Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube as Storage

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 163 posts

Re: YouTube as Storage

#4

Post by repeekad »

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

Re: YouTube as Storage

#8

Post by wasmainiac »

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.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#9

Post by pogue »

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.

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.

Re: YouTube as Storage

#10

Post by ranger_danger »

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.

I wonder if anyone has ever compiled a list of channels with abnormally large numbers of videos? For example this guy has over 14,000:

https://www.youtube.com/@lylehsaxon

Post reply on HN