I'd be interested to see the statistics on how much of that is comprised of videos that haven't been watched in over a decade, or ever. Surely they could nuke a couple million hours of MLG montage parodies and craft beer podcasts without anyone noticing?
We all have India Derangement Syndrome at this point, but nonetheless I wonder what would happen if Youtube just nuked all content from India (and to a greater extent, Pakistan). If you just go to the main page and view the most recent uploads, it's just an endless stream of useless shit from pajeets. Not to mention they're the ones who run most of the AI slop channels, as well as the channels who steal other people's content to leech off ad revenue such as unauthorized Shorts channels that upload snippets from other videos.
The site would smell a lot better.
If you want to save yourself from some legal troubles later, look up "night routine" and delete those files. You'll know them when you see them.
Are you telling me that or are you quoting my post to refer to a third person? I'm not saving or archiving videos of little girls, I'm no sicko, I just found them when visiting the "Latest" page. In fact right now there are at least 3 videos of little girls on that page that someone archived... It's weird as fuck, and I don't think that stuff needs to be saved.
How the hell did I screw up this badly? Sorry. I meant for PreserveTube... forget it. Retardation on my part.
At one point for a short amount of time there were ads. I turned off my adblock when I noticed it was blocking stuff on the site. Not sure why they got rid of them with a push for donations instead of having both since you know most people are probably not gonna donate. I get ads are annoying but as long as they aren't intrusive and aren't a crazy resource hog I don't care if it's able to help keep the site afloat. (Maybe have a message to urge people to turn off their adblockers?)
Most of it is actually just garbage made by ai accounts in the past 2 years. Youtube has been trying to nuke them off the site and demonetize videos which have ai stuff in them but they're only removing the heavy hitters (over 10k subscribers). That and Indians posting... whatever Indians post...
Perhaps in lieu of permanent reduction in quality, what about tiered storage? Have a normal, faster storage made out of SSDs or whatever, setup for the small bit of videos that are usually or recently watched, and is fast enough to stream at full quality. Then, as videos sit unwatched, they fall out of that smaller, higher speed storage system and get relegated away to a bigger, but slower system made out of traditional hard drives. Then all that remains in the fast storage would be a thumbnail sized downsample of the video at 240p or some other small size that takes up relatively little storage space.
Only if you look at the cost of media. A compatible drive costs roughly 100x that at $5600. I think tape is nifty, too, but it remains limited to big players who have store terabytes of information offsite because they're subject to regulations, and the drives are priced accordingly. That price isn't just manufacturers being greedy assholes taking advantage of deep pockets. Tape transports require some fairly high-precision parts that are not trivial or cheap to make. If you've ever had a video tape or multi-track audio tape transport apart, you'd understand.
My suggestion would be to add a field for "reason for archival" and periodically check the database and prune archives with no good reason. Would save money but cost time.