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

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

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

S3 allows delete and is efficient here. I’m sure Google can figure it out

They allow search by timestamp, I’m sure YouTube can write algo to find zero <=1 view

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.

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.

The idea of exploiting someone else's server to store files is incredibly old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive

When Google launched Gmail (2004) with a huge 1GB storage quota, Richard Jones released GMailFS to mount a Gmail account as a standard block device.

I mean, it is pretty likely they figured out it could be a pretty obvious possible misuse before anyone actually started doing it.

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.

You are right, but YouTube is also a massive repository of human cultural expression, whose true value is much more than the economic value it brings to Google.

> 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

Right, you just pay daily in worrying when, not if, youtube will terminate your account and delete your "videos".

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 lets say one has 20000 random bit error over that 100GB. Not a lot of errors, but guess what, par will not be able to protect you (assuming those 20000 errors are spread over > 16384 blocks it precalculated in the source). so at the simplest level , 20KB of errors can be unrecoverable.

par2 was created for usenet when a) the size of binaries being posted wasn't so large b) the size of article parts being posted wasn't so large c) the error model they were trying to protect was whole articles not coming through or equivalently having errors. In the olden days of usenet binary posting you would see many "part repost requests", that basically disappeared with par (then quickly par2) introduction. It fails badly with many other error models.

Or.... backblaze B2

Stop ruining the internet end exploiting free resources

Yup. Even after a device reboot at that time, too. Still doing it a half day later. Odd.