Didnt even think to do that, I thought I could just hit the 'search by oldest' and get what I wanted, but knowing this
thanks
Yeeeeeeah, about that.
Even if you do include those search parameters, YouTube has a tendency to bury any videos that don't have a large footprint of some kind. Even then, good luck with trying to find any related videos from that era. The sidebar is near completely dominated by more contemporary videos of one sort or another. Up until a few years back, you used to be able to see some form of related videos depending on the era of the current video you were on.
These days, not even using the method mentioned will be completely foolproof in guarding against the glut of current year slop. There's also the matter that a good portion of the videos from the way back when days simply do not exist anymore for any number of reasons. Copyright takedown. Author deleting the video and/or their channels. Getting buried to the point where it becomes impossible to find them. Even if you had the algorithm from say 2011, you won't be able to find those videos anymore without the appropriate playlists and/or favorites from your browser.
Past me had the hindsight to randomly favorite videos, albeit not enough of them. But I have a good enough sample size to say that at least half of my favorites from the years between 2007-2010 are just gone. The only proof of their existence being either the favorite itself, or perhaps something on the waybackmachine that archived the webpage, but not the video itself.
Then there is the added insult of videos that technically exist, but in a privated form that has no other backup. Good lord, such pains to see something so close, yet so damned far. Good luck trying to contact those creators for a copy, seeing as YouTube did away with the personal PM system sometime after 2012. If you see anything from that era you wish to archive,
do it. It may not be around for long.
One thing that pains me about those deleted videos isn't just the loss of the video itself, but also the discourse surrounding it. This also applies especially to videos that technically exist, but all the discourse that wonderfully dates it to what people said back in the day are purged due to being given the dreaded YouTube Kids label. Which means all those comments from back in the day just go poof. Gone.
If it isn't that, then there's the fact that some videos of the age could be copyright blocked in your region.
This video, Pokedictator for instance, has been blocked by Shopro. Back in the day, there was the ability for the copyright holder to just "mute" the audio of a given video. So, the audio is gone, but you still had the video on silence by itself, and the comments therein. It seems though YouTube has changed it sometime in the past to completely block said video, including the comments to go along with it. I am guessing it was done to simplify things, and to prevent the bitching from clogging up valuable real estate that could spend those eyeballs elsehwhere. But boy does it ever piss me off to see something to this effect.
Comments are a shitshow half the time on Youtube, even back then. But they represented a discourse, something genuine, that you do not find much anymore on modern comment sections, sanitized as they are now. God knows I have been trying to search something, some service, something that approximates that version of YouTube that preserves the collective consciousness, the zeitgeist, the browsing experience of back then without the modern shit clogging it up.
It does not exist. I checked up and down, and the solutions that exist only partially address the issue, if it does at all. The only thing I have are the favorites I have left, and the channels that I did not migrate during the YouTube Google Account migration. I recently checked on that a little while back, and I found that the recommendations for that channel are still largely preserved in the past. I have since disabled the watch history for that one, to keep it as a time capsule for the works of 2011. I dare not touch it for fear of tainting it with the modern bull, and in a way that forced Google Account integration was a blessing in disguise.
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Christ, I clicked through nine of those old favorites in a row, and all of them were either deleted, had their channels purged, or were otherwise copyright cocked blocked. I can't imagine much of YouTube from the 2006-2009 are around anymore if this is just a sample of what I have just experienced.
I have stated it once before, and I will say it again.
Archive.
Archive.
Archive
Something
will happen, not if, to those seemingly minsicule videos that you end up wanting to revisit. Be paranoid, archive as much shit as your drives will allow. Screw what YouTube thinks, burn their bandwidth if you must to archive all that you can. Take snapshots of those videos and the related section too, if you can. Preserve some semblence of the feel of that era. YouTube sure as hell won't.
I did manage to find something back then from eighteen years in the past, and it's an old interview with the then surviving WW2 veterans on the Iraq War.
It's surreal, seeing men who are now undoubtably dead from an era where I was able to see their reactions while they were still alive. Not many of those men left, unfortunately, and you don't find those sorts of videos around anymore. Pity, seeing as that was one of the big draws I had towards YouTube to start off with.
Oh well. I do have a few other videos. Just keep in mind that YouTube ended up double compressing some of them. First with the initial compression, then when they fucked up later down the line sometime between 2010-2012 when they updated their compression algorithm that really screwed with those videos of back then. I can assure you while not great, they did not look this terrible even at 240p.
Anyway, here's a few choice ones to enjoy.
That's all I have for the time being. I'll probably post a few more later in the old internet appreciation thread down the line. But it's disheartening to know that many videos even in my favorites are just gone in one form or another. You wouldn't even know that they existed if I didn't favorited them. One must wonder how many others I didn't save suffered a similar fate.
