Comment by yupyupyups
6 hours ago
Even when the so called "ad-pocalypse" happened, this wasn't as big of an issue as it is today.
What's going on with Google being extra stingy seems to correlate well with the AI boom (curse). I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube. Not just new popular videos that are on fast storage, but old obscure ones that probably require more resources to fetch. This is unnatural, and goes contrary to the behaviour pattern of normal users that YT is optimized for.
I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are getting more constrained in general. If I'm right, they deserve the bulk of the blame imo.
This will happen in the real world when the robot mass production gets going. We'll climb the exponential till we run into the resource limits of the planet at meteoric speed.
Yes, the regulators will try and manage it, but eventually every decision about who can use the robot/AI genie for what will go through them because of the robot/AI genie's enormous strain on natural resources, and you'll be back to a planned economy where the central planners are the environmental regulators.
There are hard decisions to make as well. Who gets to open a rare earth processing plant and have a tailing pond that completely ecologically destroys that area? Someone has to do it to enable the modern economy. It's kind of like we won't have a good AI video generator and will always be behind China if some Youtube creators refuse to license their content for AI training. Same goes for the rare earth processing tailing pond. Nobody can agree on where it's going to go, so China wins.
Hopefully most of what the bots are ruthlessly scraping is all the AI slop that is filling YT. Hopefully garbage in - garbage out will kill off all the AI nonsense.
yes, "AI" can be useful, but nonsense and slop are not.
>I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube.
certainly, but for Google, that bandwidth and compute is a drop in the bucket. at the scale Google operates, even if there were a hundred such bots (there aren't - few companies can afford to store exabytes of data), those wouldn't even register on the radar. of course, like the other social media oligarchs, Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content, but even that isn't their motivation here - "login to prove you're not a bot :^)" was ALWAYS going to happen, even without the AI bubble.
enshitiffication is unstoppable and irreversible, and Google is its prophet - what they don't kill, they turn to shit.
>I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are getting more constrained in general.
even before the AI bubble, every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare, for the same reason those fuckass blogs are built with FOTM javascript frameworks - there's nowt so queer as webshits.
>every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare
Lol, that's so true.
>Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content,
Yeah, data is money. Reddit are doing the same thing, but even more aggressively. You want API access? Pay an astronomical amount of money for it, that is other people's content. Reddit also hosts a much small amount of media relative to YT.
For YT, I'm not so sure the increase in traffic is a drop in the bucket for them. It can depend a lot on which videos are being fetched. Cheap storage is cheap only for storing a large amount of data, not doing an unusual amount of (random) access.
Who knows.