Why you should always encode from the highest quality source! http://bit.ly/ckvaaR Upload to YouTube, rip, upload (and re-encode) 1000 times.
I expect that everyone knows by now that, no matter what you upload to YouTube, they re-encode it. Even if it was a file that YouTube just encoded!  YouTube user “canzona,” whose personal website is here literally did it 1000 times, so the end result is 1000 lossy generations down.
The result is so abstracted from the original that it is it’s own thing (and that is what the creator was going for, apparently), but it is an abject lesson that we should always encode from the highest quality source available, and only send YouTube high bandwidth, high quality source for them to encode.