before you fill up the phone’s internal storage. If you don’t have a computer with a big hard drive to dump the video off on, you’re basically stuck shoving the video out to “the cloud” and then deleting the local copy so that you can film more. Whether that means pushing the raws to a private object store with an online video editing system hooked up to it, vs. uploading to YouTube where they transcode the raw to lower quality and then throw away the original, it still creates a dependence on the continued existence of some cloud provider.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Comparing an object store provider to YouTube is just pointless. It's not even close to being the same thing. If you cannot understand this difference, then we really cannot have a discussion. If you are shooting 8K video and don't know what to do with it, that is on you. Just because you can does not mean you should.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  When you can get 10TB [ EDIT: 4TB ] external drives for around $100, this is totally absurd pathway to take towards "preserving your own culture".
  - 5y ago

dotancohen 5y ago

> It's a shame a torrenting-based youtube wouldn't > really work for various reasons, both legal and social. https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/

spijdar 5y ago
I'd take "wouldn't really work" in this context to mean "not be very successful/widely used", a bar that PeerTube has yet to pass IMO.
plainnoodles 5y ago
Yeah, I know they exist. But they're never going to replace youtube in the foreseeable future, so having tools like youtube-dl, which would allow us to load content from youtube into peertube, for instance (or to archive it anywhere else), is important.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  You can mirror Youtube channels with Peertube. No need for the extra step.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  The two are not contradictory.

newswasboring 5y ago

I wonder if this could be solved with having several YouTube's. The storage can be central but maybe there can be several legal and sanctioned ways to access the videos. We already have YouTube kids. Why not also open up the market to license YouTube storage and allow other companies to make clients. It's a half baked idea but I think it can work. Right now there is no difference between premium and non premium YouTube apart from lack of ads. Everything else like background playback is an artificial barrier introduced by yt which they charge to remove. There is no creativity in this space because nobody can innovate apart from youtube. And honestly YouTube is shit at innovating.

Zambyte 5y ago
Peertube is the way to go.
- newswasboring 5y ago
  I have not tried it out extensively but it has the same two problems that youtube competitors have. Library is smaller and it's not the same speed/quality. YouTube has a hold over our internet culture at this point and I think only a anti monopoly lawsuit can fix this.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    Sure, but it's not our job to pick -- we just try everything and fight from all angles.
    - newswasboring 5y ago
      I'm not sure what you want to pick.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Vimeo. Anti-monopoly won't make video hosting free.

sarbaz 5y ago

As copyrighted material, it should be required that a copy be stored with library of Congress. It used to be that LoC submission was part of the deal with copyright, but somehow we forgot that and important history has already been lost.

lukifer 5y ago
It’s oft forgotten that U.S. intellectual property constructs were created not purely for the natural rights of individual creators, but as an incentive for public benefit: “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”.
- bitwize 5y ago
  It was common in the late 18th century to provide a rationale for the passage of a law, but the law itself by its very passage becomes legitimate irrespective of whether it fulfills its stated purpose. The rationale doesn't restrict the scope of the law, it's simply a belt onion: there because "it was the style at the time". Courts have ruled that the justification in the Second Amendment, of establishing and protecting "a well-regulated Militia", does not bind the amendment to apply only to the establishment and protection of a body designated as the militia (e.g., the National Guard). Similarly, IP laws need not "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts" to be legitimate. If Congress passes IP laws to protect large cartels with no public benefit, and maybe even public harm, those laws are in full force and 100% constitutional.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    > does not bind the amendment to apply only to the establishment and protection of a body designated as the militia It does, but only because US code says that there's two militias. The organized militias (the National Guards), and the unorganized militias consisting of every able bodied man 17-45. Since the 14th amendment was written later, that bit of code is now interpreted to mean all adults. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246

silicon2401 5y ago

> but damnit this is our culture, for better or worse! And we should preserve it. I couldn't agree with this more. It's our culture and it's our life. Is it sad that so much of our lives is defined by consumption of media and staring at screens instead of being in touch with nature and living off the land or pursuing our own passions? Yeah, it is. But it is what it is. We are defined by our experiences, memories, and stories, and the only way to preserve digital media is to have a copy. This is what got me into digital hoarding. I hated having so much emotional investment in things that I couldn't even access like old cartoons and movies, videos from youtube, or websites. Even worse when it's an old forum with conversations and activity from your teenage years, and the forum goes offline (this has happened to me with Bungie.net, though thankfully I was able to archive at least my gameplay stats). I got 3 12TB hard drives this year (1 primary, 2 backups) and already see myself running out of room soon. It probably cost around $600 total, but it's been 100% worth it. I plan to expand in the near future to make sure I have plenty of room for everything I want without having to leave out anything that's really special. I love being able to re-live media experiences from my life, share them with loved ones, and even revisit moments that were defining for me in some way or another. It's a shame that our culture is so based on consuming media. But the bright side is that it's the easiest kind of culture to preserve, compared to things like a physical book or dance, so I highly recommend others to check it out and be a part of the digital preservation world.

romwell 5y ago
> Is it sad that so much of our lives is defined by consumption of media and staring at screens Oh, come on. A Youtube video is culture just like ancient Greek plays are culture, or Sumerian cuneiform tablets. There is an overconsumption problem, but even if it wasn't there, that'd still be the culture that we'd want to at least archive.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  I disagree entirely. This quote explains my view better than I could word it: > The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.[1] Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.[1] The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry

SkyMarshal 5y ago

Time repost such cultural heritage videos on Peertube it seems. https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/

dr-detroit 5y ago

Youre literally advocating theft from Scottish Gentlemen. Im about done with you HN...

nunez 5y ago

To be fair, tons of TV shows have been wiped from history as well. I learned recently that many game shows from the 60s and 70s are mostly gone, including early episodes of Wheel of Fortune!

MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Yes even public state sponsored broadcasters didn't take archiving seriously in the beginning of television. Of course before the widespread adoption of videorecorders in the 80s the public could never rewatch anything. Nothing was meant to last.

causi 5y ago

Indeed. I began obsessively downloading and archiving every video I think worth watching more than once. My catalyst was noticing many of my favorite content creators removing their old content after deciding it either didn't match their current audience or decided it was too edgy for the current climate. One guy deleted a decade of videos after someone pointed out he said f*g in one of them.