This is part 2 of a 3-part article series about minimalism, file storage, and the curious case of YouTube. You can find the other parts using the links below.
- Tips for back-ups and storage management
- YouTube is running out of space (this article)
- A Life Lesson: Upper Limits
What’s happening
Now onto the second reason I wrote this article series: some news articles and online discussion about Google (and YouTube, and other major websites) running out of space.
More articles from my country—the Netherlands—about all the data centers they want to build here, and how nobody wants them. Which commonly receives the “counter argument” of: “Well if you want to keep using Facebook/Google/YouTube (for free), you have to accept its data centers!”
The largest website in the entire world is probably YouTube. The sheer amount of videos that are being uploaded and watched, every millisecond of every day, is astounding. No wonder they’re running out of online storage space. No wonder they’re scrambling to show as many ads as possible and find silly reasons to ban people and clean their platform.
I’m not saying it’s not a problem. But as the first part of this article series introduced, the solution is not to build more data centers, to use even more energy, to destroy even more parts of the world to basically build massive hard drives.
The solution is not to start asking a lot of money for those 10GB/15GB free accounts. Most people would just stop using it (increasing loss of valuable data, or purchases of external hard drives), or switch to whoever is still willing to offer that for free.
In fact, once people pay for their online storage, they accept loads of it. In fact, Google offers “infinite storage” plans if you’re a big organization or pay enough. Many others do the same. As such, making online storage space “premium” will have people expect a premium service and just store more, and more, and more junk online.
The solution(s)
No, the solution is to just stop being stupid with what we store and how.
Individually,
- Stop lugging around dead weight.
- Clean up your files and folders regularly, but especially once done.
- Keep your most recent or best work; minimize the rest.
- (Always keep an offline copy of everything. Don’t expect Google to never go down, never have a failure, never lose your data. They’re not magic!)
But the biggest power, of course, is in the hands of the platforms themselves.
Why … on earth … does YouTube have no restrictions at all on video uploads?
Of course you’re going to run into trouble if you have to support millions of people uploading 10 hour loops of the same song with just a static image … in 4K resolution.
Of course you’re running into trouble with all those YouTubers who swear to upload something daily, of at least 10 minutes, no matter what it takes.
And nobody ever deletes anything. When they’re done with their channel, they just start a new one and leave terabytes of video data online on the old one. Videos that were useless and junk when they were uploaded, but are certainly irrelevant or outdated now.
This is clearly unsustainable, while the solution is simple.
For example, they could cap the resolution of videos at 1080p.
- Most people can’t tell the difference between that and higher resolutions anyway.
- Most people don’t have the screen or internet connection for higher resolutions.
- I live in the Netherlands—a very modern and technological country—and I have to watch most stuff in 480p anyway. And that’s fine!
- Most videos absolutely don’t need that. (For example, when it’s just a person sitting in their bedroom and talking to a camera. Or one of those looping videos I just mentioned.)
- It’s absolutely reasonable to, if you really wanted, ask people to pay (or require a special type of account) for super high-quality videos.
This alone would save tons of storage space, without really losing anything.
Or they could simply set a hard maximum on the file size, length of videos, or number of videos you upload per day/week.
- Again, most people don’t need more or want more.
- This would save tons of space again.
- And it’s reasonable to gatekeep by having a premium account (or whatever) with no or higher limits. Though, preferably, you’d just keep this the same for everyone.
All these limits wouldn’t even take extra work. Computer systems are limited by default. YouTube had to work to make everything possible; everything we take for granted today, and everyone can (ab)use for free, whenever they want, however often they want.
So use the limits. Stick to them. There is a large gray area in which you can restrict something, without ruining creative expression or its commercial potential.
But for most of the internet’s history—and especially nowadays—platforms go out of their way to completely ignore that area and just give “infinite storage” or “infinite scaling”. Which is inherently unsustainable.
Hopefully, you can already think of other restrictions too.
Like, limit the number of comments. Set a really low limit! The creator has to personally approve them all; only the best ones with the most value are kept. (If people really want a discussion, move to a separate platform/page/approach. Keep YouTube for videos only.)
What are we losing? Hundreds of comments on a video saying very insightful stuff like “nice” or “you spelled the title wrong” or “I’m tired”? Thousands of comments that the creator simply “hearts” by default to pretend they engage with their audience?
Restrictions breed creativity. People will rise to the challenge. You’re not losing anything of value here.
Back in the old days, when YouTube was barely a few years old, there were many channels with crazy high production value, and crazy workarounds around the strict limitations of the time.
Heck, you might even shut of YouTube one day in the week. When I was young, everything was closed on Sunday. I could freely play soccer on the parking lot of my local supermarket, because there weren’t any cars and there weren’t any people. (Though, after I had a nasty fall on the stones once, my mother put a stop to that.)
And you know what? Society was fine! Sunday was a really quiet and peaceful day. You knew everything would be closed, so people had the ingenious idea to buy a few more groceries before the weekend. Woah!
Now those supermarkets are open all the time. They’re busy all the time. The road before our home is noisy and it’s bad for my ears and concentration. There’s extra stress, and many a discussion on Sunday if someone will do grocerices or not. Discussions that wouldn’t be happening if everything was simply closed.
Think about it. Would everyone’s life really fall apart if YouTube was just inaccessible on Sunday? (Or perhaps Monday, which is the least likely day for someone to upload or for people to be watching videos.)
No, it wouldn’t. It would give both creators and addicted viewers a nice and healthy break, and it would make the platform more sustainable again.
But okay, at this time you might throw up your arms and give one final retort.
“But what about freedom of expression!? What about losing customers with all those restrictions!? What about progression and moving technology forward!? What if I have a great idea for a YouTube channel that simply needs five videos every day, and I’m only satisfied if I get a thousand useless comments!? Surely that should be allowed!”
Well, no.
This is the end of part 2. In part 3 (the final part), I explain my reasoning for this and the general life lesson I would like to give those who are still reading this.