That should be a warning to people who think YouTube and Alphabet by extension has any interest in archiving knowledge for the greater good. This is commercial interest and commercial cost cutting.

While I have some sympathy with this position I think it's worth remembering that there's a huge long-tail of absolute rubbish on YouTube.

The fact that they keep it around, for free, over years and years, and at no cost to the user is remarkable to me.

Yes, YouTube is quite good if your data is absolute rubbish and you’re pleasantly surprised by anything less than full deletion.

Expecting any company to store infinite content for free forever is a bit of a curious expectation

Yeah I remember when image sites all stopped their free tier a few years ago and it broke a lot of old forum posts.

There's a reason why serious archiving of knowledge is left to government institutions.

Is it actually anyways best interest to permanently store everything that has been uploaded to Youtube? I think it would be very reasonable to purge every video uploaded by non-partenered channels that hasn't uploaded in 5 years or the video hasn't been watched in 10 years.

Let me fix it for you "... it would be very reasonable to purge every public video uploaded by non-partnered channels that hasn't uploaded in 5 years, except the very first and the very last video by that channel, along with the videos that haven't been watched in 10 years."

Personally that would delete a lot of niche music videos where it's been like 10 years since they last uploaded to that channel.

There is niche and then there is "no one has watched even a second of this in 10 years"

As much as I don't like Google or Youtube - expectation that they will just store whatever stupid stuff you post forever is unreasonable.

Like I posted some gaming highlights when I was teen and I don't think anyone, but I have ever watched them and I don't even have access to that account anymore. All of that stuff should be deleted.

Even now I occasionally have itch to make a video and I am the only one who watches them, but at least they are good enough for me that I return to watch them.

There's some sort of change going on behind the scenes. I have a bunch of 5k (2880s) footage in YouTube that now maxes out at 4k (2160). YouTube silently removed all 5k versions of videos (nothing between 4 and 8k now).

It really seems like they may put 4k and above into their YouTube premium offering or something?

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6375112 >Note: In 2022, we started removing support for playback at resolutions between 4K and 8K. For example, we may no longer support playback at 5K.

I guess it's not exactly shocking... what better way to reduce their storage requirement than to downsample old and not-frequently-watched content.

I bet 95%+ of videos on the platform fall into this bucket.

Notification of this fact by youtube would've been nice to be honest - and perhaps a way to pay to keep them in high quality.

Highly unlikely, we’re talking about Google here.

One day, the future may regard YouTube, as BBC, who recycled and overwrote Dr Who tapes to save a few bucks.

And lost handsomely as a result.

in fact, unfortunately, almost every TV station did that in that time, some of them preserved their material on film, but unfortunately not all of their material

TV station?

Dr Who wasn't a daily, TV station talk show, and Studios tend to archive.

The BBC gets the footnote in history, here.

No it happened in my country too. Technology was pretty shit in the 60s, TV was a new medium for European public broadcasters and they had to budget.

The most egregious example I know of is a "60fps audio video sync test" now only available in 30fps

Yup, they are potentially ruining rare moments captured

I should probably download all the old music videos I care about before it's too late

A local copy is a good step forward for content you truly care about. I don't think there's any service you can really count on the decade long term. Meanwhile, I still have the music and photo collection from all my life. Is is a worthy pursuit? The more I grow, the less I think so. Does it work? Absolutely yes.

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ is your best friend.