Google to delete old accounts that haven't been accessed for a few months - SO I'D LIKE YOU TO POST OLD ASS VIDEOS FROM YT YOU THINK ARE IMPORTANT.

[General Emílio Médici]

It makes sense sadly. Storage and cloud shit are expensive and Google isn't printing money like they used to. Hell YouTube has literally never turned a profit and always been on the edge of profitability but not more because of how expensive video hosting is (which is why competitors also have a hard time getting started and why they are constantly destroying the platform for ads.) However this is a horrendous idea and will almost surely be a disaster. I think they could compromise by deleting only videos with low view counts (like less than 5k or so) from such inactive accounts but it would still be bad.

I've got several friends and colleagues who either work at Alphabet or have worked for them here in Austin and Mountain View, and they all have said it's a very poorly-run company in terms of product development and management. They can't seem to create anything that generates revenue beyond advertisements. Their enterprise services are somewhat profitable, but are not as competitive as other companies like IBM, Salesforce, etc. The money they make is in spite of their lousy management.

Mildly interesting link showing what google creates and can't stick to: https://killedbygoogle.com/

I'm not surprised they're doing this sort of thing and should be a warning to anyone who relies on their Google accounts for their data. You truly get what you pay for with a company like Google.

The reason Google is so shit at products is because their corporate culture is pretty much made up of hype beasts and flashy PR stunts and announcements as the basis for promotions and accomplishments in the eyes of management and fellow employees, not actually work and results. You get props for creating new things and pushing new Alphabet products but not for actually keeping said products and services working or putting in the elbow grease on the 9-to-5 to keep it maintained.

So that means once a product is delivered you are encouraged by the market forces of office politics to just drop it and move on to the next project and deliver a new product, and the running of the project gets delegated to whoever because no one cares anymore and even if they did there is no reason to be maintaining and improving it when all it gets you is a "feeling of accomplishment" while the rest of the office and company start passing you up for bonuses and promotions and salaries;

 

[Almighty Space Duck]

Thanks for the heads up. Now archiving a channel that’s been inactive for 6 years that is the only source for old tv broadcasts of road races in the eras and series I care about I’ve ever found.
And if I am right then these will be lost when google nuke that channel.

Edit-
I wonder what this will do to do the subscriber counts on channels that are likely being propped up by inactive accounts? I’m thinking of the fat degenerate Jim Sterling since I read his thread but there will be many many more that will see a sharp drop in subscribers.

 

[Human Waiter]

RIP Internet Historian.

Seriously though it will be a shame. I'll have to look through my subscriptions to see if any of the dead channels have videos I want to save.

 

[Benevolent Dictator]

>Google deleting data

That doesn't sound right. But perhaps they can't do anything with personal data from 10 years ago.

 

[Anonitolia]

since the cutoff date is 2 years, I'm going to post some of my favorite YouTube channels that haven't uploaded in that time here
not all of them are small or unknown, but they haven't uploaded in a while so I felt it pertinent
+bonus Jenna Marbles since I watched her when I was little but she got cancel-cultured off the internet years ago and hasn't uploaded since so it's worth mentioning her here too.

Sideways, TooManyMoths, Xidnaf, Cadfog (one year and ten months since the last upload), bad puns (one year and seven months since the last upload, but fuck you it's super underrated and deserves a mention), Local58 TV (see the comment on bad puns), Frederik Knudsen (one year, eleven months, and two weeks since his last upload), PilotRedSun, Jenna Marbles.

EDIT: WE ALSO REALLY NEED TO PRESERVE SHIT LIKE NEUTRAL RESPONSE OR PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME. Sounds weird screaming it like this, but the channels that uploaded them have been inactive for over a decade and they're very important parts of internet history.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I fully believe the archivist mindset for online content came about due to half the internet just disappearing in under five years.

Longer than that. When my first computer died, I didn't save the hard drive. I regret that because there were pictures and videos on there I've never been able to find since. I've tried, but I've never bothered to ask internet sleuths to help me dig because no one cares about old AMVs and Halo kill compellations. They are likely junk now, but have a lot of nostalgia for me if I were to ever find them again.

Hell, there's an Alone in the Dark let's play I love that has some videos missing due to YouTube automatically setting unlisted videos to private years ago.

Thanks for the heads up. Now archiving a channel that’s been inactive for 6 years that is the only source for old tv broadcasts of road races in the eras and series I care about I’ve ever found.
And if I am right then these will be lost when google nuke that channel.

What channel?

>Google deleting data

That doesn't sound right. But perhaps they can't do anything with personal data from 10 years ago.

Right. Current data they can sell, but old data is an inconvenience because it puts protected people in the shit. Better for them to nuke it all.

 

[Almighty Space Duck]

What channel?

oldSCCAguy yah
I do love me some IMSA GTP/GTO era racing.

 

[Anonitolia]

Is there any half-decent way to archive Google Groups?

 

[Celebrate Nite]

https://archive.is/fELoY

They edited some things to their announcement. Apparently they aren't nuking accounts that have YouTube vids, but the wording also says "at this time" meaning in the near future they most likely will.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

It's not just YouTube, there are a lot of older blogs still hanging around that are at risk. These are lower priority since archiving text and photos is easier, but videos are a problem.

Still, the Internet Archive is on uneven ground itself, and archived websites are ALWAYS missing at least a quarter of the pictures (and God help you if they used scripts).

 

[ZMOT]

It's not just YouTube, there are a lot of older blogs still hanging around that are at risk. These are lower priority since archiving text and photos is easier, but videos are a problem.

Still, the Internet Archive is on uneven ground itself, and archived websites are ALWAYS missing at least a quarter of the pictures (and God help you if they used scripts).

another reason why web 2.0 is shit. fucking phones...

 

[FiddleAFox]

I wonder what the owners of clipped 90s/2000s tv shows will have to say about this scenario going down. Those accounts haven't been active in two years and probably aren't ever going to be either because they already got all of the clips they could put onto YouTube.

 

[Anonitolia]

I wonder what the owners of clipped 90s/2000s tv shows will have to say about this scenario going down. Those accounts haven't been active in two years and probably aren't ever going to be either because they already got all of the clips they could put onto YouTube.

pretty sure they're gonna be too inactive to speak, and YouTube'll be happy about that
i'd go so far as to say that a part of why they're doing this might be to purge YT of all that crappy copyrighted stuff that was especially rampant in the past (and still is now- arguably more so)

 

[Colon capital V]

Bro, I will fucking RIOT if they close down Kitty0706 and take down this masterpiece with it:

This could also spell terrible news for YTP accounts that haven't been active in decades, holy FUCK

 

[Celebrate Nite]

a part of why they're doing this might be to purge YT of all that crappy copyrighted stuff that was especially rampant in the past (and still is now- arguably more so)

>and still is now- arguably more so
Gee, it's almost like that had a Streisand Effect when they tried to remove those things the first time around.

Seriously, fuck copyrights. I get taking someone down for uploading a full length feature unedited/unaltered, but all these companies are notoriously money-hungry bastards that WILL go after the little guy for making something even 100% transformative. Its why people fucking hated Warner Music Group back in the day, and it's the same reason why people fucking hate Universal Music group to this day. "oh shit, this person is using a song that belongs to us for more than 5 seconds!? BANNED!! SUED OUT THE ASS!!!" Anything Simpsons/SouthPark/WWE related will make you eat a strike. It's fucking retarded.

 

[FongJonesDong]

I am an ex-Googler who used to pay attention to storage stuff, and storage accounting is basically the reason for all of these deletions. Google is still printing money, but these "free unlimited storage" services basically came from an accounting trick that ended in 2021. Now they are trying to figure out what to do about all the junk data that these services have picked up.

Back in the day, Google storage used to run on hard drives. Since search and ads are I/O-intensive applications, once the disks got over a few hundred GB of capacity, they found themselves saturating the I/O bandwidth of a disk to handle searches long before filling it up with data and running hard drives nearly empty.

Some engineer at the time had the bright idea of separating the throughput of a hard drive from its capacity and selling them as distinct resources. The throughput was called a "spindle" and represented essentially the amount of data that can be retrieved from a disk per second. Each drive comes off the shelf with X TB of capacity and 1 spindle, and now those can be sold to teams separately. Search or ads would generally buy almost the entire spindle and a small chunk of the bytes, and leave the rest of the bytes for other services to buy at an incredibly deep discount (provided that they don't mind having lower priority on reading and writing data on that disk). This is why gmail could afford to launch with 1 GB of storage space, and Google always seemed to have tons of space for your bullshit cat videos.

Eventually, a storage service showed up called crackstore that made this capacity free as long as you were willing to wait for retrieval and have your data move around a little bit. Google Photos was built on top of crackstore, and YouTube became a big user.

In 2021, after SSDs had gotten pretty wide adoption, all of the I/O intensive workloads basically moved to SSDs, including pretty much all of search. Google Cloud also had picked up a shit load of cold data that was now sitting on the disks, too, so the whole price ratio between a spindle and a byte got skewed in favor of the bytes being more valuable than the spindle even though drive capacity is increasing. Free bytes became untenable, and now Google was in a capacity crunch. Crackstore started charging for data, which immediately hit their biggest user, Google Photos. Free storage from photos was the first casualty, but the capacity crunch also meant a huge bill for YouTube, which used crackstore for all the random home videos people uploaded that had 2 views, and was not easy to charge for the way photo storage is. Gmail and docs also have the same problem but to a lesser degree, hence the account deletions.

Free bytes work when you are deploying hard drives for the throughput and trying to fill the bytes, but doesn't work in the modern era of Google where you buy disks for bytes (like normal people). All that data is costing money, and doesn't really add commensurate value, so it's time to delete it.

 

[ATI Escapee]

I found this youtube channel yesterday. It is worth a scroll thru and a watch. Inactive for 10 years. Not saying I agree with this guy....but I think his 'philosophy' is important. Fuck I hope they reverse the decision. https://m.youtube.com/@anikinippon



This particular video is worth a watch from the start...........

God I just love finding philosophical autists that actually commit to their craft so hard you just can't help but be fascinated

 

[I Do Not Post]

Is this article accurate? If so, why is nobody talking about it?