Of course videos disappear for copyright, ToS violations, or when the uploaders remove them. They do not disappear just because nobody watched them.
Gigachad 1 days ago [-]
There’s a whole activity around discovering random 15 year old videos with almost no views. It’s usually some random home video
epolanski 22 hours ago [-]
A friend of mine worked two years in YouTube as a content admin.
Basically being given videos to watch all day, especially coming from the middle east (this was ISIS time so any video from the area had someone watching it as soon as uploaded).
Needless to say there's endless gold no view videos according to him.
It's also interesting that it was no open secret that already in 2018 they were all told that they were essentially training machines to do their job.
nabhasablue 16 hours ago [-]
I was interested in the same thing and built a search for it
I seem to recall reading that the HD variations may get removed leaving only 480p or lower for older unwatched videos.
The original upload would likely still be stored, but not available for viewing.
Nevermark 13 hours ago [-]
That would be an odd thing to do. HD is low resolution already, and 480 is noticeably worse.
If they really wanted to compress, take out every other frame, and regenerate those frames with a neural decoder. But I don't know why that would be worth the effort for a stable number of low res files either.
wasmainiac 2 days ago [-]
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.
weird-eye-issue 1 days ago [-]
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
raincole 1 days ago [-]
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.
weird-eye-issue 1 days ago [-]
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.
raincole 1 days ago [-]
Yeah and the math doesn't check out.
For example, if in year N youtube has f(N) new video. Let assume f(N) = cN^2. It's a crazy rate of growth. It's far better than the real world Youtube, which grew rather linearly.
But the rate of "videos that are older than 5 years" is still faster than that, because it would be cubic instead of quadratic. Unless the it's really exponential (it isn't), "videos that are older than 5 years" will always surpass "new videos this year" eventually.
whycombigator 21 hours ago [-]
Video sensors are continuously getting cheaper, better and more more prevalent over time. The trend is towards capturing all angles of everything, everywhere, at increasingly higher resolutions.
weird-eye-issue 22 hours ago [-]
> Unless the it's really exponential (it isn't), "videos that are older than 5 years" will always surpass "new videos this year" eventually.
Such a weird strawman argument that you are making up. You've over thought this so much that you are missing the forest from the trees
UltraSane 1 days ago [-]
Yes. a video no one watches is a waste of storage.
dotancohen 20 hours ago [-]
Maybe not.
Maybe it could be used to train a neutral network. Maybe it contains dirt on a teenager, who might become a politician two decades from now. Maybe it contains an otherwise lost historical event.
weird-eye-issue 14 hours ago [-]
Or it just helps to cement YouTube as the go-to place for uploading and sharing videos for almost any purpose which has a long-term positive effect for user engagement and retention
amelius 1 days ago [-]
^ This.
pogue 2 days ago [-]
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.
First one has transcribed stack overflow to YT by the look of it
b00ty4breakfast 18 hours ago [-]
AH! I've stumbled on that first fellas videos before! The videos aren't crazy complex but the sheer volume is impressive in a perverse kind of way.
ranger_danger 1 days ago [-]
I guess I should have mentioned I wasn't looking for automated/AI-generated videos.
jl6 1 days ago [-]
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 check moment.
One day, somebody is going to be tasked with deciding what gets deleted. It won't be pretty. Old and unloved video will fade into JPEG noise as the compression ratio gets progressively cranked, until all that remains is a textual prompt designed to feed an AI model that can regenerate a facsimile of the original.
asah 1 days ago [-]
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).
flux3125 1 days ago [-]
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.
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
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.
eMPee584 1 days ago [-]
I've stumbled upon very valuable content with very low view numbers - the algorithms spiral around spectacularity and provocation, not quality or insight.
asah 14 hours ago [-]
Then it's on you to share it !
coldtea 1 days ago [-]
>videos that had some viewership base, there may be a consideration
Those would be the worst of the lot regarding how valuable they are historically for example. Engaging BS content...
zaik 1 days ago [-]
Hopefully the deletion will not affect videos with thousands of views, even if the account is lost.
loloquwowndueo 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
CuriouslyC 1 days ago [-]
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."
dessimus 1 days ago [-]
Monuments erode away and memories of those enshrined are lost time as well, nothing lasts forever.
bentcorner 1 days ago [-]
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.
donkeyboy 24 hours ago [-]
This is amazing.
tempestn 22 hours ago [-]
Would've been, once. These days I assume bentcorner asked their favourite LLM to generate a poem parodying Ozymandias about once-popular youtube videos.
1bpp 17 hours ago [-]
It doesn't feel like it at all (I'd never expect an LLM to say 'pfp' like that, or 'lossly[sic] compressed', ASCII instead of fancy quotes) but who knows at this point.
I may have gotten incredibly neurotic about online text since 2022.
7 hours ago [-]
bentcorner 7 hours ago [-]
Nope, I hand wrote this.
I actually considered using an LLM but in my experience they "warp" the content too much for anything like this. The effort required to get them to retain what I would consider something to my taste would take longer than just writing the poem myself. (Although tbf it's been awhile since I've asked a LLM to do parody work, so I could be wrong)
fragmede 19 hours ago [-]
or you could get over it and still enjoy it anyway. Like how Coke Zero tastes.
tempestn 16 hours ago [-]
That is a fair point. Especially since, assuming it was AI-generated, it presumably wouldn't have existed at all otherwise.
joquarky 17 hours ago [-]
Brought to you by Carl's Jr
spriggancg 1 days ago [-]
let's see what will last longer over the ages : engraved stone or google?
georgefrowny 1 days ago [-]
Depends on the pH, probably.
herodoturtle 1 days ago [-]
Like tears in rain <3
ralusek 1 days ago [-]
mono no aware
1313ed01 1 days ago [-]
Dropbox seem to be doing the same thing. After years of whining about my 2TB above limit I recently received a mail with a deadline to delete my files or they will.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
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.
semitones 1 days ago [-]
Not all of the square footage of a data center is usable for racks
24 hours ago [-]
jongjong 22 hours ago [-]
Oh. I noticed in an AI music generation service I use that old pieces were severely degraded to the point that they were crackling really bad... And I remember thinking that it's a good thing I downloaded an mp3 of my favorites. I confirmed that the quality is very different by listening to the downloaded recording with the hosted version side-by-side.
ntoskrnl_exe 1 days ago [-]
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.
stogot 1 days ago [-]
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
dev1ycan 1 days ago [-]
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.
Well the time filters (before/after:date) still seem to work, but for controversial / hot topics, somehow, more recent videos tend to still show up at the top. Try "scandal after:2010 before:2012"..
moffkalast 1 days ago [-]
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.
sfn42 1 days ago [-]
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 load a video. Some times you have to go back and forth a few times to get it to load. It'll often desync the comments from the video, so you're seeing comments from a different video. Some times the sound from one short plays over the visuals of another.
It only checks for notifications when you open the website from a new tab, so if you want to see if you have any notifications you have to open youtube in a new tab. Refreshing doesn't work.
Seems like all the competent developers have left.
r_lee 1 days ago [-]
and if you do a hard refresh on the webapp, it literally takes like 10 seconds for the homepage to load
sfn42 1 days ago [-]
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.
Smalltalker-80 1 days ago [-]
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.
ilaksh 1 days ago [-]
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.
kingstnap 1 days ago [-]
The idea of exploiting someone else's server to store files is incredibly old.
None of us, in the original discussion threads, knew of it being done before then IIRC.
altmanaltman 1 days ago [-]
I mean, it is pretty likely they figured out it could be a pretty obvious possible misuse before anyone actually started doing it.
j-bos 1 days ago [-]
This ia really cool but also feels like a potential burden on the commons,
vasco 1 days ago [-]
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.
agnishom 1 days ago [-]
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.
Yes, but it's a classic story of what actually happened to the commons - they were fenced and sold to land "owners."
Honestly, if you aren't taking full advantage within the constraints of the law of workarounds like this, you're basically losing money. Like not spending your entire per diem budget when on a business trip.
agnishom 1 days ago [-]
This seems like a narrow understanding of value.
Which do you think has more value to me? (a) I save some money by exploiting the storage loophole (b) The existence of a cultural repository of cat videos, animated mathematics explainers, long video essays continue to be available to (some parts of) humanity (for the near future).
komali2 1 days ago [-]
This is assuming doing A has any meaningful impact on B.
Anyway in this situation it's less that YouTube is providing us a service and more, it's captured a treasure trove of our cultural output and sold it back to us. Siphoning back as much value as we can is ethical. If YouTube goes away, we'll replace it - PeerTube or other federated options are viable. The loss of the corpus of videos would be sad but not catastrophic - some of it is backed up. I have ~5Tb of YouTube backed up, most of it smaller channels.
I agree generally with you that the word "value" is overencompassing to the point of absurdity though. Instrumental value is equated with moral worth, personal attachment, and distribution of scarcity. Too many concepts for one word.
agnishom 19 hours ago [-]
"Siphoning back as much value as we can is ethical."
I feel the same way. (Although, I am less sure of it.) However, I think backing up important parts of YouTube, as you have done, is a much better approach towards doing this.
24 hours ago [-]
asah 1 days ago [-]
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.
justinclift 1 days ago [-]
> 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. :(
rapnie 16 hours ago [-]
There is no "fundamental free-ness" for vids stored on YT. Videos are stored to serve the business plan of Youtube and under the rules Google sets for them, where they serve their advertisement and surveillance capitalism business.
Looking at the Wikipedia page for "Commons" [0] the first meaning of commons "accessible to all members of a society" is not really true, unless "on the whim of the YT platform". The second meaning of "natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit" is also not really true. There is no understanding that google will take any other than their own benefit into account. The third meaning of commons on that page is closest I guess to what is needed:
> Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.
And that is certainly not what Youtube can be considered to be. Youtube videos are not in the commons, but kept on a proprietary platform where the proprietor is the sole decider what happens to its availability there.
> 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
cheschire 1 days ago [-]
Have you? Assuming Google would want to not put all their chips on that one number and invest all available capital in the purchase of a nation, and assuming that nation were open to being purchased in the first place (big assumption; see Greenland), Google is absolutely still in a place to be able to purchase multiple smaller countries, or one larger one.
arcticfox 1 days ago [-]
Greenland already has a wealthy benefactor, I'd be surprised if poor countries wouldn't be interested
He encodes bits as signs of DCT coefficients. I do feel like this is not as optimal as it could be. A better approach IMO would be to just ignore the AC coefficients altogether and instead encode several bits per block into the DC. Not using the chrominance also feels like a waste.
brandonli28 3 hours ago [-]
This actually won't work against YouTube's compression. The DC coefficient is always quantized, rounded, scale, and any other things. That means that these bits are pretty much guaranteed to be destroyed immediately. If this is the case for every single block, then data is unrecoverable. Also, chrominance is not used on purpose, because chrominance is compressed much more aggressively compared to luminance.
sdenton4 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, I would assume that transcodes kill this eventually...
zokier 2 days ago [-]
Also, how to get your google account banned for abuse.
newqer 1 days ago [-]
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.
compsciphd 1 days ago [-]
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.
e145bc455f1 1 days ago [-]
what other tool do you recommend?
iberator 1 days ago [-]
just pay for storage instead. It's absurd that rich developers are doing ANYTHING but to pay for basic services - ruining the internet for those in real need.
we can't have nice things
catlikesshrimp 1 days ago [-]
you can split files so you can have more par blocks (100GB in 100 1GB parts 32k blocks per part)
compsciphd 2 hours ago [-]
yes, but it just moves the needle a bit, if you lose 1 of the 1GB parts in totality, you also can't recover, so it really depends in on your error model you are trying to protect from.
In practice a DVD like PI/PO model would be the best for many people (protect the 1GB parts like you said with 5-10% redundancy, and then protect all 100 1GB parts together with 5-10% redundancy. the PI will repair as much as it can at the 1GB size, while the PO will be able to repair 1GB blocks that can't be repaired otherwise.
It be interesting if Par2 or something like it could implement it natively without people having to hack together their own one off solutions.
wellf 1 days ago [-]
Or.... backblaze B2
willis936 1 days ago [-]
Plus restic or borg or similar. I tried natively pushing from truenas for a while and it's just slow and unreliable (particularly when it comes to trying to bus out active datasets) and rsync encryption is janky. Restic is built for this kind of archival task. You'll never get hit with surprise bills for storing billions of small files.
metroholografix 1 days ago [-]
6$ / TB / month is a fool's bargain even for something as low as 10 TB. One can buy a used LTO-6 drive for a few hundred bucks and build tape libraries that span hundreds of TBs.
There's no Cloud-based backup service that's competive with tape.
encom 1 days ago [-]
Have Backblaze software stopped being utterly awful, to the point of being almost nonfunctional, yet?
ziml77 1 days ago [-]
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.
wellf 22 hours ago [-]
I use backblaze software and it is fine. Works much better than others in the same pricepoint.
ranger_danger 1 days ago [-]
There are already channels with millions of AI-generated videos on them.
brandonli28 1 days ago [-]
Hey there, Brandon here (developer). I've uploaded an explanation video here for anyone that's interested, which might be useful to watch :D
Love this project, although I would never personally trust YT as Storage, since they can delete your channel/files whenever they want
rzzzt 1 days ago [-]
Upload to other video sharing sites for redundancy. RAIVS!
iberator 1 days ago [-]
Stop ruining the internet end exploiting free resources
rzzzt 1 days ago [-]
It was a tongue-in-cheek / silly suggestion outright. I don't think many people are actually using the tool for its off-ToS purpose though, there is also a lot of prior art across multiple sharing services. It's still interesting to think about the inner workings of it.
Interestingly, this is a specific implementation of a more general idea - leverage social media to store encrypted content, that requires decoding through a trusted app to surface the actual content.
AI tools can use this as a messaging service with deniability. Pretty sure humans already use it in this way. In the past, classifieds in newspapers were a similar messaging service with deniability.
I imagine something like Reddit might make for better storage than this. It'd be pretty trivial to set up a few accounts with private subs too just store encrypted text based data. Not fast or anything but surely easier to work with.
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.
andrewstuart 1 days ago [-]
How does it survive YouTube transcoding.
google234123 17 hours ago [-]
Kind of stupid to do this while planning on doing a summer internship at YouTube?
up2isomorphism 18 hours ago [-]
YouTube is not a place you expect your data will persist. It can disappear, unavailable for any period of time. But if you don’t care if your data is available, why bother with this thing?
This is one of those seemingly “smart” but actually dumb idea.
moritzwarhier 15 hours ago [-]
> This is one of those seemingly “smart” but actually dumb idea.
Your comment seems very sad to me. If you want your data to be safe, you could use physical storage though, and save the data there, on redundant physical hard disks in distributed locations, in various encodings.
You could also try to add even more redundancy by using an audio track with the bit sequences as spoken words combined with a video track that is resilient to low-bandwidth encoding, for example a news show where every segment takes place in front of an info graphic representing one or two bytes per segment. Could be a giant pie chart for variable-precision floating point numbers or a giant still frame of an alphabumeric character to represent raw bytes.
Add some enganging current events to the coverage to make sure the videos stay relevant.
Use large fonts to keep them resilient to video compression.
Combine YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo and at least two disk storage arrays to get five-nines enterprise-grade reliability.
The overhead for encoding and decoding is easily outweighed by the cost-neutral added redundancy.
j45 1 days ago [-]
This is a digital version of a cassette tape to load and save data, love it!
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
Imagine trying to pay for all that content, nobody on earth would be able or willing to supply 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...
Basically being given videos to watch all day, especially coming from the middle east (this was ISIS time so any video from the area had someone watching it as soon as uploaded).
Needless to say there's endless gold no view videos according to him.
It's also interesting that it was no open secret that already in 2018 they were all told that they were essentially training machines to do their job.
https://ytstalker.mov
The original upload would likely still be stored, but not available for viewing.
If they really wanted to compress, take out every other frame, and regenerate those frames with a neural decoder. But I don't know why that would be worth the effort for a stable number of low res files either.
For example, if in year N youtube has f(N) new video. Let assume f(N) = cN^2. It's a crazy rate of growth. It's far better than the real world Youtube, which grew rather linearly.
But the rate of "videos that are older than 5 years" is still faster than that, because it would be cubic instead of quadratic. Unless the it's really exponential (it isn't), "videos that are older than 5 years" will always surpass "new videos this year" eventually.
Such a weird strawman argument that you are making up. You've over thought this so much that you are missing the forest from the trees
Maybe it could be used to train a neutral network. Maybe it contains dirt on a teenager, who might become a politician two decades from now. Maybe it contains an otherwise lost historical event.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268536
Source?
https://www.youtube.com/@lylehsaxon
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mrOXqgShzI0
This shit is the reason I can't afford a new HDD.
One day, somebody is going to be tasked with deciding what gets deleted. It won't be pretty. Old and unloved video will fade into JPEG noise as the compression ratio gets progressively cranked, until all that remains is a textual prompt designed to feed an AI model that can regenerate a facsimile of the original.
Those would be the worst of the lot regarding how valuable they are historically for example. Engaging BS content...
I expect rather than deleting stuff, they'll just crank up the compression on storage of videos that are deemed "low value."
I may have gotten incredibly neurotic about online text since 2022.
I actually considered using an LLM but in my experience they "warp" the content too much for anything like this. The effort required to get them to retain what I would consider something to my taste would take longer than just writing the poem myself. (Although tbf it's been awhile since I've asked a LLM to do parody work, so I could be wrong)
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.
They allow search by timestamp, I’m sure YouTube can write algo to find zero <=1 view
The youtube shorts thing is buggy as shit, it'll just stop working a lot of the time, just won't load a video. Some times you have to go back and forth a few times to get it to load. It'll often desync the comments from the video, so you're seeing comments from a different video. Some times the sound from one short plays over the visuals of another.
It only checks for notifications when you open the website from a new tab, so if you want to see if you have any notifications you have to open youtube in a new tab. Refreshing doesn't work.
Seems like all the competent developers have left.
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.
None of us, in the original discussion threads, knew of it being done before then IIRC.
Honestly, if you aren't taking full advantage within the constraints of the law of workarounds like this, you're basically losing money. Like not spending your entire per diem budget when on a business trip.
Which do you think has more value to me? (a) I save some money by exploiting the storage loophole (b) The existence of a cultural repository of cat videos, animated mathematics explainers, long video essays continue to be available to (some parts of) humanity (for the near future).
Anyway in this situation it's less that YouTube is providing us a service and more, it's captured a treasure trove of our cultural output and sold it back to us. Siphoning back as much value as we can is ethical. If YouTube goes away, we'll replace it - PeerTube or other federated options are viable. The loss of the corpus of videos would be sad but not catastrophic - some of it is backed up. I have ~5Tb of YouTube backed up, most of it smaller channels.
I agree generally with you that the word "value" is overencompassing to the point of absurdity though. Instrumental value is equated with moral worth, personal attachment, and distribution of scarcity. Too many concepts for one word.
I feel the same way. (Although, I am less sure of it.) However, I think backing up important parts of YouTube, as you have done, is a much better approach towards doing this.
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.
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. :(
Looking at the Wikipedia page for "Commons" [0] the first meaning of commons "accessible to all members of a society" is not really true, unless "on the whim of the YT platform". The second meaning of "natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit" is also not really true. There is no understanding that google will take any other than their own benefit into account. The third meaning of commons on that page is closest I guess to what is needed:
> Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.
And that is certainly not what Youtube can be considered to be. Youtube videos are not in the commons, but kept on a proprietary platform where the proprietor is the sole decider what happens to its availability there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons
Exactly which countries could they buy?
Let me guess: you haven’t actually asked gemini
> 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 works.)
https://youtu.be/l03Os5uwWmk?si=nJDwz4s7_E4WFOwC
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.
we can't have nice things
In practice a DVD like PI/PO model would be the best for many people (protect the 1GB parts like you said with 5-10% redundancy, and then protect all 100 1GB parts together with 5-10% redundancy. the PI will repair as much as it can at the 1GB size, while the PO will be able to repair 1GB blocks that can't be repaired otherwise.
It be interesting if Par2 or something like it could implement it natively without people having to hack together their own one off solutions.
There's no Cloud-based backup service that's competive with tape.
https://youtu.be/l03Os5uwWmk?si=nJDwz4s7_E4WFOwC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
(YouTube video for this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03Os5uwWmk)
AI tools can use this as a messaging service with deniability. Pretty sure humans already use it in this way. In the past, classifieds in newspapers were a similar messaging service with deniability.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03Os5uwWmk
This is one of those seemingly “smart” but actually dumb idea.
Your comment seems very sad to me. If you want your data to be safe, you could use physical storage though, and save the data there, on redundant physical hard disks in distributed locations, in various encodings.
You could also try to add even more redundancy by using an audio track with the bit sequences as spoken words combined with a video track that is resilient to low-bandwidth encoding, for example a news show where every segment takes place in front of an info graphic representing one or two bytes per segment. Could be a giant pie chart for variable-precision floating point numbers or a giant still frame of an alphabumeric character to represent raw bytes.
Add some enganging current events to the coverage to make sure the videos stay relevant.
Use large fonts to keep them resilient to video compression.
Combine YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo and at least two disk storage arrays to get five-nines enterprise-grade reliability.
The overhead for encoding and decoding is easily outweighed by the cost-neutral added redundancy.
https://www.tapeheads.net/threads/storing-data-on-your-analo...