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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16083 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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I not so recently went into nostalgia dive for youtube and while a lot of videos were deleted there was one that I couldn't find. At first I just glossed over it, but later it kept bugging me inside. I tried to find it again, but after an hour of searching I got nothing. I got a little vexed and tried again some other time, spending entire evening trying to prove myself that I'm not going senile and the video exists, right? Right?

Yeah, it was useless. Yesterday I said enough is enough and submitted the question to /r/namethatsong and I got the answer.

This is the music video it was posted on youtube 9 years ago and has more than 4million views, yet invisible to the search queries of mine. You can try to search for it yourself by describing thhe music video, but as soon as you put "murder" or "assassination" the search shits itself completely.

My current theory is that google search heavily prioritize recency and popularity above everything else. Which is too bad if you're looking for everything else.

The biggest problem with searching YouTube is that it's not incentivized to show you the results most relevant to your query; rather, it's incentivized to show you the most popular content that happens to have the flimsiest of relevance to your query.

youtube is my bigger complaint. I want the rawest uncut version of events, and often I want the original uploader so they get the credit. If you're at the bleeding edge as they are being uploaded you can get them but after 24 hours you are wading through nothing but local news stations and response videos.

Had a similar experience trying to find a clip of a very specific portion of a particular video game. I KNEW the clip existed because I had watched it all those years ago. I could get pretty specific describing the game itself, the content of the clip, the sort of surrounding logic of why this clip was unique and interesting, and zilch. Plenty of results for reviews of the game, other gameplay videos, or trailers for the game, though.

At least part of it was probably because the clip was like 5 second long, and most of the content showing up in the search was 10+ minutes long. I have to assume that it's easier to monetize longer content. Nobody would want to watch a 30 second ad before a five second clip, vs. several 30 second ads in a ten minute video.

I did eventually locate the clip I wanted but it was a different video with meme text overlaid for some reason.

Can you link to the video game clip?

Luckily it's in my history because trying to find it again would have been maddening.

Don't know if it's relevant to anything.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=W-ZSFw9VqF4?feature=share

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