from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is there an archive of videos like archive.today?

by wmsmith on 10/20/23, 6:23 PM with 3 comments

I would love a service like archive.today where you punch in a video link and the content gets cached for a simple, no-bs archive.

The enshittification of the video platforms is getting to me. I'm ready to ignore any video links -- I can read faster than the video can show an intro, beg for subscribes, show three ads, and then finally get to the topic at hand. Maybe there's a healthy compromise?

There are browser plug-ins that kind of do this, but I like the archive method better. Submit a video on HN, post the archive link. Done. No bs. If I choose to engage with the platform, I will. (This model actually got me to sub to nyt, btw, so I see that as a net win).

Does this concept or anything like it exist?

While I certainly don't want to take anything out of the mouths of the content creators, so maybe this needs some links to source platform to enable people who want to engage more.

  • by sdrinf on 10/20/23, 10:04 PM

    The specific issue with the concept as presented, is that there. is. no. financial. model. that makes this viable, under present subscription conversion rates, and ad models.

    Nonetheless, archive.org actually saves youtube videos, automatically, at scale. Please consider https://archive.org/donate if it's useful for you.

  • by KomoD on 10/21/23, 5:28 PM

    One of the issues is that videos are so much larger than websites, photos, so there's not many who can keep something like that up.

    You could make something where you enter in the link and it'd upload it to archive.org.