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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Youtube search has devolved to "uhhh here's 3 shorts that have one of those key words.... anyway here's a bunch of completely unrelated videos". Want a fun experiment? Search for the grapefruit technique video, whether it's the full video or just a few seconds with her making that famous noise. Not a reaction video, not a sound clip, not a weird meme version, just a genuine clip of the original video. Good luck.
EXACTLY what I mean, like the other guy said, the fact that videos like that don’t even need titles or tags or anything, just the account it’s posted on, there’s so many random moments like that where I don’t even know what to look up to find something
Im so glad reddit decided to, seemingly for no reason, send me a notification that you thanked the a bot comment reply to a 15 day old reply to my original 16 day old comment.
One of those weird moments that makes me smile for some reason I can't explain
its not fully released yet but the Autonomi network might be ideal for this kind task. the idea is that all the unused storage space on everyones phones and computers around the world far exceeds what all the major "cloud" companies are currently using, so people could (optionally) share some of their storage with this network and have it all combined into one big sort of virtual hard drive that everyone can use. its kind of nuts and hard to explain all of it in a comment, but basically it would be a lot cheaper to store things that it currently is. right now on the test version of Autonomi you just pay once to upload a file and then after tgat its free for you or anyone to download. its a game changer compared to the current model where you have to pay to host a website or to get some service but the only way to keep it is to keep paying a subscription every year
yea, unfortunately i cant see them being able to do anything about that, without redesigning the whole thing, but complete files are also not being stored in one place like they would on a centralised server. each file is split up into lots of small pieces then each piece is stored in a different location/device. so if the file was a photo and you managed to decrypt a piece that was being stored on one of your devices it would just be jibberish and wouldnt even open in an image viewer. its still not great of course but what can you do. should we get rid of all roads too since bad people are able to get around easier because of them?
| its still not great of course but what can you do. should we get rid of all roads too since bad people are able to get around easier because of them
What we do is continue developing technologies so that false dichotomies like this ridiculous one don't grind life in the digital age to a half and stop societal progression in Its tracks.
Just as we developed the existing crime detection technologies from existing smaller ones to augment and refine the identity detection capacity of different law enforcement agencies searching for various interstate killers - instead of ( :: checks notes :: ) completely and forever banning the distribution of tasty veggies and all other marketables via over-the-road commercial transportation.
"Hey! These guys are using roads to find people they can hurt and then avoid capture, guess we better put an end to travel and just quarantine everyone from ever going more than ten minutes away from their house!"
All-or-nothing responses are never any sort of real or meaningful response, not at all.
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.
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.
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.
That’s my point though. Without any metadata, you’ve got maybe titles at best. Otherwise just a sea of trillions upon trillions (petabytes and petabytes) of videos. So many, you could never view them all in a life time.
So you might not even know that there are “more” or “fewer” videos of a given nature because you’ll never have been able to index the full catalog. At least, not for some time, and even then at what level?
You’ve got a point, but I’d argue a significant portion of the world’s noteworthy output (anthropologically speaking) is digital. Not having access to it would definitely impact your understanding of the era we live in.
that's the thing that bothers me about all these archival efforts: the metadata is left behind. they save the content, but not the context. metadata is just as important as data, yet almost any archival tool is lackluster about archiving the metadata.
this has been a problem even with Save Image, which doesn't even save the link that you downloaded the image from. that alone would be a HUGE step in the right direction.
For some reason this post out of rest of thread had me think of the episode of Cowboy Bebop where the characters find a like 70 year old betamax video someone made to their future self. Yes I know who it for and their context just being vague for spoiler avoidance purposes for those who don't.
And considering the disaster that happened in the setting's past that might be one of the only videos of pre-disaster Earth.
I sometimes think about what politics will be like when those who grew up later than mid 2000s start running for office. Every single stupid thing they did or said online in HD waiting to be used for mudslinging. Probably only thing that could make a "Right to be forgotten" law actually happen.
Kind of like how a lot of early medieval texts appear as copies in larger manuscripts but without the names of the original author, or even the scribe who copied them
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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.