4 ms·

I did some napkin math. If 1 billion people each backed up 10gb, we’d almost have enough to store a copy of YouTube with zero data redundancy. Google is massiv

by KMnO4 4y ago

I did some napkin math. If 1 billion people each backed up 10gb, we’d almost have enough to store a copy of YouTube with zero data redundancy. Google is massive.

CamelCaseName 4y ago
It's unbelievable that YouTube was as free as it was for as long as it was. We got too great a deal for so long that we many people can't see things any other way.
- yesco 4y ago
  Was probably easier when the videos had a time limit and didn't support 4K (or 1080p even).
  - judge2020 4y ago
    For reference, 1080p was in 2009: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/1080p-hd-comes-to-youtube/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/1080p-hd-comes-to-youtu... while ads came out much before then: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/partner-program-expands/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/partner-program-expands...
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  It is not "free" at all if you are paying with your data. My data privacy is worth way more than the cost of streaming some video with crap discovery.
- rchaud 4y ago
  It's unbelievable that Wikipedia is free and survives on donations. Youtube sells ads and is subsidized by one of the biggest ad companies in the world that happens to have a lot of cheap cloud storage available.
  - AkshatJ27 4y ago
    Bandwidth is expensive and videos take up way more bandwidth than text. I'd say it would be pretty much impossible to run something like YouTube, on that big of a scale, solely on donations.
  - nerpderp82 4y ago
    YT is not subsidized by Google, it makes a profit. The scale of storage and serving is not of any real comparable scale.
    - Nifty3929 4y ago
      I wonder how many orders of magnitude separate the amount of data stored in YouTube vs Wikipedia? 5? 6? How about data served by them?
      - Jensson 4y ago
        About 8 for storage, wikipedia is gigabytes, youtube is around exabytes.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      Not for the first 15 years it didn't.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    My understanding is that Wikipedia does not survive on, or even need donations, at all: they are entirely funded through their endowment. The donations go to the Wikimedia Foundation which spends the money on a bunch of other social stuff that's not related to running Wikipedia at all. So unless you want to support all those other causes, you're effectively wasting your money by donating to Wikipedia's frequent donation requests. Wikipedia isn't the storage hog that YouTube is; it doesn't cost that much to keep it afloat, and the people moderating the content (the editors) are all volunteers anyway.
    - alexvoda 4y ago
okasaki 4y ago
But most people have more free disk space than 10gb, and most people also have more than 1 device. I have 2 phones, 3 laptops, a desktop and a NAS, with some 40TB between them. My workplace has a private cloud with some 70PB of storage, plus tape, and tons of desktops and laptops.
- masukomi 4y ago
  a) i seriously doubt your "most" claim about free disk space. Maybe "most privileged white folks in rich countries" but not "most people" b) just because i HAVE 10Gb of free disk space doesn't mean i'm going to offer it up for archiving of random internet crap c) if it was on my phone it'd cost money and now we're very actively ignoring just how expensive it is to be online in 3rd world countries if you're not a rich expat. > My workplace has a private cloud with some 70PB of storage, plus tape, and tons of desktops and laptops. sure. HOw much of that do you think they'd be willing to contribute, for free to backing up random crap from people on the internet that may or may not be legal and could open them up to litigation because they're not an ISP / platform and thus not protected by the Shield laws?
  - olonn 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - aktenlage 4y ago
      Wow, the word racism is used really inflationary. I cannot find that the GP has posted a derogatory opinion about other "races". Maybe they are a bit narrow minded or ignorant, but calling them "racist maggot" is ridiculous.
    - TOMDM 4y ago
      > stopped reading here Your account is 5 days old. Either you need to learn the culture instead of telling other people, or you're a coward that won't voice their real opinions on their main account. Or you've been banned already and need to take the hint.
  - 4y ago
amelius 4y ago
We're currently at around $0.02 per GB, so that would be $0.20 per person. A bargain. (From a random source on the internet, [1]) [1] https://www.petercai.com/storage-prices-have-sort-of-stopped-dropping/ https://www.petercai.com/storage-prices-have-sort-of-stopped...
swyx 4y ago
wait, is the total number of videos on YouTube a known number? thats fascinating, i'd love to see your assumptions for napkin math
imiric 4y ago
That's impressive indeed, but if we boil it down to just the things that are worth saving, removing duplicates, long and pointless livestreams, long videos that are just endless loops, etc., it could be done with much less space. If we also ignore auto generated spam[1] and harmful content (Elsagate, etc.), it would require even less. It's a nice thought experiment, but we really don't need to archive all of YT. That's why I appreciate projects like this and yt-dlp that allow me to not just archive what I'm interested in, but to watch it when and how I want, without Google tracking my every move, and interrupting every few minutes with ads. Paying for YT Premium only partially solves the second issue. I don't want to see sponsored content either. [1]: https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Roel_Van_de_Paar https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Roel_Van_de_Paar
- tcmb 4y ago
  I would argue that backing up selectively instead of just grabbing everything makes the job harder, not easier. You might need less storage, but who will decide (and how) what gets stored and what doesn't?
  - alexvoda 4y ago
    In a world where backing up to IPFS would be as easy and widespread as hitting Ctrl+D to bookmark and sharing backups would not be dangerous legally, your answer gets an easy answer. Each person gets to decide what they find important, backup and commit resources to. We already have the sharing technology (BitTorrent, IPFS), and the backuping tech (ArchiveBox, TubeArchivist). But they are not integrated and they are not easy to configure and use for a nontechnical person. And they are unlikely to become mainstream thanks to the copyright cartel. Many years ago there was the dream of every home having a home computer giving people ownership over their digital life. A world where everyone has their own email server, their own diaspora pod for their family, their own blog, etc. etc. and all they had to do was buy or build a box and plug it in. Projects like freedomplug and sandstorm.io and YunoHost and others. There are even newer projects like Umbrel. And of course NASs that now have apps on them. Arguably, NASs and Umbrel are really easy to configure and use. OMV is somewhat harder but not unreasonable. Alas, a self sovereign world is not what people desire. People are content with letting themselves be controlled by a few megacorps. Everything is in the cloud (someone else's computer). Also, with the rise of botnets and DDOSs, it became unfeasible to self host something public without something like Cloudflare in front. I miss the old internet.
jl6 4y ago
I’m not aware that Google make public the total size of YouTube. Your estimate is 10EB. That seems quite low.

by KMnO4 4y ago

I did some napkin math. If 1 billion people each backed up 10gb, we’d almost have enough to store a copy of YouTube with zero data redundancy. Google is massive.

CamelCaseName 4y ago

It's unbelievable that YouTube was as free as it was for as long as it was. We got too great a deal for so long that we many people can't see things any other way.

yesco 4y ago
Was probably easier when the videos had a time limit and didn't support 4K (or 1080p even).
- judge2020 4y ago
  For reference, 1080p was in 2009: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/1080p-hd-comes-to-youtube/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/1080p-hd-comes-to-youtu... while ads came out much before then: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/partner-program-expands/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/partner-program-expands...
wintermutestwin 4y ago
It is not "free" at all if you are paying with your data. My data privacy is worth way more than the cost of streaming some video with crap discovery.
rchaud 4y ago
It's unbelievable that Wikipedia is free and survives on donations. Youtube sells ads and is subsidized by one of the biggest ad companies in the world that happens to have a lot of cheap cloud storage available.
- AkshatJ27 4y ago
  Bandwidth is expensive and videos take up way more bandwidth than text. I'd say it would be pretty much impossible to run something like YouTube, on that big of a scale, solely on donations.
- nerpderp82 4y ago
  YT is not subsidized by Google, it makes a profit. The scale of storage and serving is not of any real comparable scale.
  - Nifty3929 4y ago
    I wonder how many orders of magnitude separate the amount of data stored in YouTube vs Wikipedia? 5? 6? How about data served by them?
    - Jensson 4y ago
      About 8 for storage, wikipedia is gigabytes, youtube is around exabytes.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Not for the first 15 years it didn't.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  My understanding is that Wikipedia does not survive on, or even need donations, at all: they are entirely funded through their endowment. The donations go to the Wikimedia Foundation which spends the money on a bunch of other social stuff that's not related to running Wikipedia at all. So unless you want to support all those other causes, you're effectively wasting your money by donating to Wikipedia's frequent donation requests. Wikipedia isn't the storage hog that YouTube is; it doesn't cost that much to keep it afloat, and the people moderating the content (the editors) are all volunteers anyway.
  - alexvoda 4y ago

okasaki 4y ago

But most people have more free disk space than 10gb, and most people also have more than 1 device. I have 2 phones, 3 laptops, a desktop and a NAS, with some 40TB between them. My workplace has a private cloud with some 70PB of storage, plus tape, and tons of desktops and laptops.

masukomi 4y ago
a) i seriously doubt your "most" claim about free disk space. Maybe "most privileged white folks in rich countries" but not "most people" b) just because i HAVE 10Gb of free disk space doesn't mean i'm going to offer it up for archiving of random internet crap c) if it was on my phone it'd cost money and now we're very actively ignoring just how expensive it is to be online in 3rd world countries if you're not a rich expat. > My workplace has a private cloud with some 70PB of storage, plus tape, and tons of desktops and laptops. sure. HOw much of that do you think they'd be willing to contribute, for free to backing up random crap from people on the internet that may or may not be legal and could open them up to litigation because they're not an ISP / platform and thus not protected by the Shield laws?
- olonn 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - aktenlage 4y ago
    Wow, the word racism is used really inflationary. I cannot find that the GP has posted a derogatory opinion about other "races". Maybe they are a bit narrow minded or ignorant, but calling them "racist maggot" is ridiculous.
  - TOMDM 4y ago
    > stopped reading here Your account is 5 days old. Either you need to learn the culture instead of telling other people, or you're a coward that won't voice their real opinions on their main account. Or you've been banned already and need to take the hint.
- 4y ago

amelius 4y ago

We're currently at around $0.02 per GB, so that would be $0.20 per person. A bargain. (From a random source on the internet, [1]) [1] https://www.petercai.com/storage-prices-have-sort-of-stopped-dropping/ https://www.petercai.com/storage-prices-have-sort-of-stopped...

swyx 4y ago

wait, is the total number of videos on YouTube a known number? thats fascinating, i'd love to see your assumptions for napkin math

imiric 4y ago

That's impressive indeed, but if we boil it down to just the things that are worth saving, removing duplicates, long and pointless livestreams, long videos that are just endless loops, etc., it could be done with much less space. If we also ignore auto generated spam[1] and harmful content (Elsagate, etc.), it would require even less. It's a nice thought experiment, but we really don't need to archive all of YT. That's why I appreciate projects like this and yt-dlp that allow me to not just archive what I'm interested in, but to watch it when and how I want, without Google tracking my every move, and interrupting every few minutes with ads. Paying for YT Premium only partially solves the second issue. I don't want to see sponsored content either. [1]: https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Roel_Van_de_Paar https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Roel_Van_de_Paar

tcmb 4y ago
I would argue that backing up selectively instead of just grabbing everything makes the job harder, not easier. You might need less storage, but who will decide (and how) what gets stored and what doesn't?
- alexvoda 4y ago
  In a world where backing up to IPFS would be as easy and widespread as hitting Ctrl+D to bookmark and sharing backups would not be dangerous legally, your answer gets an easy answer. Each person gets to decide what they find important, backup and commit resources to. We already have the sharing technology (BitTorrent, IPFS), and the backuping tech (ArchiveBox, TubeArchivist). But they are not integrated and they are not easy to configure and use for a nontechnical person. And they are unlikely to become mainstream thanks to the copyright cartel. Many years ago there was the dream of every home having a home computer giving people ownership over their digital life. A world where everyone has their own email server, their own diaspora pod for their family, their own blog, etc. etc. and all they had to do was buy or build a box and plug it in. Projects like freedomplug and sandstorm.io and YunoHost and others. There are even newer projects like Umbrel. And of course NASs that now have apps on them. Arguably, NASs and Umbrel are really easy to configure and use. OMV is somewhat harder but not unreasonable. Alas, a self sovereign world is not what people desire. People are content with letting themselves be controlled by a few megacorps. Everything is in the cloud (someone else's computer). Also, with the rise of botnets and DDOSs, it became unfeasible to self host something public without something like Cloudflare in front. I miss the old internet.

jl6 4y ago

I’m not aware that Google make public the total size of YouTube. Your estimate is 10EB. That seems quite low.