Lost online video megathread

Each time I see that YouTube video, occasionally also Instagram post or a Tweet, that has not been re-uploaded anywhere else, it feels emotionally painful to me.

I believe that for the uploader, it should be illegal / impossible to delete videos/posts on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and every other social network.

Obviously, it should be removed in rare occasion (e.g. it violates a policy), but everything else should stay online permanently for the following reasons:

I know, it sounds pathetic, and I don't know why my brain is wired in that way, but it feels painful when I can not find a video I remember having seen years ago.

It feels painful when I open the URL of that video, just to see that error message stating that the video is private or not available. Nobody knows where that video went.

Often, I watched such a video years ago, now it jumped back into my mind, but there is no trace of it remaining online. Something I remember having seen in my life is just in limbo. Gone. Thin air. Just a memory in the form of a biochemical arrangement inside my thinking apparatus.


Historical value

• Not just the video contents, but the exact bytes and pixel patterns inside of such a video might represent historical information that could be useful to future generations, no matter how absurd it sounds.
  
  
• Many videos are uploaded nowhere else (e.g. Internet Archive, Dailymotion, BitChute), and the latter can do miserable 480p only anyway.
  
  
• Maybe, a few years after watching that video, one becomes nostalgic
  
  
• Video removals are usually based on irrational and incomprehensible reasons.
  
  
• In 2018, a channel uploaded a new version of a 2014 video. That 2014 video was privatized because of that, despite still good, valid and legitimate. No re-upload of that video exists anywhere.
  
  
• A funny YouTuber put most of his videos on private in 2016, despite they were still good and could be enjoyed today by so many more people, hadn't he taken them offline.
  
  
• Deleting videos for “clean up” is a foolish reason, because old videos don't interrupt the time line anyway! They can just be viewed by viewers who need them. Old posts on Instagram require deep scrolling, therefore they don't bother anyone.
• A user might seek for a specific part of a video, which was not the reason for the deletion.
  

• It should be possible for the uploader to leave a message on why the video was taken down, so that users can comprehend it better.
  
  
• The valueable conversations in the comments.
  
  
•     Of course, there are websites that can help downloading YouTube comments, but they require the comments to be downloaded in advance.
  
  
•     The Wayback Machine and ArchiveToday are not able to store YouTube comment unless applying “&disable_polymer=1&lc=1” to the video URL manually, which is almost never done by people who use the services.
  
  
•     Thankfully, Twitter tweets are immune to the demise of their parent tweets.
  
  
•     Some comments might contain information only understandable to someone who has watched that video.
  

I am not the only one to think like that, but also TheWheatIsHeat96. His video is titled: “I hate when good videos on YouTube get deleted, private, blocked in our country.” (no URL because of spam filter false positive).


I hope that at least one of you is like-minded.