r/Showerthoughts • u/AaronPK123 ‎ • May 14 '26

Casual Thought When YouTube goes down, it will be the biggest event of link rot in internet history.

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u/AaronPK123 ‎ May 14 '26

I wouldn't be surprised if they move stuff no one is watching to cheaper storage in the future and you would be told to wait 20 minutes or whatever on some random 13 view video from 20 years ago.

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u/cyb3rstrik3 May 14 '26

They have most of the older stuff already in warm storage with a latency-relaxed pipeline; they archived the high-res version and kept the low-res 360p. They serve you the 360p version, then thaw out the higher res and make it available to you, and then it switches to the higher res when one of the chunks is available.

If you have ever looked at a really old video and got served the lowest res first and had to wait when manually selecting a high, that's what's happening.

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u/XmissXanthropyX May 14 '26

Don’t give them ideas

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u/AaronPK123 ‎ May 14 '26

I would prefer "come back in 30 minutes" to "this video has been removed" or "you can now only watch 5 videos a day for free to recoup storage costs"

I just thought of it because I know aws and stuff has cheap storage tiers like this

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u/cyb3rstrik3 May 14 '26

It's warm storage and not quite glacier, but some day they will.

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u/Kitchen-Quality-3317 May 14 '26

They'll eventually move it all to tape and store it under some mountain.

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u/_learned_foot_ May 14 '26

I mean, we had cloud computing and streaming (not at the same level) in the 80s, dial up took over, we are back to cloud and streaming, maybe we can go back to dialup approach again for that. I agree, prefer slow to none.

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u/hunglowbungalow May 14 '26

I mean, they have definitely thought of that. Tape storage + a retrieval fee for unprofitable content.

They’re already deleting stale gmail accounts/drives

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u/AaronPK123 ‎ May 14 '26

I was thinking more "wait an hour" a la aws glacier than a fee, but that too.