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points by maybewhenthesun 2 days ago | 0 comments

There used to be tons of videos from around 2008-2010 of a french folk festival I always went to. I remember watching all videos of those events and see if I spotted anyone I knew.

Those were definitely not copyright claimed by anybody. But 3/4 of them are gone by now when I tried some nostalgia - youtbe -spelunking recently . I assume youtube silently deletes videos if they are never watched? Or maybe they are still there, but not easily findable anymore.

[–] kombookcha 2 days ago

I suspect that they might still exist if you go through the uploader's profile, but are buried in a way that makes them not really searchable. This seems to be the case for goofy meme videos made by friends of mine in the 00s.

Still - it would not surprise me to find out that youtube has some kind of culling mechanism for deleting old videos form inactive uploaders that don't get views.

[–] jobigoud 2 days ago

I was going to suggest searching on DailyMotion as it was the Made-in-France Youtube concurrent and was quite popular in these years but apparently they've gone full tiktok and removed old videos… sigh.