YouTube as Storage

Post by bentcorner » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 3:35 PM UTC

dessimus wrote: post #77

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.

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

    I met a user from an antique land
    Who said: Two squares of a clip of video
    Stand in at the end of the search. Near them,
    Lossly compressed, a profile with a pfp, whose smile,
    And vacant eyes, and shock of content baiting,
    Tell that its creator well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these unclicked things,
    The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
    And on the title these words appear:
    "My name is Ozymandias, Top Youtuber of All Time:
    Look on my works, ye Mighty, and like and subscribe!"
    No other video beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that empty profile, boundless and bare
    The lone and level page stretch far away.

Post by sdenton4 » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

thrdbndndn wrote: post #17

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 wo…

Post by catlikesshrimp » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

compsciphd wrote: post #33

newqer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

par2 is very limited. It only support 32k parts in total (or in reality that means in practice 16k parts of source and 16k parts of parity). Lets take 100GB of data (relatively large, but within realm of reason of what someone might want to protect), that means each part will be ~6MB in size. But you're thinking you also created 100GB of parity data (6MB*16384 parity parts) so you're well protected. You're wrong. Now…

Post by herodoturtle » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 4:04 PM UTC

dessimus wrote: post #77

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.

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

Post by semitones » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #90

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…

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.