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.
There are literally millions of videos of street fights and sucker punches on youtube. Do they really intend to remove every single one of those videos?
They have always removed those that they review, presumably triggered by sufficient reports by users - do you find that unexpected? Unless you're implying that if you can't moderate some threshold percentage of instances of a violation that you should moderate 0% of them, which seems unrealistic, but I've seen people make that argument.
Well that's the problem isn't it? If they are going to use their discretion and apply rules selectively, why not make exceptions for videos that most people don't find distasteful, even if they violate your policy?
It seems self-evident that normalizing a behavior helps to propagate it. It's obviously not the sole driver of a behavior, but trends grow the more they're displayed / normalized, no?
For example, many people jaywalk because they see people doing it all the time without consequences.
Some kid inevitably sees it on the internet with 12m views. He has been wanting to start a channel on his own and thinks "I'll punch my unsuspecting brother on camera, how funny!" now someone's in the hospital. Don't blame the bullets or the gun, blame the wielder who is a minor. Who is to blame for such an eventuality? I see a danger that Goog is potentially liable for.
Kids are on the internet.
There is a higher bar for moderation than people want now (partly because of it), but that's how it is.
I don't have a problem with this video being taken down.
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?
See, I'd have thought that everybody tacitly understood that YouTube's scale has redefined presentation of videos over the Internet and as a consequence is the premier video archive for all of Humanity. This doesn't erase their fiduciary duties, but it does attenuate them -- archiving and presenting videos (to show ads) is actually how the money is made. But I'll bite -- I'm a credulous idiot who's confused YouTube for an NGO. You are a wise cynic who's come to correct me.
>Their mission is to make money, not to archive the internet.
I assume they remove "violent" videos to appease advertisers. In this case, they did not consider the value of the video being removed, instead prioritizing the safety of the content with respect to the advertisers.
In the large, YouTube's terms of service are structured around retaining an audience (both in terms of individual and institutional choice... Without a TOS that at least nominally says what constitutes offensive content, businesses and schools block access to YouTube and that decreases viewership which decreases revenue potential). They are also structured around being a hospitable place for advertising, and advertising (in particular brand advertising) gets real gun-shy on spending dollars on content that might be significantly off the bead from "wholesome."
Whether or not this video in particular violates the TOS is debatable (though having never heard of this before this link on Hacker News, my naive read on it is that it's simple violent aggression and a display of unadulterated physical violence, which generally doesn't pass the TOS for graphic violence... "Content featuring anything listed above where the viewer is not given enough context to understand that the footage is dramatized or fictional").
Actually in the US YouTube is legally allowed to delete or remove any videos they want to, regardless of whether they might contain evidence of crimes. They would generally only be required to preserve such evidence if given a court order, which doesn't appear to be the case here.
Not just history of the internet: Youtube takes down videos of war crimes. Destroying or covering up evidence of war crimes is, itself, a war crime. I'm surprised that Youtube isn't in hot water over that.
Isn't YouTube headquartered in one of those countries that officially consider foreign war crime tribunals directed at their citizens a reason to invade the responsible country?
> Youtube takes down videos of war crimes. Destroying or covering up evidence of war crimes is, itself, a war crime. I'm surprised that Youtube isn't in hot water over that.
Do they actually delete the videos? For all we know, the video is still stored on Google's servers indefinitely, there is just a flag set which blocks public access to it. If a government or UN agency asks for a copy of the video, is Google able and willing to provide it? Knowingly destroying evidence of a crime is (often) a crime; denying public access to evidence of a crime is not a crime, especially if you are still happy to provide it to the proper authorities on request.
Regarding "Destroying or covering up evidence of war crimes is, itself, a war crime", I don't believe that is actually true. Under the Rome Statute of the ICC, war crimes are crimes against article 8; destroying evidence of a war crime is not a war crime, because it is not an article 8 crime, it is a crime against article 70 ("Offences against the administration of justice"). Other international treaties against war crimes (such as the Geneva Conventions), and national laws against war crimes (such as the US War Crimes Act codified at 18 USC 2441), likewise do not consider destroying evidence of a war crime to be a war crime, instead it is a non-war crime against the administration of justice.
You can just look up their terms of service which I'm fairly sure leave a carve out for news items ...
But you are making an assumption that the average worker (probably from India) making $1 an hour, can tell the difference between newsworthy war crimes, and a snuff film.
I don't think anyone is going to get that right 100% of the time. So no, I don't really see it as a problem.
They're deleting a digital copy of evidence of war crimes. It's not like you can prank someone into being a war criminal filling up their storage with war crime videos, so that they're forced to delete it.
If I leave a gun I used to kill someone at your house (and you're aware that it is a murder weapon), can you just destroy it without being an accessory?
Also, lol at Youtube getting filled with war crime videos. Youtube has plenty of space.
Thank you for introducing me to the word temerity.
Clearly they are relying upon an immature AI dragnet to classify and kill categories of objectionable material. Thankfully they have an appeals process, but it seems to me that automated takedowns are blatantly wrong. Instead they ought to use that data to generate a queue for humans to review and flag, where more popular videos have more reviewers requiring consensus. No matter, it’s clear we’ve allowed a commercial platform to outgrow its structural integrity, and no algorithm can do a thing but delay its collapse under its own weight.
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.
They've been there done that. They've been to the EU as well and came back with a tan (which let's face it is an impressive feat on its own). Have they even "suffered" fines in the EU that the Zuck has received?
Don't even need to prove you own your target video, just claim it and boom, you get what you want (redirect monetization to your MCM, takedown the video, etc).
I think that to risk a lawsuit over copyright infringement is an opening that could be interpreted as kryptonite, if I upload the Justice League movie to Youtube, Warner wouldn't hesitate to sic a lawyer to Google's offices demanding the takedown, not hurting you, but them.
Please, if that actual scenario were to happen, Googs would just immediately comply with the take down and move on. Nothing would happen to Googs. They would then shut down your account, which is exactly what should happen. You're* an idiot for posting an obviously known copyrighted piece of conent in its entirety. Don't be a troll
The aurora borealis perhaps? The sun could decide to throw us a particularly nasty geomagnetic storm one day and suddenly Google would go to fearsome tyrant to basically irrelevant overnight. I imagine most of us on HN would be out of a job too!
There’s been a lot of controversy lately about Robinhood/Citadel/GME/Reddit. And it looks like either Google might be taking sides, or that if you are powerful enough you can get Google to block some search results/suggestions.
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.
If you don't think a meme sensation video that's received millions of views and copycats hasn't been reported thousands of times over the years, for any reason, or no reason, just because people can, because people want to watch the world burn; I want to come live in your world.
> The 14 years it was up doesn't mean YouTube reviewed it previously and decided to keep it.
You cannot possibly know, unless you work on YT moderation in Google. Also, moderation rules might vary over the years, so it might have even been checked once per year and survived for 14 years, til now. The real issue here is that nobody outside an internal Google team has voted on these policies.
You really think this video was only reported recently by 2 or 3 people after 14 years? People will report and dislike videos all the time just to be trolls. I don't have any sources to link to on this outside of my experience moderating content on much smaller subreddits/forums, but I'm willing to extrapolate and imagine a video that's been up for 14 years with millions of views has received its fair share of reports.
This video was recently part of a Vice article, which is going to multiply eyes on by several orders of magnitude.
It might not have been literally "2 or 3 people," but it's a reasonable assumption that the differentiating factor in 14 years is that a bunch of people saw it all at once, and some critical mass of those who saw it flagged it.
The fact that this one specifically was taken down while copycats and reuploads have not strongly suggest it was hit by community moderation flagging.
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.
The router has the issue of traffic and the path being encrypted. It does not see the paths that are browsed and so cannot backup or replace/URL with the new one?
> I don't have enough disk space to archive every video I've every watched.
You don't need to. It would be enough to allow users to download all videos by default as a sort of local cache, have settings for max cache size and cache policy with LRU by default, and also support pinning.
Heck, doing what Google already does with Google Play updates would already be a step up.
One option is to use cloud storage and to pay for it. If thats not an option, how should an add-on decide what video to archive? A button besides the video, how often you watch it or whether you paste it somewhere else?
This is a problem that decentralised protocols such as IPFS theoretically solve. You reserve x GB on your storage to cache the content you consume and can optionally "pin" content to keep it on your disk indefinitely.
The problem is there are privacy concerns with this type of system as it's possible for anyone to find out who has consumed particular content.
Let's say you watch new and unique youtube videos for an hour a day, or 365 hours a year. (This is a lot more than I watch, btw)
Let's say we have 5Mbps videos, or half a megabyte per second.
365 * 60 * 60 * 0.5 = 657G/year
A 1TB disk is about $50, for about $25/year to store it at home.
If you upload your videos to S3 Glacier it'll run around $8/year (per year, so after a few years this is more expensive than buying drives).
For comparison, YT premium is $144/year.
I only watch about 10 minutes of unique youtube videos a day on average, so I'm looking at around $1/year cost if I want to archive every single youtube video I've ever seen. It's pretty affordable.
> Let's say you watch new and unique youtube videos for an hour a day,
I wonder for how many users this is true. I personally watch several hours a day of youtube because it's mostly on in the background instead of music. Lots of infotainment channels. I'm pretty sure on average it's like 20mins per day can't find the source though.
I was thinking about this a few months ago and wish there was some sort of background app that could keep and eye on my YT accounts likes and archive them.
In a comment[1] on a related thread a few weeks ago, someone pointed out that if you pass youtube-dl a playlist URL instead of an individual video, it will download all the videos on the playlist. Thus, you should be able to just have a cronjob that calls youtube-dl on a specific playlist every so often.
> 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.
Ooh. Crazy, not at all thought through, probably bad, legislation idea popped in to my head:
EU Data Address Ownership Directive: All services that allow users to upload data that is then made publicly available, MUST have a method for the user to create a 301 redirect to another location where the content is available.
(Maybe allowing for a "Are you sure you want to follow the link to https://alternative.com and leave Youtube? We have no responsibility nor control for the content on alternative.com")
Assuming Youtube video IDs are unique even in the case of removal, we could just create a URN space for Youtube, say urn:google:youtube:<video id>. Another option would be a content-bassed hash, but that would make quality variations of the same video unrelated.
Once you switch to a permanent resource identifier, you don't need to rely on Google for locating the video anymore. That won't replace Youtube as the massive video store it is, which is probably not a (financially, legally) feasible undertaking even on a national level, but at least you untangled one part of the kludge.
> 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.
> 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.
You can film 8K video on a smartphone these days… but only about 15 minutes of it before you fill up the phone’s internal storage.
If you don’t have a computer with a big hard drive to dump the video off on, you’re basically stuck shoving the video out to “the cloud” and then deleting the local copy so that you can film more. Whether that means pushing the raws to a private object store with an online video editing system hooked up to it, vs. uploading to YouTube where they transcode the raw to lower quality and then throw away the original, it still creates a dependence on the continued existence of some cloud provider.
Comparing an object store provider to YouTube is just pointless. It's not even close to being the same thing. If you cannot understand this difference, then we really cannot have a discussion.
If you are shooting 8K video and don't know what to do with it, that is on you. Just because you can does not mean you should.
It's more like $300+ dollars but there's another, more important point: hard drives fail. If we're talking about YouTube creators who spend hours producing culturally relevant content, we're going to want a much more robust backup strategy than simply throwing it on an external hard drive.
Is it possible for a home user to build a storage system with high availability and off-site backups? Sure. Will it be affordable and convenient? Extremely unlikely.
What if the original content creator does not want their content shared in this manner? For every view not on YT, they lose metrics/money. It is not your decision to do this.
I'm just so not understanding how the concept of ownership is lost to others.
I have to somewhat agree: the more of these services you upload the same file to, the greater the chances of at least one of these copies surviving over a prolonged period of time.
Now, i cannot recall what it was called, but there was this one app that could upload files to dozens of them at the same time, provided that you have the accounts - if the files aren't publicly listed and don't compromise your privacy, that's definitely a route to consider.
While a good point, if the content is important to you, then you should take appropriate measures to back it up.
People should really consider storing their data only on a cloud provider that they don't pay for as equivalent to storing it only on a single USB stick.
Even storing it on a provider you do pay for should be seen as equivalent to storing it on a NAS located in your house/office: it's somewhat protected against hardware failure, but still not "backed up". Instead of fire/theft, your concerns should be account closure/compromise, or the provider just going out of business.
Both can be true. Youtube is successful because it hosts so many videos. Downloading a few favourites doesn't impact their business model, but it allows me to save those few videos that I think don't deserve to be lost.
You as an end viewer is not the topic though. I'm talking about the content creators that lose their content when YT makes a decision against them, but they no longer have a copy locally. For them to delete their only local copy because it's on YT just because they don't have the space, then that is 100% on them. I don't care if they are 15 years old and don't have the funds for massive drive space. That's just part of being in the video content creation business. Losing content as a creator is a growing pain lesson that everyone eventually learns. Its very similar to not having backups in general. It's a lesson best learned before it happens, but rarely learned until after.
This is deeply ignorant of the actual reality. Most content creator are not technically savvy nor have the ability to setup any kind of distribution service. Also, you're missing the whole point of video streaming, which is becoming huge.
I've know youtubers that did upload videos as a hobby, but couldn't even afford to keep them locally stored in their hard drives after a few years. Makes the videos less valuable? In no way.
Not being technically savvy is such a strawman. I'm not missing the point of video streaming. Most of my career is because of video streaming.
If you build a house of straw because you're not technically savvy to build it out of brick doesn't mean you get to complain that the wind blew it down even if it was a big bad wolf. If you don't do something right, it's nobody's fault but your own. It's often called growing pains. Backups are a lesson best learned before they are needed but regularly only thought about after data is lost.
>If you build a house of straw because you're not technically savvy to build it out of brick doesn't mean you get to complain that the wind blew it down even if it was a big bad wolf.
Let's apply this reasoning to a few other examples. Let's say you live in the jungle, and build your house to jungle building codes. Then, a logging company comes in and dismantles your furniture to make particle board for IKEA products. One could argue that if you were more competent, you'd be able to form a well-armed militia, build land vehicles and air craft, and defend your jungle home against the invaders, who are not infinitely powerful and could be dissuaded by even a reasonably well-run guerilla uprising. One might also argue that that's crazy. ;)
To put it another way, if being a guerilla fighter is the only way to have furniture in the jungle, we wouldn't expect everyone to become guerilla fighters, we'd expect a few people to become guerillas while most people lost their furniture.
Here's another example. Let's say you're a US citizen concerned about civil asset forfeiture. If you were more competent, you would smuggle your wallet across the states where that happens inside of your hubcaps, or maybe in a drone, or perhaps in a shallow-water submarine. On the other hand, it's a bit might-makes-right to assert that only people who can assemble smuggling vehicles have property rights. Again, if that was the way to have property rights, we'd expect a few people to become smugglers and almost everyone else to lose property.
So finally coming back around to the YouTube thing, if we say that the way to have a platform is to build servers, organize communications networks, and arrange payments outside of the usual system, then we would expect a few people, almost all of them criminals, to do that, while most people simply would lose their platform.
No one is coming into your jungle to dismantle your house, or searching your vehicle to seize your wallet. You are going out of your way to utilize other people's infrastructure.
If you don't rely upon youtube, you don't need to worry about youtube. If you choose to take advantage of the ease and convenience of utilizing their freely-available service, you have to deal with their rules. For most people, it's a small price to pay. For everyone else, there's stackoverflow.
I don't understand why people think it's a corporation's job to preserve knowledge for future generations. We have a government for that.
Google never signed up for that role I'm sure. And if we expect them to do that funnel taxpayer money to them. But honestly I don't want to live in a world where corporations provide these public goods.
Yeah, I know they exist. But they're never going to replace youtube in the foreseeable future, so having tools like youtube-dl, which would allow us to load content from youtube into peertube, for instance (or to archive it anywhere else), is important.
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.
I have not tried it out extensively but it has the same two problems that youtube competitors have. Library is smaller and it's not the same speed/quality. YouTube has a hold over our internet culture at this point and I think only a anti monopoly lawsuit can fix this.
It’s oft forgotten that U.S. intellectual property constructs were created not purely for the natural rights of individual creators, but as an incentive for public benefit: “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”.
It was common in the late 18th century to provide a rationale for the passage of a law, but the law itself by its very passage becomes legitimate irrespective of whether it fulfills its stated purpose. The rationale doesn't restrict the scope of the law, it's simply a belt onion: there because "it was the style at the time".
Courts have ruled that the justification in the Second Amendment, of establishing and protecting "a well-regulated Militia", does not bind the amendment to apply only to the establishment and protection of a body designated as the militia (e.g., the National Guard).
Similarly, IP laws need not "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts" to be legitimate. If Congress passes IP laws to protect large cartels with no public benefit, and maybe even public harm, those laws are in full force and 100% constitutional.
> does not bind the amendment to apply only to the establishment and protection of a body designated as the militia
It does, but only because US code says that there's two militias. The organized militias (the National Guards), and the unorganized militias consisting of every able bodied man 17-45. Since the 14th amendment was written later, that bit of code is now interpreted to mean all adults.
That's not the interpretation used by the Supreme Court in D.C. v. Heller:
> The Supreme Court held:
> (1) The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.
> (a) The Amendment's prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause's text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.
If you read the decision, it actually is the interpretation used by the Supreme Court there. You can actually see this in the next bullet that you cut off
> (b) The prefatory clause comports with the Court's interpretation of the operative clause. The "militia" comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens' militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens' militia would be preserved. Pp. 22–28.
You can also see this clearly in US v. Miller, where sawed off shotguns were allowed to banned only because they had no military use (at the time). The unorganized militia must be allowed to use military weapons, which is why you can still go out and buy all sorts of crazy stuff like miniguns if you have enough money.
I don't claim that original intent has any bearing on copyrights/patents being enforceable or legitimate. Similar to the 18th Amendment vs. the Volstead Act, the Constitution merely authorizes the power to the state, while specific laws of Congress handle the details.
I'm making the upstream normative claim: so long as we have intellectual property (there are certainly moral and practical arguments against it), laws passed by Congress should reflect that intent: that temporary artificial monopolies also carry positive externalities to society at large. While incentives for creation are certainly part of that story, I think there is a strong case for reforming that balance: shortening copyrights, limiting/eliminating patents on software and business methods, and strengthening fair use and consumer rights.
In the US, copyright protection is automatically granted as soon as a protected work is fixed in a tangible form[1], so it's not possible for the Library of Congress to store all copyrighted material.
> 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.
Well, most of it is just trash that won’t make anyone less rich if lost. It’s like putting a script of Antigone and a sex advertising graffiti in Pompeii on the same level.
Sex-advertising graffiti in Pompeii are still valuable cultural artifacts that let us know what life in Pompeii was like.
There are two orthogonal reasons for culture to be preserved:
* there are things that will be valuable to future generations to build upon and enrich them
* someone in the future would ask, what was life like in 2020, and without the "trash" culture, the answer will be very much off the mark
Trash or not trash, this is what we have.
This is why archive.org is important, this is why preserving Usenet archives is important, and why I'm happy that many geocities websites were archived before Yahoo axed them.
Indeed, but there’s this concept called “forgetfulness”. We can’t afford to hoard everything, eventually things get lost in time and it’s ok. We will die and so will our own footprints disappear. Something - perhaps the most relevant and actively preserved, or frequent and therefore merely because of statistics - will survive.
Sure, we don't need to preserve every single piece of scrap in our collective memory.
But archiving doesn't do that either. There are many more silent films archived than either of us have watched, for example.
Then sure, not everything needs to be archived. I believe there's a reasonable, subjective threshold of what you'd need to keep to get an idea of a person living in the time period.
Letting go and keeping are not incompatible ideas.
This is a bit gatekeep-y. Who defines what is trash and not significant. There are 7 billion people on earth, do you think the same things need to be equally relevant to everyone? Something you might find trash can have enormous impact on someone else's life. One of my favorite entertainment products is pro wrestling, many, many people consider it trash. Should it be thrown out?
No, actively scrubbed in the name of some principle I guess not. Please do enjoy your wrestling but don’t cry foul if It doesn’t survive scrutiny and interest over the multitudes of humanity and is lost in time
I disagree entirely. This quote explains my view better than I could word it:
> The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.[1] Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.[1] The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse.[2]
I think I agree and disagree with you. I agree with the value of preservation, as a hobbyist collector and archivist myself. However I agree with the notion that all culture and aspects of a particular culture are of equal worth. If I had to choose in a house fire, I'd take a hard drive full of my favorite youtube videos and movies, and leave behind the hard drive full of mobile game advertisements and mid level marketing media. Would you do the same, or would you actually have a hard time choosing?
> notion that all culture and aspects of a particular culture are of equal worth
I never made such a claim.
The problem is that everyone has their opinion on what needs to be preserved. I might not care at all about what you have on your hard drive, and vice versa.
Archive and libraries aren't Eternal and Forever Storage. Future archivist might as well prune them (as they do).
However, at the current time we don't have enough data to decide which things are worth preserving, and which are not.
I'm aware of the value of old game ads and I have many myself, both physical and digital. But I'm talking about relative value. I would gladly leave my old Nintendo Powers behind if it meant I could take my actual games or movies with me, for example.
Like anything else this is just my opinion, but I do think being more connected to nature would improve our lives vs what's now being normalized: working in an office all day, commuting, and staring at various screens in your free time. I believe the modern lifestyle contributes a lot to the chronic stress, anxiety, etc that are so common nowadays. This is quantitative, to an extent: spending time in nature has a measurable and positive impact on your well-being:
> Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing
I'm sorry but I find self reported data about wellbeing hard to believe in most cases. There is such a cultural pressure to associate nature with wellbeing that I find myself being very wary of such reporting.
To be fair, tons of TV shows have been wiped from history as well. I learned recently that many game shows from the 60s and 70s are mostly gone, including early episodes of Wheel of Fortune!
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.
Don't quit! I'd rather have good, honest people working at Google, instead of them quitting Google. What would Google be like if no good people worked there?
That's a very optimistic view of what happens to a company with a lot of technical power and solid procedure for maintaining it in place if all the people with a conscience leave.
You are assuming a correlation between technical competency and moral competency that I've never observed history guarantees.
Even if everyone quit, they could hold the ship steady and hire anyone else in the world that wants to make millions of dollars, because we know consumer habits will not change.
I could even imagine people wanting to work for Google to actively harm society as a form of Cold War. Because of this, it is probably better for people to stay and fight for good, but I might be wrong.
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.
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.
"Content featuring anything listed above where the viewer is not given enough context to understand that the footage is dramatized or fictional" would be my guess as to the specific stanza of the violent/graphic content service term this video trips over.
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.
It is, but at what point do we start not allowing people to display a fist connecting with another person? Violence isn't good in most situations, but do we really need to just not allow it at all, even in this comedic setting? I don't know anyone that sees someone get assaulted in real life and think that that isn't a bad thing. We're desensitized, but I don't think we're that desensitized.
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.
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?
Unfortunately, I actually believe that the people behind the YouTube censorship actually benefited from their censorship and scattering of the community by producing an environment where antitrust actions are far harder to argue because YT can now claim there are many "competitors", which none of the alternatives really are.
It first dawned on me that this was possibly a tactic when Google was catching heat for manipulating results. I found it odd that DuckDuckGo was given the duck.com domain that Google owned, free of charge.
It makes no sense other than that Google was trying to support controlled opposition in order to claim that there was a competitive market.
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.
1. 1984 is not a religious prophecy. That something has happened which bears some aesthetic similarity to a part of the book is not significant or interesting by itself. If you wish to assert that Google has the power to shape the truth then you will first have to explain why,
2. The video still exists, in a thousand forms, both on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet where YT has no power. If YT wished to scrub it from the site they could do so, but they didn't.
> That something has happened which bears some aesthetic similarity to a part of the book is not significant or interesting by itself. If you wish to assert that Google has the power to shape the truth then you will first have to explain why,
Man, if only there were other examples of Google's censorship of videos on even more important issues. Maybe an example at the top of Hacker News from today... [0]
I'm vaccinated and I'm not a fan of insane anti-vax conspiracy theorists. But I absolutely don't think the government or the de facto public space owners being able to ban entire topics of discussion.
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.
> 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.
Do you happen to have any reference that points out which content was removed for political reasons?
You're on HN. If said censorship exists then nothing stops you from pointing it on HN.
You think CEOs really discuss here? It's used as a tool to gather information and marketing, besides, successful CEOs and mass murderers are cut from the same cloth.
I would go far as to say on uncensored platforms one sees the true nature of humans not bound by society and that's eye opening for the one who's fast asleep.
Better to be informed of reality than sweep under the rug and creating a faketopia where one is required to choose words carefully that the powers that be agree with, history tells us what that path that leads to.
What exactly do you expect me to link to? A thousand "this video does not exist" pages? YouTube does not track its own moderation. That's part of the problem.
Here are some well-written examples by Matt Taibi:
Note that he doesn't claim he was censored. He just doesn't want to support a platform that censors in general.
...
The latest example I've seen directly was a strike against Dr. Mobeen Sayd's channel because he interviewed Pierre Kory. To put it into context, it's a channel from an MD with 10 years worth of educational content. It got a confirmed strike last week because he interviewed another doctor several month ago. There were also 50+ other videos deleted from the channel.
It's time-consuming to provide these examples and it's impossible to know when people are asking for proof in good faith and when they are just play-acting ignorance.
You don't see any difference between the concrete links in this post and the handwavy allegations in your prior post? If it's not worth your time, don't bring it up.
YouTube has been seriously ramping up its censorship for at least couple of years and it goes way beyond anti-vaccine videos. Comments on HN related to this subject routinely display ignorance of the issue or deny it outright. Moreover, a thread discussing some WaPo article that white-washes the whole thing as reasonable and scope-limited fight against disinformation is hardly proof that HN crowd started to take censorship seriously. There is a bit more awareness recently, but it's nowhere near what I would naively expect from a website full of tech-savvy people.
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:
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.
232 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 52.4 ms ] threadThe 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.
A vanishingly rare sentiment.
>punching someone outside of a boxing ring
I could probably find 100,000 unique instances of violence solely from big Hollywood studios on Youtube as we speak
For example, many people jaywalk because they see people doing it all the time without consequences.
Some kid inevitably sees it on the internet with 12m views. He has been wanting to start a channel on his own and thinks "I'll punch my unsuspecting brother on camera, how funny!" now someone's in the hospital. Don't blame the bullets or the gun, blame the wielder who is a minor. Who is to blame for such an eventuality? I see a danger that Goog is potentially liable for.
Kids are on the internet. There is a higher bar for moderation than people want now (partly because of it), but that's how it is.
I don't have a problem with this video being taken down.
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.
They are not your friend. Nor anybody's friend.
>Their mission is to make money, not to archive the internet.
So how did deleting this make YouTube money?
I assume they remove "violent" videos to appease advertisers. In this case, they did not consider the value of the video being removed, instead prioritizing the safety of the content with respect to the advertisers.
In the large, YouTube's terms of service are structured around retaining an audience (both in terms of individual and institutional choice... Without a TOS that at least nominally says what constitutes offensive content, businesses and schools block access to YouTube and that decreases viewership which decreases revenue potential). They are also structured around being a hospitable place for advertising, and advertising (in particular brand advertising) gets real gun-shy on spending dollars on content that might be significantly off the bead from "wholesome."
Whether or not this video in particular violates the TOS is debatable (though having never heard of this before this link on Hacker News, my naive read on it is that it's simple violent aggression and a display of unadulterated physical violence, which generally doesn't pass the TOS for graphic violence... "Content featuring anything listed above where the viewer is not given enough context to understand that the footage is dramatized or fictional").
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170812/01102937985/once-...
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/youtube-ai-deletes-war-cr...
Sometimes we want it big enough to fight against state-level censorship; sometimes we want it small enough to obey anti-trust or privacy law.
Do they actually delete the videos? For all we know, the video is still stored on Google's servers indefinitely, there is just a flag set which blocks public access to it. If a government or UN agency asks for a copy of the video, is Google able and willing to provide it? Knowingly destroying evidence of a crime is (often) a crime; denying public access to evidence of a crime is not a crime, especially if you are still happy to provide it to the proper authorities on request.
Regarding "Destroying or covering up evidence of war crimes is, itself, a war crime", I don't believe that is actually true. Under the Rome Statute of the ICC, war crimes are crimes against article 8; destroying evidence of a war crime is not a war crime, because it is not an article 8 crime, it is a crime against article 70 ("Offences against the administration of justice"). Other international treaties against war crimes (such as the Geneva Conventions), and national laws against war crimes (such as the US War Crimes Act codified at 18 USC 2441), likewise do not consider destroying evidence of a war crime to be a war crime, instead it is a non-war crime against the administration of justice.
But you are making an assumption that the average worker (probably from India) making $1 an hour, can tell the difference between newsworthy war crimes, and a snuff film.
I don't think anyone is going to get that right 100% of the time. So no, I don't really see it as a problem.
Also, lol at Youtube getting filled with war crime videos. Youtube has plenty of space.
Clearly they are relying upon an immature AI dragnet to classify and kill categories of objectionable material. Thankfully they have an appeals process, but it seems to me that automated takedowns are blatantly wrong. Instead they ought to use that data to generate a queue for humans to review and flag, where more popular videos have more reviewers requiring consensus. No matter, it’s clear we’ve allowed a commercial platform to outgrow its structural integrity, and no algorithm can do a thing but delay its collapse under its own weight.
Don't even need to prove you own your target video, just claim it and boom, you get what you want (redirect monetization to your MCM, takedown the video, etc).
*Not you you, but the royal you
Or well, not acting evil.
The aurora borealis perhaps? The sun could decide to throw us a particularly nasty geomagnetic storm one day and suddenly Google would go to fearsome tyrant to basically irrelevant overnight. I imagine most of us on HN would be out of a job too!
(can't wait for this one to get deleted...)
YouTube users: Can I see it?
Google: ...no.
Emphasis on easily - if it ever becomes straightforward, without going through scary settings menu, Google will be quite scared.
There’s been a lot of controversy lately about Robinhood/Citadel/GME/Reddit. And it looks like either Google might be taking sides, or that if you are powerful enough you can get Google to block some search results/suggestions.
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.
You cannot possibly know, unless you work on YT moderation in Google. Also, moderation rules might vary over the years, so it might have even been checked once per year and survived for 14 years, til now. The real issue here is that nobody outside an internal Google team has voted on these policies.
It might not have been literally "2 or 3 people," but it's a reasonable assumption that the differentiating factor in 14 years is that a bunch of people saw it all at once, and some critical mass of those who saw it flagged it.
The fact that this one specifically was taken down while copycats and reuploads have not strongly suggest it was hit by community moderation flagging.
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.
You don't need to. It would be enough to allow users to download all videos by default as a sort of local cache, have settings for max cache size and cache policy with LRU by default, and also support pinning.
Heck, doing what Google already does with Google Play updates would already be a step up.
The problem is there are privacy concerns with this type of system as it's possible for anyone to find out who has consumed particular content.
Let's say you watch new and unique youtube videos for an hour a day, or 365 hours a year. (This is a lot more than I watch, btw)
Let's say we have 5Mbps videos, or half a megabyte per second.
365 * 60 * 60 * 0.5 = 657G/year
A 1TB disk is about $50, for about $25/year to store it at home.
If you upload your videos to S3 Glacier it'll run around $8/year (per year, so after a few years this is more expensive than buying drives).
For comparison, YT premium is $144/year.
I only watch about 10 minutes of unique youtube videos a day on average, so I'm looking at around $1/year cost if I want to archive every single youtube video I've ever seen. It's pretty affordable.
I wonder for how many users this is true. I personally watch several hours a day of youtube because it's mostly on in the background instead of music. Lots of infotainment channels. I'm pretty sure on average it's like 20mins per day can't find the source though.
I was just thinking about this problem from a different angle.
What if everyone, or at least a bunch of willing souls, ran the following script on their on pc's:
1. YouTube-dlc every video you ever watch automatically in the background and save to NEW_VID directory
2. make a checksum of every file that comes into NEW_VID
3. Check by using the checksum if the file already exists on open platforms like https://joinpeertube.org, https://odysee.com or https://d.tube
4. If not, upload the file.
5. Delete the file.
I was thinking about this a few months ago and wish there was some sort of background app that could keep and eye on my YT accounts likes and archive them.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28482923
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.
EU Data Address Ownership Directive: All services that allow users to upload data that is then made publicly available, MUST have a method for the user to create a 301 redirect to another location where the content is available.
(Maybe allowing for a "Are you sure you want to follow the link to https://alternative.com and leave Youtube? We have no responsibility nor control for the content on alternative.com")
Once you switch to a permanent resource identifier, you don't need to rely on Google for locating the video anymore. That won't replace Youtube as the massive video store it is, which is probably not a (financially, legally) feasible undertaking even on a national level, but at least you untangled one part of the kludge.
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.
You can film 8K video on a smartphone these days… but only about 15 minutes of it before you fill up the phone’s internal storage.
If you don’t have a computer with a big hard drive to dump the video off on, you’re basically stuck shoving the video out to “the cloud” and then deleting the local copy so that you can film more. Whether that means pushing the raws to a private object store with an online video editing system hooked up to it, vs. uploading to YouTube where they transcode the raw to lower quality and then throw away the original, it still creates a dependence on the continued existence of some cloud provider.
If you are shooting 8K video and don't know what to do with it, that is on you. Just because you can does not mean you should.
Is it possible for a home user to build a storage system with high availability and off-site backups? Sure. Will it be affordable and convenient? Extremely unlikely.
I was just thinking about this problem from a different angle.
What if everyone, or at least a bunch of willing souls, ran the following script on their on pc's:
1. YouTube-dlc every video you ever watch automatically in the background and save to NEW_VID directory
2. make a checksum of every file that comes into NEW_VID
3. Check by using the checksum if the file already exists on open platforms like https://joinpeertube.org, https://odysee.com or https://d.tube
4. If not, upload the file.
5. Delete the file.
I'm just so not understanding how the concept of ownership is lost to others.
Or seed a BitTorrent. Or both.
Now, i cannot recall what it was called, but there was this one app that could upload files to dozens of them at the same time, provided that you have the accounts - if the files aren't publicly listed and don't compromise your privacy, that's definitely a route to consider.
People should really consider storing their data only on a cloud provider that they don't pay for as equivalent to storing it only on a single USB stick.
Even storing it on a provider you do pay for should be seen as equivalent to storing it on a NAS located in your house/office: it's somewhat protected against hardware failure, but still not "backed up". Instead of fire/theft, your concerns should be account closure/compromise, or the provider just going out of business.
I've know youtubers that did upload videos as a hobby, but couldn't even afford to keep them locally stored in their hard drives after a few years. Makes the videos less valuable? In no way.
I sincerely don't understand any of your points.
If you build a house of straw because you're not technically savvy to build it out of brick doesn't mean you get to complain that the wind blew it down even if it was a big bad wolf. If you don't do something right, it's nobody's fault but your own. It's often called growing pains. Backups are a lesson best learned before they are needed but regularly only thought about after data is lost.
Let's apply this reasoning to a few other examples. Let's say you live in the jungle, and build your house to jungle building codes. Then, a logging company comes in and dismantles your furniture to make particle board for IKEA products. One could argue that if you were more competent, you'd be able to form a well-armed militia, build land vehicles and air craft, and defend your jungle home against the invaders, who are not infinitely powerful and could be dissuaded by even a reasonably well-run guerilla uprising. One might also argue that that's crazy. ;)
To put it another way, if being a guerilla fighter is the only way to have furniture in the jungle, we wouldn't expect everyone to become guerilla fighters, we'd expect a few people to become guerillas while most people lost their furniture.
Here's another example. Let's say you're a US citizen concerned about civil asset forfeiture. If you were more competent, you would smuggle your wallet across the states where that happens inside of your hubcaps, or maybe in a drone, or perhaps in a shallow-water submarine. On the other hand, it's a bit might-makes-right to assert that only people who can assemble smuggling vehicles have property rights. Again, if that was the way to have property rights, we'd expect a few people to become smugglers and almost everyone else to lose property.
So finally coming back around to the YouTube thing, if we say that the way to have a platform is to build servers, organize communications networks, and arrange payments outside of the usual system, then we would expect a few people, almost all of them criminals, to do that, while most people simply would lose their platform.
If you don't rely upon youtube, you don't need to worry about youtube. If you choose to take advantage of the ease and convenience of utilizing their freely-available service, you have to deal with their rules. For most people, it's a small price to pay. For everyone else, there's stackoverflow.
Anti-monopoly won't make video hosting free.
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.
Courts have ruled that the justification in the Second Amendment, of establishing and protecting "a well-regulated Militia", does not bind the amendment to apply only to the establishment and protection of a body designated as the militia (e.g., the National Guard).
Similarly, IP laws need not "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts" to be legitimate. If Congress passes IP laws to protect large cartels with no public benefit, and maybe even public harm, those laws are in full force and 100% constitutional.
It does, but only because US code says that there's two militias. The organized militias (the National Guards), and the unorganized militias consisting of every able bodied man 17-45. Since the 14th amendment was written later, that bit of code is now interpreted to mean all adults.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246
> The Supreme Court held:
> (1) The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.
> (a) The Amendment's prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause's text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.
Per Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Hell...
> (b) The prefatory clause comports with the Court's interpretation of the operative clause. The "militia" comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens' militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens' militia would be preserved. Pp. 22–28.
You can also see this clearly in US v. Miller, where sawed off shotguns were allowed to banned only because they had no military use (at the time). The unorganized militia must be allowed to use military weapons, which is why you can still go out and buy all sorts of crazy stuff like miniguns if you have enough money.
I'm making the upstream normative claim: so long as we have intellectual property (there are certainly moral and practical arguments against it), laws passed by Congress should reflect that intent: that temporary artificial monopolies also carry positive externalities to society at large. While incentives for creation are certainly part of that story, I think there is a strong case for reforming that balance: shortening copyrights, limiting/eliminating patents on software and business methods, and strengthening fair use and consumer rights.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#mywork
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.
Oh, come on. A Youtube video is culture just like ancient Greek plays are culture, or Sumerian cuneiform tablets.
There is an overconsumption problem, but even if it wasn't there, that'd still be the culture that we'd want to at least archive.
There are two orthogonal reasons for culture to be preserved:
* there are things that will be valuable to future generations to build upon and enrich them
* someone in the future would ask, what was life like in 2020, and without the "trash" culture, the answer will be very much off the mark
Trash or not trash, this is what we have.
This is why archive.org is important, this is why preserving Usenet archives is important, and why I'm happy that many geocities websites were archived before Yahoo axed them.
But we need to entertain the option of letting go
But archiving doesn't do that either. There are many more silent films archived than either of us have watched, for example.
Then sure, not everything needs to be archived. I believe there's a reasonable, subjective threshold of what you'd need to keep to get an idea of a person living in the time period.
Letting go and keeping are not incompatible ideas.
If you want to invest in a time capsule for your favorite fancy go ahead.
But please don’t go “ad hominem”-y when implying anyone is violating or oppressing you if they don’t happen to have your same priorities.
> The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.[1] Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.[1] The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
That's why it needs to be preserved, especially if it's harmful.
We keep museums not only to be wowed by amazing artifacts, but also to know our past, what life was like.
And for the same reason, everything from Hitler's radio broadcasts to doge memes is worth preserving.
See my other response in the thread.
...old videogame advertisements[1]
The irony is just so, so beautiful.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692049
I never made such a claim.
The problem is that everyone has their opinion on what needs to be preserved. I might not care at all about what you have on your hard drive, and vice versa.
Archive and libraries aren't Eternal and Forever Storage. Future archivist might as well prune them (as they do).
However, at the current time we don't have enough data to decide which things are worth preserving, and which are not.
Funny thing you say that.
Because today on the front page on Hacker News, we find... Old game advertisements[1].
Irony notwithstanding, I hope that proves my point.
The hard drive you'd leave behind would be a treasure someone 40 years in the future.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692049
> Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44097-3
Culture includes lifestyle and activities, which is why I made that particular point about nature.
https://joinpeertube.org/
Of course before the widespread adoption of videorecorders in the 80s the public could never rewatch anything. Nothing was meant to last.
Dear googlers: Quit. You’ll make plenty elsewhere; just stop ruining the Internet please.
You are assuming a correlation between technical competency and moral competency that I've never observed history guarantees.
Can it get worse? Because it looks like whatever good guys are left don't have a voice anymore.
Yikes... I can't believe you even typed that... inviting it to happen.
It can always get worse. There's always whistle-blowing, which would stop if all the good people left.
I could even imagine people wanting to work for Google to actively harm society as a form of Cold War. Because of this, it is probably better for people to stay and fight for good, but I might be wrong.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJf9Pf9rjO4
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.
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.
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.
https://joinpeertube.org/
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
Example instance: https://peertube.cpy.re/
A proposed solution is:
What if everyone, or at least a bunch of willing souls, ran the following script on their on pc's:
1. YouTube-dlc every video you ever watch automatically in the background and save to NEW_VID directory
2. make a checksum of every file that comes into NEW_VID
3. Check by using the checksum if the file already exists on open platforms like https://joinpeertube.org, https://odysee.com or https://d.tube
4. If not, upload the file.
5. Delete the file.
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?
https://archive.org
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
Unfortunately, I actually believe that the people behind the YouTube censorship actually benefited from their censorship and scattering of the community by producing an environment where antitrust actions are far harder to argue because YT can now claim there are many "competitors", which none of the alternatives really are.
It first dawned on me that this was possibly a tactic when Google was catching heat for manipulating results. I found it odd that DuckDuckGo was given the duck.com domain that Google owned, free of charge.
It makes no sense other than that Google was trying to support controlled opposition in order to claim that there was a competitive market.
I can't believe they've done this.
1. 1984 is not a religious prophecy. That something has happened which bears some aesthetic similarity to a part of the book is not significant or interesting by itself. If you wish to assert that Google has the power to shape the truth then you will first have to explain why,
2. The video still exists, in a thousand forms, both on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet where YT has no power. If YT wished to scrub it from the site they could do so, but they didn't.
Man, if only there were other examples of Google's censorship of videos on even more important issues. Maybe an example at the top of Hacker News from today... [0]
I'm vaccinated and I'm not a fan of insane anti-vax conspiracy theorists. But I absolutely don't think the government or the de facto public space owners being able to ban entire topics of discussion.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/29/youtube...
Do you happen to have any reference that points out which content was removed for political reasons?
You're on HN. If said censorship exists then nothing stops you from pointing it on HN.
I would go far as to say on uncensored platforms one sees the true nature of humans not bound by society and that's eye opening for the one who's fast asleep.
Better to be informed of reality than sweep under the rug and creating a faketopia where one is required to choose words carefully that the powers that be agree with, history tells us what that path that leads to.
Here are some well-written examples by Matt Taibi:
https://taibbi.substack.com/?sort=search&search=censored
Here is Glenn Greenvald explaining why he moved to Rumble:
https://rumble.com/vl268j-welcome-to-glenn-greenwalds-system...
Note that he doesn't claim he was censored. He just doesn't want to support a platform that censors in general.
...
The latest example I've seen directly was a strike against Dr. Mobeen Sayd's channel because he interviewed Pierre Kory. To put it into context, it's a channel from an MD with 10 years worth of educational content. It got a confirmed strike last week because he interviewed another doctor several month ago. There were also 50+ other videos deleted from the channel.
This is the video in question:
https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1/dr.-pierre-kory,-ivermect...
Here is YouTube search confirming it does not exist on the original channel anymore:
https://www.youtube.com/c/USMLEOnline/search?query=Dr.%20Pie....)
It's time-consuming to provide these examples and it's impossible to know when people are asking for proof in good faith and when they are just play-acting ignorance.
Here's the thread for today, currently at #2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693060
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lRV1VHv1g
I've never heard of the meme before, but that seems pretty benign.
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.