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YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

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Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#151

Post by jefftk »

pmlnr wrote: post #144
jefftk wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is people generally do different things when it's out of interest. More going deep on whatever their passion is, less of everything else. So you get ugly sites with interesting essays, or beautiful data visualization but no text for search engines to use to know to send people to the page. I really liked https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/the-costs-of-r... on this. I also think (though don't…

> I also think (though don't have the numbers) that there are many more hobby sites now than there were in, say, 1995, because the whole web is so much bigger. I severely doubt this. 1995-2004(?), essentially pre-myspace, was an era when many of us had a homepage as a hobby; some went into blogging as well, but still on their own site. Compare it to the web today: everyone is posting content* on silos and a most don'…

It sounds like you're talking about relative numbers, and I have no disagreement there, but I'm talking about absolute numbers. There just weren't that many people online in 1995, so even a large fraction then can easily be less than a very small fraction now.

I know lots of people with websites (ex: my own, https://jefftk.com) and a lot of this is it's so much easier and cheaper now. You don't have to be a sysadmin or be friends with one, domains cost 10x less than they used to, many more people have internet access, etc.

> When was the last time you saw real, true, honest content, without an agenda, without cat videos, without selfies, on a modern content silo?

I think it depends a lot who your friends are, what subcultures you're in, and how you choose who to follow. My Facebook feed is mostly my friends talking about interesting things and I like it a lot.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#152

Post by TeMPOraL »

Jenz wrote: post #124
II2II wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube has helped to improve the product, but I am of the opinion that the most of the best YouTube channels are produced by a single person who post weekly at most. They seem to have struck a good balance between audience engagement and information value. Consider Ben Eater or Technology Connections videos. The former may be more education oriented while the latter is well geared towards my quirky tastes in enterta…

> In contrast, the channels that have large production crews and publish more regularly usually feel thin on content. There is either very little value to the information or the density of information is incredibly low. There are exceptions. Vox comes to mind because they clearly respect their audience, has many more people involved in production, and produces more polished videos. Are you familiar with the youtube c…

That's an exception to the rule - a rare case of people with enough integrity to not sacrifice quality and accuracy, while having a distinct and approachable enough style to attract a wider audience. And still, I'm not sure if they've reached "financial independence" point yet. Yes, there's Patreon (and I send them money there), but last I checked (roughly a year ago), they still funded it in big part from the money they make commercially as a creative agency.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#153

Post by TeMPOraL »

bitL wrote: post #17
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #7

This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…

Exploration vs exploitation. Initially all businesses are trying to figure out how to make money by quickly exploring possible business ideas. That's when the most fun but also most start-up tragedies happen. Once some revenue stream is found, the company can start growing, getting into collaborative phase, where it is viewed as a super cool place and most people inside can change things. At some point business oppor…

Don't forget how the rest of the story goes. As businesses mature and margins evaporate, they start ruthlessly optimizing and cutting corners on everything they can to maximize their profits. Qualities that made the space interesting in the first place are the first to be thrown under the bus.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#154

Post by [deleted] »

jefftk wrote: post #151
pmlnr wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also think (though don't have the numbers) that there are many more hobby sites now than there were in, say, 1995, because the whole web is so much bigger. I severely doubt this. 1995-2004(?), essentially pre-myspace, was an era when many of us had a homepage as a hobby; some went into blogging as well, but still on their own site. Compare it to the web today: everyone is posting content* on silos and a most don'…

It sounds like you're talking about relative numbers, and I have no disagreement there, but I'm talking about absolute numbers. There just weren't that many people online in 1995, so even a large fraction then can easily be less than a very small fraction now. I know lots of people with websites (ex: my own, https://jefftk.com ) and a lot of this is it's so much easier and cheaper now. You don't have to be a sysadmin…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#155

Post by TeMPOraL »

input_sh wrote: post #93
r_singh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This resonates with me so much. On a slightly unrelated note: When these to-be monopolies are just starting and raising dollars, their service and everything is on point. Once their too big to have competitors, there is absolutely no way of even contacting them (even if you're in the clear and they're wrong). Customer service from these tech monopolies really makes me feel like we're all cattle.

If you have, let's say, a billion users, each of which can report stuff, and have some algorithm that weeds out 90% of bogus reports, how big would your customer support team need to be to handle the remaining 10% in a reasonable time span?

That's a side effect of too much centralization. Grocery stores handle billions of customers daily and have no problem processing even 10% of them complaining about something, because there's lots of stores and each handles complaints themselves. Customer support scales linearly with the scale of the sector.

You could say it's one of the negative side effects of globalization - instead of small market entities serving their local populations, you have large market entities that try to handle everyone themselves.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#156

Post by StavrosK »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #150
StavrosK wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you track them down today? In the old days, you typed "knitting" into Lycos and you got this wonderfully weird site of someone for whom knitting was a passion, along with a webring full of similar sites. Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise? My only hope at this point is Neocities.

> How would you track them down today? You go and find an appropriate subreddit. Seriously. Subreddits are mini-Internets. Yes, centrally controlled and restricted to newsboard format (the latter is arguably a benefit), but they link out to interesting sites on the "main" Internet, and mostly haven't been poisoned by marketers just yet. Not an elegant solution, and not a permanent solution - but it works for now.

It doesn't work very well, though. They're still at the mercy of reddit's advertisers.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#157

Post by Ruthalas »

kipchak wrote: post #46

I hate how removed videos don't retain a title. It's one thing for a video to be taken down, it's another to see a mystery box taunting me from my favorites playlist. What forbidden knowledge (cat video) is forever lost to time?

https://youtuberecover.com/ is a project designed to preserve the metadata of YouTube videos, searchable via original url.

They have a decent database, and you can add videos to it!

No affiliation, I just found it recently, and it may suit your use-case.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#158

Post by kipchak »

Thorrez wrote: post #56
kipchak wrote: post #46

I hate how removed videos don't retain a title. It's one thing for a video to be taken down, it's another to see a mystery box taunting me from my favorites playlist. What forbidden knowledge (cat video) is forever lost to time?

Have you tried archive.org?

Ah, good idea! I had figured the odds of it being indexed were unlikely but it's there from 2011. Seeing older YouTube is always nostalgic.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#159

Post by ColanR »

dvtrn wrote: post #53
ColanR wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing that for a while.

Storing locally or to your own private cloud? Could you share storage setup, I'm thinking I'm going to be doing this as well

Nothing fancy; basically what ravenstine said. If it's interesting, and I want to hold onto it, I youtube-dl it. Eventually it makes its way onto a USB backup drive.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#160

Post by kipchak »

Ruthalas wrote: post #157
kipchak wrote: post #46

I hate how removed videos don't retain a title. It's one thing for a video to be taken down, it's another to see a mystery box taunting me from my favorites playlist. What forbidden knowledge (cat video) is forever lost to time?

https://youtuberecover.com/ is a project designed to preserve the metadata of YouTube videos, searchable via original url. They have a decent database, and you can add videos to it! No affiliation, I just found it recently, and it may suit your use-case.

Thanks! Trying it on a few links it worked on a newer video from a terminated account but no dice on old stuff. It looks like they remade their account so that's definitely a win!
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