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YouTube as Storage

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Re: YouTube as Storage

#81

Post by sfn42 »

r_lee wrote: post #75
sfn42 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, one that I forgot to mention is if you pause a youtube short and go to a different tab, the short will unpause in the background, or it might change to an entirely different short and start playing that.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#83

Post by loloquwowndueo »

zaik wrote: post #78
flux3125 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Re: YouTube as Storage

#84

Post by CuriouslyC »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #83
zaik wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

Goog is 100% not going to delete anything that is driving any advertising at all. The videos are also useful for training AI regardless, so I expect the set of stuff that's deleted will be a VERY small subset. The difference with email is that email can be deduplicated, since it's a broadcast medium, while video is already canonical.

I expect rather than deleting stuff, they'll just crank up the compression on storage of videos that are deemed "low value."

Re: YouTube as Storage

#85

Post by ziml77 »

encom wrote: post #57
wellf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or.... backblaze B2

Have Backblaze software stopped being utterly awful, to the point of being almost nonfunctional, yet?

What does Backblaze's backup software have to do with B2? Backblaze B2 is just storage that exposes the same API as S3. You can use any backup software that supports S3 as a target.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#86

Post by weird-eye-issue »

raincole wrote: post #55
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The framing here is really weird. The volume of videos increasing isn't 'growth.' Videos are inventory for Youtube. They're only good when people (without adblocks!) actually watch them.

Growth in this context is that there are a larger volume of videos each year. So each year a single video is exponentially a smaller and smaller percentage of the total.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#87

Post by shevy-java »

Interesting idea. But I actually think we need to overcome Google. Google has become such a huge problem in so many domains. There need to be laws for the people; Google controls way too much now. YouTube should become a standalone company.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#88

Post by shevy-java »

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.

That may be, but I assume for videos that had some viewership base, there may be a consideration. E. g. if a video was viewed 20 million times, it may be worth more than one that was viewed only 5 times.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#89

Post by leephillips »

Kwpolska wrote: post #28
arjie wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Videos do disappear, though. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1ioz4x1/is_it_... Searching hn.algolia.com for examples will yield numerous ones. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23758547 https://bsky.app/profile/sinevibes.bsky.social/post/3lhazuyn...

Of course videos disappear for copyright, ToS violations, or when the uploaders remove them. They do not disappear just because nobody watched them.

They also disappear when the government of Pakistan tells Google to erase them: https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/

Re: YouTube as Storage

#90

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

It depends. At the rough 2 PB of new data they get a day that’s about 10 sq ft of physical rack space per day. Each data center is like 500,000 sq feet so each data center can hold 120 years of YouTube uploads. They’re not going to have to restrict uploads anytime soon.
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