Google's YouTube Becomes More Like Microsoft's GitHub: Anything They Don't Control Simply Does Not Exist (or Barely Acknowledged)
You are being bossed by Google. YouTube is digital slavery.
LAST time Google was waging a war on Invidious we thought it was the end of Invidious [1, 2], but then Invidious apparently recovered, as we assumed Google's lawyers were on the retreat, repelled by a massive backlash and reputational risk to Alphabet (not good for shareholders; Invidious isn't used by many so people anyway).
Things seem to be getting rather bitter at Google, which lays off workers and is looking to cut costs while hoarding traffic at other parties' expense.
As shown in a screenshot from the past year: 1) Techrights was prevalent in many search results in Google Video search (links to the site itself). 2) some topics was dominated by Techrights.
And today: Google Video search for the same phrase/s yields just loads and loads of YouTube URLs.
This morning I wrote about what's happening in Invidious and it turned out others had noticed the same. I reported this as quickly as possible and it seems to be no accident or coincidence. I've since then tested about 20 instances for about and hour and all of them failed to load (and actually pay videos) except one that tricked Google by using a proxy. It's technically hard and expensive.
For the time being (if not for the foreseeable future) please do not upload any more videos to YouTube.
Whenever you upload to YouTube any kind of material, e.g. conference talks, you prevent people from accessing them without Google's worsening restrictions, which will maybe include DRM (EME), WEI, hostile ads you cannot skip... who knows what comes next.
Simply saying "just use YouTube" is telling people to tolerate increasingly terrible things, even tracking of the mouse etc. Last week we mentioned that YouTube not only discriminates against people with ARM processors but also Firefox users.
YouTube videos are not like a "public market". People cannot even download them for legitimate purposes - they may struggle to download even videos of themselves speaking in some conference.
As noted above, based on observation, Google seems to be culling/delisting many Web videos (even if the format is WebM, which Google controls). It's all being optimised to push more and more YouTube. It's about money, not information discovery. █
Don't be a slave of Google at YouTube. They will leave you to die. They don't care about you.