This isn't the first channel I've witnessed this, and weirder stuff, on. Another example is this video - "Belt" meme - it is accessible on Grayjay, yet not on YouTube, meaning (I think) that publicly shared videos are being deindexed, and yet they are still hosted.

You used to be able to take the video code from the URL (everything after '?v=' and before '&') and get the exact video in search results. Not now. The second YouTuber, Sparky, has 35 uploads, only 9 of which are visible. And I can attest that at least one of the remaining 26 is hosted, but invisible. I don't even know how it came up using Grayjay but not YouTube or Revanced.

Basically, there's a TON of shady underhanded shit happening at YTHQ and everyone needs to jump ship to Odysee, Peertube or some platform that won't be clogged with AI. This is bad for everyone.

I'm posting it here mainly because I verified my findings with yt-dlp, and this new bs is successfully thwarting my attempts to archive.

3rd Oct edit: I am seeing massive differences in indexed videos versus archived videos. I am currently aggregating but the definitely affected videos range from 10% to 50%

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[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 30 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not sure these channels even are (they look like slop vids) , but YouTube is supposed to be taking the ban hammer to low effort and slop videos starting this month. A little housekeeping will be greatly appreciated, as the slop/low effort/"look at me bro!" videos have gotten out of hand.

[–] Fyrnyx@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

But they're probably going to backpedal from that soon too since they're now allowing misinformed and blatant lying kinds of videos that play a bias.

So if they're doing that, they're going to allow low-effort/slop videos too, even after this.

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Low effort/slop videos are different than your right-wing mis/disinformation, conspiracy theory, white supremacy videos though. By all the platforms giving Trump back his accounts they have said they are OK with those again, it's just the low effort/slop they care about. However, if those circles cross, I'm sure AI slop spreading hate would be now OK.

[–] Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 month ago

Without disinformation, people will naturally work to improve democracy which will eventually expand it to the economy (socialism), so disinformation is arguably a necessary evil to protect the capital class from democracy

[–] Pamasich@kbin.earth 26 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Youtube seems to be blocking access to a seriously large amount of publicly listed videos

Creators can choose whether their videos should be accessible and whether they should be listed anywhere. Which you don't seem to have ruled out being the case here. So I'd say you're jumping the gun here.

I have seen channels which delisted (and later privated entirely) almost all their videos for legitimate reasons, so it's certainly possible.

And I can attest that at least one of the remaining 26 is hosted, but invisible.

This one is almost certainly just delisted.

everyone needs to jump ship to Odysee

The fediverse has its own video platform (peertube).

[–] weirdo_from_space@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

PeerTube is a hard sell. Finding things to watch on there is a pain since most instances are trash. Only ones I can think of that are worth using are diode.zone and tilvids. Tilvids is nice but a lot of their material is uploaded from YouTube and the sponsorships are still embedded. If Sponsorblock was configured to work with it though it would be interesting.

[–] chocosoldier@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

the last time i looked at peertube it was 100% alt-right conspiracy slop. has that changed?

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago

I didn't see anything like that last time I was on peertube.wtf

Like any other fediverse thing, the instance you use makes a difference.

[–] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You’re certain that these videos haven’t been unlisted by the uploader themselves, right?

[–] Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

I'm not, but the sheer amount (nearly 50% in some cases) is suspicious. Save getting answers from the creators themselves, best I can do is keep collating data. Some of the affected channels' videos have no harmful content and millions of views per.. But I don't fully know yet.

[–] Hegar@fedia.io 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Save getting answers from the creators themselves

Is there a reason you're not doing this? If I made income from you tube I'd want someone to draw my attention to this.

I'd think that a "hey, I noticed this weird thing, is that you delisting or is yt being shady?" type communication would be appreciated and help flesh out the picture.

[–] Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I am not an established researcher, so I believe I have no legacy to justify a response from busy folk. I was referring less to myself not reaching out, and more to the unlikelihood of any responses. I am absolutely messaging creators who I see have a significant disparity between published and indexed videos.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago

It doesn't hurt to try...

[–] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 month ago

Definitely shoot them some messages or emails. You deserve clarity on this, and so do they.

[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

YouTube is not doing good. I get flickering on Apple TV. On my Mac videos play without sound (computer isn’t muted) or they take way too long to load. Granted I don’t pay, but wow. Google is not doing so well.

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 15 points 1 month ago

That sounds like it could be a codec issue, have not experienced any of that on my TV's or Linux boxes.

[–] Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I too see issues, but my clients are all some form of alternate app so I don't have a true baseline. On Grayjay some videos just stop loading halfway through, and I can't view it unless I switch to one of the other clients, and SmartTubeNext and YouTube with Sponsorblock both give me about a minute of black screen. NGL I prefer the black to unnecessarily invasive advertising

You shouldn't really have to pay, not when advertising is the way Google funds everything. Iirc advertising is 90% of their substantial income.

I am seeing more rules and system changes hurt creators, and more creators quit, complain about it, and/or actively recommend adblockers and Patreon donations.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 1 month ago

and SmartTubeNext and YouTube with Sponsorblock both give me about a minute of black screen

I just read somewhere that it's because clients need to wait until the pre-roll ad ends. until that the servers will block requests to the actual video for your client

[–] Fyrnyx@kbin.melroy.org 6 points 1 month ago

Google has successfully broken YouTube.

You can't view YouTube videos anymore when shared without having to verify you're not a bot. You can't go a few moments without a video hiccuping itself when you leave it idle. You can't view some videos without a premium subscription. You can't view videos without age verification and good luck when there will be times that verification check somehow breaks.

Like, good job, assholes.

[–] annoyinglyfish@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 month ago

youtube fucking sucks now. Seriously. All i ever used it for was NEWS/POLITICS and HISTORY/RELIGION and it asked me for my id. The only childish thing i can even imagine it flagged was frogger overwatch. Now, as im downloading stuff, a bunch of the political content i like is 'unavailable' and near impossible to download. Join peertub. Please.

[+] riskable@programming.dev -15 points 1 month ago (4 children)

It's ok: Google and all other ad-supported search is about to go the way of the dinosaur as soon as local AI search catches on. When your own PC runs a search for you, it basically googles on your behalf and you never see those ads.

It's going to change everything.

[–] fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It's not going to change everything. Why would you ever use an LLM for anything information related ever? I can make up wrong answers just as fast as it can.

I really hope that this is a joke and I'm making a fool of myself.

[–] riskable@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Google search: "scientific articles about (whatever)" Then you get tons of ads and irrelevant results.

LLM search: "Find me scientific articles about (whatever)" Then you get just the titles and links (with maybe a short summary).

It's 100% better and you don't have to worry about hallucinations since you it's wasn't actually trying to find an answer... Just helping you perform a search.

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You're joking right? "making up answers" in the case of search results just means a dead link. If you get a good link 99% of the time and don't have to use an enshitified service, that's good enough for 99% of people. Try again is the worst case scenario.

[–] fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Finding search terms is the one task I consistently use LLMs for. They did not say that though, they said replacing traditional search with LLMs, that traditional search is about to "go the way of the dinosaur". I dont trust any local LLM to accurately recall anything it read.

Not to mention that once we gain dependence on LLMs, which is something big tech is trying really hard to achieve right now, it will not be all that difficult for the creators to introduce biases that give us many of the same problems as search engines. Product placement, political censorship, etc. There would not be billions of dollars in investment if they thought they weren't going to get anything out of it.

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

(the best) Local LLMs are FOSS though, if bias is introduced it can be detected and the user base can shift away to another version, unlike centralized cloud LLMs that are private silos.

I also don't think LLMs of any kind will fully replace search engines, but I do think they will be one of a suite of ML tools that will enable running efficient local (or distributed) indexing and search of the web.

[–] fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

First of all, they are not FOSS. I know it seems tangential to the discussion, but it's important because biases cannot be reliably detected without the starting data. You should also not trust humans to see bias because humans themselves are quite biased and will generally assume that the LLM is behaving correctly if it aligns with their biases, which can be shifted in various ways over time, too.

Second, local LLMs don't have the benefit of free software where we can modify them freely or make forks if there are problems. Sure, there's fine tuning, but you don't get full control that way, and you need access to your own tuning data set. We would really just have the option to switch products, which doesn't put us much further ahead than using the closed off products available online.

I'm all for adding them to the arsenal of tools, but they are deceptively difficult to use correctly, which makes it so hard for me to be excited about them. I hardly see anyone using these tools for the purposes they are actually good for, and the things they are good for are also deceptively limited.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Someone would have to pay for the API calls though. And that tends to mean either pay a subscription or view ads. There's no technical reason your local LLM couldn't call a search engine's API to give you an ad-free search experience, and in fact you don't need an LLM to run a local ad-free search frontend. But there is a commercial reason, namely that whoever runs the search engine API will want payment. It would be some progress to have an ad-free search subscription, but it wouldn't get around all the megacorp fuckery that decides what search results you get.

[–] gravitywell@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

APIs are the compromise that sites have to make if they dont want the much more reasource heavy scrapping methods used.

The most they could do is rate limit IP addresses, and that doesbt work too well when jts individual users who can just request a new IP any time

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not to mention that the scraped indexes can and should be shared. Unfortunately what OP is seeing may be a move to thwart this type of brute force scraping, and might resolve as dynamically assigned domain addresses, where the URL of a set object is temporarily assigned and streamed only to a single or group of IP addresses that request it within a given timeframe before being rotated out until found in search again and then reassigned a new URL, etc. This is a frankly stupid use of resources, but can effectively be used to prevent crowdsourced indexes from proliferating, and to punish IPs or even MAC addresses or browser fingerprints associated with downloading and reuploading videos which almost certainly have stegnographic fingerprinting embedded that associate with who the video was served up to at the time it was downloaded.

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 4 points 1 month ago

Also, you know what would make this all even worse? Laws requiring that people prove their identity in order to consume content or pull videos... just like age verification laws now being passed in several countries. What a coincidence.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yeah, no thanks. I'll pass.

[–] Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago

I agree with local search, but I prefer more of a traditional algorithm-based search to generative AI. A solution I've seen (that is far more attainable than building your own search engine) is hosting a metasearch engine, which collates results from search engines, based on your own preferences of results. Or perhaps using someone else's established server if their preferences align with yours. Localised (on-device) search will be a gamechanger in many ways, but I believe a meaningful version of that is far off and potentially impractical to implement.