The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

One of the things that drives me crazy about YouTube is that if a video gets taken down, it shows up as a "This video is no longer available" with no further metadata. I am far, far more uptight about no knowing which video was removed than I am about the fact that it is no longer available.

I have put serious thought into creating a tool that would automatically yt-dlp every video I open to a giant hard drive and append a simple index with the title, channel, thumbnail and date.

In general, I think people are way too casual about media of all kinds silently disappearing when you're not looking.

I've always wondered why we don't see any platforms just remove the media while leaving the metadata, comments, ratings, etc intact. Like, is there some legal requirement that the idea itself has to be hard to find, or is it okay to just remove the media and let people keep discussing it?