[adamdonahue]

There's an opportunity here. Put the video on both YouTube and a blockchain, make it easy to find on the latter via the YouTube URI, then when one discovers a non-working link you YouTube you can pivot to the blockchain-based backup. Once enough people know about this hack it then, with a browser plug-in, censorship be gone!

This is obviously off-the-cuff, undetailed thinking here, but an approach like this might make sense in the future.

[s_dev]

How does a YouTube 404 turn in to a working link? You don't control what You Tube displays on their 404.

[NavinF]

Easy: Your extension looks at the HTTP status code and if it’s 404, query the distributed hash table for another copy of the video. Then replace the <video> element on the page with a different one that plays bytes from your callback function (Media Source Extensions) just like WebTorrent.

(Note: There are alternatives to YouTube that already use WebTorrent to make videos harder to delete, but their content is incredibly hard to sort through. Instead of improving on YouTube by making filters optional, they just didn’t implement filters at all. So most of the videos in search results are scams or political)

Dead comment that I can’t vouch for asks:

>Why do you need Blockchain for this?

I’m not sure if you need blockchain. I’d avoid it if possible because it’s expensive and slow. But you might not have a choice if you need a censorship resistant distributed log.

>Why can't you just cross post on Rumble with the exact same title and make an extension which replaces 404d videos with the equivalently titled Rumble video?

I’ve never heard of Rumble, but many have built YouTube alternatives only to run out of funding and end up on this list: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Deathwatch#Dead_as_a_...

Hell even my team has built a shitty YouTube alternative during a 1-day hackathon. The videos are downloaded peer-to-peer with webrtc and my site has better clustering/search than most *tubes; but of course the site is dead today and all the videos are inaccessible: https://github.com/NavinF/NodeVid.com

[jtbayly]

But then you're relying on the IPFS version to accurately say which Youtube video URL it is equivalent to. I could upload any number of videos claiming to be the same as your video, right?

[NavinF]

True. Maybe that can be solved with an oracle[1] that runs the command “yt-dlp <url> -o - | sha256sum”. So every file you upload must be identical to the YouTube video at the same link.

1: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/oracles/

[peteradio]

Maybe get a mechanism of law passed which makes it difficult for platforms to sweep content from view in cases of changes of moderation. If youtube decies Charlie Bit Me is violent and they know longer wish host it, then they must provide some sort of redirect if video owner provides. I don't know?

[rnotaro]

Fun fact, Charlie Bit Me owners actually sold the video as an NFT and removed it from Youtube.

[mypastself]

Presumably with the browser plugin. This would of course require all your users installing it.

[gifnamething]

This idea has provenance with SponsorBlock

[sharklazer]

You can’t store a video on the blockchain. How incredibly bad of a design would that be! The ledger is shared. People typically mint the hyperlink as an NFT.

[adamdonahue]

Right-o.