You know, a part of the original company vision for YouTube prior to the Google acquisition was really something akin to the IA, in that they did pride themselves with hosting footage of the Indian Ocean Earthquake:
Now, acting as diplomatically as I possibly can, I can say that your suggestions of the IA and YouTube interfacing together were at a previous point in time a continuous process. But a number of factors have made direct cooperation between the IA and Google (thereby YouTube) come to a screeching halt.
At this current point in time, we stand at a historical crossroad. And I'm only here to just act as a humble messenger ;)
You have to, however, also consider the multi-domainness of YouTube videos. Yeah sure, there's billions of hours of clips not one person can watch in a single life-time. But unlike your 2000-year old Roman shopping lists, we have footage of events that are anchored to a particular time-period. Or location.
One of the most impressive things you can do is, try searching up a landmark. My personal favorite is the [Jumping Stone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1TtMN8nXTM) on the Nias Island of Indonesia. What would have otherwise just remained a novel tourist attraction, forgotten by the modernity of the 21st century, is now essentially a "tag" which has hours of footage associated with it. Thousands of tourists travelling back and forth, locals growing old, new people being born, buildings being built and demolished around it. You can even just study how video quality improved in that particular region. That there IS something wholly unique to this era and definitely worth preserving. YouTube as a company has figured the logistics of storing it, but the question of how humans can hope to read such data remains yet unanswered.
There was something of a brokered agreement between Archive Team/Twitter to upload a fraction of Tweets to the IA. That too, unfortunately, ceased some time last year. Either way you might want to take a look at https://archive.org/details/twitterstream
There was also a sister website called "Welcome to Republic City" which is now available on BlueMaxima's Flashpoint:
https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
Why hello there, it seems you've found your way into the
So some more backstory on this blogpost:
I'm trying to start a nostalgia wave, Flashcember, since this December is well Flash's last December.
I'm sure a few the people on here are actually good artists, so would any of you be interested in drawing/sketching one of your favorite flash games? Or perhaps remixing/covering a song?
I mean I'd genuinely appreciate it if you could do anything like this at all, but if you want to go the extra mile could you share it around with a #Flashcember hashtag or similar?
Starting from August 2019, only uploaders can approve submissions, when previously other viewers or YouTube moderation could also publish. A lot of people seem to have forgotten this, and YouTube never really updated the UI/Help pages to reflect it.
I have to wonder if whichever analyst came up with those stats was aware of this but turning a blind eye, or simply never noticed.
YouTube has had a "community contribution" feature (akin to fan translations) since around 2014, so viewers can help caption or subtitle videos of channels they frequent, for deaf or international audiences.
2019: A controversy erupts due to a particular case of a troll basically adding spammy, graphic translations on big YouTubers' videos. Said Big YouTubers complain and YouTube begins restricting the feature to make the process of publishing submissions increasingly difficult. (Previously other viewers could give approval through consensus and YouTube changed this to require manual action from all uploaders, severely lowering the rate of published captions)
2020: YouTube decides to kill the feature for good (by September 28), in the process they will be deleting all unpublished drafts. Seeing as this decision was more so motivated on reputation than functionality, it didn't take long for projects such as http://youtubexternalcc.netlify.app/ to emerge, which will continue to offer the feature externally.
Our project is to try and grab these drafts in hopes of passing them along. There are people who rely on them as a function. No particular person would go looking for a specific translation of a certain video, but the ability to have human-written captions instead of an automatic translation is something people continue to look for. So here we are trying to rescue submissions YouTube deemed weren't worth assessing properly.
While YouTube assures us that it's a very few number of channels which rely on community contributions, this paints a very blurry picture of how many users are reliant on these.
Not to mention use cases which aren't available to any of the alternative caption providers:
1) When a user uploads their captions or Google generates them, it’s often a one-time process. If there’s a mistake, no one is going to go back to fix it. But with community contributions, users can build off of previous work by correcting one another, not unlike how Wikipedia works.
2) Even though community contributions carry the risk of sabotage, they also provide viewers with the power to moderate. Someone snuck in a joke on a video you were watching? Just go into the caption editor and edit it out! Community Contributions spare channels of having to moderate these manually by relegating the task to channel viewers.
3) Where automated captions are stuck with plain text, and uploaders are limited by the time they’re willing to invest to stylize their captions, there are people out there waiting to tap into their potential. YouTube supports a plethora of caption/subtitle formats, which a seasoned captioner can use to add color, formatting and emphasis!
4) In translation, there are times when we don’t want it to be too precise. An example could be explaining the meaning of a word, the wordplay in a joke… And although there are techniques to recognize proper names, there are sentences that automated translation is not designed to handle.
For an illustrated version of this explanation see The Impact of YouTube Removing Community-Contributed Closed Captions