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YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

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Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#161

Post by [deleted] »

StavrosK wrote: post #117
simonh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sentiment mentioned often, but all the things we could do back in the day are not only still possible, they are actually still being done by people out there. What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though. Fortunately, in my experience…

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.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#162

Post by snak »

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.

That will come in handy, thanks!

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#163

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

dredmorbius wrote: post #113
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…

Sorry, but having been there at the time, and looking at technical requirments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21256674 ), I'm calling bogus. Online downloadable audio was barely tractable in 1999 or earlier, let alone streaming video. What was this golden age, what were the sites, and what was the usage? Streaming video is almost wholly 2004 and later, generally years later.

You are absolutely correct about the timeline! My experiences with independent video sites were mostley between 2000 and 2007 I'd guess. I do not think this contradicts any of my other statements, though.

Looking back further before video, we had web-rings which allowed for finding some of the best and worst sites on a subject :) I can't be the only card carrying member of the HTML Writers Guild here, can I?

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#164

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

spookthesunset wrote: post #66
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…

What are you talking about? What niche video sites existed before YouTube? Seriously. Video on the internet wasn’t really a thing before YouTube. Give me a break...

I didn't talk about before YouTube existed–I'm talking about when YouTube became the defacto standard for online video. Independent video sites existed and flourished along side YouTube in the beginning.

Sidenote: If we were having this conversation over beers at a meetup would you have said "Give me a break..." to me? Is this your conversational tone in person as well?

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#165

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

spookthesunset wrote: post #71
bsamuels wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

newgrounds

So 10 second clips of grainy 300x300 cat videos stolen from broadcast tv? If you think that is all that is on YouTube, you are sadly mistaken. Again. Give me a break. YouTube has absolutely transformed content distribution for then independent producer. We’ve never had a better age for independent content.

I didn't say it wasn't better and I didn't say it didn't transform content distribution for the independent producer. What I said was

1.) there used to be a lot of niche video sites 2.) many of those sites are gone 3.) The standardization of YouTube is one of the reasons many of those sites are gone.

The first two are facts and the second is my opinion, but which of those things do you not agree with?

I can miss something and understand that what we have now is better overall.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#166

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

spookthesunset wrote: post #70
drdeadringer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things True Honest Question. What were these sights? I was a teenage in the 1990s. I seriously and literally do not know and now I want to.

They didn’t exist. This person is full of it. There was no “golden age of internet video” before YouTube. Period. Video was all through real player and was grainy, postage stamp affairs that constantly suffered from buffer underruns. It sucked. There was no independent dudes exploring abondoned buildings with high quality production (the proper people). No dudes picking locks in under 30 seconds (lock picking lawyer)…

Sigh... I've replied to a couple of your other comments, but it is getting exhausting :( You are using quotes around something not from my comment, and not anything that I am referring to.

And it really seems like whatever site I tell you I miss is going to be met with reasons why YouTube is better for said content, which is completely orthogonal to my original point.

For some reason my comment got a lot of replies and comments. Take some time to think about why that is? Everyone is just on here full of it? Making up feelings of missing web sites? Maybe you don't miss any web sites–that is okay. Maybe it seems silly that someone would have strong-positive memories and emotions tied to certain web-sites that were actual communities to many of us–that is okay. But you shouldn't shame others. Not for this, not for anything.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#167

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

root_axis wrote: post #73
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…

I think this is just rose tinted glasses. The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude more content available today than in the 90s across the full spectrum of human affairs. Although highly visible to the individual content creators, the slivers of content that get removed from YouTube are drops in the ocean compared to the massive amount of content made availabl…

> I think this is just rose tinted glasses.

To some degree yes, but the feeling of belonging to niche forum in the 90's and 00's, really had a different feeling today's sub-reddit, discord, slack communities.

> The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude

This is very good point, and maybe what I'm mostly uncomfortable with. I'm uncomfortable using large web sites (like YouTube or Reddit) for community building. This could be tied to certain personality types, or lacking from something emotionally for me, but that may be what causes the feeling of missing those sites.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#168

Post by spookthesunset »

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #164
spookthesunset wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? What niche video sites existed before YouTube? Seriously. Video on the internet wasn’t really a thing before YouTube. Give me a break...

I didn't talk about before YouTube existed–I'm talking about when YouTube became the defacto standard for online video. Independent video sites existed and flourished along side YouTube in the beginning. Sidenote: If we were having this conversation over beers at a meetup would you have said "Give me a break..." to me? Is this your conversational tone in person as well?

This is my HN tone because tons of people here love to play the “everything was better back in the day” card. Couple that with every mention of google bringing out people with huge axes to grind and it can become eye-roll city. Apologies for being so harsh.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#169

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

drdeadringer wrote: post #24
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…

> Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things True Honest Question. What were these sights? I was a teenage in the 1990s. I seriously and literally do not know and now I want to.

For video, it was really a bit later into the early and mid 00s.

Answering this is hard, though. The best way to think about it is think of all those super random, niche subreddits. I'm sure all of those had cool, interesting web sites made by people really into that thing. So really they existed for everything. Find someone who was online a bunch during this time people and ask them if them were members of any interesting online forums.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#170

Post by pmart123 »

StavrosK wrote: post #156
TeMPOraL wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It can be a good way to find additional resources though. Asking questions or looking at posts often can yield many more interesting sources.
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