5 ms·

> No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. As Youtube makes a much bett

> No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. As Youtube makes a much better places for publishing and archiving content than the rest of the Web. With Youtube you don't have to worry about URLs changing or domain names expiring or anything like that. You just publish your video once, get a unique video-id and don't have to worry about anything else. Google's monopoly worked here in our favor for once and they have been reasonably good in not breaking old content (not perfectly, as video annotation got crippled pretty badly). I think that's where the rest of the Web fell short. The Web has no concept of "publishing". There is no ISBN when you write a blog, no library were you could look up that ISBN. It's all just a file on a server or an entry in a database, that will get mangled and lost in the coming years. Worse yet, the article itself isn't even accessible from the Web, it's mixed together with a user-interface, ads and other stuff or spread across multiple pages. All this makes it quite tricky to keep old content readable and archived for the future. This also leads to a weird situation that a lot of publications are still avoiding the Web after 20+ years. They publish as ePub or PDFs instead, which you can somewhat access from the Web, but really aren't well integrated into it. But it's by far the easiest way to ensure that a text document published today will remain readable a decade down the line.

londons_explore 4y ago
Unlisted youtube videos from 10 years ago are all gone... Google made the decision to delete every video 'shared by URL' because of the possibility that the URL generation algorithm had leaked. It was legally less risky to delete all the content than to risk leaking all the content to the open web. IMO, they made the wrong call - it would have been better for the internet as a whole to notify all users that "We have a new 'share by link' option, and no longer consider the old links private. Please update all old links and then click this button to disable the old URL. If you don't click the button, videos shared by URL may be discovered by others in the future."
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Do you have a source for this?
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    I think he has it slightly wrong; unlisted videos were made private (not deleted AFAIK, but still rendered unavailable.) https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27610409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27610409
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Thanks.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Mine was certainly deleted. They didn't even tell me about it.
dEnigma 4y ago
Unfortunately when I look through my old Favourites playlist, which at some point reached the limit of 5000 videos, I can see how many of those videos are now private, deleted, or blocked in my country. The worst part is that in many cases I can't even recover the video title, so I have no idea what has been lost. A possible solution would be to store the titles separately, but I didn't think about this while I added stuff to my collection. I do agree though that the unique, unchanging URL is a huge boon, when I look at the situation in my browser's bookmarks for comparison.
- base698 4y ago
  Noticed this in a playlist of about 80 videos. It's now 55. I have no idea what it is that's missing.
- laurex 4y ago
  I made our wedding playlist on YouTube, since I pay for premium, and about 30% is now gone after a couple years. It would be nice if YT at least gave some indication of things they do not plan to delete, i.e. it's an official source not an upload subject to the whims of DMCA.
- r721 4y ago
  >The worst part is that in many cases I can't even recover the video title, so I have no idea what has been lost. I use two methods to recover deleted video titles: 1) google videoId part of the URL 2) look up cleaned up (with removed playlist-related parameters, just "youtube.com/watch?v=[videoId]" form) video URL in web.archive.org - sometimes it even has an archived video itself!
_Algernon_ 4y ago
There's plenty of videos on youtube that have been removed. Every few years when I look through my list of liked videos, a couple more are gone forever. Granted, this is likely by the creator themselves, but that doesn't matter when the purpose is archival.
- hobs 4y ago
  On a playlist of about 27 thousand videos (me and my cohorts links to each other over ~8 years) I observe about 10% missing, its a lot! Most of these are not information but amusing, random, short videos, and of course some of it is account deletions/disabling - copyright strikes - and people taking down their own stuff, but still, a lot!
  - 6510 4y ago
    here 2000+ subs 1900+ channels gone
- rchaud 4y ago
  I hate creating playlists on YT for this reason. When they delete videos, they don't even list the title of the video anymore, they remove the thumbnail and everything, so you won't even know that something you added months ago is no longer available.
auggierose 4y ago
Well, I once had a comment exchange with Sean Young (of Bladerunner fame) on YouTube, but that is gone now. So much for its archival qualities.
VHRanger 4y ago
> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. They're not, though. Because Youtube re-encodes videos every couple of years, with new "better" lossy compression algorithms. And each time the videos get successively worse. Watching a 2008 Youtube video will not only look grainy because it's 360p, but it'll look actively *worse* than it did in 2008 because of all the lossy compression that was applied to it over the decades.
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  YouTube has definitely kept the original videos for as long as I can remember, so any transcodes you see are only one generation after the original (plus maybe one more for if they didn't launch with this feature) And yes the new codecs really are better. Same quality at lower bitrate.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I know the norm when I read an article more than a year or two old that has tons of YouTube embeds is for most or all of them to show a "video gone" error. Sometimes even ones that are weeks old are like that. It seems to be at least as bad as the rest of the web as far as data/link rot goes.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  As a sibling comment noted, I'm pretty sure Youtube keeps the original video files, so generational loss should not be a huge problem. The problem is that Youtube is bitstarving 240p and 360p streams. That makes sense when a video is available at a higher resolution, and the 240p version is for people stuck on dial up or whatever. But in cases where 240p is the highest resolution available, Youtube should provide a high quality 240p stream!
makeitdouble 4y ago
> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. Do videos survive account deletion ? In particular, GDPR has provisions about deleting account info after years of inactivity, and Youtube is apparently not an exception (https://qr.ae/pv9o9j https://qr.ae/pv9o9j) So except the chunk of accounts that will stay active for the years to come, a big part of youtube videos should be disappearing progressively.
BrainVirus 4y ago
>The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. Roughly 1/3 of my YouTube bookmarks are dead and most of them are much more recent than 10 years. They purge videos at an alarming rate.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> There is no ISBN when you write a blog, no library were you could look up that ISBN. An ISBN is a string of characters, much like a URI/URL, and offers no more "protection" for long term access and the latter. Books get mangled and lost too; their only benefit is that it is harder to mangle and lose them, and there is likely to be more than one of them.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  More or less all "proper" books are kept by national libraries. So if you got real need, there is a chance to hunt them down.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. Tons of them aren't. I've run into many linked from wikipedia footnotes that no longer exist, particularly digitized film from the 20th century. A ton of wikipedia pages still cite old films, documentary footage, linking to videos which were uploaded by Jeff Quitney, who was banned from youtube a few years ago because some of the old films he uploaded contained material that ran counter to modern values (I think the one that eventually got him banned was an old christian film warning children about homosexual predators.) When they banned him, they took down a ton of completely innocuous videos because a tiny minority were offensive. https://archive.org/download/Jeff_Quitney_me https://archive.org/download/Jeff_Quitney_me

londons_explore 4y ago

Unlisted youtube videos from 10 years ago are all gone... Google made the decision to delete every video 'shared by URL' because of the possibility that the URL generation algorithm had leaked. It was legally less risky to delete all the content than to risk leaking all the content to the open web. IMO, they made the wrong call - it would have been better for the internet as a whole to notify all users that "We have a new 'share by link' option, and no longer consider the old links private. Please update all old links and then click this button to disable the old URL. If you don't click the button, videos shared by URL may be discovered by others in the future."

dredmorbius 4y ago
Do you have a source for this?
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I think he has it slightly wrong; unlisted videos were made private (not deleted AFAIK, but still rendered unavailable.) https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27610409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27610409
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Thanks.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Mine was certainly deleted. They didn't even tell me about it.

dEnigma 4y ago

Unfortunately when I look through my old Favourites playlist, which at some point reached the limit of 5000 videos, I can see how many of those videos are now private, deleted, or blocked in my country. The worst part is that in many cases I can't even recover the video title, so I have no idea what has been lost. A possible solution would be to store the titles separately, but I didn't think about this while I added stuff to my collection. I do agree though that the unique, unchanging URL is a huge boon, when I look at the situation in my browser's bookmarks for comparison.

base698 4y ago
Noticed this in a playlist of about 80 videos. It's now 55. I have no idea what it is that's missing.
laurex 4y ago
I made our wedding playlist on YouTube, since I pay for premium, and about 30% is now gone after a couple years. It would be nice if YT at least gave some indication of things they do not plan to delete, i.e. it's an official source not an upload subject to the whims of DMCA.
r721 4y ago
>The worst part is that in many cases I can't even recover the video title, so I have no idea what has been lost. I use two methods to recover deleted video titles: 1) google videoId part of the URL 2) look up cleaned up (with removed playlist-related parameters, just "youtube.com/watch?v=[videoId]" form) video URL in web.archive.org - sometimes it even has an archived video itself!

_Algernon_ 4y ago

There's plenty of videos on youtube that have been removed. Every few years when I look through my list of liked videos, a couple more are gone forever. Granted, this is likely by the creator themselves, but that doesn't matter when the purpose is archival.

hobs 4y ago
On a playlist of about 27 thousand videos (me and my cohorts links to each other over ~8 years) I observe about 10% missing, its a lot! Most of these are not information but amusing, random, short videos, and of course some of it is account deletions/disabling - copyright strikes - and people taking down their own stuff, but still, a lot!
- 6510 4y ago
  here 2000+ subs 1900+ channels gone
rchaud 4y ago
I hate creating playlists on YT for this reason. When they delete videos, they don't even list the title of the video anymore, they remove the thumbnail and everything, so you won't even know that something you added months ago is no longer available.

auggierose 4y ago

Well, I once had a comment exchange with Sean Young (of Bladerunner fame) on YouTube, but that is gone now. So much for its archival qualities.

VHRanger 4y ago

> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. They're not, though. Because Youtube re-encodes videos every couple of years, with new "better" lossy compression algorithms. And each time the videos get successively worse. Watching a 2008 Youtube video will not only look grainy because it's 360p, but it'll look actively *worse* than it did in 2008 because of all the lossy compression that was applied to it over the decades.

ReactiveJelly 4y ago
YouTube has definitely kept the original videos for as long as I can remember, so any transcodes you see are only one generation after the original (plus maybe one more for if they didn't launch with this feature) And yes the new codecs really are better. Same quality at lower bitrate.
yamtaddle 4y ago
I know the norm when I read an article more than a year or two old that has tons of YouTube embeds is for most or all of them to show a "video gone" error. Sometimes even ones that are weeks old are like that. It seems to be at least as bad as the rest of the web as far as data/link rot goes.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
As a sibling comment noted, I'm pretty sure Youtube keeps the original video files, so generational loss should not be a huge problem. The problem is that Youtube is bitstarving 240p and 360p streams. That makes sense when a video is available at a higher resolution, and the 240p version is for people stuck on dial up or whatever. But in cases where 240p is the highest resolution available, Youtube should provide a high quality 240p stream!

makeitdouble 4y ago

> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. Do videos survive account deletion ? In particular, GDPR has provisions about deleting account info after years of inactivity, and Youtube is apparently not an exception (https://qr.ae/pv9o9j https://qr.ae/pv9o9j) So except the chunk of accounts that will stay active for the years to come, a big part of youtube videos should be disappearing progressively.

BrainVirus 4y ago

>The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. Roughly 1/3 of my YouTube bookmarks are dead and most of them are much more recent than 10 years. They purge videos at an alarming rate.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

> There is no ISBN when you write a blog, no library were you could look up that ISBN. An ISBN is a string of characters, much like a URI/URL, and offers no more "protection" for long term access and the latter. Books get mangled and lost too; their only benefit is that it is harder to mangle and lose them, and there is likely to be more than one of them.

johannes1234321 4y ago
More or less all "proper" books are kept by national libraries. So if you got real need, there is a chance to hunt them down.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. Tons of them aren't. I've run into many linked from wikipedia footnotes that no longer exist, particularly digitized film from the 20th century. A ton of wikipedia pages still cite old films, documentary footage, linking to videos which were uploaded by Jeff Quitney, who was banned from youtube a few years ago because some of the old films he uploaded contained material that ran counter to modern values (I think the one that eventually got him banned was an old christian film warning children about homosexual predators.) When they banned him, they took down a ton of completely innocuous videos because a tiny minority were offensive. https://archive.org/download/Jeff_Quitney_me https://archive.org/download/Jeff_Quitney_me