Your YouTube Playlists Don’t Belong to You
How I’m dealing with the loss of a playlist I’d been curating for 14 years
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I remember the first video I watched on YouTube. It was also the first I saved to my Favorites playlist.
“Muffins” is an absurdist ad for a bakery, whose long list of muffin flavors descended into bird, fire, and blood. I was 13 years old and it was the funniest thing I ever watched.
That was of course before I came across Charlie the Unicorn.
YouTube became a home where I collected countless creations. I’d later share these discoveries with friends at sleepovers, watching their faces, awaiting cackles of approval. We’d then go off to look for more. It was entertainment, but also an opportunity for pure connection.
Over the years, my compilation of favorite videos grew. OkGo music videos, a Soul Train dance line, viral ad analysis, a Reggie Watts performance, song mashups, and random clips lived among even more nonsensical skits like “The Landlord” and “Unbelievable Dinner.” As SNL’s Digital Shorts hit YouTube, Laser Cats and their ilk pushed me well over 100 saved videos. I continued exploring and curating into high school and college, frequently spending nights traveling in YouTube’s time machine and rewatching the best of the bests.
The playlist became a library reflecting my passions, tastes, and sense of humor at the time — an archive of nostalgia — but it wasn’t just a mirror. It was literally me in videos. A meticulously curated self-portrait. A personal collage of URLs formed over the years. From 2007 to March 2021, the morning YouTube emailed me that my entire playlist was deleted, 14 years of favoriting accumulated to over 2,000 videos.
