I wish YouTube had not removed:

[jacques]

Anything

 89/32%

Those great UFC matches

 9/3%

Geeks Gone Wild

 15/5%

The Daily Show

 31/11%

South Park

 23/8%

The Simpsons

 16/6%

My user account

 11/4%

Daniela Cicarelli

 16/6%

CowboyNeal & Paco DeathMatch

 29/11%

The final part of that movie I was watching...

 19/7%

Other (please specify)

 17/6%

275 total votes

[marto]

... my kidneys and left me in a bathtub full of ice!

[xiaoyafeng]

ouch! I thought it's true!

[wolfger]

...any of the videos that were obviously victims of illegal false DMCA takedown requests.

[parv]

Since the resolution of the videos is horrid, does not matter if anything is removed or the whole thing goes under.

[zerogeek]

And I thought I watched LOTS of YouTube. I hadn't realized that things were being removed.

Am I the only one using YouTube to watch the junk that it was intended for? Honestly, if I want to watch "shows" there are MANY ways to get much better quality video on this here interweb thing...

[gloryhack]

I wish there was a 64 bit Linux Flash player that I could use to view YouTube content!

[jonadab]

You're not missing much.

My main workstation runs FreeBSD, which doesn't have a Flash player either. (There's an entry for flashplugin in the ports tree, but it's marked as broken due IIRC to a security issue.) As far as I'm concerned, this makes an excellent excuse when people send me URLs for Flash sites and bug me about watching them.

If I ever actually want to view Flash content for some reason, I can of course go to another computer and view it. On several occasions I have done this, including twice for YouTube videos, and in all instances it was a complete waste of time, devoid of entertainment value, let alone any actual information. The conclusion I have reached is that most people are *extremely* easy to amuse. (This is probably the same reason so many people watch television, which as far as I'm concerned is *actively* boring.)

So I consider the fact that the flashplugin port is broken to be a major selling point of FreeBSD. When people tell me that there's this uber-cool Flash content I've just absolutely got to see, I can respond without being rude or dishonest. "Sorry, I can't. There's no working Flash plugin for FreeBSD." This is a much better excuse than the one I used to use. Previously I used to tell people that I had uninstalled Flash because of how annoying it was -- I don't want my web experience to have blinky flashy animations. This was true, and seemed like a good reason to me, but for some reason it tended to upset people. (Why? No clue. I don't think I will ever understand humans.) Not even having the *option* to install the Flash plugin, due to my choice in operating systems, doesn't bother people nearly so much.

There are some things I don't like about FreeBSD, and it is possible that I will want at some point to move back to Linux. If so, I'll have to keep the 64-bit version in mind as a way to retain my good no-Flash excuse.

[parv]

Oh, but there is a way if one is /dying/ to see a YouTube video by way of Python, which I found about from some random tech news|web log site. There are other suggestions related to this on Digg site.

[gloryhack]

I'm much the same way: We have a television, but it's got no connection to the outside world and we live (way out in the sticks) where there's no broadcast reception at all. Most Flash content is insipid garbage, but every now and then a potential new client comes along whose web site navigation is dependent upon Flash -- guaranteed to get 'em a good old gloryhack lecture about accessibility every time.

Be that as it may, I've got to run my business, so I keep a "sacrificial lamb" 32 bit machine handy. With a 64 bit Flash player, I could turn that old machine off and save the electrons for the neighbor's air conditioner and their porch light that's always on.

[gregor42]

"The Collective Will and Impetus of the New Generation to operate their own streaming video servers."




I would say the same thing about MySpace and personal web servers too. The dumbing-down of technology comes at a price. Remember when desktop publishing first broke & people started designing pages with 20+ fonts on them? That's how bad 90% of the MySpace pages I've seen are. It's the age of flaming logos & blinking text all over again.

YouTube is yet another example. How many homemade videos have any kind of decent quality whatsoever? Or are they all drunken coeds eating insects at keggers & the like?

Television at least puts the little "amateur video" bug on the screen as an apology for low-grade content.

For any person who's complaining about being banned or whatever from YouTube - put up your own server. It's not Rocket Science!

What exactly is the Big Rush that you're supposed to get from providing a corporation with royalty-free content to begin with? At least if you run your own server & give your content away for free you get the 'benefit' of the server logs so you have some idea of who's looking at it.

If the kick is to be a User and just watch videos for free - there's always BitTorrent and that sports much better resolution.

[jgamble]

... the Washington Press Club dinner speech Colbert made, with Bush present.

[cLive ;-)]

shhhh!

[tbone1]

The WKRP Thanksgiving Episode. Actually, it's still there, but for how long? Watch it while you can!

[lin0]

Other but I will not tell you which one ;-)

I guess that with all the lawsuits going around they will keep removing some of the wonderful material that was out there :-(

[cog]

Wow! I didn't even know The Simpsons had been there O:-)

[been42]

I guess I showed up at YouTube a bit late, because I never knew there were UFC matches there. I would have spent a lot more time there if I'd known...

In general, though, I don't think they should remove much. If I watch a television show, or a scene from a show, on YouTube, it's just to see if it's worth picking up on Tivo. The quality of YouTube video is generally low enough that it's not worth wasting much of my time on it.

[sir_lichtkind]

I'M very interested in so called conspiracy theories (feel free to mod me down) and it happened often that youtube as google videos said me "video not available" when some site i currently surfed on linked to a film. No i dont mean that i could not get a connection, this filmes were deleted. Why they delete this, when everybody can publish showing the world his tongue or ass?

[Skeeve]

YouTube? What is YouTube?

[radiantmatrix]

The Colbert Report Threatdowns are what I miss most. :(

[lorn]

I'm from Brazil, and i stayed 24 hours, without Youtube because Daniella Cicarelli, but is so funny, the justice of Brazil doesn't know what's internet, and try to judge this things.

[Mago]

What it would like of found was Daniela Cicarelli film ... Pure Art !!! ;-)

[wjw]

You Tube is like Television: Mind-numbing 99% of the time. If it went away tomorrow, I would be completely oblivious except for one fact; My wife and daughter are from Russia. They listen to music, watch ballet, see what is happening in their home town, listen to people speaking their native language. Having spent some time overseas myself, I can at least imagine the comfort they get from having access to this bit of home. I recall times when I would have given a weeks pay to just sit and listen to some music in my own language while I was in Korea eating too much kimchea and drinking too much soju.

I can't stand stuff like You Tube, but I sure do see the positive side of it for a couple of people I care about! :-)

Guess it all depends on your point of view...

[chacham]

If it went away tomorrow, I would be completely oblivious

I am curious: is that really still true?

[wjw]

Actually, No. I am now getting some pretty good information from YouTube. Over the last year or so, I have gotten back into embedded programming on Arduino's and RPi. YouTube has been a source of some pretty good information.

Additionally, I took up bee keeping and YouTube has been damn handy for getting some visuals for becoming familiar with what to look for in bee health and bee keeping in general.

And I have to admit, I have also seen some pretty interesting projects targeting wind and solar installations. ....and every now and again someone will send me a link to some off-the-wall video that just plain cracks me up....

So, my statement is no longer true regarding YouTube. I am stubbornly sticking to that opinion regarding televisions though. We have not had a television that does more than act as a 54" monitor in our house in 12 years. More a matter of principle than anything now I guess. I don't even know what is on television anymore except for Fox News...and the only reason I know about that is that when I visit my 83 y/o mom, she is sitting there watching that crap.... simply blows my mind to see what she is watching.... I guess she has earned the right and then some. >

---

[samizdat]

The final part of that movie I was watching...

... for free. :D

drat, I guess I'll have to go back to coding my multi-dimensional C extension library and patching it into the BSD and Linux kernel source trees.

[margulies]

Did Simpsons and South Park been there?? o.O

How I wish i knew it before....

[xiaoyafeng]

unauthorized and porn clips will ruin YouTube.

[jesuashok]

Screw YouTube

[Mutant]

Interesting, but if you were YouTube, would you be worried about some guy complaining on his blog, or the billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom?

[apotheon]

If I were running YouTube, I'd be interested in the suggestion that a fair use argument could be applied as an assumption of promotion rather than infringement. The key passage from that rant:

I believe that such cases occupy far more of a gray area, in which the sharing of other people’s content, in small amounts for no profit, constitutes promotion of the content, and should be considered permissable until such time as the copyright holder objects, at which point it should be immediately removed with complete understanding that both parties acted in good faith.