Lost online video megathread

On March 13th 2016, German-Turkish video creator "Mert Matan", then with around 830K subscribers, published the video "GAY PRANK AN MEINEN VATER!!" (thumbnail) of him pretending to be homosexual, causing his father to beat him up, which lead to massive controversy and news headlines. The six-minute video received over a million views (2016-03-16) before he privated it as a result of criticism. Whether the video was staged or not is uncertain.

As of 2021, the full-length video is nowhere to be found online for documentation purposes, even after originally viewed over a million times within days. Only a partial re-upload from 2018-10-03 (12.483 views) contains a forty-second excerpt of the originally 6 minutes and 9 seconds long video according to this wayback capture. Several comments on the 40-second reupload are asking for that channel named "Reuploadking" (8 subscribers; 4 videos; 14.354 total views at writing time) to release the full video.

An archive of the watch page with a sample of 172 out of the 9742 comments exists though: 2016-03-14 17:48:13 (short URL). Thanks to the archivist out there who submitted it.

I have a playlist on youtube that I call childhood videos, which are basically just videos I watched on youtube since I was young. Some days ago I noticed a video was made private and I kept trying to remember what was it about, and I think I figured it out

I think the video was Mario singing Tik Tok (the song by Kesha not the app). The thumbnail was the official artwork from New Super Mario Bros and it had Mario and Bowser both singing the song. Some lyrics were modified to fit in some Mario references. I’m kinda sad because this was definitely a nostalgic video for me

The URL: m.youtube.com/watch?v=bOmdUswaWd4

 "The Internet never forgets"? – Apparently it does. Even after four years of air time . . .

A lost German video is "YouTube Deutschland Zerstörung (Schlechter Content ist eine Entscheidung)" (Rough translation: "Destruction of YouTube Germany – terrible content is a choice"), which was produced by and uploaded on August 21st 2016 on the German documentary channel "Simplicissimus" back when they had less than 40,000 subscribers (channel page archive from 2017-03-09). Currently, they have above 900K subscribers.

That video was a ten-minute documentary criticizing several German YouTube creators that were relevant at that time, some with millions of subscribers, including "ApoRed" (commercial failure), "Mert Matan" (more details below), "Simon Desue" (channel stale), and "BibisBeautyPalace" (commercial success, still viewed much, though the subscriber count is near-stagnant since 2019). It was privatized in late 2020.

In comparison, the March 2016 video by "Mert Matan" mentioned in an earlier post, where he pranked his father by claiming to be a homosexual (that incident was also referenced in this video), which solicited a violent reaction, was only online for few days, and two and a half years later, someone published a forty-second snippet of it. The entire video is available nowhere at the moment.

But no traces of this video by "Simplicissimus" can be found anywhere. Some out there might have downloaded it, but it would be difficult to reach out to them.

The fact that a video with good production quality can vanish from the public record after more than four years of air time, during which it gathered more than 400,000 views and 30,000 positive ratings, is alarming.

That video was a piece of german YouTube history, and now, even though nothing seemed wrong about it, it disappeared at the whim of their uploaders. Any video not backed up is hanging by a thread. An uncomfortable reality. Sometimes, platforms show their cold shoulder, where content loss can be protected against by mirroring to multiple platforms. But this was an uploader's discretion.

When content falls out of scope, unlisting it would be better than completely memory-holing it. (More about this at the post bottom.)

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The above video used a background music called "Pacman ft. Rhyzup – Listen up". That music track was removed from SoundCloud. Other tracks by that account are still online, which suggests that this one was manually removed.

Here is a video from the same channel (available as of 2021-07-08) where a snippet of the music can still be heard at the end at 4m43s, and a Tweet from 2015 links to the track.

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Windows Vista Automatic Blue Screen was a video I watched in early 2010. It was of a ThinkPad running Windows Vista Home Basic, which got a blue screen of death within seconds of viewing the login sceen, as mocked by the title.

As far as I can remember, it was available until at least 2015. Nothing seems wrong with it; not sure why they removed it.

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Strange soundtrack "Club Beats – Ranger Mode" vanished from all platforms.

When submitting the outro music of "Suzy Lu: The Most Problematic YouTuber You've Never Heard Of" by John Swan to Aha-music to find out from which repository John Swan gets his music, the result was:



When searching for that track, search engines delivered results, but all traces of that music appear to have disappeared.

Amazon Music: "sOrRY! We cOuLd nOt fiNd tHiS pAGe!" – Bing Cache from 2020-07-04 when it was still there. (long URL)

YouTube: Appears to have existed, but now "unavailable" while title still displayed. The video has 16 likes and 444 views, uploaded on May 2, 2020, which notably is weeks after John Swan's video (April 9th).

TikTok: "This sound isn't available in your country or region"

YanDex Music: "Ошибка 404" (I don't need to understand Russian to know what this means.)

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"agkvideo Maker", an aspiring Angry German Kid video parodist from early 2016 (short URL) sadly "closed" (i.e. deleted) his channel later that year (short URL).

His channel was promising. At least, he could just have left it. But instead, he took it down.

"Closed" makes it sound as if it could be "opened" again, which to my knowledge can not.

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Maybe, just maybe, uploaders should not be able to just memory-hole videos after they became popular, e.g. after 100.000 views, over 70% positive ratings, and online for at least half a year. YouTube even applies restrictions to changes that can be made to a video starting with 100,000 views.

On Wikimedia Commons, only administrators can delete (and undelete) media. If YouTube was that way, much memory-holed content could still be enjoyed today.

My perception of YouTube has changed from a timeless video repository to an ephemeral one. It has come to a point where whenever I click on a YouTube link, I hope that I don't get some ugly error message telling me that the video is unavailable for whichever reason.

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In late 2018 or early 2019, a channel named "People are still idiots" uploaded "😂CON ARTISTS GETTING CAUGHT COMPILATION!!😂", which included George Dillman's "non-touch knockout", Duhphxnk, iPad theft by rogue airport security, and an elderly woman who wanted to scam as a fortune teller.

It got at least three million views, but then it vanished. Fortunately, some 94-Subscriber channel named "Best of the Internet" reuploaded it in January 2019 (while the original was still online).

The reupload has 308 views, 7 likes, and 0 dislikes.

The only comment is from three months ago: "thanks for the reupload I wondered where this went."

Channels should not be criticized for reuploading content, as they act as a backup in case the original gets removed. These small channels are Internet heroes who keep the history for the rest of us. It's like a collective memory.

Had this reupload not existed, that compilation video might have been memory-holed entirely. Only the individual videos might have floated somewhere around the Internet. This proves that even millions of views grant no immunity against memory-holing.

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The channel "BEST OF DASHCAM EUROPE" with over 132K subscribers has removed all of their videos. I have not verified yet whether private or permanently deleted, but this proves once again that videos there seems nothing wrong with might just randomly go missing. Videos with any view count are vulnerable to getting memory-holed.

I noticed this vanishing as I remembered a music used in one of their videos, presumably among their most popular, and I was about to plug it into Midomi.com to find out its name.

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Verdict:

Sadly, YouTube is not the eternal repository of videos I so much wanted to believe it is. In my late childhood, I took for granted that any video I watch today will be there tomorrow, or next month, or even next year. I mean, that is the whole concept of "video on demand". But that trust has been broken.

YouTube can prettify the design of their virtual tombstone (e.g. "this video is unavailable", "this video is private") as much as they like, it still appears like gore. My thoughts in that moment: "I came here to watch the video, not to read the text "this video is private! If the owner has granted you access, blah, blah, blah………"! Around 2020, they have centered the text in the black rectangle (HTML tag: "yt-player-error-message-renderer") rather than it being aligned to the left, which I do not prefer, as that makes it appear more "in-your-face". It reminds me of the green "No URL has been captured for this domain." text fading in on the Wayback Machine's wildcard search, where the green colour is completely wrong, as that is a negative thing. But hey, at least they got rid of that disappointed looking red face in that rounded rectangle since their new "Polymer" layout.

Even videos which nothing seems wrong with are at the risk of the channel owner's life circumstances, emotions, and changing content scope.

"Coach Red Pill" (272K subscribers as of 2021-07-19) announced having deleted a video from two or three months ago (not sure which exactly, and whether permanently deleted or only privatized), because he endorsed a Twitter user he now disapproves of.

From his description (bold for highlighting):

This is yet another reason informative videos can vanish at any time: Because the channel owner decides that they no longer like one short portion of it, even though the rest of the video is fine. This could also be why Simplicissimus (>903K subscribers) took down (privatized) that aforementioned August 2016 video, though that was after four years of air time.

So far, he has not republished that video with that portion cut out, and he might not do so at all.

As always, one can not rely on channel owners to keep their stash of videos intact for all eternity.

Removed early video of popular malware reviewer Daniel White, "Danooct1": FaceBook Worm.

Listed on his channel page on September 9th, 2009 (earliest Wayback Machine capture): "716 views - 1 week ago". (Archive.Today mirror)