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
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.
Always mirror your content on a few PeerTube sites. When 1 goes down, its your responsibility to re mirror
@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
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.
@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 @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.
@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.
Ask any Dr who fan. The BBC did this as well back in the day…
@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.
@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 Some of it is saved by public services (for content in french, by INA).
@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…
@bortzmeyer @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology @internetarchive Maybe there’s some collaboration possible with SearxNG? (I recall writing the INA search addon)
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Anyone who’s put all their precious eggs in one basket controlled by someone/something else is a fool.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Curious if you are aware of anyway of downloading one’s content off YouTube for this all but inevitable moment?
@VoxofGod @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology 4k videodownloader is great for downloading everyones content <3
Yt-dl.
Command line tool, works on all desktop OS’s, can handle things in batch, download full playlists, etc.
I believe the current up to date/maintained fork of it is yt-dlp
I use Downie (on Mac) but there’s a video downloader app for every platform. It doesn’t download the ads either 😉
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
“So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?”Things improve.
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.
Things improve.
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.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Or Elon Musk takes over?
@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…
@jeroen @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology @fanf @brewsterkahle
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.
my 2c
@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 @brewsterkahle
@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.
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Enter
/r/datahoarder
?