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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

The IA is one of the purer forces for good on the internet. It's definitely worth your donations. I do wonder, though, how well-filled the niche is for providers for the content that can't be on IA, specifically that which has been requested to be taken down. Quite a lot of the "wild west" era internet content both ranks highly on things I personally want preserved and is quite likely to have takedown requests.

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It'd be pretty cool if someone could organize an "Internet Wild West" archive specifically for that kind of content and host it using torrents and I2P so that it can't be easily challenged. Yeah, there's probably a lot of problems with that, but there's nevertheless parts of the Before Time that I'd like preserved.

This is why I download and archive locally things I enjoy repeatedly and find significant. If I remember something I once loved or laughed hysterically at back in the old days, I use yt-dlp to download it because I know someday it'll get erased and a shrinking minority of people will even remember what it was.

To me, it's about personal culture. There are videos and other online content that became an institution in my young brain, but inevitably faded into irrelevance, eventually disappearing entirely in some cases. If I remember a piece of media but find that it's been lost for good, it's like I've lost a small part of myself.

In any case, I definitely recommend creating a personal archive. I agree that the Internet Archive is an amazing thing and that we are blessed to have it, but clearly not everything has an obvious place on it and I think it's only a matter of time before the Cathedral, if you will, recognizes its existence and subverts or destroys it.

If I remember a piece of media but find that it's been lost for good, it's like I've lost a small part of myself.

I could not have phrased it more perfectly myself. Those things are a part of us. Back in the day your preserved memories were a journal, a book, a photograph, a videotape. Now they live on the cloud and all it takes to lose part of it is for a creator to decide that content doesn't suit their brand anymore and erase it. Just going through your Youtube Liked Videos list and seeing how many are no longer available should be enough to send a cold chill down your spine.

If I like it, I save it. There are some things I suspect I may have the only existing copy of. I wish someone would come up with a site archiver like HTTRACK but built for archival of modern websites that are full of content not hosted directly on the site's server.

YouTube's search experience became so bad that I can't find videos that I watched 10 years or more ago. And I can't tell whether it's because their search algorithm & UI went downhill or because the videos have been removed.

I'm pretty sure it's all of those things combined. Their search has become heavily weighed towards mainstream media, so if a video even has a single keyword that can be related to a current event or important person, it may be impossible to find because CNN, Vox, and Jimmy Kimmel Live dominate most of the results.

The search feature also seems to return less in general, and has become geared towards suggesting content below the fold. You can get it to keep returning more that's related to the search query by just continuing to scroll, but it runs out remarkably quickly.

So yeah, if you like it, download it. I don't care what anyone says about copyright. Unless it's something you know will be around, it can disappear for good.

From what I can tell, if you sort the results by "Upload date" it will consistently return keyword-only matches until you reach the oldest match.

I'd love a multi-billion line spreadsheet that just contains videoIDs, titles, channel names, and descriptions from all of YouTube.

the-eye.eu is supposed to be that, but it appears to be centralized. i can't remember if they had any decentralized file storage abilities. it's currently mostly down and being restored from backups or something.

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