Dive into anything
On July 23, any unlisted YouTube videos from 2016 or before will be changed to private unless you manually opt-out of this change. Make sure you opt out if you have PBs that are unlisted!
This is important enough to speedrun history that it should probably be pinned in this sub for a while
Every single unlisted video uploaded by an inactive account is going to get wiped out because there’s no way they’ll get to the form in time, especially if they’ve lost their login info or if they don’t have access to their account anymore. Or if the owner died…
This is going to affect a lot of videos. :/
Edit:
Link to google’s support page explaining the update: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970
Form to opt out: https://support.google.com/youtube/contact/older_unlisted_update
Every single unlisted video uploaded by an inactive account is going to get wiped out because there’s no way they’ll get to the form in time
They aren’t getting deleted. If they don’t get to the form until August 6 then it just means the videos will be hidden for 2 weeks, not deleted permanently.
Or if the owner died…
This one is an issue. We should archive them now then? I’d suggest enlisting the help of r/DataHoarder, they’re normally super interested in things like that.
Edit: I posted a thread there and have already gotten some valuable information.
Things that youtube could do to reduce damage from this change, just off the top of my head:
-only private videos below a certain viewcount (prevents widely shared videos from disappearing)
-whitelist accounts who watched the video while it was Unlisted (more risky in theory but prevents most of the damage)
-give more time… one month really isn’t enough
Like what? How many old YouTube videos that are unlisted and no longer have an active channel owner, exist?
I would think it’s very very low? And if you have any you know about, start backing them up now.
Yeah, and I don’t really get what they mean. It says videos after Jan 1 2017 have more secure unlisted URLs. But videos actually never had separate URLs depending on whether they’re public or unlisted. Each video has only one URL containing 11 random characters of [a-zA-Z0-9_-].
Maybe all Youtube URLs were actually pseudorandomly generated in such a way that you can guess the URLs if you have, say, the channel ID, and they changed this as of 2017. That would potentially allow old unlisted videos to be programmatically discovered. It doesn’t seem like anyone actually knows what the deal is for sure, though.
Anyway, this just proves once again that Youtube is not an archive and we should not treat it as such. Neither are Twitch, Google Drive, Mediafire, Mega, etc. We should try our best to mirror speedrun history on the Internet Archive, which is committed to keeping files up forever.
To any members of your respective speedgame community, it would be worth asking people in your scene what resources are unlisted, and try to get those backed up just in case.
I’m updating this list of at-risk videos as my SRC/Youtube scraper finds them.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Gzr9jFmhjQUHcXz12LuNpJOD1AW5PvBAjzFUiHV7wVk/
I don’t understand why there’s no option to just unlist them back. Like okay, this “purge” of theirs wipes out all old Unlisted videos and maybe some stay like that, but why wouldn’t it be possible for someone to just switch it back to Unlisted?
I’m sure it’s possible to switch them back but some people may have hundreds of unlisted videos and that would be a massive pain to fix afterwards
I’m devastated by this news, so many videos are going to be gone forever
If only we had til the end of the year to save all of this content. So many obscure forums will have links to videos that will not be known about until far after they are made private. It sucks there is only so much we can do to save this content
But it’s kinda strange as to why YouTube wants to do this. One possibility is because privated videos are only stored on 1 server instead of multiple ones – and therefore take less storage? It’s kinda weird tho.
Do you know Watch2Gether? You can basicly search there for everything.. Search your own Youtube Name.. You can find unlisted Youtube Videos using this
https://old.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/o76z90/on_july_23_any_unlisted_youtube_videos_from_2016/h2xp359/
and the responses to this comment that elaborate further
About Community
runners
practicing strats
Top 1%
Ranked by Size