When Baby Shark (yes, that Baby Shark. The most watched video of all time.) had just passed 7000 views, the Wayback Machine picked up the video file (proof from 2022 that the video had already been captured, see the play button; watch page at 7186 views).
In January 2024, the Wayback Machine strangely captured the video file of Baby Shark again, but the 2016 video file vanished. This was the URL to the original 2016 file (pastebin in case the encoding fails), and it is gone, as if it had never been captured. While the 2016 and 2024 files presumably have the same video content, the 2016 file must have had different encoding parameters. I was unaware the Wayback Machine would replace existing video files.
It might not have been deliberate, but a technical glitch. In either case, it is worrying.
Why is this worrying?
YouTube Studio allows uploaders to blur and cut out parts of existing videos, and the Wayback Machine might replace untampered versions of videos with tampered versions.
This once again brings me back to my point: if you truly value something, have a local backup of it. Don't solely rely on any online service, not even one as noble as the Wayback Machine, to keep something for you forever.
Sometimes I also get the error "The requested video has been archived but is not currently available for playback" - I have no idea why an archived video would not be available for playback.
2012 Gangnam Style is still there. Download it while you can.
The original 2012 encoding of Gangnam Style can be obtained at this URL (redirect if it doesn't work). It's even in full 1080p.
These days, the Wayback Machine captures YouTube videos in 720p (which is understandable due to storage consumption).
Last Edit: Apr 27, 2024 22:51:21 GMT by gordon: replaced pastebin.com/UgyxFRGP with pastebin.com/XPhfqKac due to line breaks
when you say "can exist", do you mean like, the total than can exist ever or that can be stored by a particular phone or something? I ask because I did a little search on youtube but there's just a bunch of people comparing phone brands
No, I mean how many 12 megapixel (4000×3000 pixel) pictures are possible with each combination of each pixel colour.
About 130000 views, yet none of these parts have been picked up by the Wayback Machine, not even the watch page. All captures are from after they were deleted.
holymoly2207 (channel ID) is the Super Mario 64 speedrunner who became a victim of his own ego. He became known in 2017 for writing this bragging comment under a cheese05 speedrun:
Yeah baby. You can play like TAS. Very impressive. Back in 2004 I held the 16 Star world record for several years. Holy Moly
Not long after, his runs were discovered to be spliced. Had he swallowed his ego, he might have been caught much later, but it is likely that his cheating would eventually be discovered.
I went to check it out as I had never heard of this person before and to my surprise he did have 2 videos (2 part 16 star) with over 100,000 views on part 1 and over 30,000 on part 2. This run was later beaten by Myles (or not beaten because it was found to be spliced by Caivs) in 2008.
About 130000 views, yet none of these parts have been picked up by the Wayback Machine, not even the watch page. All captures are from after they were deleted.
SocialBlade data shows his channel existed until 2019-12-13. Visiting his channel page today shows the generic 404 page, no reason for why it has disappeared. The likeliest cause is he deleted it out of embarrassment.
The channel @holymoly-pd2yy (displaynamed "holymoly2207") is apparently an unrelated parody channel created in 2022. It even copied the PlayStation 4 profile picture.
Last Edit: Apr 20, 2024 16:02:24 GMT by gordon: added charliebrown64 video
...I don't understand your apparent obsession with "censorship".
Where did I use the word "censorship"?
it was taken down for being mildly NSFL.
There is no such thing as "mildly NSFL". Either it is NSFL or not. And Mumkey's videos were certainly SFL. YouTube was OK with his videos for over a year.
(Edit 1) Were you referring to the archive.org takedown? That might have been by the uploader. It's the same weakness that YouTube has: uploaders can simply unpublish their uploads.
Last Edit: Apr 17, 2024 21:48:19 GMT by gordon: Edit 1
Items may be taken down for various reasons, including by decision of the uploader or due to a violation of our Terms of Use.
I am disappointed when I see this message.
Archive.org is a very helpful website, but just like on YouTube, nothing on Archive.org is guaranteed to be permanent. (I know, no one likes to hear this, but it is the reality. I am saying this to encourage people to save what they value. As the error message says, "decision of the uploader" is a possible reason for takedown.)
We have passed the million-view mark of lost videos.
1.2 million views, over 57000 likes.
On April 21, 2019, Julienco (Julian Claßen), then one of Germany's most viewed YouTube channels, published "Bibi hat mich rausgeschmissen ..", which translates into "Bibi threw me out".
"Bibi" is the short name for "Bianca", his life partner from 2009 to 2022. She has a YouTube channel of her own, "BibisBeautyPalace", and actually gave Julian his initial popularity boost in July 2014.
I don't remember what exactly happened in this video, but what I do remember is that it was clickbait, as many videos by Julian and Bianca are. Still, it is impressive how a million-view video can disappear into nothingness.
The Wayback Machine picked up its watch page, but not the video itself.
He made a video containing valid points, but they were interspersed with occasional insults.
I fully understand his anger, given that the termination shattered his dreams of being an online comedian. However, him insulting YouTube staff might have eliminated any remaining chance of reinstatement he had.
Another likely reason for YouTube refusing to reinstate Mumkey Joenes is avoiding an embarrassing admission of failure. But everything suggests that YouTube wanted him gone deliberately.
Thankfully YouTube is not the only video platform in existence, but it is by far the largest and most watched.
Last Edit: Apr 16, 2024 17:22:08 GMT by gordon: spelling
Perhaps it is due to the VigLink redirect? It might have mis-encoded characters such as "?" and "&" in the URL.
Try checking that, yeah.
Actually, it was the rich text editor not encoding the URLs properly, so editing them manually using the BBCode editor fixed it. Thanks for letting me know.
Last Edit: Mar 24, 2024 18:44:21 GMT by gordon: punctuation
"Incels: The Saddest Community On The Internet", published by Glink (then 53 thousand subscribers) on August 28th, 2017, was viewed over 21000 times and liked over 1500 times. And not one of these 1500 people liked it enough to download it?
YouTube has made clear that it considers involuntary celibacy a sensitive topic. Whoever discusses this topic on YouTube is on thin ice.
This is also shown by the treatment of Mumkey Jones, who made a satirical series about the story of rampage runner Elliot Rodger, see the Mumkey Jones thread.
In that video, Mumkey said that YouTube "looked at the third reich's policy on free speech and thought 'Hey, maybe we should give that a shot!' ".
While this obviously was for humor and satire (as usual with Mumkey's edgy videos), it appears this crossed the line and infuriated someone who works at YouTube, so they pushed the nuke (i. e. termination) button.
It was uploaded in mid-2017, but apparently discovered by a YouTube employee a year and a half later, in December 2018, when Mumkey was terminated. I can imagine that YouTube employees would be compelled to scrutinize a video that has "VS YOUTUBE" in the title.
Elliot Rodger: The Movie (2017) Official Trailer #1
While we're at it, it appears that no live copy of Elliot Rodger: The Movie (2017) Official Trailer #1, published on August 5th, 2017, exists. The Wayback Machine failed to save it, showing the error "Attempts to archive this video failed". Once this happens, the Wayback Machine will not try saving it again. The video was effectively blacklisted from being archived.
Partially lost audio on a video with 18 million views.
In January 2020, video game speed run analyst Karl Jobst uploaded "The Worst Fake Speedrun on Youtube", which analysed the fake speedrun video "Pasando Super Mario en 5 minutos", published December 2017 by Badabun, a spanish channel with over 40 million subscribers.
Now, the video by Karl Jobst is mostly not lost, but there is a muted segment from 14m45s to 15m01s, after Karl said "Tarvo gives one of the greatest performances I've ever seen…". No upload with the full audio exists anywhere.
Apparently, it was muted because it played copyrighted audio from the end of the video by Badabun, a track named "Cigarette Boat" (hearable on the original video by Badabun), so Karl opted to mute that segment to avoid losing monetization. YouTube lets uploaders remove parts of videos without having to remove the entire video. (Not sure why this name was picked for a video game sound track. It doesn't sound like cigarette commercials at all.)
On the Wayback Machine, we get the error "Attempts to archive this video failed". Once this error occurs, the Wayback Machine does not even try to archive it again. In effect, it is locked out of the Wayback Machine.
That's the problem with only a small segment of a video being lost: almost no one notices. If an entire video is gone, far more people will notice than if only a part of it was removed.
Thanh Schäfer is a German-Asian comedian who had over fifty thousand subscribers. He was most active in the early 2010s. His channel (created in 2011) stood inactive for a long time, then suddenly disappeared in May 2023, likely manually deleted.
