Post by gordon on 56 minutes ago
On September 22nd, 2016, German YouTuber "HerrNewstime" (Thomas Hackner) who creates news videos about YouTube, uploaded a video (URL) criticizing the controversial "YouTube Heroes" system. The title, "Werde YouTube Petze.. | Das YouTube Heroes System!" translates into "become a YouTube snitch! | the YouTube Heroes system!".
Thomas apparently took it down in February 2017.
- Watch page archive from March 10, 2017 (archive.today). It shows "this video has been removed by the user". Apparently, this error remains for up to one month after deletion, after which it becomes "This video is unavailable.". (More about the errors.)
- Next capture from March 31, 2017. By that time, it reads "this video is unavailable".
- AutoShared tweet. The AutoShare to Twitter feature was removed by YouTube in January 2019.
Philip DeFranco (also known as Philly D) and Shane Dawson have largely memory-holed their early YouTube catalog, even after Philip promised in his 2019 departure video, at 5 minutes and 3 seconds, that he wouldn't:
(Edit: LOL, they took that down too. But it was available as of April 2022 (archive.today).)
I was never really interested in them much, but in the archives, I found a video on the February 2010 archive of Philip DeFranco's channel that caught my eye:
(From 2010-02-16, capture from 2015-02-01)
This was 2010, when seven minutes were considered long. The video in question was online for at least half a decade and yet no live copy of it exists.
Many Shane Dawson videos from 2009 to 2011: archive.today/2011.06.30-215631/http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=07E1C99ABA04E3C1
(Yes, YouTube really had "view_play_list" as their URL. 😄 )
Much of it appears to have been clickbait and overpromise, but it goes to show that videos with millions of views can disappear into nothingness or be locked away in Google datacenters, for no one to enjoy.
Thomas Rid said:
The notion that the internet does not forget is utter nonsense—the public internet forgets every single day, like knowledge quietly dropping off a cliff into the dark sea of time[…]
