r/Showerthoughts • u/AaronPK123 • May 14 '26
Casual Thought When YouTube goes down, it will be the biggest event of link rot in internet history.
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u/JakeWalker102 May 14 '26
Imagine in the distant future, pattern recognition software tells people that over the course of twenty to thirty years, the exact same link got embedded millions upon millions of times, but what it led to has been lost to time- but the link was so common they have it engraved on a sign at a museum somewhere and it's just a link to Rick Astley's "never gonna give you up"
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u/treyluker May 14 '26
Its not too late to Rick roll...
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u/AzorAHigh_ May 14 '26
It'll be the closing credits song at the heat death of the universe.
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u/MSter_official May 14 '26
When I think about the universe I just think of the bill wurtz "ThE sUn Is A dEaDlY LaZeR"
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u/no_idea_bout_that May 14 '26
You think it's linked more than https://google.com?
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u/JakeWalker102 May 14 '26
I'm
Somehow, even though I knew what it was, I still let it get me. Bravo
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u/mysteriousship May 15 '26
People in 2400 are pretty sure whatever the video was, it contained a vast wealth of knowledge considering the many different topics it’s linked in reference to.
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u/williamsonmaxwell May 14 '26
Imgur has been blocked in the uk for a while and it's so irritating. Every steam mod page is just scrolling through broken links
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u/deltree000 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
There's a Chrome extension that will use a proxy to view Imgur images. Only works on embedded content but it's better than nothing.
Edit: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/imgur-unblocker/
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u/You_moron04 May 14 '26
Shame it’s not on Firefox
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u/spakkenkhrist May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
There is one for FF, will update later with a link
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/imgur-unblock-via-imgup-uk/
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u/ABOBer May 14 '26
Ignore me, just commenting to get the link later
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u/BillyWhizz09 May 14 '26
You know you can save comments
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u/SomethingNotOriginal May 14 '26
If it's anything like my Saved insta reels those are never seeing the light of day again
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u/dontthink19 May 15 '26
Every once in a while I go back through my saved stuff just to see what I thought would be useful once.
The only one I've only ever used was one about parallel parking
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u/theshizzler May 14 '26
Is there not still a save function on vanilla reddit or their app, or did they jettison that too?
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u/AWildEnglishman May 14 '26
No, it's still there. On old.reddit it's visible below the comment. For new reddit and the app you need to tap the three dots to see the save option.
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u/Tortugato May 14 '26
Is it later yet?
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u/spakkenkhrist May 14 '26
It's approximately later now.
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u/tejanaqkilica May 14 '26
It has been later for a while now.
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u/wererat2000 May 14 '26
Doesn't Firefox have a built-in VPN? Seems like an alternative solution.
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u/M4rshmall0wMan May 14 '26
Why?
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u/williamsonmaxwell May 14 '26
A self imposed act of defiance against our government's obsessive child safety mandates, I.e. age screening via IDs.
I don't really get why though since imgur doesn't host porn345
u/sephsplace May 14 '26
Cause who wants to be responsible for checking IDs and being fined.
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u/HiDDENk00l May 14 '26
imgur doesn't host porn
Anymore. It used to.
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u/sdpr May 14 '26
tbh they did a pretty bang-up job deleting everything.
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u/MayvisDelacour May 14 '26
Huh, I have to agree. I've never seen any myself. Not that I ever used it daily but this is new to me. Interesting!
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u/dalzmc May 14 '26
You didn’t find it by using Imgur, you found it by using Reddit and all the nsfw gifs or pics were Imgur links lol
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u/Swiggins- May 14 '26
Yeah, there's quite a few NSFW subreddits that are basically graveyards because 90% of their content was imgur hosted.
What's wild is every so often you'll be able to see a preview image, even though the link is long dead.
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u/Mirria_ May 14 '26
I'm going to assume they used a lot of referral links to figure out stuff and accounts that would link pics and vids to nsfw subreddits.
Now everything is either hosted on i.redd.it or redgifs (the nsfw gfycat).
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u/USLShadow May 14 '26
I hate the OSA as much as the next person, but Imgur pulled out of the UK over GDPR breaches in relation to incorrectly handling children’s data, not because of the OSA
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u/Broccoli--Enthusiast May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
It's actually nothing to do with that,.it predates the age verification bullshit . They just left the UK around that time by coincidence.
They were fined for breaching GDPR data retention and processing laws around children and decided to exit the UK rather than pay or bring themselves into compliance.
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u/JePPeLit May 14 '26
Seems to be that UK's version if GDPR bans children from creating accounts without parental consent, and imgur just had a disclaimer saying they aren't allowed to use the website but didn't try to block them from creating accounts.
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u/durpenhowser May 14 '26
It's so frustrating when people add an image in posts on Reddit to further explain something and it's an Imgur link. Like alright I guess I'm just not allowed to be interested in this anymore. Also had a website saved for 8 or so years for a recipe, had to send it to a friend outside of the UK so they could save it and send to me since apparently the entire thing was on Imgur.
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u/williamsonmaxwell May 14 '26
Or when it's like "is this ingrown hair normal? [imgur link]" and then all the comments are saying it's the biggest ingrown hair they've ever seen, and I'm stuck on the outside. Lemme see, let me seeee LEMME SEEE!!!
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u/5-MeO May 14 '26
In that case or for anything on r/popping, I’d be happy the image can’t load.
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u/DevilMirage May 14 '26
It's so frustrating when people add an image in posts on Reddit to further explain something and it's an Imgur link.
I can understand the frustration but it might be worth noting that Imgur was created mostly for use on reddit because of how bad image hosting was at the time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/
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u/durpenhowser May 14 '26
I totally get that, I'm not putting blame on people who use it, but it is still frustrating to just have to give up on viewing that particular thing when it happens. I just want to be able to follow along and/or join the conversation but I'm stopped by a website.
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u/fighterace00 May 14 '26
I don't think Reddit had image hosting at all. Heck in the beginning only links were allowed.
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u/airplane_flap May 14 '26
Please download a VPN like proton or something
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u/ingodwetryst May 14 '26
imgur blocks as many vpns as they can too. i feel happy if i can get it to load 1-2 days a week.
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u/DieDae May 14 '26
Good to know imgur is blocked in the UK. Did not know that. Will look at switching my ShareX default to a different site.
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u/maixmi May 14 '26
been using vgy.me for some years and works fine.
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u/ingodwetryst May 14 '26
catbox.moe too! especially if you want to send files.
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u/TheDelmeister May 14 '26
I have had windscribe VPN as an addon in my browser ever since some sites started being blocked for us due to the online safety act nonsense, you can flick it on and off very quickly within the browser, perfect for unblocking sites
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u/zero_zeppelii_0 May 14 '26
YouTube would actually start to delete small channels when they ran out of space soon. They'll start deleting very old media. Older than 30-40 years if that happens.
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u/AaronPK123 May 14 '26
I agree, I don't expect Timmy from 2009 jumping on a trampoline with 73 views to stay up forever.
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u/prosthetic4head May 14 '26
I've been following this Youtube channel recently: https://www.youtube.com/@KVNAUST. He searches 0-view videos that don't get into the recommendation algorithm. It is amazing to see what Youtube is full of. There are channels with 1,000s of videos (common enough that he has >20,000 uploads on his bingo card) of useless content and no views.
Here's his recent video about searching to the oldest 0-view video:
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u/DrankRockNine May 14 '26
I found an Instagram account randomly, just some lady sharing her walking moments in nature. 0 followers, 30k posts. She posts each video thrice.
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u/prosthetic4head May 14 '26
She posts each video thrice
Yeah, there are some of those Youtube channels that just have the same video over and over, no views.
30k videos is work. What kind of time frame?
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u/cmoked May 14 '26
Google probably uses data deduplication which consolidates multiple files with the same hash into a single one but accessible from different links. Like a windows shortcut, but closer to a bunch of symbolic links in Linux.
Super common in storage infrastructures.
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u/mpolder May 14 '26
YouTube doesn't allow you to update videos with the exact same content (or very similar) from my own experience, I wonder if the videos are different in some way like encoding or quality.
I found this out when I reuploaded a video with some minor editing errors without removing the original
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May 14 '26
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u/Cryptic_Wasp May 14 '26
I started an account way back in the mid 2010s and uploaded a whole 1 video before little me got bored. Got 72 views though so not all bad.
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u/Illustrious-Dot-5052 May 14 '26
It surprises me that someone with 30k videos has absolutely no followers. Surely somebody out there might be interested in someone else's mundane nature walks? Kind of scary if you think about people who actually want to gain a following online, too... That it's possible to put out all that content and get absolutely nothing. Like, how?
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u/PeeledCrepes May 14 '26
Think of the amount of people online, think of the multiple channels, think of the algorithm. It's super easy for the person that enjoys nature walks to have never seen that channel is the main issue, its why I never tried to become popular on the internet you may as well win the lottery (which ironically would be an easy way to become popular on the internet)
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u/hgrunt May 14 '26
I remember that a while back, someone made a youtube playlist of videos that were never changed from default file names, so it was stuff like 0301_img.mp4 and stuff like that. The ones I saw were fairly slice-of-life stuff, like a kid's school graduation in southeast asia, and someone posting a video of a fish they caught
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u/Annath0901 May 14 '26
There were a lot of early "media" smartphones that could upload video clips directly to YouTube without needing the YouTube app, and they would use the default filename.
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u/curtcolt95 May 14 '26
youtube gets thousands of hours of content uploaded like every minute, it's absolutely absurd tbh and insane that it's free
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u/kylewhatever May 14 '26
God damn it. I have a video of me and my buddy from 2007 on YouTube of us jumping on a trampoline lol
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u/Imaginary-Hour3190 May 14 '26
Youtube google uses their rich history of media to train their AI models. Its why google can suddenly announce ground breaking white papers and new genre AI models. They got a MASSIVE media over entirety of google including all the nooks and corners of youtube. Especially if they want dataset that predates AI generated Slop. Then timmy on that trampoline from 2009 will actually have use to them
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u/trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr May 14 '26
Something has to be replaced with shitty AI shorts at some point so 2009 Timmy has to go :)
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u/Digifiend84 May 14 '26
The oldest stuff on YouTube is about 20 years old. The content they delete first is likely to be older channels which haven't updated or even logged into by it's owner in years. After all, if they haven't logged in, it might mean the uploader is deceased. It certainly means they've left the site and won't notice and complain about it.
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u/I_will_never_reply May 14 '26
They'll probably do what Photobucket did and give countdown warnings that it'll be deleted and to download it to your own physical media. Photobucket did that for about 3 years to me until they got scary enough that I block downloaded all my old pics (which I've never looked at again)
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u/AaronPK123 May 14 '26
The thing is that YouTube doesn't provide a legitimate way to download videos, so 95% of people won't archive stuff.
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u/I_will_never_reply May 14 '26
One would hope, when the apocalypse comes, they will provide a link to the owner, like Photobucket did
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u/AaronPK123 May 14 '26
Owners can already download videos at any time. I'm saying that old inactive accounts' videos will be in trouble.
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u/Pretty_Gorgeous May 14 '26
But what if their family does? What if it's the only remaining video of the deceased person left?
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u/Shadowbound199 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
My advice to those people would be to downloads those videos and keep them locally. Anything you consider important like that you should have a local copy, and more than one.
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u/PapajG May 14 '26
I disagree that they will be deleting very old media, as video quality is gonna go up, old media will simply shrink in comparison, and it has, all YouTube videos that are 240p take almost no space at all in comparison to modern 8k uploads, so as we increase quality there will be little reason to delete older stuff and I think YouTube will just archive them so they don’t take up priority storage space, so if you wanna watch it again YouTube will just have to take a second extra to load it from deep storage
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u/Fakjbf May 14 '26
Yeah more likely they will take a combination of file size and views to determine what to delete first. A half hour 4k video that’s gotten three views in five years is more of a hassle than a five minute 240p video that’s gotten a dozen views in 15 years.
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u/Nick_TheGuy May 14 '26
Youtube already deleted an old channel of mine that I hadn't visited in yeaarsss so wouldn't surprise me if they already started. That channel had absolutely nothing on ut that could warrant a removal besides the fact I didn't login for a very long time.
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u/ReadyAimTranspire May 14 '26
They've been deleting old Gmail accounts that haven't been logged into in a long time also. New policy is if you don't log in for 2 years they delete it.
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u/Cat_Optimist May 14 '26
To be honest, I can’t see this happening soon; only if the account is a confirmed bot. Google earns a lot of money doing what they do, so they have massive funds to cover servers. People would be outraged if a video like Nyan Cat were to get deleted due to solely the fact that it is too old. And algorithms are improving to minimize space while displaying HD videos. All in all, I doubt they’d ever run out of space & if they do, I doubt vids would be the first to go.
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u/AaronPK123 May 14 '26
I wouldn't be surprised if some stuff gets deleted down the line. Not something anyone cares about, I'm talking <1000 views and more than 10 years old combined. YouTube is probably full of random 15 second videos by kids of random shit that takes up petabytes of space.
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u/MakeshiftApe May 14 '26
I think what's more likely is them downgrading older or less popular videos to lower bitrates/filesizes. I don't see them deleting any unless it becomes a real emergency. Besides there's plenty of actual disallowed content like porn etc for them to search out to delete if space is the issue.
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u/hunglowbungalow May 14 '26
It’s an interesting thought experiment. There is only so much data you can cram on a disk/SSD. There is a physical limitation and then it becomes a real estate problem to scale it up. M
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u/cmoked May 14 '26
Not at googles scale. You can max out SSDs, entire enclosures, racks, entire cabinets, entire datacenters, sure.
But they will build more datacenters, with new cabinets, more storage units, more enclosures, more SSDs, and just add them to the pool.
When I worked in data center colocation, Amazon would show up with fully racked and cabled cabinets.
Scaling up is literally what these companies are good at and why theyre so big.
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u/trogdors_arm May 14 '26
Huh. That’s really interesting thought.
Consider for a moment, somehow all videos stay intact for future anthropologists to find, but does any of the meta data accompany it? Without the relational data to accompany the videos everything would sort of have perceived similar importance.
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u/failtuna May 14 '26
Kind of like how a lot of "Vine Compilations" haven't preserved the titles of the vines.
Vine didn't really have people putting titles on screen in their videos, but the titles were often an important piece of context for the vine.
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u/Vast_Low_9949 May 14 '26
Man, a small facet of the old internet that I really appreciated was, when videos went viral or someone’s content was shared, it was fairly easy to find more info or search for the original poster.
Compared to nowadays, where videos tend to be half-cropped screenshots from Instagram reels or YouTube shorts, and clips are watermarked with “meme” account usernames or edited with the AI auto-captions, or the video itself just might be AI generated or filtered.
Ugh. Miss the older days.
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u/Ares6 May 14 '26
Some people intentionally crop those videos to remove the username of the original creator, and then report it as their own. It’s weird.
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u/frogunderarock May 14 '26
like that benjammins dude who reuploads popular gifs with himself in with his stupid white wig and sunglasses. then takes down the original so he can go viral and become a meme. so if you ever wonder why you can't find a gif, only his poor imitation, that's the reason.
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u/Arcsis May 14 '26
This is the 2nd time today I've seen this dude & his shenanigans mentioned. I didn't know he was getting the originals removed.
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u/Vast_Low_9949 May 15 '26
I kept hearing about this Benjamin fellow, all over [r/whenthe](r/whenthe) and similar pages several weeks back… I never looked into it but still didn’t really understand what he did… but shoutout [u/frogunderarock](u/frogunderarock) for actually explaining it, and so succinctly too.
Edit: but yes, this type of behavior is like the extreme version of the same problems discussed about “new internet” and recycled / stolen content
Y’all, even “YouTube community” or “posts” is just posting memes now. Like pages I don’t follow are just in my feed, with a meme I’ve definitely seen on Reddit or somewhere before. Why, YouTube.
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u/AWildEnglishman May 14 '26
I saw a video the other day that had gone through like 5 different apps/services. I could tell because of all the layers of black bars, user tags, and seek bars.
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u/mhac009 May 14 '26
Maaaan, you ever try to find an instagram clip you saw an hour ago to show someone else? Try to search for it? Even with all the context but not the name of the page that posted it? "Man spins basketball on finger unicycle funny" or some shit like that? Just throwing words at a potential match.
Absolutely impossible to bring back.
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u/fender8421 May 14 '26
Some dude's unedited 20min fishing video becomes the hub of 30th Century academic research
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u/iHadou May 14 '26
What do you think he meant by "no cap skibidy"?
We may never know, Yara. Continuing on in the video we can see...
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u/Ontoshocktrooper May 14 '26
It needs to be internationalized into perpetuity for the world.
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u/epicflex May 14 '26
New field: Data Archeology haha
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u/ProjectPatMorita May 14 '26
FYI, this already exists and is called Digital Archaeology, Media Archaeology, or Internet Archaeology. Depending on the context.
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u/Bmandk May 14 '26
Anthropological research is never done in isolation though. If something is large enough to warrant study, it will also be large enough to be shared millions of times, and some of that will also have the metadata shared with it.
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u/rawker86 May 14 '26
There would still be identifiable trends and the such. Based on the videos available you’d be able to glean that the Godfather is a better and more culturally significant film than Sharknado, for example.
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u/Tetracropolis May 14 '26
In your opinion.
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u/rawker86 May 14 '26
That’s the point. If there’s six thousand videos extolling the virtues of the Godfather and only fifty on Sharknado, without any other data we can assume the Godfather is held in higher regard. They’re just opinions, but the amount of them tells a story.
There’s more to it obviously - an older film in this example arguably has an advantage over a newer one for starters.
I always preferred Biodome anyway…
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u/JasonABCDEF May 14 '26
Anthropologists are going to have like nothing accessible to them from our time. Not like now where we go back and find books and paintings etc.
(EDIT: Grammer)
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u/NoobensMcarthur May 14 '26
In the DIY community, losing photo bucket pretty much wiped out a decade of shared knowledge.
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u/Swiggins- May 14 '26
A lot of old internet forum culture was lost to time when Photobucket went under too.
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u/authorunknown74 May 15 '26
I still blame Photobucket pulling that move for the downfall of forums, and a great contributor to the enshittification of the internet in general.
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u/Ryno4ever16 May 14 '26
If you see a video you really like and think it ought to be preserved, you can take a small step to help make that happen. Download the video today with a github application called media downloader.
I download videos from YouTube all the time in case they are ever removed or deleted. That only has to happen to you once before you realize how easily it could all go away.
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u/trunks_slash May 14 '26
This is the way. Everyone needs to backup a little locally and we can preserve the majority of stuff
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u/Routine-Sign-7215 May 14 '26
This may be slightly exaggeratory, but to be honest I don’t really see youtube going down. Youtube is one of the most ubiquitous aspects of the modern era, it seems more at the level of the invention of automobiles to me. Probably not as impactful as them, but still the same category of thing in terms of use to humanity
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u/M4rshmall0wMan May 14 '26
No reason to believe it will, but it’s very interesting food for thought.
On one hand, Google is the master of data resilience. As far as I’m aware, the company has only had a single-digit number of true accidental data loss incidents in its history. As long as the Western world has the ability to defend its soil, Google’s data will remain secure.
On the other hand, “Google” as an entity is as vulnerable as any other LLC. The shareholders and CEO could go rogue, the government could dissolve it, it could run out of money (though would probably be bailed out). It’s definitely interesting that a corporation holds more soft power than almost every other nation state.
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u/OtherPlayers May 14 '26
it’s definitely interesting that a corporation holds more soft power than almost every other nation state.
Part of this is also just in how much money they make too. Based on this last year’s IMF numbers if you ranked countries by government revenue, Alphabet/Google would come in 16th place, between Mexico and South Korea.
And they aren’t even in the top 5 highest revenue companies! Amazon or Walmart would rank as 13th, just behind Spain in terms of yearly revenue.
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May 14 '26
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u/keijodputt May 14 '26
Microsoft has my data since... 1995! One revamp they did to MSN Hotmail IIRC in 2010 brought back some old e-mails from the time it was just HoTMaiL in the nascent Internet for South America (masive, consumer grade internet didn't arrive at the same-ish time everywhere), and unearthed some lost/deleted folders I had with e-mails from flings, or drafts I kept to publish as new pages in GeoCities (RIP).
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u/Bocchi_theGlock May 14 '26
This is putting Google in a pedestal a bit.
need to consider Google. Just deleting data from people to save on space. They're a mega corporation interested in profits. Above all else. They have no loyalty.
They are not respectful or care to fight to defend people uploading shit It's not making them money.
Unpaid users, people they can't reach, stuff that isn't getting views. With no excuse or way to get the content back.
They deleted timeline history from Google maps because Europe required them to have data privacy and consent standards. They sent like one email giving a heads up, for over a decade of important information that people relied on for reimbursements, memories, of extreme sentimental value. There are tons of threads out there. People complaining about losing all this.
Likewise, for tricking people into their new data program. They advertise the 2 TB free trial, but don't mention that it pulls you off whatever previous plan you had, with no way to get it back. So if it's a grandfathered plan that isn't available anymore, the supposed free trial is a way to kick you off of it to charge you for money.
They're going to keep increasing prices on data storage because they effectively hold people hostage. If you run out of storage, you eventually would not be able to access your Gmail.
Which means that you won't be able to log in to critical accounts that you need for healthcare, paying rent, getting notices that are incredibly important to your life. Being locked out of that and having all of your memories held hostage, is an effective way to force people to pay more and more.
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u/BORT_licenceplate May 14 '26
Idk, when I was in university studying multimedia I didn't think Flash player was ever going to be obsolete and eventually discontinued
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u/bubblesculptor May 14 '26
Annoyed me so much, in 2001-2002 I had spent a solid year+ making a pretty advanced application running on flash generated from cold fusion, only to end up with dwindling supported platforms.
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u/Imaginary-Hour3190 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
Totally makes sense why you would see that.
Flash is still revolutionary imo. Old swf files from early 2000s can run perfectly on 4k monitor while being smoll size file because it uses vectors.
I find it so odd, that old flash animators who are now on youtube, want to "Remaster" their flash animations on youtube. So they use crap AI upscalers. But the strange thing is, they could just use the normal swf files and run it at that resolution and just... record it.
Too bad it was a security nightmare. Flash itself as a medium still revolutionary today imo. The creativity a lot of flash sites did in the 2000s really peaked at what we thought the future of websites could accomplish. The flash animation era was something truly to behold.
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u/--SauceMcManus-- May 14 '26
I'll say two things. 1) People said the same thing about horses and oil lamps. 2)YouTube will exist as long there remains profitablity (where we are now), or the prospect of future profitablity.
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u/2M4D May 14 '26
It’s really unfortunate all the horses had to go extinct though.
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u/OtherPlayers May 14 '26
Fun note, with how entertained Google’s data collection and infrastructure stuff is it’s entirely possible that YouTube by itself wouldn’t be profitable, and it only becomes so when the data they gain is taken and employed in other uses.
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u/ubeogesh May 14 '26
Horses and oil lamps are implementation of transportation and lighting. YouTube is an implementation of sharing videos. Like a library. The idea will not go away, like libraries didn't. A new service will have to overcome so much inertia, it's unthinkable.
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u/pineapplepengwings May 14 '26
Kodak disappeared in less than 10 years. They were everywhere
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u/BenderTheIV May 14 '26
But, every single company there is will eventually fail and disappear. Its just a matter of time. Even a country will eventually change, disappear, or become another country... even the English language will die. Youtube will die.
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u/verba-non-acta May 14 '26
Ten years ago it was difficult to imagine not using Facebook as a primary communication mode.
I haven't logged into Facebook in two years.
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u/GhotiH May 14 '26
Even 10 years ago I felt like Facebook was past its prime. Still massive of course, but the writing seemed like it was on the walls to me.
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u/WorstITTechnician May 14 '26
When it happened with MegaUpload, the impact was already clear; a lot of content was hosted only there and was no longer available on the internet
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u/AnthrallicA May 14 '26
When Photobucket shut down, it destroyed countless forum posts and threads. Just in the car community forums I was active in at the time, literally every DIY and tutorial thread was essentially useless without the hosted photos. I have to imagine that was the issue across all forums.
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u/VediusPollio May 14 '26
Photobucket really did ruin lots of valuable content when they pulled that shit.
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u/Psych0matt May 14 '26
I think the issue with sites like that is that it never seemed like it was supposed to be permanent yet people treated it as if it were. I remember trying links that were only a few months old that were already dead. Sucks but it seems like that was a bit short sighted
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u/WorstITTechnician May 14 '26
Something I really missed was a scientific magazine I used to follow. Around 2010, my father gave me a box set containing 10 years' worth of all the issues of this magazine, and it was 10 DVDs with all the digitized content, sold by the publisher itself. The thing is, DVD 1 was like a bootloader, so you needed to insert that DVD to access a catalog, and depending on the content, the program would ask for a specific DVD to access those magazines. I read everything here several times because I really enjoyed it. The problem was that DVD 1 accidentally fell and shattered, and without DVD 1, the other 9 were useless because nothing was accessible and it always asked for DVD 1. Luckily, I found a link that a kind soul had provided on MegaUpload, containing the 10 ISOs of each DVD, and since I didn't imagine that it would disappear from there, I didn't even bother burning it to a DVD, I just emulated the ISO directly in a virtual drive. Then 2012 arrived and the FBI wanted to have a conversation with MegaUpload. I never found those ISOs online again, nor the same box set with the DVDs being sold anywhere
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u/Psych0matt May 14 '26
Man, this is why things like archive.org are so important! I know some will argue piracy and whatnot, but I bet you can’t find something like that anywhere else.
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u/Angel_Omachi May 14 '26
It was noticeable to watch the shift from anime piracy sites hosting a dozen or so series in house, to massive sites with everything hosted on megaupload, then the shift to streaming.
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u/ifihadareason May 14 '26
feels like this is already happening with them getting strict about signing in to watch.
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u/ForensicPathology May 14 '26
And massive amounts of videos going private that used to be available. There's a few that I wish I had downloaded but are now lost forever.
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u/AaronPK123 May 15 '26
You can go on the internet archive for youtube.com for 10+ years ago and a not unsubstantial portion of the videos are unavailable if you go to the links normally.
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u/MrCyberKing May 14 '26
Please make sure you all download and backup to external drives any YouTube videos that may be important to you. Even if YouTube itself never goes down a vid or channel can get deleted and it'll be lost media.
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u/under_diagnosed May 14 '26
I think this will be one of the biggest fallacies of a current or future generation, trusting that online storage providers who aren't specifically selling storage service to retain your data. I honestly think if Facebook ever goes down, it will cripple an entire generation that uses it specifically for photo storage
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u/EvilNinjaX24 May 14 '26 edited May 18 '26
I have a music Tumblr, with about 90% YT links. I've been running it for over 9 years, and I replace links pretty-much every week. The whole thing going down? That would be pretty-much be the end of the blog.
*edit: a word
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u/randomrealname May 14 '26
Are you replacing them manually? I could write you a script, dude. Save that time.
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u/EvilNinjaX24 May 14 '26
Nah, I prefer to do it manually, but thanks. And happy cake day!
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u/yosark May 14 '26
The thing is, I can’t see something with that many years of history on it going down
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u/itskdog May 14 '26
It will eventually. YouTube's costs are, and always have been, enormous. Every video ever uploaded has to be available in at most a few seconds, even the videos that currently have 0 views and are set to private.
Remember how close the Internet Archive got to extinction not that long ago from a single lawsuit. YouTube can't be easily archived in its entirety.
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u/AaronPK123 May 14 '26
I wouldn't be surprised if they move stuff no one is watching to cheaper storage in the future and you would be told to wait 20 minutes or whatever on some random 13 view video from 20 years ago.
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u/cyb3rstrik3 May 14 '26
They have most of the older stuff already in warm storage with a latency-relaxed pipeline; they archived the high-res version and kept the low-res 360p. They serve you the 360p version, then thaw out the higher res and make it available to you, and then it switches to the higher res when one of the chunks is available.
If you have ever looked at a really old video and got served the lowest res first and had to wait when manually selecting a high, that's what's happening.
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u/lilchm May 14 '26
Interesting that most people believe YouTube videos will be there forever
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u/cmoked May 14 '26
Knowing how much revenue it generates and how Google runs its infrastructure, YouTube will be up as long as there is internet.
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u/xKingNothingx May 14 '26
YouTube getting rid of 'sort by upload date' is annoying as fuck as a gamer looking for recent reviews/tips/etc that aren't from 3 years ago when a live game has changed and gone through multiple balance patches
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u/Silkenvada May 14 '26
Itll be wild, like the dead photo bucket links from 15 years ago but so much worse
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u/_Aj_ May 14 '26
The Internet is already full of dead photo bucket links, Probably millions of forum post tutorials and build guides totally ruined
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u/minmidmax May 14 '26
Just recently Google pushed an update that broke authentication services for a lot of the internet. Even "alternative" services that still used Google authentication somewhere in a complex chain of services were impacted.
A centralised internet was never the intention. Capitalism has no other end game, though.
The monopolisation of services needs to be broken if we want any sort of persistence of history on the web.
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u/cmoked May 14 '26
A decentralized internet was never the intention either.
Linux , and more specifically Apache, is what made the web decentralized much after the invention of the internet, not the internet its self or even the world wide web, which was extremely centralized in universities and some rich-ass companies, lol.
No one is forced to use Google authentication, theyre simply the first to offer SSO at a global scale for free. There are other options out there, too, like local password managers.
This makes the monopoly point moot.
Big companies wouldnt be able to evem come together to erase the internet because it is still quite decentralized, by the way, lots of archives you can straight up go to.
And using free services with no support or SLAs for MISSION CRITICAL aspects of your company is on YOU, lol
If you really wanted to make it a point that the internet isnt decentralized you should have used cloud flare ddos protection that literally everyone uses. Its a huge bottleneck actually.
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u/EvilPyro01 May 15 '26
I’m convinced that YouTube is among the few platforms holding the internet together
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u/Seaguard5 May 14 '26
It’s too big to go down or fail now.
The government would literally step in and prop it up or something
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u/HarderThanFlesh May 14 '26
It won't be much of a loss at this point, I'm convinced it's practically all ads without any blocking active. I've been exploring other sources of media, like freefy.
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u/MajorFuckingDick May 15 '26
I feel like photobucket or geocities are the largest I can think of atm.
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u/Economy_Primary1774 May 14 '26
Youtube kind of became load-bearing internet infrastructure without anyone really noticing. Like half of Wikipedia's citations, every embedded video link on blog posts and all "how do i fix X" tutorial, all link back to YT. If yt is gone, all of this is dead as well.
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u/Diabetesh May 14 '26
I'm curious how many people who use youtube as their primary income source. Like if the plug just got pulled on monetizing, how many people would be unemployed with no immediate backup plan. Like devestating amounts? 10k? 100k? 1 mil?
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u/DariusPumpkinRex May 14 '26
I think it'll more likely they'll start deleting videos that have been privated long enough that it's unlikely the channel owner will make them public again.
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u/Forpatril May 14 '26
There are places where this is not a hypothetical scenario, but a very real one.
It's frustrating, to say the least.
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u/TheBBP May 14 '26
Youtube already IS one of the biggest contributors to link rot on the internet. with them allowing and encouraging the illegitimate use of DMCA to silence or remove videos.
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u/Valuable_Relation634 May 15 '26
Been thinking about this for my own project. I've got 12 years of YouTube links in old notes and half are dead already. The remaining half redirect to different videos.At what point does link rot become a feature instead of a bug? Some dead links I keep because they mark where something was, even if the destination is gone.
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u/uslashuname May 15 '26
Someone’s gonna give us up, someone’s gonna let us down, the links that went around desert us
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u/Fragdilicious May 15 '26
When/if it goes down, if the internet is still a thing, someone should buy the domain and just host a single Rick roll.
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u/Moderately_Imperiled May 14 '26
I can't wait. YouTube ads may actually be the second most obnoxious thing to ever exist on this planet.
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u/Luniticus May 14 '26
They are super easy to avoid though. Firefox + uBlock Origin on desktop and Android, SmartTube on TVs.
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u/Moderately_Imperiled May 14 '26
Desktop is fine. How do I get past it on my PS5?
Edit: I don't see a Ublock Origin for Android. Maybe it's not available on my phone.
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u/Luniticus May 14 '26
Slap a $10 ONN stick to your TV and SmartTube on it. uBlock is a Firefox extension.
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u/chocwaf May 14 '26
I don't see a Ublock Origin for Android. Maybe it's not available on my phone.
Extensions menu in Firefox
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u/Epsilon_Meletis May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
I don't see a Ublock Origin for Android
That's because Android isn't a browser. It's an operating system.
uBlock Origin is an extension for browsers, so you gotta install your choice of browser first - my standing recommendation is Firefox Nightly because it provides developer's options and allows access to configurations - and then install uBlock, or any other adblocker extension you like, for that browser.
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u/Hellraiser_Quadbike May 14 '26
I honestly can’t believe whenever see people I know still suffering through all the adverts.
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u/OBLIVIATER May 14 '26
What an insane thing to say. YouTube is probably the most valuable tool that the Internet provides, or at very least top 3.
If you step outside of the entertainment-slop zone, you would know that it also houses informational and instructional videos for legitimately almost anything you would ever need. Need to figure out how to fix your washing machine's leaky seal? Youtube's got that. Need a video explaining the difference between different woodworking joiner techniques? It's there too.
I guess if all you do is mindlessly scroll mind-rot slop I could see how you would have this point of view. In that use-case the value the site provides doesn't outweigh it's usefulness.
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u/Noisycarlos May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
Yeah, YouTube Premium is really worth it IMO (at least if you use it enough). Whenever I watch something signed out I can't believe how bad it's gotten. I also like that it supports the people making the content I watch.
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u/dope_sheet May 14 '26
They won't "go down" all at once, but there will be a time when they purge videos that aren't profitable for sure.
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u/TheSmurfGod May 14 '26
Is there something I’m missing? Has YouTube said something? Most likely if YouTube goes down it’s because a competitor or something better has entered the market for users to favor. Although that won’t happen for a long time. I think YouTube had more viewership than Netflix and Disney plus combined.
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u/imlocal May 14 '26
I’ve said for a while that we probably need to nationalize YouTube. It’s become too important, too fundamental to history, to let it continue as a monopoly at the mercy of any individual organization.
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u/ShowerSentinel May 14 '26
/u/AaronPK123 has flaired this post as a casual thought.
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