ArchiveTeam is working on backing up selected channels/videos to the Internet Archive, where they can also be watched via their Wayback Machine. You can help them decide what is culturally or historically important enough to save.

ArchiveTeam generally is an interesting project I highly recommend people read about.

Their YouTube project can be seen here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube

And you can learn how to get involved (by running a virtual machine appliance) here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

Do you happen to know if there are any project or talk of not archiving the video content itself, but instead the transcripted content instead? I feel that this would be very advantageous to archive knowledge based (versus delivery based, such as prank and stand up comedy) videos much more efficiently than the videos themselves.

Someone below brought up a very good point about many of these videos being much longer than they need to be (mainly for reimbursement and ad reasons). If the transcripted content can be archived, it could also be abridged and/or summarized as well as being combined with other similar video content as well.

I'm sort of thinking as I go here now, but I would think that perhaps Youtube has an API that lets you access the closed captions of videos?

I would be kinda worried that one day youtube just send them a take down notice because it violates something in their eula.

and you can use yt-dlp to download bits you want to save yourself.

Yeah that is what ArchiveTeam is using.

Just wonder can't we just start web torrent/torrent or IPFS these video files with some kind #YTPubArchive tag?

Don't you need to have an account for that? Already a barrier I am not willing to take.

No. yt-dlp downloads most videos without needing a yt (or any) login. A very few end up gated behind some form of login, but I suspect those are creator specific.

I find login walls on YT only when needing to confirm age for some reason: explicit or suicidal content, age checks, etc

Same.

Video quality apparently slightly degrades as youtube constantly re-encodes/processes things and there's at least one well-known example of a Neil Cicierega video being completely unplayable https://twitter.com/neilcic/status/911080613733580801?s=20 (not this specific video, but this has happened in the past)

You should be locally saving any video you ever think you will want to watch again. Many of the videos I enjoyed in college of regular people just making stuff for fun (when being a content creator wasn't a thing) have been taken out by reruns of copyright searching bots and creators turning 30 and being embarrassed by what they posted in their 20s. One musical artist I followed decided to take down all of their old content because their latest album wasn't getting enough plays.

I save everything with replay value now, especially music.

THIS!

If music, video or writing is something you want to see again, download a copy to own it yourself. Trusting a for-profit streaming company is simply idiotic.

HD space is cheap these days, so no excuses.

On a personal level, you don't need the entire platform to go down to notice the bitrot. Over half of my "Watch Later" and other playlists from 8(?) years ago are now "deleted/private" videos.

It has already happened. A lot of content that used to be available on YouTube is gone because of policy changes (unlisted content automatically changed to private, banned users, videos deleted by the site) and more is already only available to logged in users or only in certain countries even though they used to be public.

I have been personally archiving the channels with content I enjoy. I know that doesn't help the general population…

If stuff disappeared (even just the Youtuber rage quit, not necessarily end of the platform) and people were talking about being bothered about it I tend to think people like you would pop up with archives.

It's the really niche stuff that few if anyone would notice or care enough to talk about that would be properly lost. And if it's niche but there's a lot of care from the few, then that's one way that archivists are made.

You are way too optimisitc. Even for videos that thousands of people have saved, chances are you won't be able to find any of them.

Anything can disappear in this modern era. Thankfully YouTube is not DRM protected yet and you can do something about it. Any media company can take any video offline and your access to it will be gone. Same for ebooks, not only those tied to your account, but I was thinking, what if Overdrive/Libby terminate the access to particular library.

I doubt YouTube will ever roll out DRM. It doesn't help serving more ads.

I worry about that as well. I guess we assume nothing is going to happen because it's Google. But Google just dodged a bullet with Chrome which, if they had been hit, had a real chance to harm the entire web. Youtube could be next.

If things disappear, that is ok. Everything is fleeting.

The steady state idea that most people have about civilization is just not applicable once there is oil-dependent information technology.

Either we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but acceleration eats YouTube in a transformative way, or we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but societal fission eats YouTube in a catabolic way.