Idk, I personally think about this a lot and it’s something I’m pretty passionate about. With the way online storage is viewed and how the web has been enshittified to no end, it’s kinda terrifying to imagine how all of these videos, movies, music and general art posted online could cease to exist in the blink of an eye because we don’t have a robust network in place geared towards saving what is produced. Like, you could swipe up or down on some website and never see an image/video again.
When I take a step back, I consider the fact that maybe this is a utopian vision and we can’t save everything. But then I fucking think about my time how I learned about how private companies have these networks in question to preserve their “data” that would not even exist in a world that made the slightest amount of sense because it has no value whatsoever. And yet, they have the power and resources to ensure it’s kept safe at all costs
I'm not very knowledgeable on the technical aspects but wouldn't it be absolutely astronomically costly to archive media at that scale? Youtube has to handle thousands of hours of high quality video being uploaded per minute, but they make a profit out of it which means they can pay for the data centers and the CDN (someone can Cunningham's law me it they don't use a CDN), if you were to archive what they have, you'd have to invest a close to equivalent amount of money (not as much in distribution, but you'd probably have to spend a ton of money on a deal with Google to let you crawl through YT and download everything). I can only see archiving of all the stuff that's being uploaded as just providing a guarantee that data isn't discarded and providing a separate interface for looking through the archive that is separate to the algorithmic slop feed.
Of course archiving all videos uploaded to YouTube is impossible. It would make much more sense (and be extremely doable) to archive all content within a certain “view threshold” and I’m kinda shocked that YouTube doesn’t have a way to do that.
We probably don’t have to worry about YouTube but everything from vine for example (that isn’t in some compilation on YouTube ironically) is completely gone. Maybe what I’m arguing for is decentralized video sharing idk
Also, probably shouldn’t have framed this specifically in the context of YouTube. I think what spurred this thought was having a conversation with some people about how media (owned by various companies) is disappearing the minute it’s taken off of streaming services because we’re all “renting” our data at this point.
It’s completely fucked
are videos ever really removed from youtube? don't they just restrict access to everyone except the internal servers?
