YouTube making all unlisted videos uploaded before 2017 private

[ImAlsoRan]

Summary

As part of a security measure, YouTube is converting all unlisted YouTube videos uploaded before January 1st, 2017 to private videos. Creators can opt out of this through a form, but there is no way to prevent it if you are not the channel owner. Videos uploaded on or after January 1st, 2017 will not be affected. YouTube will notify users that have videos affected by this change.

 

Quotes

Quote

In 2017, we rolled out an update to the system that generates new YouTube Unlisted links. This update included security enhancements that make the links for your Unlisted videos even harder for someone to discover if you haven’t shared the link with them. We’re now making changes to older Unlisted videos that were uploaded before this update took place.

 

My thoughts

I'm not a big fan of this. If you look around YouTube today, there's plenty of channels that have been abandoned. Unlisted videos are typically used by educators, journalists, and advertisers as embeds on a website, which can sometimes provide important context. It is also used in old YouTube videos as "easter eggs" and the like. This change will break tons of links and questions the reliability of YouTube as a video archive (or "time capsule" as the comment section calls it). I think changing the creator's original intent for viewability really makes it hard for everybody and I think this is a bit of a nuclear option.

 

Sources

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6UHS1-vDMM

https://9to5google.com/2021/06/23/youtube-unlisted-videos/

[Spotty]

Quote

What can I do?

First, you should check whether you own legacy content. Then, you can take one of four actions:

• Do nothing and we'll make the Unlisted video Private starting on 23 July 2021: Private videos are only seen by you and viewers that you choose. Bear in mind though, if you embedded the video in a website or app, it will no longer work.
• Opt out of this change to keep your Unlisted video in its current state: You can opt out to keep your videos in their current Unlisted state by filling in this form by 23 July 2021. If you treat your Unlisted videos like Public videos (e.g. they're embedded on third-party sites or shared on social media), we recommend that you opt out of this change. If you choose to opt out, your existing links will continue working as they do today, but they won't get the benefit of the security update.
• Make your Unlisted video Public: Your video will be visible to anyone using YouTube.
• Reupload the Unlisted video as a new Unlisted video: If you want to keep your videos Unlisted and benefit from this security update, you'll need to download them and reupload them as Unlisted under the new system. Note that data associated with the original upload, such as views or comments, won't be attached to the new upload. If you've embedded the video on a website or app, you'll have to update the link to point to the new video.

You can choose to opt out and your videos will remain unchanged, unlisted. You can also re-upload the video again as unlisted and get the security benefits of the changes YouTube made to make it harder to find unlisted videos.

This is going to impact channels that the creator has abandoned and won't act on this change, but they've abandoned the channel so I don't think they care.

[minibois]

Just like them removing annotations, this is a big whyyyy?!
Of course, annotations were miss-used by many creators, so I understand preventing people from adding any annotations, but why remove something that has been used as a key part of some videos.

I feel the same way about this change. The unlisted videos is something somewhat often used, to add something to a video you didn't necessarily want to have in the full video. This is going to be super annoying, to hear a video talk about an unlisted video, only for it to be private.

 

I understand why they're doing it, but this seems like the equivalent of painting a wall with a paintball gun; lots of collateral damage, for the end objective.

[AnonymousGuy]

"security" aka we want to save money on our bandwidth bill by effectively removing videos that are older.

[Vishera]

8 minutes ago, ImAlsoRan said:

security

Doesn't make any sense,it's just an excuse.

[Forbidden Wafer]

People upload all sorts of videos and those can be crawled over time. It does make a lot of sense to make them private after some time.
 

[ImAlsoRan]

29 minutes ago, Spotty said:

This is going to impact channels that the creator has abandoned and won't act on this change, but they've abandoned the channel so I don't think they care.

Exactly. What will you do if you come across an article with a now-defunct YouTube link? Or a curriculum piece in school that links to a now-private YouTube video? There's no way to access the video anymore if the channel is abandoned, especially if the user isn't aware of it before July 23 of this year.

 

7 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

People upload all sorts of videos and those can be crawled over time. It does make a lot of sense to make them private after some time.

If a user really wanted a video to be private why wouldn't they make the video private?

[Forbidden Wafer]

Just now, ImAlsoRan said:

If a user really wanted a video to be private why wouldn't they make the video private?

Because they needed to share for some time and they forgot after that? Kinda the same for people wanting to keep a public video unlisted because they don't want everyone to find it.

[Spotty]

1 minute ago, ImAlsoRan said:

If a user really wanted a video to be private why wouldn't they make the video private?

You'd be surprised how many people think that unlisted videos can only be accessed by people they give the link to. That's why YouTube is making this change.

 

3 minutes ago, ImAlsoRan said:

What will you do if you come across an article with a now-defunct YouTube link? Or a curriculum piece in school that links to a now-private YouTube video? There's no way to access the video anymore if the channel is abandoned, especially if the user isn't aware of it before July 23 of this year.

Unpopular opinion but if a university is using YouTube to host their educational videos as unlisted videos, and they aren't maintaining those videos/accounts to take necessary steps to update for the change, then that's their own damn fault. If they want to have videos that only their students can access as learning material then putting it on YouTube as an unlisted video is not the way to do it. They should be hosting the videos themselves and require a student account login portal to access them.

[poochyena]

5 hours ago, Spotty said:

so I don't think they care.

But I care, those will be videos I won't be able to watch now.

 

5 hours ago, Spotty said:

then that's their own damn fault.

but its not, Its youtube's, youtube is the one making the change.

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, minibois said:

Just like them removing annotations, this is a big whyyyy?!

It should be obvious. 

 

All it takes is to brute-force cycle through all the video short-urls to find "private" stuff that was unlisted but intended to be private. Personally I'm only half excited about this. It's a good way to suddenly destroy all the second-hand piracy youtube is used for, but it's also going to lock out people from re-watching videos that were not intended to be indexed (eg private videos that had to be unlisted to share, more so with discord)

 

This is a move to make sure that only those intended to see the video will see it, but a lot of legacy forums out there will move, remove or strip those keys off the url.

 

However it will make it a lot harder for law enforcement to "see" what these unlisted videos are if they are reported as sexual assault or murder evidence.

[atxcyclist]

Wow, so all of the great information still available on unattended channels will go away? I've learned quite a lot from old videos on channels that haven't even posted anything in years, my guess is that almost all that content will be come private and essentially lost forever; Great job YouTube, really amazing. /s

[DuckDodgers]

YouTube is not an archive/backup service and was never advertised as such. They only provide the convenience of online video sharing, like any other social media. If someone wants to archive their video collection, they better invest in local storage solution or dedicated service for that.

[wanderingfool2]

7 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

"security" aka we want to save money on our bandwidth bill by effectively removing videos that are older.

An unlisted video on an unmaintained channel...yes that must be getting so many views that they are worried about bandwidth /s.  In all seriousness though, the cost of bandwidth from unlisted videos that are unmaintained will likely be so minuscule as the cost of even storing the videos....I bet a lot of the videos are only a few views

[Kisai]

1 minute ago, DuckDodgers said:

YouTube is not an archive/backup service and was never advertised as such. They only provide the convenience of online video sharing, like any other social media. If someone wants to archive their video collection, they better invest in local storage solution or dedicated service for that.

Doesn't matter, when you have a first-mover advantage, everyone will try to use it for their own personal curated collection of media before the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA/ESA move in to ruin it. That is what it was for.

 

Honestly we are kinda overdue for something else to come along and supplant the web as a whole. It's probably going to be some variation of IPFS and some future google-free search engine that has no central control for that to happen.

 

But when there is no central control, the liability starts landing on the one hosting the piece of content.

[Seyrren]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Honestly we are kinda overdue for something else to come along and supplant the web as a whole. It's probably going to be some variation of IPFS and some future google-free search engine that has no central control for that to happen.

There are other things, like odysee, but people unfortunately have become to dependent on youtube and they don't want to even try and support something else, thus its very hard for other platforms to grow. This is what Microsoft probably wants to achieve with Windows as well.

 

--------------------------------

 

Youtube has always been lazy bastards, unlisted videos had always been used to share things in a more controlled environment, tight community, and they don't want to check all of the videos to see if they align with their "guidelines" and "vision" so the best approach to avoid the backlash of the videos being deleted is to just turn them into private videos.

[crystal6tak]

They should make this an opt-in change.

 

Those who want the added security are likely the active users. Leaving those that don't care for security or abandoned channels unchanged.

[Vanderburg]

14 hours ago, Spotty said:

They should be hosting the videos themselves and require a student account login portal to access them.

...why?

[Mark Kaine]

14 hours ago, ImAlsoRan said:

Exactly. What will you do if you come across an article with a now-defunct YouTube link?

happens all the time to me to the point i dont even click on such videos anymore most of the time. Thats besides 99% of "tutorial videos" are absolutely awful.

 

14 hours ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Because they needed to share for some time and they forgot after that? Kinda the same for people wanting to keep a public video unlisted because they don't want everyone to find it.

no, i always unlist because  i dont want ads on my videos, which surprisingly works to this day… not a single add ever on my videos …

[Tieox]

Eh, seems a good move.  

[Spotty]

15 minutes ago, crystal6tak said:

They should make this an opt-in change.

 

Those who want the added security are likely the active users. Leaving those that don't care for security or abandoned channels unchanged.

In a way hasn't it has been an opt-in change for the last 4 and a half years since Youtube made the changes to the URLs at the start of 2017. People could have changed their unlisted videos to private or reuploaded them as unlisted to get the new and more secure video URL.

 

Just now, Vanderburg said:

...why?

Universities are major organisations that shouldn't be using a free video platform to store and host their educational material they do not intend to be viewed by the public. Youtube does not have the account restrictions in place to properly limit the sharing of videos to those who should have access to them (currently enrolled students in those classes). They should not be at the mercy of a company like Youtube which could delete their account and remove all of their videos that are required by students for any trivial reason. Imagine if students woke up one day to find all their lectures are missing because the schools youtube account got DMCA/Community infringement and deleted without warning.

[cj09beira]

if the crazy amount of privated and deleted videos recently wasn't enough (mostly of people afraid of strikes), the worst part is a privated video means you cant even see the title, so most of the time i cant even remember what i cant see anymore, was it a song?, which song?, was it a documentary, etc..

[ImAlsoRan]

4 hours ago, Spotty said:

Universities are major organisations that shouldn't be using a free video platform to store and host their educational material they do not intend to be viewed by the public.

University isn’t the only education. Plenty of teachers for all grades make videos for their curriculums and share them with other teachers. If the channel doesn’t fix the unlisted videos, many teacher’s curriculums might be broken and cause the teacher a bit of pain having to re-create the video themselves.

[SolarNova]

Youtube doing a shi**y thing again ..oh what a surprise.

 

The amount of old videos i see day to day that are entertaining or educational is crazy, half of them from obviously dead channels or channels made solely to post a handful of videos and nothing more.

 

This will cut a bunch of publicly available content, and i suspect its purely for Youtubes benefit, be it reduced server load or forcing all available content to be handled under 'up to date' rules etc.

 

In all honesty ,,, i think Youtube should do it ..and more. .keep going.. keep making the platform worse, with the people in charge atm its a terrible platform, there is way to much editorial control being used by YT, its why people are pushing for them to be treated like a publisher rather than a platform. The sooner there is either major law changes in the US force YT to get their act together ..or YT effectivly kills its self allowing other platforms to rise up ..the better.

[Sir Asvald]

Google strikes again. This will suck for people unlist their videos for patreon...