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.
repeekad [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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
Now that they can harvest it all for AI training, that decision was the cheapest and greatest thing they ever did.
Imagine trying to pay for all that content, nobody on earth would be able or willing to supply it.
wasmainiac [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
UltraSane [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes. a video no one watches is a waste of storage.
amelius [3 hidden]5 mins ago
^ This.
pogue [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
NameLook puts a whole new meaning to "low effort videos"
wellf [3 hidden]5 mins ago
First one has transcribed stack overflow to YT by the look of it
ranger_danger [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I guess I should have mentioned I wasn't looking for automated/AI-generated videos.
jl6 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I've stumbled upon very valuable content with very low view numbers - the algorithms spiral around spectacularity and provocation, not quality or insight.
coldtea [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Hopefully the deletion will not affect videos with thousands of views, even if the account is lost.
loloquwowndueo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Sweet summer child.
CuriouslyC [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Monuments erode away and memories of those enshrined are lost time as well, nothing lasts forever.
bentcorner [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
spriggancg [3 hidden]5 mins ago
let's see what will last longer over the ages : engraved stone or google?
georgefrowny [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Depends on the pH, probably.
herodoturtle [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Like tears in rain <3
ralusek [3 hidden]5 mins ago
mono no aware
1313ed01 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Not all of the square footage of a data center is usable for racks
ntoskrnl_exe [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
dev1ycan [3 hidden]5 mins 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"..
stogot [3 hidden]5 mins 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
moffkalast [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
and if you do a hard refresh on the webapp, it literally takes like 10 seconds for the homepage to load
sfn42 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This ia really cool but also feels like a potential burden on the commons,
vasco [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
asah [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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. :(
agnishom [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
cheonn638 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Greenland already has a wealthy benefactor, I'd be surprised if poor countries wouldn't be interested
Yes it is inefficient. But youtube pays the storage ;-). (There is probably a limit on free accounts, and it is probably not allowed by the TOS.)
genidoi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Right, you just pay daily in worrying when, not if, youtube will terminate your account and delete your "videos".
madmads [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think it's just meant to be a fun experiment, not your next enterprise backup site
K0balt [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Stegonagraphic backup with crappy ai transmogrified reaction videos. Free backup for openclaw agents so they can take over the internet lol
sdenton4 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yeah, I would assume that transcodes kill this eventually...
zokier [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Also, how to get your google account banned for abuse.
newqer [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
what other tool do you recommend?
iberator [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
you can split files so you can have more par blocks (100GB in 100 1GB parts 32k blocks per part)
wellf [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Or.... backblaze B2
willis936 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
encom [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Have Backblaze software stopped being utterly awful, to the point of being almost nonfunctional, yet?
ziml77 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
ranger_danger [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There are already channels with millions of AI-generated videos on them.
esskay [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
Love this project, although I would never personally trust YT as Storage, since they can delete your channel/files whenever they want
rzzzt [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Upload to other video sharing sites for redundancy. RAIVS!
iberator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Stop ruining the internet end exploiting free resources
rzzzt [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
qwertox [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The explainer video on the page [0] is a pretty nice explanation for people who don't really know what video compression is about.
I can remember the years when YouTube was used by Contentdistributors by uploading high quality material protected with a password :-D
shevy-java [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
HN.zip
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.
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
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...
Imagine trying to pay for all that content, nobody on earth would be able or willing to supply it.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268536
https://www.youtube.com/@lylehsaxon
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."
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.
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. :(
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
(YouTube video for this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03Os5uwWmk)
https://youtu.be/l03Os5uwWmk?si=nJDwz4s7_E4WFOwC
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03Os5uwWmk
https://www.tapeheads.net/threads/storing-data-on-your-analo...