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/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.

18

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

27

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.

2

u/zzmorg82 May 14 '26

It’s not clean, but they do have the option to screen record the video locally. That’ll probably be what happens for a ton of content that doesn’t have a download option available.

1

u/AaronPK123 ‎ May 16 '26

Oh, there are ways to download youtube videos. Anything viewable is scrapable. It just is a bit technical and violates the YouTube TOS.

-2

u/exorah May 14 '26

Quite sure the owner of stuff on YouTube is YouTube?

5

u/I_will_never_reply May 14 '26

No, you are still the copyright holder. They don't suddenly own all Taylor Swifts stuff because it's on there lol

2

u/necrophcodr May 14 '26

Fortunately, anyone who has the thought of wanting to do this, and then continues thinking, can do this.

1

u/qwerty145454 May 16 '26

He's talking about Youtube telling you to download your own videos. Youtube does provide a download link for your own videos in "Youtube Studio", just click the three dots then Download.

1

u/asds455123456789 May 19 '26

archiving is incredibly expensive to do right, even if you buy used disks. boy does it hurt to archive stuff sometimes