With the success of TikTok in recent years, Youtube saw itself under pressure and brought up its competitive format called "Youtube Shorts" with the goal to provide the platform with more short videos and animate content creators with limited (time) budget to upload videos there.
Often with little value to its audience (one can only put so much information/entertainment into a few seconds long clip), the platform further increases its need for hard drives at even higher speeds.
Especially with ever more high resolution video formats and more and more people uploading content.
Not only the resources to produce these storage mediums are huge but also the energy demands to run this system (servers, active cooling, maintenance etc.) are enormous.
Youtube (but also other platforms) could save a lot of resources with only one simple trick:
Deleting content nobody watches anymore. Such an approach would allow for a more lightweight, more profitable business, with less material and energy needed.
By applying a filter searching all videos not having received a single view for "X" amount of years and delete those.
Especially in combination with checking, whether the account that created the content is still in use.
If not, the it might be safe to get rid of all the junk files currently wasting valueable disc space.
A less radical approach is to just compress and maybe de-list the videos not being watched. In this case the content creator has the possibility to download his own content still but due the compression, more disc space is freed.
While I have no access to the Youtube database, I would assume, that this measure would allocate gigantic amounts of data storage and potentially save a lot of money and resources in general.
Deleting this quasi-dead content also has the nice side effect of restoring privacy as it adds a "right to be forgotten" function, which is often asked by various privacy focused institutions.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
Despite being a logical conclusion, I have little hopes this feature will be added anytime soon, unless a competitor forces Youtube to do so. Until then resources and money will get wasted by sheer unwillingness to change for the better.
Further readings:
https://angelo-sasso.blogspot.com/2019/11/saving-ressources-in-digital-world.html
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