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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”

#161
post #79

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…

> At what point is a hypothetical harmful scenario too absurd to care about? They’re YouTube. At their scale, there’s no such thing as an “edge case.”

Nah, they still have weird edge cases. That's what keeps eg SREs busy. (I used to work as an SRE on Google Photos.)

But at YouTube scale, the cases need to get weirder and weirder to fall into 'not-yet-handled' territory.

Sometimes all the holes in the cheese still align.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe critical training materials should not be published to YouTube?

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.

YouTube is probably a more reliably backup in the vast majority of cases than whatever internal backup the company would come up with.

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

#163

This makes me sad, I remember quite a few unlisted videos going around for one reason or the other over the years. Videos meant to be watched, mind. There's lots of old stuff on YouTube from long dead small channels. This stuff rots and disappears over time with nobody around to maintain it. I guess it's a good reminder that everything needs maintenance. Something similar, but much more dramatic, happened once they g…

It's been clear to me we're at the tail end of the golden age of online videos and I and many others have been furiously downloading in preparation for the inevitable.

More than anything I think the web of hyperlinks is dead. We have collectively decided that anything that isn't "news" isn't valuable, so the old web of interlocking hyperlinks has made way for a new web of content feeds.

It makes me sad, too.

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

#164
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 irrelevan…

> And the security risks are often overstated as long as you tried to minimize attack surface; [...]

You know that this requires some uncommon computer proficiency?

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

#165
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may have been true, but these days can't you just put the video on S3 or any storage and play it using the tag?

Yea, that is entirely doable. Some transcoding might need to be done first though. The worst part is that you’ll have to get your IT department involved.

> The worst part is that you’ll have to get your IT department involved.

That's also one reason spreadsheets are still so popular:

As an average corporate drone, you can either hack together something quickly over the weekend in Excel that will mostly work. Or you can wait 3+ months for your IT department to fail to deliver.

(And that's the best case scenario.)

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

#166
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The idea that all or most of these missing videos are due to GDPR deletion requests is completely incorrect. They are almost all from spurious copyright takedown requests. YouTube has no legal obligation to automatically honor these, and it certainly doesn't have to delete all associated metadata. Framing this issue as an instance of YouTube being respectful of their users data is ridiculous.

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

#168
post #164
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 irrelevan…

> And the security risks are often overstated as long as you tried to minimize attack surface; [...] You know that this requires some uncommon computer proficiency?

Sure, and I certainly would recommend people start with an off-the-shelf solution like google-drive. But that recommendation is based on precisely that - you don't want to need that expertise, nor risk screwing it up. But it's not based on the fact that it's actually pragmatically more reliable (or less ongoing effort) to host on something like google drive.

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

#169
post #2

That's unfortunate. I have a few videos which seems to have been forgotten even by their uploaders. Those videos would probably not be updated. I guess I need to back them up manually.

Or uploaders who have died and may have unlisted videos and linked to them in descriptions or comments. I don't recall the creator, but I do recall a video series that used links in the videos that pointed to other videos for a basic quiz or choose your own adventure.

VlogBrothers did a sort of YouTube game show series that way some years ago.

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

#170
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...)

My old university prof used to say: "How many Germans do you need to change a lightbulb? One, because we are efficient and don't have time for humor." (German university + German prof)

Yeah, the Austrians are saying that, but here in Germany we say the same about them.

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