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 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…
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@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
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
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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.
@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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@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
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
Yeah, memorizing is exactly not archiving. 🤷♂️In fact it is pretty much the opposite.
@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 @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 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 @tsturm Unfortunately, we’re probably going to find out.
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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.
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@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.
@AstaMcCarthy @ckent @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
This is a very valid point. If you do create content that you intend to share to an audience, it’s quite easy to find an affordable or free instance to simply mirror your content.
Once it’s setup, it will sync automatically with no additional effort, and we can ALL celebrate that we are not feeding the monsters.
It is very much an ethical choice, and I think we can all agree we need to slay those beasts.
@lps @AstaMcCarthy @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Everything I’ve been doing in the last 12 months is HDR experiments
I’m starting 2 new channels soon, and one of them will be SDR only so I think I can publish that onto PeerTube easily
@lps @ckent @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Personally I would go one step further and invert that. So primarily publish on free and open platforms and sync from there to less free places. See https://indieweb.org/POSSE@AstaMcCarthy @lps @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology I’m all down for that, especially for non-video. For video I’ll have to self-host as if it’s Web 1.0 because PeerTube will reprocess and mangle my videos.
@ckent @AstaMcCarthy @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
There is an option, if you do self-host peertube, to retain the original resolution if no other options are selected. I’m not sure if that avoids transcoding, which I think is what you’re looking for.
@lps @AstaMcCarthy @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Hmm I looked into this a year ago. But from this screenshot, it’s only talking about resolution. I’m after bit-depth and colourspaces, and yes you’re very right about avoiding transcoding.
I throw a lot of CPU/GPU at my encodes, more than other people would. And so I’d prefer it if others wouldn’t transcode it. I’m happy to live within some rules — just tell me a CBR or VBR maximum …
That’s actually a problem.
There is no backup for this collective memory outside the servers of this company.
