I dont know what to think, really.
The Dekaif channel has 434 videos, but YouTube is only showing 275 to clients, whether logged in or not, whether yt-dlp or official access.
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%
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, no thanks. I’ll pass.
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.
