My real worry with Google’s voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There’s countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
#tech #technology #Google #enshittification #youtube #video @technology #capitalism #film #television #cinema #art #arts #SocialMedia #business #economics
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
Early 4chan – before it’s spectacular decay – was quite conscious where it’s memory resided – in users.
You’d have to understand the peculiar software architecture to know why, but 4chan has no ability to preserve posts. When a thread maxes out it is deleted.
The /y/ and other board’s user’s were openly conscious that the communities memories were their responsibility, maintained by reposting older material, simply because the code didn’t support anything else. But the result was real community and collective memory, explicitly maintained. Though conjured up by a teenage programmer there’s much profundity in there, accidental or otherwise. (I suspect the former but having talked to him at a conference once he was at least aware of it after.)
@tomjennings
Yeah, memorizing is exactly not archiving. 🤷♂️
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
In fact it is pretty much the opposite.
@tomjennings @technology @pluralistic @ajsadauskas It’s important to note though that some boards acquired community wikis and archives way sooner, like /tg/.
In part because faithfully and accurately memorizing entire homebrew sourcebooks is not a reasonable prospect.
Not that that’s stopped 4chan before
@tomjennings @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology And then he went to work for Google.
@tomjennings @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology then there’s just the massive history of music, live performances, both official and unofficial, even phone recordings, local/unknown bands, demos, etc., that will likely be lost in purges in the future… I still can’t really find many of the old (very poor) phone recordings and lofi recordings of metal bands from the early 00’s to early 10’s that I knew… A lot of artists are starting to come around to digital distribution and upload old stuff, but… then there’s just the absurd amount of defunct/dead bands (that admittedly no one cares about)
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