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
@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 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 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
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology, then it is deleted and gone.
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 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/moviesUnless 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.
@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?
@gvlx @BaroqueInMind @pluralistic @technology @ajsadauskas
One guy is using AltaVista to enable searching for Gopher content.
https://benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h/f91xCT53LZG1GJfk5R@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
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.
@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 @tsturm Unfortunately, we’re probably going to find out.
@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.
They should fix that, because it’s certainly degrading the experience on Lemmy. A good number of these replies have the tags longer than their actual content.
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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
@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…
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@GhostOnTheHalfShell
There are archives everywhere already. The problem is that these ventures are publicly funded, and municipalities are broke, and the national government squeezes public services in favor of other expenses. Here’s one dataset of Archives locations in the USA: https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=6cc5e9301e28453cba9737f7e8d284df&extent=-125.6236,25.3089,-68.8902,52.8456 - We need to support public archival instututions that have already existed for decades. & not put all eggs in the IA basket.
@jeroen @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology @fanf @brewsterkahledeleted by creator
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@jeroen @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology @fanf @brewsterkahle And THAT Is why commercial companies want to destroy archive.org
@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…
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@tomjennings
Yeah, memorizing is exactly not archiving. 🤷♂️In fact it is pretty much the opposite.
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@tomjennings @technology @pluralistic @ajsadauskas It’s important to note though that some boards acquired community wikis and archives way sooner, like /tg/.
In part because faithfully and accurately memorizing entire homebrew sourcebooks is not a reasonable prospect.
is not a reasonable prospect.
Not that that’s stopped 4chan before
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@tomjennings @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology And then he went to work for Google.
