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Comment by wasmainiac | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

^ This.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

Yes. a video no one watches is a waste of storage.

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.

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

I wonder if anyone has ever compiled a list of channels with abnormally large numbers of videos? For example this guy has over 14,000:

https://www.youtube.com/@lylehsaxon

There is a channel with 2 million videos: https://www.youtube.com/@RoelVandePaar/videos One with 4 million videos: https://www.youtube.com/@NameLook

First one has transcribed stack overflow to YT by the look of it

NameLook puts a whole new meaning to "low effort videos"

Lord above. This is the worst garbage I've ever seen:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mrOXqgShzI0

This shit is the reason I can't afford a new HDD.

I guess I should have mentioned I wasn't looking for automated/AI-generated videos.

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.

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.

Do they make a profit nowadays

Likely yes, with a margin of perhaps 38%

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268536

> The volume of videos increases exponentially

Source?

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