Rob's Musings

I find it difficult to quantify precisely how dissappointed I have been with YouTube in the past few months.  I am greeted with a "We're sorry, this video is no longer available" message for literally every link I follow for a YouTube video.  It might be simpler for them to just replace the entire site with a message stating "We're sorry, interesting content is no longer available on YouTube".  I fully expect that there will be certain situations (particularly those involving copyright violations) where YouTube will have legitimate reasons for quickly removing questionable content.  However, what's the motivation for almost immediately removing user supplied content, where the copyright is owned by the uploading user?  I don't know if others of you have been having similar experiences with lately, but this dissappointing development presents the perfect opportunity for capitalization by any competition that's willing to move in and provide for the market that YouTube seems to be neglecting.

Update:  Though I still maintain that YouTube has been unnecessarily removing certain videos, it turns out that the fact that this occured for almost every video was a problem with Flash.  I found a number of other people having the same problem, which, for some reason, mainly presented itself in Flash's interaction with YouTube.  The easiest work around is to remove Flash's cache, or simply to reinstall Flash.