Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history | Hacker News Reader

Twitch's new storage limits will purge swaths of Internet gaming history

arstechnica.com

58 points01-_-45 comments

I never really considered Twitch to be a platform that _kept_ videos, only stream them to the viewer. If you're on Twitch and you want to make your video permanent, you have to upload it to Youtube. That's how most of the streamers I watch handle it anyway.

Google is a solid behemoth, but they don't provide safekeeping for regular users.

Without recourse, they can lock you out of your account, or delete pieces of your data for umbrella reasons (copyright, csam, undisclosed)

That said, saving the stream as a video to youtube is a good idea because of redundancy.

> Google is a solid behemoth

10 years ago, Google promised certain college alumni high storage limits forever. In the past 4 months, Google decreased the storage limits two times, and told users to reduce their GDrive use or have their emails deleted

Didn’t consider the AGI race would lead to the loss of digital archives owned by the few companies that could afford to keep those archives up for free

I have seen people upload petabytes worth of pirated content onto those student mail accounts. Most of it got purged after the limits were imposed.

I assume Twitch doesn't make much from people watching old streams. Do they put adverts on them?

I watch a lot of gaming playthroughs on YouTube, frequently years after they happened. I guess Twitch isn't in that market.

> I assume Twitch doesn't make much from people watching old streams.

Something like 0.5% of all viewtime goes to them, according to Twitch.

> Do they put adverts on them?

They have ads on VODs (records of recent streams from the last 30-60 days), so I guess they have them also on the Highlights. And it seems Twitch is grabbing all the income from those ads, streamers get nothing. Speaks loud if they still think it's monetary beneficial to save the costs for storage.

> I guess Twitch isn't in that market.

Twitch is mainly live-content, a big part of the experience is to see content in a timely context and have chat-interaction. Some people are also watching VODs when they had no time to watch it live, but IIRC that only 50-10% of the viewer, and rarely consistent.

Highlights are a bit of an outside on that site, because they are not well advertised, you can't easily find a specific video by content and the viewing-experience on YouTube is simply superior. You basically have to know about them and specifically search for them.

>streamers get nothing Lmao, they get a centralised platform to hock their performances from. They don't have to worry about hiring people to build them said platform, manage infra, bandwidth, uptime/sla etc.

> Something like 0.5% of all viewtime goes to them, according to Twitch.

That's a lot of minutes.

> To date, Twitch content has been viewed for 21 BILLION hours[1]

[1] https://twitchtracker.com/statistics

Indeed, on an individual level this seems like much, but on the global level it's still not much. At worst, you will lose a low number of users.

But I have to correct myself, highlights make up <0.1% of viewing time, but this change will impact 0.5% of streamers.

Facebook is doing the same thing[0] meaning that YouTube is Web's utility at this point. Google is so profitable that they will not put any limit on your YouTube storage anytime soon.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/18/facebook-now-only-stores-l...

I have been dealing with extracting photos from Google photos in a reasonable way. That experience has reminded the only backup is the backup you fully control. Download your content, duplicate it on a second disk, and use a general purpose cloud storage system to sync it.

You can submit bulk requests but as of a few years ago the full resolution isn't uploaded unless you are on their premium plan, the best option is to pull them from the devices directly.

Does google takeout not work? I’ve been intending to help my partner move off of Google Photos and takeout is what I had planned.

It works well.

Google is so good at making money that they won’t let opportunities like removing “non revenue generating content” and “high maintenance content” pass them by. A problem that started with larry page visiting steve jobs in his deathbed.

The days of accumulating data for it to be profitable someday in the future are going away with the introduction of AI. Once the videos have quenched research possibilities, the data will be removed.

And google street view will need a license to use

Google will do the same thing, it's only a question of when (and I will be in trouble when they do!) The first step in this direction was turning off Google Photos free storage at lower resolution.

I remember a purge they did on VODs 10 years ago: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Twitch.tv#Broadcast_r...

I remember the subsequent workaround: "PSA: your past streams will be deleted after X days, unless you mark the whole thing as a highlight." It mostly only made sense for infrequent streamers (e.g. if you had one stream every few months) since it would quickly get quite overwhelming if you were streaming every day.

Guess Twitch finally wised up to that loophole. It's a pity, but I get it, storage isn't free even if you are an arm of an internet behemoth who makes many billions of profit every year.

In a speed running context, those saying “the streamers just need to save their best content and ditch the rest”.

I think this works if we’re assuming all those world record holders are still active, I can imagine many have gone on to other things or haven’t logged into their account in years.

So it will certainly need to be a community effort to try and preserve some historic runs done over the years. I don’t even know if footage can be archived if not owned by the original streamer

Fundamentally, you should have multiple copies of any data you really want to keep. Those copies should be spread across multiple storage media and physical locations. Optimally, you retain direct control of some subset of the copies.

Disasters happen. Even in absence of this policy change, what would the community do if weather, fire, malicious actors, etc caused some massive failure that resulted in substantial data loss for Twitch? No warning, no time window, it's just gone?

Events like these, where it's not sudden and complete loss, are great reminders to actually protect data you think is worth protecting. Twitch is one "copy" and not one that is directly controlled by the creator.

As to archival options when the original creator is no longer available for whatever reason, there's always the option of screen recording. This will be somewhat lossy versus the original video, but it works.

yt-dlp for downloading - no need to screen record

> An “incalculable” loss

Simply not true. Only because it is possible to record every moment in someone's personal gaming time, does not make it historically relevant.

100 hours is a lot of time if you just keep the relevant parts of your videos. And you can always just host your additional stuff on YouTube or Vimeo, if you want.

I am not even sure if there are some decent twitch alternatives except maybe youtube?

Kick is mostly used by people doing ahem not so illegal stuff.

What else am I missing someone.

I really believe that youtube is a better alternative to twitch in the long run. But that might change as well who knows.

They’re not calculating the value these streams have as data for training AI?

They can still keep them in their archive.

Doesn't good stuff on Twitch get cross-posted to Youtube anyway? I imagine the actual stream is several hours long and not really of interest to 'historians' or Twitch viewers.

Earlier source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43109669

This is really a tragedy, I would have at least hoped they would have offered it someone like archive.org to keep.

I hope this won't make YouTube pull the same stunt in the near future, at least for the smaller channels.

I’ve been thinking about this and waiting for when they charge money to keep content stored on their servers.

In all likelihood, too few people would be willing to pay for this long-term to be worth implementing it. And it would increase the chances of an alternative platform becoming successful, more than just deleting old videos, because having to pay for something that was free before tends to cause a bigger outcry, and also because it would give people more time to migrate their videos.

They did that some years ago, deleting videos from inactive channels. And then stepped back at some point.

Why? All this stuff costs money.

Blame all the fuckwits of the world for uploading yet another "40 hours of black screen with a metal pipe sound randomly through the video" video.

I saw they take in like 4.3PB a day but that post was from years ago so it's probably even more, now.

Those 40 hours of black screen probably compress pretty well. If that's not good enough, maybe reducing old/unwatched content to 480p would be a good alternative to just purging it?

Also, 4.3PB per day, at today's newegg HDD prices, is about $100k per day or $36.5 million per year. Yeah, you have to consider replication and whatnot, but you get the point-- this is pocket change for Google.

That seems like moving the problem from memory to compute.

Acquiring the SSD isn't the only cost, it's also paying for power, the cost of the buildings they are housed in, the staff to look after such hardware, hiring SREs to maintain availability etc which will also make it higher.

For me it's only my personal photo library, but in an age where we constantly produce data and don't have a sense for limitations in regards to storage space (unlike with my bookshelves, boxes of fabrics for sewing and board game collection) we should get into the habit of deleting content that isn't worth storing and condensing long videos.

So they're keeping the erotic stream content? I can get behind this decision :^)

Incalculable? If you care so much I can calculate how much Amazon Glacier will cost you to archive all of this "priceless" footage. Are we seriously expecting a streaming platform to be the Library of Congress now? If so, let the government pay to keep everything forever

Is this a zoomer thing or do people not know how to save things anymore?

New generations (re)discover that the cloud is just someone else’s computer, and that on a service you don’t pay for you’re the product and not the customer.

On short notice. Really short notice. This has easily sent thousands of people into a panic.

Twitch are out of their minds, and there's a blatant disconnect with the streamers.

Twitch knows exactly what they're doing. They're forcing streamers to assume the responsibility & cost for storing & serving video archives. Twitch's costs go down, which means their profit goes up, which makes their execs & shareholders happier. They're unlikely to lose much business, & if they do lose business it will be dwarfed by the cost savings & increased profits.

A lot of archived streamer footage will disappear; most archived footage that is preserved will likely uploaded to streamers' YouTube channel(s).

Yes, they know what they're doing re: moving the responsibility of storing/serving video archives to the streamer.

No, they don't know what they're doing re: doing this on such short notice. Few streamers have the time, network bandwidth and local storage to salvage the data in such short notice.

As a result, many a streamer is working without sleep moving data to save it from certain doom.

Just ask one of the generative models to recreate this "priceless" footage, at least one of them will have slurped up most of it by now.

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