Flash forward to about a year later. He's now using VideoPad and griping about the inability to go back and fix his typos (of which there are about 400 as of this current writing). A new project is started for a SMW hack called Magical Crystals. But there's an ominous note in the description: annotations are going to completely disappear. I of course took this news spectacularly well. And by that I mean I have a backup of all of his videos on a flash drive.
I opened up youtube-dl and got six channels in their entirety out of fear: the previously referenced SomeGuy712x, PinkKittyRose, qzecwx which I'm surprised I remembered how to spell, Shinryu, Kit, and SuperMetalSonic360. It was only after doing that that I realized I was wasting time and storage space. Good job, me.
I then opened up a repository collecting various channels' worth of annotation data, which you can find here. I looked around for other efforts to save annotations. (This is the only reason I have any sort of social media, namely a Reddit account, by the way.) And that is when I found the Discord server now known as the Internet Trash Heap. They had a worker to find and archive annotation files. I naturally ran three of them. We saved 1.4 billion videos worth. (Yes, I did have to look that figure up.)
In the end, they now survive on Invidious, thanks in part to my only merged PR. I feel a certain level of pride about this. Certainly why Fukkireta brings back memories for me.
- glmdgrielson
——
Over the past year, a lot of progress has been made in restoring YouTube annotations.
When YouTube removed annotations on January 15, 2019, they removed the XML data for them, but not the code needed to render them. Because of this, I wrote a Firefox extension called AnnotationsReloaded, which replaced the response to the request for annotation data with the archived data. This worked until YouTube removed the rendering code from their player, which had started to break in August and was almost completely gone by the end of September. Because of this, glmdgrielson, afrmtbl, myself, and others began to work on re-implementing annotation rendering with new JS code. This code is now used in Invidious and in a new browser extension, Annotations Restored.
Also, an API has been added to Invidious for retrieving annotation data. A Reddit user by the name of Archivist has also collected some YouTube metadata, so we may be able to further expand the collection of data available on the API in the future.
- tech234a
——
The thing about the YouTube annotation removal was that it was so unnatural that even a year later the layout for it has yet to be updated to signify their removal.
General (vocal) consensus at the time was either neutral, or in favor of the removal. The feature was likened to the relic that video responses were, a feature whose removal was also celebrated for its outdatedness (at least in contrast to the rest of the website) and frequent abuse.
Yet it would seem that behind the vocal cheering was silent weeping... That common silence is strangely what brought us all together, which is kind of ironic when you think about how annotations themselves were at one point just as valid of an alternative to comments for communication between YouTube users, going back to video responses, with their removal collaborators began linking their videos or channels through the annotations.
The amount of links between annotations I found was scary, back in January of 2019 while trying to make a tool of my own for annotation back-up, I remember starting on a list of chuggaaconroy videos and only crawling from annotation link to annotation link I was able to scan maybe 100 thousand videos or more, which unfortunately weren't backed up because of some stupid oversights. But even with what we did recover I'm fairly certain it's possible to see that interlinkage.
So in fact, those of us freaking out in that large web of thousands of videos all knew each other, maybe like neighbors, we just hadn't met yet... Funny enough my own biggest contribution was perhaps bringing some publicity to the whole endeavor.
The last few days remaining... I thought I was alone until I was able to hit the jackpot with a certain post I made on Reddit. It was just a set of tools I'd made so people could back things up locally or on the waybackmachine. They weren't professional to say the least, with the .exe versions being actually broken. Yet I was able to stir much discussion in the comments helping a lot of people -myself included- find out about several independent archiving efforts, including the group who would later go down in history as the Internet Trash Heap.
That thread as far as I'm concerned is a treasure in its own right, and even if the actual topic that post was about is no longer relevant it really reflects the zeitgeist of those anxious days.
I'm glad to report those are just pleasant memories now...
- the Mad Programer
——
I, unfortunately, did not contribute much directly to archiving annotations. I first found out annotations were going to be removed completely from a tweet by Neil Cicierega about how he was editing the descriptions of an interactive video project he made so that the project would work without annotations. Being someone who already cared about loss of digital heritage, I was quite worried about all the information which would surely go away. I tried in vain to beg YouTube via social media, but obviously this didn't do anything. However, I did find the Discord server dedicated to mitigating this problem by gathering up all the annotations before they could be deleted. In the end, while not all annotations could be grabbed, the project was still able to scan billions of videos and thus saved a sizable portion of them, especially ones from popular channels. While I don't especially miss the feature (though YouTube hasn't really added anything new which could replace their functionality), I am glad that this chunk of Internet history was not lost forever.
-A.S.t.R.I.
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