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Technology @lemmy.ml

Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au @aus.social

1y ago

My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.

My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.

Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.

There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.

So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?

tech #technology #Google #enshittification #youtube #video @technology #capitalism #film #television #cinema #art #arts #SocialMedia #business #economics

80 comments

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
The same thing that's happened with numerous print newspapers around the world. When they downsize, sack the backroom staff, and move to shopfronts they dump - literally - those priceless collections of photographs, negatives, and, yes, glass plate negatives, as though they were old office furniture.
- @Throsby @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology I wonder how much of this is captured by the local library? There was a time I could check old newspaper content on microfiche.
  
  @kneworldodor @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
  We do have that. The libraries scrupulously keep copies, but not necessarily physical media.
- @Throsby @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology old microfilm will get vinegar syndrome if it isn’t stored properly and if it is older acetate microfilm. Eventually it will become unusable. It’s expensive to replace just one reel of microfilm. Old newspaper clippings will all eventually crumble. I believe librarians and archives are the best place to save our history and culture. Unfortunately they are often not well-funded.
- Ask any Dr who fan. The BBC did this as well back in the day......

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology As a professional video editor with an add’l interest in audiovisual archiving, I spend a lot of time discussing how it’s not in my clients’ best interest to put their media legacy into YouTube/Google’s hands. Not only is it a compressed version, which isn’t good for repurposing (editor hat), there’s absolutely no guarantee it’s going to be there for the long-term (archivist hat). If they want to use it as a delivery platform, fine. It’s not an archive

Unless the public puts literally billions of dollars into funding and expanding public libraries to catalog all this video media into numerous publicly owned gigantic server farms that maintain the capacity to upgrade digital storage indefinitely, all video media is doomed to stay with privately owned capitalistic multinational corporations that are influenced by foreign governments to censoring various things at will, and all video media is destined to die forgotten and overwritten by future shitty memes and useless influencer garbage.
- Should be govt supported online libraries. Not under regular copyright rules (but they aren't allowed to profit or redistribute it either) but for potentially culturally relevant content that is 5 or more years since publication.
- @BaroqueInMind @pluralistic @technology @ajsadauskas
  We should all contribute to a global, distributed, federated, and resilient database, keeping a disk at home and (securely!!) sharing it with the world.
  I wonder if the technology is already there?
  DigitalPreservation #GlobalCooperation
  
  @gvlx @BaroqueInMind @pluralistic @technology @ajsadauskas The @internetarchive would be happy to accept your donation (I give regularly). Their scope is global, though based in the #UnitedStates, and they're not affiliated with #government or any #Capitalist #corporation. As well as their continuous #WaybackMachine web scraping they also have #Video and #Text archives plus some niche things like the #CoverArt archive.
  https://archive.org/donate
  
  @gvlx it's https://ipfs.tech/
  @BaroqueInMind @pluralistic @technology @ajsadauskas
  
  @gvlx @BaroqueInMind @pluralistic @technology @ajsadauskas
  One guy is using AltaVista to enable searching for Gopher content.
  https://benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h/f91xCT53LZG1GJfk5R

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Then we will quickly learn which people were prudent enough to keep backups, and which were not.
datahoard
- @AlexanderKingsbury @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
  Agreed! It's an important point of redundancy. If it's worthy, should be stored and distrubuted even if the most popular way is unavailable (I say)
- @AlexanderKingsbury @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology With TransIP in NL there was once a free 1000GB of cloud storage on HDDs when they moved the paid accounts to SSDs.
  The agreement was Best effort, but for lost data they were not responsible as there would be no backups, unlike the paid accounts.
  Yes, there came a time when a disk crashed in the RAID, and then while rebuilding a 2nd disk crashed.....
  Yes, bye data.
  Apparently some people were upset that their data was lost....
  So, 2
  
  @AlexanderKingsbury @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology 2) as they also didn't have a good feeling at TransIP, they decided to cancel the free storage option.
  I just thought "You knew there would be no backup, so lost, was lost... You accepted that. Tough luck!"

Always mirror your content on a few PeerTube sites. When 1 goes down, its your responsibility to re mirror

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology @tsturm Unfortunately, we’re probably going to find out.

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Anyone who's put all their precious eggs in one basket controlled by someone/something else is a fool.
- @Judeet88 @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology I swear, most any writer or student pre-cloud will tell you this. Always find multiple ways to save the things most important to you.

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology This is why it's important to own one's own content and only post it to social media, etc., as a secondary copy.

Archive.org is where a lot of these videos are getting archived.
- They don't have the space to archive it all. No one does. It's the reason it has grown so big without real competition.
  No one can do it.. or at least make money doing it.

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology There's always @internetarchive . If you want a place to preserve your videos, and you don't require #monetization, upload them.
The #WaybackMachine might already capture your videos, but you don't need to take the chance, and their Video library is better curated.
https://archive.org/details/movies

@ajsadauskas
That's actually a problem.
There is no backup for this collective memory outside the servers of this company.
@pluralistic @technology

@ajsadauskas
That's why #peertube is so important! Everyone should be migrating or at least mirroring there ASAP... It will happen.
@pluralistic @technology
- @lps @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology When YT’s “musk kitchen sink” moment happens, I’ll switch over
  For now there’s a few things missing, like HDR, and current leadership at YT is surprisingly understanding how to keep an ecosystem fertile
  But already I know to actively maintain a backups folder of all my uploads. Which is interesting — so do they. YouTube preserves every upload, and has periodically reprocessed the originals to higher quality (less downgrades).
  
  @ckent @lps @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology If you have a backup of all your video's anyway, why not upload it to a peertube server too? By keeping you content exclusively available on YT you actively strengthen Google's video monopoly.

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Well, Google will tell you to download your material before a certain date, and then just clear their servers...

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Can I SHOUT LOUD ( to far too many people still covering their ears ! ) TOLD YOU SO ! ACTUALLY IS ALREADY HAPPENING ! .. "Oh it's always going to be on the internet to download when I need it" .. NO IT'S NOT !! How many times YT for whatever reason took down something or forbidden you to see in full or .. What's going to happen ? That when they'll really need money they'll start say PAY OR WE TAKE ALL DOWN .. and content will vanish from YT !

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology BTW, enough media will be lost in the future due to DRM versions that will no longer be supported at a certain moment.

@ajsadauskas@aus.social Minor correction: "becomes unprofitable" should be "becomes insufficiently lucrative".
Furthermore, how much revenue Google needs to make from each of its properties including Youtube keeps going up quarter after quarter thanks to insatiable shareholder appetite.
It's like sending a citizen each day to the nearby dragon to get it to leave you alone, but over time the price keeps going up.
@pluralistic@mamot.fr @technology@lemmy.ml

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Youtube is basically my entertainment. I do not have cable or TV of an kind. I am very selective in my viewing. If you appear to be a decent human ie: not racist, not misogynistic, not fascist or nazi I will probably watch anything you have to offer. If you are an asshole I will block you.

@ajsadauskas@aus.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr @technology@lemmy.ml There are ways to download from it with tools like yt-dlp (no Premium account needed), at least for now. I am not sure what the legal position is with re-distribution (possibly depends on the video) but I would suggest this as a good way to archive a backup of content you value offline.
- @ajsadauskas@aus.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr @technology@lemmy.ml It also fetches them without ads so it's a good way to watch on my TV where those aren't blocked.

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology It'll go where Orkut went.
- Why is everyone @-ing the same group of people in this post?
  
  I think they're replies in mastodon?
  
  I was wondering the exact same thing. Nobody uses ats and hashtags on Lemmy, but on Mastodon, that’s the only way to tie the conversation fragments together. This is just ActivityPub doing its thing. Welcome to the Fediverse.

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Needs to be nationalised; or more precisely, converted to a non-profit body.

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology, then it is deleted and gone.

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology i think it already is unprofitable, just that they haven’t decided (how) to act upon that fact.
On the other hand, is hosting it all become more or less expensive over time? If server costs are getting lower faster than the amount of stuff people upload grows, they could well keep it just to know what every person online wants to watch (and show ads, I guess).

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
What, you don't have a personal archive of your youtube favorites?
Better start the backup now?
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

YouTube as 'too big for ethics' and also 'too big to compete with' is terrifying AF.
Nothing can replace YT and it's success or failure is in the hands of one unscrupulous company.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Curious if you are aware of anyway of downloading one's content off YouTube for this all but inevitable moment?
- Yt-dl.
  Command line tool, works on all desktop OS's, can handle things in batch, download full playlists, etc.
  I believe the current up to date/maintained fork of it is yt-dlp
- @VoxofGod @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology 4k videodownloader is great for downloading everyones content 3
- I use Downie (on Mac) but there’s a video downloader app for every platform. It doesn’t download the ads either 😉

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Some of it is saved by public services (for content in french, by INA).
- @bortzmeyer @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology we can't have one service archive everything, maybe even @internetarchive … But could we make a service/browser plugin to tell if a video is archived already somewhere and propose where to add it? If it's in French - INA, and so on…
  
  @bortzmeyer @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology @internetarchive Maybe there's some collaboration possible with SearxNG? (I recall writing the INA search addon)

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Hear hear! That Do No Harm motto seems to have become increasingly flexible...

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology and I have a vimeo account, and I keep "meaning to try" to use it....there's even good stuff on there! It's affordable if it's pay-to-view! But no....

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Why I am still buying music to own.

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
"If"?

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
"So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?"
Things improve.
Youtube does not have a monopoly because it's the only video app installed on your computer, but because it's the one everyone uses.
Plenty of people have tried to compete, but Youtube was good enough. Others had good reasons to try but concluded that Youtube was good enough.
When Youtube is no longer good enough, they get to show they can do it better.
Google search is worse, because it hasn't been good enough for a long time, but somehow every competitor has decided to be worse. Altavista 25 years ago beat what Google search is today, I can't imagine Microsoft being unable to afford to bring Bing up to Altavista levels.
- Things improve.
  It is not a natural law that things will eventually improve. It takes deliberate effort and money and an environment where this improvement is possible. Especially a video hosting site takes a lot of capital. And if powerful actors has a literal stranglehold on the market, then it can be virtually impossible even for obviously better alternatives to gain a foothold.
  
  @uienia
  I was answering a question about what happens when it becomes unprofitable for "powerful actors that have a literal stranglehold on the market" to keep pumping money into maintaining that strangehold.
  I expected it to be obvious that the first thing that happens is that they stop doing so. THEN there is room for others to improve things.

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Or Elon Musk takes over?

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology truth!

I’m not worried about it. You don’t need YouTube in your life.
If it bothers you this much you may be spending entirely way too much time on your computer.
- The problem here is not about any one persons YouTube habits. It's that we've been pouring so much into it as a group that if it goes away it'll be torching even more history. The Internet has a bad problem with losing things and it is already making finding old data difficult. This is especially noticable with games or even more specifically mods. Morrowind mods have a long and vibrant history of being lost forever because the hosts kept changing and archives going under. There are many games and mods I played as a kid that are gone now and forums talking about them that are also gone. YouTube is a single point of failure for a ton of video history and losing that history is generally considered to be A Bad Thing ™️
  
  @ArmoredThirteen @Coreidan Agreed. My worry is not even that youtube will do a big conspicuous wipe of things (though they might). It's that they'll quietly start deleting low view count content from accounts who don't log in much leaving people wondering if they were misremembering that they used to be able to access certain content

80 comments