2/14/2026 at 9:47:53 AM
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
by repeekad
2/14/2026 at 4:02:12 PM
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.
by MagicMoonlight
2/15/2026 at 1:50:40 AM
PeerTube is a thing. I like to think without centralized players like YT, that P2P supported federation may have gained a better foothold.by paulryanrogers
2/15/2026 at 4:23:12 PM
There’s still timeby water9
2/14/2026 at 10:35:10 AM
Videos do disappear, though. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1ioz4x1/is_it_...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...
by arjie
2/14/2026 at 10:58:43 AM
Of course videos disappear for copyright, ToS violations, or when the uploaders remove them. They do not disappear just because nobody watched them.by Kwpolska
2/14/2026 at 1:15:13 PM
There’s a whole activity around discovering random 15 year old videos with almost no views. It’s usually some random home videoby Gigachad
2/15/2026 at 12:30:20 AM
A friend of mine worked two years in YouTube as a content admin.Basically being given videos to watch all day, especially coming from the middle east (this was ISIS time so any video from the area had someone watching it as soon as uploaded).
Needless to say there's endless gold no view videos according to him.
It's also interesting that it was no open secret that already in 2018 they were all told that they were essentially training machines to do their job.
by epolanski
2/15/2026 at 5:34:34 AM
I was interested in the same thing and built a search for itby nabhasablue
2/14/2026 at 3:27:32 PM
They also disappear when the government of Pakistan tells Google to erase them: https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/by leephillips
2/15/2026 at 4:14:40 AM
I seem to recall reading that the HD variations may get removed leaving only 480p or lower for older unwatched videos.The original upload would likely still be stored, but not available for viewing.
by lysp
2/15/2026 at 8:50:57 AM
That would be an odd thing to do. HD is low resolution already, and 480 is noticeably worse.If they really wanted to compress, take out every other frame, and regenerate those frames with a neural decoder. But I don't know why that would be worth the effort for a stable number of low res files either.
by Nevermark
2/14/2026 at 9:52:48 AM
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.by wasmainiac
2/14/2026 at 10:16:15 AM
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 todayby weird-eye-issue
2/14/2026 at 12:44:54 PM
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.by raincole
2/14/2026 at 3:08:05 PM
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.by weird-eye-issue
2/14/2026 at 4:48:23 PM
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.
by raincole
2/15/2026 at 1:02:39 AM
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.by whycombigator
2/14/2026 at 11:58:30 PM
> 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
by weird-eye-issue
2/14/2026 at 8:35:23 PM
Yes. a video no one watches is a waste of storage.by UltraSane
2/15/2026 at 2:00:10 AM
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.
by dotancohen
2/15/2026 at 8:29:55 AM
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 retentionby weird-eye-issue
2/14/2026 at 1:03:59 PM
^ This.by amelius
2/14/2026 at 10:05:55 AM
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:by ranger_danger
2/14/2026 at 10:45:59 AM
There is a channel with 2 million videos: https://www.youtube.com/@RoelVandePaar/videos One with 4 million videos: https://www.youtube.com/@NameLookby HeliumHydride
2/14/2026 at 11:26:13 AM
NameLook puts a whole new meaning to "low effort videos"by buenzlikoder
2/15/2026 at 6:29:18 AM
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.
by qingcharles
2/14/2026 at 11:03:44 AM
First one has transcribed stack overflow to YT by the look of itby wellf
2/15/2026 at 4:15:49 AM
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.by b00ty4breakfast
2/14/2026 at 4:28:08 PM
I guess I should have mentioned I wasn't looking for automated/AI-generated videos.by ranger_danger
2/14/2026 at 9:55:06 AM
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.by pogue
2/14/2026 at 10:25:17 AM
Do they make a profit nowadaysby throw_await
2/14/2026 at 11:53:45 AM
Likely yes, with a margin of perhaps 38%by rezonant
2/15/2026 at 4:28:41 AM
> The volume of videos increases exponentiallySource?
by pwdisswordfishy
2/14/2026 at 1:24:52 PM
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.
by jl6
2/14/2026 at 1:38:48 PM
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).by asah
2/14/2026 at 1:57:19 PM
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.by flux3125
2/14/2026 at 3:16:34 PM
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.by shevy-java
2/14/2026 at 3:58:08 PM
I've stumbled upon very valuable content with very low view numbers - the algorithms spiral around spectacularity and provocation, not quality or insight.by eMPee584
2/15/2026 at 7:32:56 AM
Then it's on you to share it !by asah
2/16/2026 at 5:07:54 PM
But to whom, I have no followers and a blog update has been on my TODO list for two decades..by eMPee584
2/14/2026 at 6:47:02 PM
>videos that had some viewership base, there may be a considerationThose would be the worst of the lot regarding how valuable they are historically for example. Engaging BS content...
by coldtea
2/14/2026 at 2:27:50 PM
Hopefully the deletion will not affect videos with thousands of views, even if the account is lost.by zaik
2/14/2026 at 2:43:08 PM
[flagged]by loloquwowndueo
2/14/2026 at 2:52:54 PM
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."
by CuriouslyC
2/14/2026 at 2:25:40 PM
Monuments erode away and memories of those enshrined are lost time as well, nothing lasts forever.by dessimus
2/14/2026 at 3:35:14 PM
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.by bentcorner
2/14/2026 at 10:18:11 PM
This is amazing.by donkeyboy
2/15/2026 at 12:03:33 AM
Would've been, once. These days I assume bentcorner asked their favourite LLM to generate a poem parodying Ozymandias about once-popular youtube videos.by tempestn
2/15/2026 at 4:38:02 AM
It doesn't feel like it at all (I'd never expect an LLM to say 'pfp' like that, or 'lossly[sic] compressed', ASCII instead of fancy quotes) but who knows at this point.I may have gotten incredibly neurotic about online text since 2022.
by 1bpp
2/15/2026 at 3:23:34 PM
Nope, I hand wrote this.I actually considered using an LLM but in my experience they "warp" the content too much for anything like this. The effort required to get them to retain what I would consider something to my taste would take longer than just writing the poem myself. (Although tbf it's been awhile since I've asked a LLM to do parody work, so I could be wrong)
by bentcorner
2/16/2026 at 5:02:55 AM
Ah, well, kudos then!by tempestn
2/15/2026 at 3:26:38 AM
or you could get over it and still enjoy it anyway. Like how Coke Zero tastes.by fragmede
2/15/2026 at 5:44:56 AM
That is a fair point. Especially since, assuming it was AI-generated, it presumably wouldn't have existed at all otherwise.by tempestn
2/15/2026 at 5:22:14 AM
Brought to you by Carl's Jrby joquarky
2/14/2026 at 4:27:18 PM
let's see what will last longer over the ages : engraved stone or google?by spriggancg
2/14/2026 at 9:15:34 PM
Depends on the pH, probably.by georgefrowny
2/14/2026 at 4:04:04 PM
Like tears in rain <3by herodoturtle
2/14/2026 at 7:21:15 PM
mono no awareby ralusek
2/14/2026 at 4:53:24 PM
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.by 1313ed01
2/14/2026 at 3:31:37 PM
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.by dyauspitr
2/14/2026 at 4:17:14 PM
Not all of the square footage of a data center is usable for racksby semitones
2/15/2026 at 12:10:39 AM
Oh. I noticed in an AI music generation service I use that old pieces were severely degraded to the point that they were crackling really bad... And I remember thinking that it's a good thing I downloaded an mp3 of my favorites. I confirmed that the quality is very different by listening to the downloaded recording with the hosted version side-by-side.by jongjong
2/14/2026 at 1:06:22 PM
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.
by ntoskrnl_exe
2/14/2026 at 1:12:16 PM
S3 allows delete and is efficient here. I’m sure Google can figure it outThey allow search by timestamp, I’m sure YouTube can write algo to find zero <=1 view
by stogot
2/14/2026 at 1:10:03 PM
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.by dev1ycan
2/14/2026 at 1:42:58 PM
I’m pretty sure this is the real reason why they changed old unlisted videos to being marked private: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-youtube-unlisted...by joecool1029
2/14/2026 at 4:13:41 PM
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"..by eMPee584
2/14/2026 at 1:07:56 PM
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.by moffkalast
2/14/2026 at 1:26:44 PM
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.
by sfn42
2/14/2026 at 1:55:59 PM
and if you do a hard refresh on the webapp, it literally takes like 10 seconds for the homepage to loadby r_lee
2/14/2026 at 2:37:02 PM
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.by sfn42