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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

Quite common, depending on what you're after.

Pornhub and its sisters recently dumped pretty much everything by unverified users thanks to an NYT hit-piece. Depending on your interests a lot of content went goodbye.

Youtube frequently delists music videos.

Creators sometimes remove old videos for various reasons.

Shit like this is why the cloud is not to be trusted.

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Don't even trust "private" cloud storage. I used google docs in school and randomly they locked one of my documents that I needed to work on citing "tos violation". Week later the document was unlocked but I will never trust them again.

> Shit like this is why the cloud is not to be trusted.

Exactly.

No such thing as "the cloud" it's just other people's computers.

Video essays with fair use clips will randomly get purged by content ID or direct DMCA enforcement, even months or years after the video is originally uploaded. Sometimes the creator will trim out those bits and reupload it, but of course the original video in your playlist maybe permanently dead. And if it's an older video (or inactive account) they may not bother fixing it at all.

Pornhub deleted videos that were unverified because a number of them involved children and victims of human trafficking and abuse. The group Exodus Cry set up a campaign called TraffickingHub to bring attention to it. The New York Times did report on it, but it doesn't qualify as a "hit piece":

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...

> Pornhub deleted videos that were unverified because a number of them involved children and victims of human trafficking and abuse.

Indeed, but they through the baby out with the bathwater on that one. A tiny percentage of the content they deleted met that criteria.

So? Your original comment still say hit piece when it was in no way that and you seem to acknowledge that in the follow up.

Because it was a hit piece. A victim's advocates group pulled a stunt called "TraffickingHub" -- a gross, gross overstatement of the problem just by looking at the name -- and the NYT covered it because they love to report on that stuff. The problem was overblown in every possible angle, and PH moved to cover their ass.

An article is a hit piece if it lies or distorts the truth. Can you point out where the New York Times did this for this article?

They lost all of that content because they were not moderating their uploads to begin with. Whatever valuable content that was lost, if any, was purely because of their failure to police their own site.

It was better when they didn't police it. There are other ways to censor trafficking content.

Like what?

> Youtube frequently delists music videos.

I think you mean companies/YouTubers themselves - YT doesn't remove regular videos on their own very often. The content being deleted is still a problem and reason to save it though - many externalities might be reason for the uploader to remove videos (legal, purging a Google account, etc).

They do, through DMCA enforcement. But you are right that it is a combination of YouTube, publishers, and creators delisting things

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