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).
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.
Re:YouTube as Storage
by shevy-java on Saturday February 14, 2026 @10:16AM
(#47015128)
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.
I've stumbled upon very valuable content with very low view numbers - the algorithms spiral around spectacularity and provocation, not quality or insight.
Then it's on you to share it !
But to whom, I have no followers and a blog update has been on my TODO list for two decades..
>videos that had some viewership base, there may be a consideration
Those would be the worst of the lot regarding how valuable they are historically for example. Engaging BS content...
Hopefully the deletion will not affect videos with thousands of views, even if the account is lost.
Re:YouTube as Storage
by loloquwowndueo on Saturday February 14, 2026 @09:43AM
(#47014890)
Sweet summer child.
Re:YouTube as Storage
by CuriouslyC on Saturday February 14, 2026 @09:52AM
(#47014950)
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."
Monuments erode away and memories of those enshrined are lost time as well, nothing lasts forever.
Re:YouTube as Storage
by bentcorner on Saturday February 14, 2026 @10:35AM
(#47015287)
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.This is amazing.
Would've been, once. These days I assume bentcorner asked their favourite LLM to generate a poem parodying Ozymandias about once-popular youtube videos.
or you could get over it and still enjoy it anyway. Like how Coke Zero tastes.
Brought to you by Carl's Jr
That is a fair point. Especially since, assuming it was AI-generated, it presumably wouldn't have existed at all otherwise.
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.
Re:YouTube as Storage
by bentcorner on Sunday February 15, 2026 @10:23AM
(#47024401)
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)
Ah, well, kudos then!
Re:YouTube as Storage
by spriggancg on Saturday February 14, 2026 @11:27AM
(#47015784)
let's see what will last longer over the ages : engraved stone or google?
Re:YouTube as Storage
by georgefrowny on Saturday February 14, 2026 @04:15PM
(#47018460)
Depends on the pH, probably.
Re:YouTube as Storage
by herodoturtle on Saturday February 14, 2026 @11:04AM
(#47015537)
Like tears in rain <3
mono no aware
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.
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.
Not all of the square footage of a data center is usable for racks
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.
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.