So, I don't want to depress people this early in the week, but I do want to bring something of attention to you.
Youtube is a terrible place to keep audiovisual heritage, ON ITS FACE, and we as a species decided that nah, let's do it anyway fam
Youtube is a terrible place to keep audiovisual heritage, ON ITS FACE, and we as a species decided that nah, let's do it anyway fam
As part of the whole being fined a lot of money for showing children absolutely terrible videos with its magic algorithms, Youtube has implemented a rule which has made it so videos are being split into "for children" and "not necessarily only for children" and "not for children"
I'm not arguing against that move, or why it was done. It's a natural thing that happens, just like we banned smoking ads and hard alcohol advertisements (for 45 years) on american TV. Choices are made when you're an outlet.
But as I've said before: Treating Google like an Archive is like treating a supermarket like a Food Museum. It's not true, it doesn't scale, and it's ridiculously precarious.
What concerns me with Google are The Decisions.
Being in this incredibly powerful position, culturally and archive-wise, when Google makes a Decision, that Decision can have wide-ranging effects far and beyond the immediate reasons, and affect entire swaths of culture. Randomly.
Again, this would be fine if Youtube was just this pleasant little social site where People Post Crap, but I am running into a lot of cases of unique, possibly never-to-be-seen-again audiovisual items disappearing.
When Google made the Decision to remove Annotations, they removed over 4 billion of them. Gone, poof. And now, when Google decided to remove all comments under any video classified as for kids, they removed a number that I can't begin to calculate.
I mean, really. One decision and they wiped out what has to be billions of comments. For a good reason for their internal meanings, of course. But that's a lot of history to disappear. All that context, all that info.
[I'm not going to waste time with the "all youtube comments are garbage" people. Get out.]
We're one more "decision" or two away from Youtube obliterating unique videos. A decision, like, "because this does not monetize, it will be removed within 2 years of upload" or "if you can't prove ownership of the video with this simple (but necessary) action, we delete".
What I really want are all these videos that people are ripping off old tapes or master tapes or what have you. The ones where they're doing these wonderful .MPG pulls from standard-definition sources and then squelching them through youtube's great-for-streaming routines.
We can pull stuff off the channel, but now it's double-messed with and I know there was a great 12gb-per-hour original at one point, and I want us to host that. You're not monetizing it, you're just using google to host it. We'll host it.
But outside of my own direct interest, there's town meetings and sermons and public access recordings and non-profit statements and non-monetized cultural artifacts just flying into the youtube black hole (and it is a black hole) every day, and I wish somehow I could tell them.
Tell them this is terrible permanent storage, to store these videos in multiple places, to ensure these artifacts will last through the next "decision" and that the future trauma of Google shutting them off will be to unclick one button on their uploader software.
Happy Monday
