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“Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

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Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#151

A related frustration for me is when I have random videos in my "watch later" list replaced with a gray square and a note saying the video is no longer unavailable or has been made private. Since I don't even get any details of what the video was (title/channel/description), I can't go find it elsewhere. It's like having a song deleted from a playlist silently. It makes me wonder if I should even rely on Google's fea…

In light on this common experience of natural and intentional link rot for YouTube videos, I think the only sensible strategy is to use youtube-dl to download videos to watch (and possibly delete) later.

Its all pretty seamless with rss too. You can set mpv to be your default browser for video links and it will scrape and start playing and you can save the video too. I use newsboat and a master script that uses some regex to figure out what to open the RSS link with (like a browser, feh for images, or mpv, or rtv for reddit links, etc)

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#152
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a feature. If somebody deletes their video then all of the metadata goes with it. I agree that it can be annoying but among other things, it’s the law.

> it’s the law Where? Other sites keep the metadata (and even allow new comments on) deleted posts.

GDPR text asks to delete all data for which the user withdraws consent to share. IANAL but that seems telling.

When a user asks to delete a video it’s deleted, with it goes the title and description.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#153
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a feature. If somebody deletes their video then all of the metadata goes with it. I agree that it can be annoying but among other things, it’s the law.

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

I love me a random 1984 reference… care to explain what’s wrong with honouring user requests to delete their data?

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no better way to provide video content with a text document than to link to youtube. Sure they should have a private backup but until youtube stops working well like it has for a decade, it's still more reliable than any self hosted setup a company would build.

There is no better way to provide video content with a text document than to link to youtube That may be the best "free" way, but my company puts their training videos up on some training website. The site tracks which videos were watched and sends nag emails when required trainings are late. So if you're putting up content that your employees are obligated to watch, there are better alternatives than Youtube.

But then the video viewer doesn’t have the necessary features. Especially in 2010 when those videos were put up, everyone would have used the superior Youtube or Vimeo player. But they would have chosen Youtube because you had no guarantee Vimeo would be correctly paid for years.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#156
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't it be a self hosted server? The Google drive could be deprecated at any moment

The chance of your self hosted server going down, being hacked, catching fire, etc is infinitely more likely than google drive being shut down so fast you can't switch to something else. At this point the advice is moving towards "Don't even have a video if you can't be bothered designing a CPU from scratch to host it on". Keep a local backup by all means but it's far more likely the local copy will get lost than the…

I'm a little skeptical of that, especially in the scenario that it's a "don't want to look at it much" situation. I've had VM's running for many, many years in an autoupgrade scenario, and it tends to just work. And the security risks are often overstated as long as you tried to minimize attack surface; so; for instance I for a while tried to track all related security issues - and at the very least 95% are irrelevant, and that last 5% is more CYA uncertainty than actual belief its relevant; I didn't find anything positively certainly relevant.

Obviously, if your website is running a complex stack this is fairly infeasible (good luck keeping a complex web-framework secure without vigilance!) But if it's just a static site... and static sites are the fair comparison to google drive.

The issue with google drive and similar products is that they're actively - very actively - maintained. Stuff doesn't just break because it's taken offline, but because there are changes in terms of service, there are automatic deactivations for inactivity, there are plain old incompatible upgrades, etc, etc, etc.

I mean - I totally support people starting with the minimal effort (which is surely some freemium service like google drive), and leaning to live with the limitations - but the risks of a server (whether physical or otherwise) if you're similarly conservative and willing to live within constraints not unlike hosting on drive seem overblown - people talk as if servers burn down all the time, and hackers crack everything, but nothing could be further from the truth - those are exceedingly rare circumstances. And for many things, those risk are just OK. Don't keep your only copy of the data on the box, and don't keep private stuff there, and if lighting really strikes - it's not so bad. And both strategies will need a little TLC once and a while, that's just the way it is.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's stopping you from downloading videos you care about in the first place? It's not that hard to have youtube-dl batch download playlists, which is what I do.

I wonder where the web went wrong that we ended up in this regressive place where we have to create local backups because the Internet has gotten really good at "forgetting" all the fun and interesting stuff, while never forgetting all our personal info :/

The internet has always been fragile like that though, it's not a new thing. Even more than a decade back there were those encouraging saving local copies of web pages for any content one found worthwhile, rather than bookmarking it, since there's a likelihood of the link/content disappearing, which time has shown to be a smart idea given online archives aren't always reliable[1].

The same is true (perhaps moreso) for audio/visual media online.

[1] It takes someone else to first know about archive sites, consider archiving a link pre-emptively either manually or in an automated way, which doesn't always occur. Then one problem is if a link changes a version may have been archived at the old link but the new link doesn't show as being archived (sometimes redirects are in place, other times not). Another issue is archive.org respects robots.txt and webmaster requests so crawls can be retroactively made non-public (archive.is is a bit different but there's so little known about who operates it that it's unclear how reliable it is for long-term reference).

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#158
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by your confusion. I am absolutely positive I have made videos at old workplaces that will be impacted by the change. Who knows if they'll figure it out!

I think the absurdity is that the videos you made are necessary to avoid injury?

And also that when the links stop working you just skip that part of the critical training rather than ensure the safety information is conveyed some other way.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#159
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube link (not unlisted): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAHzP4umE4M

Who says germans don't have a sense of humor (OK my austrian friends do, but you know those austrians...)

Austrians are the world's sneakiest bastards:

They managed to convince people that Beethoven was Austrian, and Hitler German.

Re: “Older unlisted videos will be made private unless you opt out”

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your complaint is that a company might have put a forklift training video on youtube, as an unlisted video, have then forgotten the password to change it, then will hire someone and tell them to watch it, that person won't be able to and will then not tell anyone else that fact, and after all that they might then hurt themselves with a forklift? At what point is a hypothetical harmful scenario too absurd to care a…

I mean, what's the flip side complaint? That a person posted a video that they didn't want to share, but as Unlisted, then forgotten the password to change it, then the video will be discovered, and it's compromising information but was uploaded to YouTube, and it comes back to harm that person? They're both pretty unlikely but at YouTube scale both are real.

It doesn't seem that unlikely. Someone makes a video of themselves with no clothes on (or whatever) and not fully understanding the privacy options they make it so it can only be shared to people they choose.

15 years later it's much easier to trawl through millions of videos by incrementing and check them automatically for nudity than anyone thought it would be back in the day.

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