[HN Gopher] 52% of YouTube videos live in 2010 have been deleted
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       52% of YouTube videos live in 2010 have been deleted
        
       Author : oidar
       Score  : 69 points
       Date   : 2022-07-14 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (datahorde.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (datahorde.org)
        
       | sithadmin wrote:
       | An excellent self-hosted tool for data hoarders that want to
       | preserve YouTube content:
       | 
       | https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
        
       | whoomp12342 wrote:
       | aka 52% of youtube from the era where it was fun have been
       | deleted.
       | 
       | badger badger badger badger mushROOM MUSSHROOOMM!!
        
         | CrazedGeek wrote:
         | That specific video actually predated YouTube itself:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badgers_(animation)
         | 
         | And it's still up on YouTube: https://youtu.be/EIyixC9NsLI
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | zucked wrote:
         | That started as a flash animation, right? So. many. wasted.
         | hours. watching flash animations. It's amazing how quickly
         | flash disappeared after the dominos were set in motion.
        
           | themadprogramer wrote:
           | I guess you can say that it FADED LIKE A FLASH :}
        
       | wongarsu wrote:
       | Twitter used to provide all Tweets to the Library of Congress for
       | archival, until the library decided it wasn't worth the effort to
       | continue adding that much data. I'm not sure who would be in a
       | position to archive YouTube for the future. Does the Internet
       | Archive make snapshots?
        
         | themadprogramer wrote:
         | There was something of a brokered agreement between Archive
         | Team/Twitter to upload a fraction of Tweets to the IA. That
         | too, unfortunately, ceased some time last year. Either way you
         | might want to take a look at
         | https://archive.org/details/twitterstream
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | Natively, not to my knowledge. Tooling is available though.
         | 
         | https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup
        
       | barrysteve wrote:
       | It's probably time to start saving the videos you like if you
       | haven't already.
       | 
       | I still remember when Key and Peele's whole catalog (or a lot of
       | it) was available on youtube back in 2015-2016. For a brief
       | window of time.
       | 
       | Some of my favourite songs with 10s of millions of views have
       | been taken down. Many niche videos don't get reuploaded.
       | 
       | No guarentees that youtube will keep your unique or exclusive
       | videos publicly available. Every video is fair game for deletion
       | at any moment.
        
         | yunohn wrote:
         | > No guarentees that youtube will keep your unique or exclusive
         | videos publicly available. Every video is fair game for
         | deletion at any moment.
         | 
         | TFA is about reuploads and other kinds of user content, that
         | was not kosher in the first place. These may be deleted by
         | YouTube.
         | 
         | Your examples are about IP and content ownership changing
         | leading to video being removed by the channels themselves.
         | That's a different problem, not solvable by YT.
        
         | FrenchDevRemote wrote:
         | >I still remember when Key and Peele's whole catalog (or a lot
         | of it) was available on youtube back in 2015-2016. For a brief
         | window of time.
         | 
         | Is there a lot of stuff missing on Comedy Central?
         | 
         | I've discovered them on Youtube(I'm european), it seems like
         | there is a tooon of content from them, is it just a small part
         | of what they did?
        
           | andrew991116 wrote:
           | Their show also included standup comedy/overarching plots in
           | between the skits that are not available on YouTube
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | AinderS wrote:
       | Youtube also does its best to prevent you from downloading
       | videos, to leave no record of the past.
        
         | BonoboIO wrote:
         | Don't give them ideas :D
         | 
         | They will start selling the past to us. YouTube Archive Plus.
        
         | remlov wrote:
         | If you're comfortable in the terminal the following works great
         | for archiving: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl
        
           | moonshinefe wrote:
           | I had issues with youtube severely capping my download speeds
           | using youtube-dl, but had success with https://github.com/yt-
           | dlp/yt-dlp
        
             | remlov wrote:
             | Doh. This is what I initially wanted to link to in the
             | comment. yt-dlp definitely is the better fork, and they
             | seem to address YouTube breaking changes faster than
             | youtube-dl.
        
       | NetBeck wrote:
       | YouTube is deleting pre-2010 videos, meanwhile anything is still
       | possible at https://www.zombo.com
        
         | MrYellowP wrote:
         | I've clicked that.
         | 
         | There's a circle, with circles around, with something around
         | one of these smaller circles. All of it is spinning. I've
         | managed to click the spinny thingy and it turned into quadratic
         | spinny thingy.
         | 
         | That's all.
         | 
         | What the fuck?
         | 
         | Please explain!
        
           | saurik wrote:
           | Did you forget to turn sound on?
        
           | jjulius wrote:
           | How old are you? It's possible that you may be outside of the
           | generation that would've appreciated it during it's peak.
        
           | themadprogramer wrote:
           | You knew what you were signing up for. Your imagination is
           | the only limit at zombo.com
        
           | willcipriano wrote:
           | It's revolutionary tech, web 5.0 at least, not everyone
           | understands.
        
             | MichaelZuo wrote:
             | The web of the future needs to be beyond numbers entirely.
        
           | schlauerfox wrote:
           | That's it. It's Zombo com. The difference is it's been
           | reliably the same since 1999.
        
           | Wowfunhappy wrote:
           | Exactly.
           | 
           | (You're not missing anything.)
        
       | toomuchtodo wrote:
       | Would love to crowdsource an effort to buy enough disk space to
       | backup YouTube to the Internet Archive and have ArchiveTeam
       | perform the archival op.
       | 
       | Assuming ~35PB of content stored at YT, should cost roughly $70M
       | for IA to buy the necessary storage infra and maintain it into
       | the future (their costs are ~$2/GB for perpetual storage).
        
         | the_biot wrote:
         | If you've spent any time on YouTube, it's painfully obvious
         | much of it is not worth archiving at all. Clearly if you had
         | some critera to select videos that are worth preserving, this
         | task would become a lot more doable.
         | 
         | But what could those criteria be?
         | 
         | You can't just select out all those fast-talking "influencers"
         | that shill and lie their way through hours worth of video just
         | because they're shit, because sometimes those videos have
         | thousands of people that DO like them, making them perhaps
         | interesting to a sociologist 300 years from now.
         | 
         | 2000-year old Roman shopping lists, personal letters and
         | obscene graffiti are _intensely_ interesting to historians now,
         | but would have been worthless to their owners even a couple of
         | days later.
        
           | MrYellowP wrote:
           | > 300 years from now
           | 
           | That's really unlikely, given it's all just digital and
           | electricity. Ignoring that our pseudo-global society will
           | have collapsed long before that and ignoring that the digital
           | era unlikely lasts that long ...
           | 
           | ... assuming humanity actually keeps going as it is ...
           | 
           | ... there is _no_ way people in 300 years will be able to
           | read _any_ device from today. Hell, the CD-ROM is dying and
           | that 's _young._
        
           | themadprogramer wrote:
           | You have to, however, also consider the multi-domainness of
           | YouTube videos. Yeah sure, there's billions of hours of clips
           | not one person can watch in a single life-time. But unlike
           | your 2000-year old Roman shopping lists, we have footage of
           | events that are anchored to a particular time-period. Or
           | location.
           | 
           | One of the most impressive things you can do is, try
           | searching up a landmark. My personal favorite is the [Jumping
           | Stone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1TtMN8nXTM) on the
           | Nias Island of Indonesia. What would have otherwise just
           | remained a novel tourist attraction, forgotten by the
           | modernity of the 21st century, is now essentially a "tag"
           | which has hours of footage associated with it. Thousands of
           | tourists travelling back and forth, locals growing old, new
           | people being born, buildings being built and demolished
           | around it. You can even just study how video quality improved
           | in that particular region. That there IS something wholly
           | unique to this era and definitely worth preserving. YouTube
           | as a company has figured the logistics of storing it, but the
           | question of how humans can hope to read such data remains yet
           | unanswered.
        
             | the_biot wrote:
             | Like so many questions of this type, I think the Internet
             | Archive is the answer. They are not a warehouse of stuff
             | stored on media/formats that are forever becoming obsolete
             | -- they store data, keyed by timestamp, sometimes with
             | metadata. How they store it and serve it up is irrelevant,
             | and they will upgrade as needed (I assume this is a
             | continuous process).
             | 
             | If the IA didn't exist, we'd have to invent it.
             | 
             | I suspect if the IA ever decides to properly archive
             | YouTube, they'll interface with the folks that run it
             | directly. Archive Team is, to put it as diplomatically as I
             | can, not a good organization.
        
               | soraminazuki wrote:
               | I don't think that's a complete answer though. The
               | article lists ContentID as the major reason videos get
               | deleted, meaning that copyright trolls could go after IA
               | if they want to. What we desperately need is copyright
               | law reform.
        
               | themadprogramer wrote:
               | > If the IA didn't exist, we'd have to invent it.
               | 
               | You know, a part of the original company vision for
               | YouTube prior to the Google acquisition was really
               | something akin to the IA, in that they did pride
               | themselves with hosting footage of the Indian Ocean
               | Earthquake:
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Indian+Ocean
               | +ea...
               | 
               | Now, acting as diplomatically as I possibly can, I can
               | say that your suggestions of the IA and YouTube
               | interfacing together were at a previous point in time a
               | continuous process. But a number of factors have made
               | direct cooperation between the IA and Google (thereby
               | YouTube) come to a screeching halt.
               | 
               | At this current point in time, we stand at a historical
               | crossroad. And I'm only here to just act as a humble
               | messenger ;)
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | virtuallynathan wrote:
         | As of 2013, I calculated the YouTube catalog is ~375PB. It's
         | probably closer to 1EB now, if not 2-5x that much.
         | 
         | http://www.autonomoussystem.net/2013/07/youtube-slowness.htm...
        
           | sterlind wrote:
           | would tape be cheaper? it'd be a lot more annoying to use,
           | but at least you'd have a backup, even if you have to queue a
           | request to access.
        
             | booi wrote:
             | Tape (~$6/TB) is cheaper than archival storage (~$14/TB)
             | but I'm not sure it's worth the cost of having another
             | "offline" system that needs robots or humans in order to
             | access for rebuilds, maintenance, verification etc.
             | 
             | I'm surprised by how magnetic storage continues to decline
             | in price as densities continue to increase. I wonder where
             | the end actually is.
        
               | crmd wrote:
               | You might be surprised to see the scale of LTO tape
               | consumption by FAANG companies.
        
           | toomuchtodo wrote:
           | _Sad trombone._
        
         | themadprogramer wrote:
         | Maybe someone should do a Kickstarter for it ;)
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-14 23:02 UTC)