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?
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 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.
I have mentioned this over the last couple of years. The cost of maintaining all those server farms is getting prohibitively expensive. Just recently google has stopped archiving webpages
& cache searches are no longer available. We cannot trust for profit companies to be the repository of all the art, literature, history, music, research, writing, etc that we want preserved. They will only preserve what makes them money. And even if a nonprofit or govt wanted to be responsible, they can't. Climate collape, cyber attacks, wars, energy costs, etc make it impossible. The fanatical republicans want to make anything their cult doesn't like illegal & impose their beliefs on the public, on businesses, and on society. They want real history & other people's cultures erased. And they're fine with trampling on other people's rights to erase it. It was always a pipe dream that everyone would be able to just login & find anything. And now libraries are targeted.
@shekinahcancook@ajsadauskas@pluralistic@technology I have cancelled my family #YouTube premium membership and am migrating away from YouTube video, podcast and music. I want to echo the voices here mentioning #peertube. For #music, I'm trying to pay the creators and download #mp3 instead. I'm listening to #audiobooks in #mp3, paying a higher price and getting a narrower selection. I have #libretube on Android which circumvents the algorithm, the ads, and supports downloads of YouTube videos.
Also, there's this one guy who's auto-uploading auto generated videos of stackoverflow questions and answers on youtube, like every few seconds. I think I saw it on one of DistroTube videos.
@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
Very true. The Dead Media Project of the 1990s showed that even if profitable, media can go dark.
Some things are made to exist and then go away, like dance or radio. But if you want to make something to last, digital is not the way to go. Not at all.
A fine short (digital) work on why digitizing everything is not the answer...
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.
We should all contribute to a global, distributed, federated, and resilient database, keeping a disk at home and (securely!!) sharing it with the world.
@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
@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.
Early 4chan -- before it's spectacular decay -- was quite conscious where it's memory resided -- in users.
You'd have to understand the peculiar software architecture to know why, but 4chan has no ability to preserve posts. When a thread maxes out it is deleted.
The /y/ and other board's user's were openly conscious that the communities memories were their responsibility, maintained by reposting older material, simply because the code didn't support anything else. But the result was real community and collective memory, explicitly maintained. Though conjured up by a teenage programmer there's much profundity in there, accidental or otherwise. (I suspect the former but having talked to him at a conference once he was at least aware of it after.)
@tomjennings@ajsadauskas@pluralistic@technology then there's just the massive history of music, live performances, both official and unofficial, even phone recordings, local/unknown bands, demos, etc., that will likely be lost in purges in the future... I still can't really find many of the old (very poor) phone recordings and lofi recordings of metal bands from the early 00's to early 10's that I knew... A lot of artists are starting to come around to digital distribution and upload old stuff, but... then there's just the absurd amount of defunct/dead bands (that admittedly no one cares about)
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.
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@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.
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@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.
@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.
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 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....
@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…
@ajsadauskas@pluralistic@technology@fanf that is why @brewsterkahle created https://archive.org -- support them so we can keep an archive of important things, otherwise commercial companies will restrict and control the information in the future, and those who write the last are the real winners...
Archive has immense storage capacity, but Google's data centers are much larger.
The world would be better served with archives scattered across the globe which federate. I've been drawn to the idea that every municipality should have one more or more archives (tied to libraries), which then federate.
the fundamental protocols of the internet are distributed and decentralized; they were designed to survive nuclear war.
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.
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.
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