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

  • Joanna Holman@aus.social
    41·
    7 months ago

    @ArmoredThirteen @Coreidan Agreed. My worry is not even that youtube will do a big conspicuous wipe of things (though they might). It’s that they’ll quietly start deleting low view count content from accounts who don’t log in much leaving people wondering if they were misremembering that they used to be able to access certain content