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And, it's back up per OP.
The fact that it is back up is even worse. If the take down was correct, why bring it back? If the take down was wrong, where was the initial oversight? It's all so arbitrary.
The back and forth is what really reinforces that nobody knows what they're doing and content creators are really just at the whim of tech giants. Trying to come up with and impose policy on what humans produce is hard for the justice system, with it's multiple levels of courts and lawmakers and hundreds of years of jurisprudence. What hope does one company have.
Even though I’m glad it’s back up, it sucks that it takes things being publicly blown up for Google/Youtube to do anything about their users/customers problems.
Earlier this year my Google ads account got banned after not having used it for more than a year. The reason given was some vague message about violating their terms. Which terms or why? They didn’t say. Which ad or campaign? They didn’t say. Tried an appeal, rejected by a robot, tried again, rejected by a robot again.
So they still ran the campaigns back in the day, they took my money, they didn’t say a thing, but then a year later they auto-ban my account? smh.
Man I feel so powerless sometimes.
Although I'm glad it is up, it was sadly only restored after the tweets became popular.
The "review" that claimed it still violated policy: https://twitter.com/Twotafkap/status/1443099098438045697/pho...
This isn't a great specific example (it's "just" a meme and not even a particularly culturally significant one in the grand scheme of things), but in general this is why projects like youtube-dl are important.
It might not be glamorous, and it might be a little stupid, but damnit this is our culture, for better or worse! And we should preserve it.
Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce, and they're also exactly the wrong ones to be hosting our collective shared culture for posterity.
It's a shame a torrenting-based youtube wouldn't really work for various reasons, both legal and social.
So, short of that, at least being able to download stuff important to us as individuals is an important right to preserve.
My personal stake in this fight is a video of "Scotland the Brave" that I used to listen to a lot, which featured an older Scottish gentleman standing in the beautiful highlands, loudly and proudly calling down through the glen.
It got randomly copyright-removed recently and I've been unable to find it elsewhere. I don't even know who the person in the video was.
> but damnit this is our culture, for better or worse! And we should preserve it.
I couldn't agree with this more. It's our culture and it's our life. Is it sad that so much of our lives is defined by consumption of media and staring at screens instead of being in touch with nature and living off the land or pursuing our own passions? Yeah, it is. But it is what it is. We are defined by our experiences, memories, and stories, and the only way to preserve digital media is to have a copy.
This is what got me into digital hoarding. I hated having so much emotional investment in things that I couldn't even access like old cartoons and movies, videos from youtube, or websites. Even worse when it's an old forum with conversations and activity from your teenage years, and the forum goes offline (this has happened to me with Bungie.net, though thankfully I was able to archive at least my gameplay stats).
I got 3 12TB hard drives this year (1 primary, 2 backups) and already see myself running out of room soon. It probably cost around $600 total, but it's been 100% worth it. I plan to expand in the near future to make sure I have plenty of room for everything I want without having to leave out anything that's really special. I love being able to re-live media experiences from my life, share them with loved ones, and even revisit moments that were defining for me in some way or another.
It's a shame that our culture is so based on consuming media. But the bright side is that it's the easiest kind of culture to preserve, compared to things like a physical book or dance, so I highly recommend others to check it out and be a part of the digital preservation world.
> Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce,
If you are producing videos at such a rate that you as the producer cannot actually save the content, then maybe you're doing it wrong.
If you are producing content for the exclusive use/distribution by a private company that is known to have draconian automated decision making processes, you have to expect that you will one day run afoul of those decisions.
The majority of content produced in mass quantity is also content that is such banal quality that it deserves to be lost to the ether.
I also lost access to a most beautiful poetry recitation from an older fellow who has passed. In hindsight, I wish I was more active in saving videos.
> Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store all the video content we produce
Definitely not. It's an addressing problem. I guarantee plenty of people have the youtube video downloaded with more redundancy than Google, and the OP even has the source files. The problem is that Youtube became the canonical URL for referencing the video, assuming singular power to control that address based on the flawed protocol of http(s), and now there's going to be a lot of strife and damage as we readjust at a higher level.
As copyrighted material, it should be required that a copy be stored with library of Congress.
It used to be that LoC submission was part of the deal with copyright, but somehow we forgot that and important history has already been lost.
> It's a shame a torrenting-based youtube wouldn't
> really work for various reasons, both legal and social.
I wonder if this could be solved with having several YouTube's. The storage can be central but maybe there can be several legal and sanctioned ways to access the videos. We already have YouTube kids. Why not also open up the market to license YouTube storage and allow other companies to make clients. It's a half baked idea but I think it can work. Right now there is no difference between premium and non premium YouTube apart from lack of ads. Everything else like background playback is an artificial barrier introduced by yt which they charge to remove. There is no creativity in this space because nobody can innovate apart from youtube. And honestly YouTube is shit at innovating.
Indeed. I began obsessively downloading and archiving every video I think worth watching more than once. My catalyst was noticing many of my favorite content creators removing their old content after deciding it either didn't match their current audience or decided it was too edgy for the current climate. One guy deleted a decade of videos after someone pointed out he said f*g in one of them.
This is truly wrong. Far from censorship, this is a field test of memory-holing. Deleting a part of the history of the Internet (yes, this silly little nonsense video is now part of Modern Culture) is a Rubicon I'm shocked YouTube has the temerity to cross. I can't wait to see what more conventional history they'll delete.
For now, note the conscious blowing-off, on YouTube's part, of all the re-uploads. Will they also get got? If not, why not?
I-- I can't believe they've done this.
At this point, Google is pretty much the fae folk of tech: immensely powerful beings with inscrutable motives and mercurial dispositions, inclined to rain ruin on your head at the slightest provocation or even just on a whim. Best to leave a saucer of milk out for them at night, and studiously avoid the areas they control if you value your anything.
I know people may be desensitized at this point, but if you can't see the correlation with the book 1984's consistent theme of the past and current being scrubbed of "wrongthink" that is thrown down the "memoryhole" to dispose of it, then I think we are all in for a far worse future than we would like.
Google would destroy "Liberty Leading the People" for depicting violent content if they could.
What's the line here? A scripted video depicting one friend punching another gets taken down, but MMA fights, movie scenes of executions, and Jackass clips stay up?
It's dangerous how much of our culture is in the hands of private companies who can restrict or deny your ability to view that piece of culture. They do so on a whim and you have no recourse.
YouTube removing content on a whim is one of the primary reasons to join, watch, and upload to PeerTube.
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
Example instance: https://peertube.cpy.re/
Reminds me of a scene 'Killed for Reading' from the movie Equilibrium.
Partridge: Don't you see, Preston? It's gone. Everything that makes us what we are, traded away.
John Preston: There's no war. No murder.
Partridge: What is it you think we do?
John Preston: No. You've been with me. You've seen how it can be, the jealousy. Rage.
Partridge: A heavy cost. I pay it gladly.
I kind of get it. Punching someone outside a boxing ring is pretty much always a bad move. A funny video where the funny part seems to be an unsuspecting person getting punched may "encourage violence". (I don't feel this way, but I could understand the reasoning.)
The cat is out of the bag on this one though. So much so, that I'd argue the video now has cultural and historical significance that justifies its wanton violence. That is to say, even a general purpose video platform that forbade violence should probably still allow war documentaries.
The original video was at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk
The Wayback Machine archives YouTube videos. I don't know how it archives or determines which videos to archive, but it has a surprising number of popular videos (but also ones with only a few thousand views and not some of those with billions, possibly because they're so high-profile due to copyright?). It also archives the video only once (creators may alter videos slightly, IIRC) and not always with the highest-quality format (possibly due an underlying problem with youtube-dl's `best` option).
YouTube is special-cased with processing to replace the player on the archived video page with the archived video (which is indexed with a mangled googlevideo.com URL, the same type as retrieved by youtube-dl), but this doesn't always work. Fortunately, archived videos can also be accessed directly by video ID through the (very undocumented) WB Machine-specific 'fake' URL:
http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/<ID>
The video in question is at:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://wayback-fakeurl.archive...
Edit: A very early reupload (2007-10-28, compared to the original video's 2007-07-13) is still up at _X6VoFBCE9k, but is of degraded quality and has an additional watermark.
The fact that people continue to be surprised by actions like this, betrays a lack of understanding of how content moderation works, and a willful lack of education on the part of YouTube.
This video was taken down because 2 or 3 people reported it in short succession. Those reports flagged it for review by a human moderator, who removed it.
If it had never been reported, it would have stayed up. If no one ever reported it, it's possible a human never reviewed it in those 14 years.
The 14 years it was up doesn't mean YouTube reviewed it previously and decided to keep it.
If YouTube did a better job explaining exactly how its content moderation works, outrage like this might be less common. However YouTube doesn't explain better because it encourages gaming the system and report-brigading.
Here is my open letter to people working for Google:
Dear googlers: Quit. You’ll make plenty elsewhere; just stop ruining the Internet please.
One of my favourite memes of all time, so it's sad for the original video to be removed from Youtube, however, I am confident it'll still be available elsewhere, and, of course, as part of thousands of existing meme compilation videos.
Sure, the Youtube team removed it, but ultimately, they're a private company, right? Aren't private companies allowed to moderate kind of however they want based on their own terms of service? They have a "graphic and violent content policy" that they're allowed to enforce. I always found the distinction between a private company's ToS and "the public good" a little tricky to understand.
Anyway, maybe this news will, in a tiny way, help other online video-sharing projects like PeerTube or Vimeo.
To be fair, it is violence.
The guy took it like a champ, and quipped something funny which I found the reaction to be really hillarious. But the internet, including MMA sports and other things have really de-sensitized people on real violence. I for one can't say I like real violence.
That's why I archive my favorite videos with tools like youtube-dl. Their automated systems, censorship mechanisms, user reports (even if they're fake), even the "fact checkers" ask and remove videos without a real reason. If the account is still active the owner can start an appeal process that rarely works.
Most of the times no appeal is done and the video is lost until someone risks his account and reuploads it again.
Never trust an online website to keep your content up for you. Always back it up since it can be removed anytime and without asking.
Youtube Alternatives :
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
If only Hacker News crowd noticed when thousands of videos with interviews, medical lectures, news footage and even congressional testimonies were removed for political reasons within the last couple years.
The video has been restored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk
Here's the video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g (reupload).
I’ve been archiving some content before, but recent occurrences keep strengthening my belief that there needs to be a collaborative archive.
A single party can’t archive everything they may ever look for, often enough you don’t even know what it may be (and when you do it’s too late).
Are there any projects like this? I imagine a decentralization through something like torrents or IPFS (with the caveat that different encodings of the same video will of course have different hashes).
Is such a project already a thing? Are other people interested in doing this?
Sorry to take the low-hanging fruit, but...
I can't believe they've done this.
People should remember that there are alternatives like peertube.
I can't believe they've done this
Can we all agree that censorship sucks? I've been using Odysee/LBRY which has a P2P video platform and all of the metadata is stored on blockchain.
The video is still there... (and it was disappointing).
Reinstated? You can still watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk&t=11s
> I'm really sorry you feel this way
The corporate wording for "Fuck you!".
Is it this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g
I've never heard of the meme before, but that seems pretty benign.
I can see it from UK no issues:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g
The past is judged by the values of the present.
we need a distributed torrent-like distributed youtube yesterday (maybe peertube, maybe something else). a system which democratically shares the load and where people can vote which videos get the most bandwidth. this dumb technocratic stewardship is just getting annoying.
Honestly boring. Likely just it got flagged as violence, and an underpaid 3rd world worker clicked a button.
Sorry about the inconvenience to this guy, but at the same time, it got 14 million views and I'm sure he made some cash. He can probably not whine so much. It's likely an honest mistake by someone overworked.
Maybe related to the panic over the TikTok property damage/theft spree stuff?
Looks like “YouTube will remove all content against vaccines” quickly got replaced with this on the front page
YT: "Im really sorry you feel this way"
YT: "K,bye"
"youtube is a safe place for all" YUCK
I can't believe you've done this.
Vaccine misinformation, right?