[Neil Jones]

Yes, so mamy youtube accounts who just download videos from elsewhere, including other youtube accounts and upload them to their channel. Often you can find several channels with the exact same video, often in terrible quality.

Sometimes this may help preserve a certain video if all other copies vanish from YouTube and the regular channels. After all a potatovision copy of something is probably better than nothing even if it has been poached from somewhere else.

Unless of course its wrapped around some other total fabrication ("15 minute music man" is the obvious example here) and then all bets are off as to what was real and what wasn't.

YouTube never was a safe haven for anything. Especially when the bots are on the crawl. The LostMediaWiki draws a very low benchmark here that if its not anywhere then its "lost". As we've seen, plonking things on YouTube doesn't make them any safer than they were before.

Until the bots went crazy things weren't too bad on YouTube. Now you can't even fart on there without it generating a strike. It may well be the era of archive TV and TV presentation on the platform is over and we end up back at the likes of TV-Ark and friends...