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YouTube as Storage

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Re: YouTube as Storage

#12

Post by weird-eye-issue »

wasmainiac wrote: post #8
repeekad wrote: post #4

I once asked one of the original YouTube infra engineers “will you ever need to delete the long tail of videos no one watches” They said it didn’t matter, because the sheer volume of new data flowing in growing so fast made the old data just a drop in the bucket

I wonder if that still holds true? The volume of videos increases exponentially especially with AI slop, I wonder if at some point they will have to limit the storage per user, with a paid model if you surpass that limit. Many people who upload many videos I guess some form of income off YouTube so it wouldn’t that be that big of a deal.

What they said only holds true because the growth continues so that the old volume of videos doesn't matter as much since there's so many more new ones each year compared to the previous year. So the question is more about whether or not it will hold true in the long term, not today

Re: YouTube as Storage

#14

Post by newqer »

zokier wrote: post #6

Also, how to get your google account banned for abuse.

Just make sure you have you have a bot network storing the information in with multiple accounts. Also with with enough parity bits (E.g. PAR2) to recover broken vids or removed accounts.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#15

Post by throw_await »

pogue wrote: post #9
wasmainiac wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that still holds true? The volume of videos increases exponentially especially with AI slop, I wonder if at some point they will have to limit the storage per user, with a paid model if you surpass that limit. Many people who upload many videos I guess some form of income off YouTube so it wouldn’t that be that big of a deal.

I assume it's an economics issue. As long as they continue making money off the uploads to a higher extent than it costs for storage, it works out for them.

Do they make a profit nowadays

Re: YouTube as Storage

#17

Post by thrdbndndn »

I don't get how it works.

> Encoding: Files are chunked, encoded with fountain codes, and embedded into video frames

Wouldn't YouTube just compress/re-encode your video and ruin your data (assuming you want bit-by-bit accurate recovery)?

If you have some redundancy to counter this, wouldn't it be super inefficient?

(Admittedly, I've never heard of "fountain codes", which is probably crucial to understanding how it works.)

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