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YouTube as Storage

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Re: YouTube as Storage

#71

Post by asah »

jl6 wrote: post #67
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

One day, it will matter. Not even Google can escape the consequences of infinite growth. Kryder's Law is over. We cannot rely on storage getting cheaper faster than we can fill it, and orgs cannot rely on being able to extract more value from data than it costs to store it. Every other org knows this already. The only difference with Google is that they have used their ad cash generator to postpone their reality chec…

You can see how Google rolls with how they deleted old Gmail accounts - years of notice, lots of warnings, etc. They finally started deletions recently, and I haven't heard a whimper from anyone (yet).

Re: YouTube as Storage

#72

Post by asah »

vasco wrote: post #25
j-bos wrote: post #16

This ia really cool but also feels like a potential burden on the commons,

That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries? They sure worry about the commons when launching another datacenter to optimize ads.

no the "commons" in this case is the fundamental free-ness of YT - if abused then any corporations will have to shut it down...

OTOH I'm 100.0% sure that google has a plan, been expecting this for years and in particular, has prior experience from free Gmail accounts being used for storage.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#73

Post by joecool1029 »

dev1ycan wrote: post #63
ntoskrnl_exe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it also be a performance nightmare? The energy bill for scanning through the terabytes of metadata would be comparable to that of several months of AI training, not to mention the time it would take. Then deleting a few million random 360p videos and putting MrBeast in their place would result in insane fragmentation of the new files. It might really just be cheaper to keep buying new HDDs.

This is why they removed searching for older videos (specific time) and why their search pushes certain algorithmic videos, other older videos when found by direct link are on long term storage and take a while to start loading.

I’m pretty sure this is the real reason why they changed old unlisted videos to being marked private: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-youtube-unlisted...

Re: YouTube as Storage

#74

Post by Valkryst »

ilaksh wrote: post #53
Smalltalker-80 wrote: post #45

Thechnically cool, but ToS state: "Misuse of Service Restrictions - Purpose Restriction: The Service is intended for video viewing and sharing, not as a general-purpose, cloud-based file storage service." So they can rightfully delete your files.

Its interesting that this exact use case is already covered in their ToS. I wonder when the first YouTube as storage project came out, and how many there have been over the years.

At-least as far back as 2017 when I wrote Schillsaver: https://github.com/Valkryst/Schillsaver

None of us, in the original discussion threads, knew of it being done before then IIRC.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#75

Post by r_lee »

sfn42 wrote: post #68
moffkalast wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides with their search deteriorating to the point where a direct video title doesn't result in a match, nobody can see those videos anyway and they don't have to cache them.

It's not just the search deteriorating. The frontend is littered with bugs. If you write a comment and try to highlight and delete part of that comment, it'll often delete the part you didn't highlight. So apparently they implemented their own textfield for some reason and also fucked it up. It's been like that for years. The youtube shorts thing is buggy as shit, it'll just stop working a lot of the time, just won't…

and if you do a hard refresh on the webapp, it literally takes like 10 seconds for the homepage to load

Re: YouTube as Storage

#76

Post by flux3125 »

asah wrote: post #71
jl6 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One day, it will matter. Not even Google can escape the consequences of infinite growth. Kryder's Law is over. We cannot rely on storage getting cheaper faster than we can fill it, and orgs cannot rely on being able to extract more value from data than it costs to store it. Every other org knows this already. The only difference with Google is that they have used their ad cash generator to postpone their reality chec…

You can see how Google rolls with how they deleted old Gmail accounts - years of notice, lots of warnings, etc. They finally started deletions recently, and I haven't heard a whimper from anyone (yet).

The problem is that some content creators have already passed away (and others will pass away by then), and their videos will likely be deleted forever.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#77

Post by dessimus »

flux3125 wrote: post #76
asah wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see how Google rolls with how they deleted old Gmail accounts - years of notice, lots of warnings, etc. They finally started deletions recently, and I haven't heard a whimper from anyone (yet).

The problem is that some content creators have already passed away (and others will pass away by then), and their videos will likely be deleted forever.

Monuments erode away and memories of those enshrined are lost time as well, nothing lasts forever.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#78

Post by zaik »

flux3125 wrote: post #76
asah wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see how Google rolls with how they deleted old Gmail accounts - years of notice, lots of warnings, etc. They finally started deletions recently, and I haven't heard a whimper from anyone (yet).

The problem is that some content creators have already passed away (and others will pass away by then), and their videos will likely be deleted forever.

Hopefully the deletion will not affect videos with thousands of views, even if the account is lost.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#79

Post by justinclift »

asah wrote: post #72
vasco wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries? They sure worry about the commons when launching another datacenter to optimize ads.

no the "commons" in this case is the fundamental free-ness of YT - if abused then any corporations will have to shut it down... OTOH I'm 100.0% sure that google has a plan, been expecting this for years and in particular, has prior experience from free Gmail accounts being used for storage.

> no the "commons" in this case is the fundamental free-ness of YT ...

Hmmm, isn't the "free-ness" of YouTube because there were determined to outspend and outlast any potential competitors (ie supported by the Search business), in order to create a monopoly for then extracting $$$ from?

I'm kind of expecting the extracting part is only getting started. :(

Re: YouTube as Storage

#80

Post by justinclift »

russfrank wrote: post #37
cheonn638 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries? Exactly which countries could they buy? Let me guess: you haven’t actually asked gemini

The USA.

That one's not a "could" as it's already been done. ;)
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