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
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.
@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.
Ask any Dr who fan. The BBC did this as well back in the day…
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
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…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNbhMCB_3g
:jrbd:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=yKNbhMCB_3g
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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?
@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 @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.
@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!”
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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
@tomjennings
Yeah, memorizing is exactly not archiving. 🤷♂️In fact it is pretty much the opposite.
@tomjennings @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology And then he went to work for Google.
@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)
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@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.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology @tsturm Unfortunately, we’re probably going to find out.
The Internet Archive archives YT videos. I’ve downloaded removed videos from there before.
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
That’s why #peertube is so important! Everyone should be migrating or at least mirroring there ASAP… It will happen.
@pluralistic @technology@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Benjamin Franklin:
Freedom of the press belongs only to those who have one
That’s actually a problem.
There is no backup for this collective memory outside the servers of this 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/movies
