commit b5e7735fd83eba2d5c06bafef3685765f44732ef
parent c1eafc3bde6985433926dc05656cb398d9ada9f6
Author: Andrew Laack <andrew@laack.co>
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2025 23:59:09 -0500
Fixed structure
Diffstat:
6 files changed, 168 insertions(+), 308 deletions(-)
diff --git a/posts/entries/sustainability-of-youtube.md b/posts/entries/the-sustainability-of-youtube.md
diff --git a/posts/site/index.html b/posts/site/index.html
@@ -8,8 +8,7 @@
<body>
<h1>Posts</h1>
<ol>
-<li><a href='sustainability-of-youtube.html'>sustainability-of-youtube</a></li>
-<li><a href='wikipedia-and-truth-on-the-internet.html'>wikipedia-and-truth-on-the-internet</a></li>
+<li><a href='the-sustainability-of-youtube.html'>the-sustainability-of-youtube</a></li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
diff --git a/posts/site/sustainability-of-youtube.html b/posts/site/sustainability-of-youtube.html
@@ -1,167 +0,0 @@
-<!DOCTYPE html>
-<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="" xml:lang="">
-<head>
- <meta charset="utf-8" />
- <meta name="generator" content="pandoc" />
- <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes" />
- <title>sustainability-of-youtube</title>
- <style>
- code{white-space: pre-wrap;}
- span.smallcaps{font-variant: small-caps;}
- div.columns{display: flex; gap: min(4vw, 1.5em);}
- div.column{flex: auto; overflow-x: auto;}
- div.hanging-indent{margin-left: 1.5em; text-indent: -1.5em;}
- /* The extra [class] is a hack that increases specificity enough to
- override a similar rule in reveal.js */
- ul.task-list[class]{list-style: none;}
- ul.task-list li input[type="checkbox"] {
- font-size: inherit;
- width: 0.8em;
- margin: 0 0.8em 0.2em -1.6em;
- vertical-align: middle;
- }
- .display.math{display: block; text-align: center; margin: 0.5rem auto;}
- </style>
- <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
-</head>
-<body>
-<h1 id="the-sustainability-of-youtube">The Sustainability of
-YouTube</h1>
-<h2 id="context">Context</h2>
-<p>I dislike using cloud services because they may discontinue my
-service [1] or they may do something stupid [2] that negatively impacts
-me. These concerns, along with concerns about privacy [3], have led me
-to keep information and content I care about away from cloud services.
-This does make me wonder, how many people would be distraught about the
-loss of their content if YouTube terminated their accounts? This is not
-the topic today, nor is it something I can easily answer, but it is
-something I wonder about and would like others to consider.</p>
-<p>Similarly, I am skeptical of ‘free’ services. It’s incorrect to say
-“if something is free, you are the product” because charity does exist,
-but when it comes to Google, they aren’t a charity. Their current model
-with YouTube is to have people upload videos to their site and show ads
-to some users when they watch said videos. There are also paid
-subscriptions, but their primary monetization comes from ads. An
-important point is they don’t purge content on a regular basis, except
-in cases of ToS violations. As such, there is a (nearly) monotonically
-increasing function that describes the storage requirements of YouTube.
-This motivates my question below.</p>
-<h2 id="question">Question</h2>
-<p>When will YouTube’s storage costs exceed their revenue if they don’t
-start purging old content, assuming their revenue does not increase over
-time?</p>
-<h2 id="how-to-answer-this-question">How to Answer This Question</h2>
-<p>We need the following information to answer this question:</p>
-<ul>
-<li>What is YouTube’s annual net profit?</li>
-<li>How much data does YouTube store?</li>
-<li>How much does data storage cost?</li>
-</ul>
-<h2 id="youtubes-profit">YouTube’s Profit</h2>
-<p>According to Alphabet’s 2025 Q2 earnings release [4], YouTube ads
-made a revenue of $9.769 billion. Annualized, this is $39.076 billion,
-but this is only revenue, not net profit. If we assume the operating
-margin across Alphabet matches the operating margin of YouTube (32%), we
-find an approximate net profit of $12.50432 billion / year. Actual net
-profit could differ from this, but since we are concerned with how much
-data storage this could support, we don’t need to factor in how this
-would be taxed.</p>
-<h2 id="storage-needs">Storage Needs</h2>
-<h3 id="total-videos">Total Videos</h3>
-<p>YouTube states on their official blog there are over 20 million
-videos uploaded per day [5]. While I don’t trust YouTube very much, and
-they don’t have many incentives to be honest on this topic, they seem
-more trustworthy in this context than the slop factory sites as they
-are, in fact, the ones who are hosting the content. As such, I will
-accept this metric.</p>
-<h3 id="average-video-size">Average Video Size</h3>
-<p>I wrote a python script that uses a curated list of popular Google
-Trends searches over the past few decades [6] to search YouTube for
-recently uploaded videos. I ran this script and compiled a list of ~7.65
-million YouTube videos.</p>
-<p>Before continuing, I will list a few limitations of this
-approach:</p>
-<ul>
-<li>YouTube likely imposes some amount of algorithmic filtering when
-sorting by ‘recently uploaded’</li>
-<li>The videos in question are all public (not inclusive of
-private/unlisted videos)</li>
-<li>Less popular search terms may have a different distribution of video
-sizes</li>
-</ul>
-<p>These are the main flaws in my methodology, but any approach will be
-imperfect without being able to get the data directly from YouTube.</p>
-<p>Of these 7.65 million videos, I sampled 615,222 of them and queried
-YouTube using <code>yt-dlp</code> [7] to find all video resolutions and
-formats YouTube will serve. It seems unlikely to me that YouTube stores
-each of these resolutions on their servers, but I think it is very
-likely that YouTube is storing the highest resolution version they are
-willing to serve to users.</p>
-<p>Based on my findings, I propose a lower bound of ~396.17 MB / video,
-which assumes they are only storing the highest resolution version and
-all other versions are generated in real time via transcoding (I am
-confident this isn’t the case, but it provides a nice lower bound). I
-also propose an upper bound of ~1.44 GB / video, which assumes they are
-storing every resolution and format for each video they are serving.</p>
-<p>All of the code used for this is available on my git server [8].</p>
-<h3 id="annual-storage-increase">Annual Storage Increase</h3>
-<p>Using my findings above about video size and YouTube’s stated video
-upload rate, we find:</p>
-<p>Lower bound:</p>
-<ul>
-<li>7.923 PB / Day</li>
-<li>2.89 EB / Year</li>
-</ul>
-<p>Upper bound:</p>
-<ul>
-<li>28.895 PB / Day</li>
-<li>10.547 EB / Year</li>
-</ul>
-<p>Note: These values may vary depending on rounding, but they should be
-similar to what anyone else would find.</p>
-<h2 id="storage-cost-by-volume">Storage Cost by Volume</h2>
-<p>GCP currently charges $26 / month for 1 TB of standard multi-region,
-US based, cloud storage [9]. If we assume the same 32% profit margin as
-before, this would cost ~$17.68 / TB / month or $212.16 / TB / year. I
-don’t know if this is high or low relative to what they actually pay.
-YouTube requires quick access to many of their videos, but many of their
-videos are likely retrieved infrequently. Additionally, it seems likely
-Alphabet’s cloud storage margins are higher than the average margins
-across the organization. Additionally, these are only US storage prices
-so this could vary depending on the regions this data is being hosted
-in. In any case, I think this is a fair estimate.</p>
-<h2 id="answer-to-the-question">Answer to the Question</h2>
-<p>Given YouTube’s approximated net profit of $12.50432 billion / year
-and an estimated cost of $212.16 / TB / year for cloud storage, we find
-their profits can support an additional ~58.94 EB of data.</p>
-<p>At the lower bound of 2.89 EB / year we find YouTube’s storage costs
-will surpass their current profits in ~20.39 years.</p>
-<p>If we assume our upper bound of 10.547 EB / year we find YouTube’s
-storage costs will surpass their current profits in ~5.59 years.</p>
-<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
-<p>These are very rough bounds, especially given how difficult it is to
-estimate the cost per TB / year for storage of this data given their
-retrieval needs, but we find that in ~5.59 - ~20.39 years, YouTube will
-be forced to start purging old content to remain profitable at their
-current profit rate.</p>
-<h2 id="citations">Citations</h2>
-<p>[1] - <a
-href="https://killedbygoogle.com/">https://killedbygoogle.com/</a></p>
-<p>[2] - <a
-href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/">https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/</a></p>
-<p>[3] - <a
-href="https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-surveillance.html">https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-surveillance.html</a></p>
-<p>[4] - <a
-href="https://abc.xyz/assets/cc/27/3ada14014efbadd7a58472f1f3f4/2025q2-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf">https://abc.xyz/assets/cc/27/3ada14014efbadd7a58472f1f3f4/2025q2-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf</a></p>
-<p>[5] - <a
-href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250911091711/https://blog.youtube/press/">https://web.archive.org/web/20250911091711/https://blog.youtube/press/</a></p>
-<p>[6] - <a
-href="https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/dhruvildave/google-trends-dataset">https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/dhruvildave/google-trends-dataset</a></p>
-<p>[7] - <a
-href="https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp">https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp</a></p>
-<p>[8] - <a
-href="http://git.laack.co/blog/log.html">http://git.laack.co/blog/log.html</a></p>
-<p>[9] - <a
-href="https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#multi-regions">https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#multi-regions</a></p>
-</body>
-</html>
diff --git a/posts/site/the-sustainability-of-youtube.html b/posts/site/the-sustainability-of-youtube.html
@@ -0,0 +1,167 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="" xml:lang="">
+<head>
+ <meta charset="utf-8" />
+ <meta name="generator" content="pandoc" />
+ <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes" />
+ <title>the-sustainability-of-youtube</title>
+ <style>
+ code{white-space: pre-wrap;}
+ span.smallcaps{font-variant: small-caps;}
+ div.columns{display: flex; gap: min(4vw, 1.5em);}
+ div.column{flex: auto; overflow-x: auto;}
+ div.hanging-indent{margin-left: 1.5em; text-indent: -1.5em;}
+ /* The extra [class] is a hack that increases specificity enough to
+ override a similar rule in reveal.js */
+ ul.task-list[class]{list-style: none;}
+ ul.task-list li input[type="checkbox"] {
+ font-size: inherit;
+ width: 0.8em;
+ margin: 0 0.8em 0.2em -1.6em;
+ vertical-align: middle;
+ }
+ .display.math{display: block; text-align: center; margin: 0.5rem auto;}
+ </style>
+ <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
+</head>
+<body>
+<h1 id="the-sustainability-of-youtube">The Sustainability of
+YouTube</h1>
+<h2 id="context">Context</h2>
+<p>I dislike using cloud services because they may discontinue my
+service [1] or they may do something stupid [2] that negatively impacts
+me. These concerns, along with concerns about privacy [3], have led me
+to keep information and content I care about away from cloud services.
+This does make me wonder, how many people would be distraught about the
+loss of their content if YouTube terminated their accounts? This is not
+the topic today, nor is it something I can easily answer, but it is
+something I wonder about and would like others to consider.</p>
+<p>Similarly, I am skeptical of ‘free’ services. It’s incorrect to say
+“if something is free, you are the product” because charity does exist,
+but when it comes to Google, they aren’t a charity. Their current model
+with YouTube is to have people upload videos to their site and show ads
+to some users when they watch said videos. There are also paid
+subscriptions, but their primary monetization comes from ads. An
+important point is they don’t purge content on a regular basis, except
+in cases of ToS violations. As such, there is a (nearly) monotonically
+increasing function that describes the storage requirements of YouTube.
+This motivates my question below.</p>
+<h2 id="question">Question</h2>
+<p>When will YouTube’s storage costs exceed their revenue if they don’t
+start purging old content, assuming their revenue does not increase over
+time?</p>
+<h2 id="how-to-answer-this-question">How to Answer This Question</h2>
+<p>We need the following information to answer this question:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>What is YouTube’s annual net profit?</li>
+<li>How much data does YouTube store?</li>
+<li>How much does data storage cost?</li>
+</ul>
+<h2 id="youtubes-profit">YouTube’s Profit</h2>
+<p>According to Alphabet’s 2025 Q2 earnings release [4], YouTube ads
+made a revenue of $9.769 billion. Annualized, this is $39.076 billion,
+but this is only revenue, not net profit. If we assume the operating
+margin across Alphabet matches the operating margin of YouTube (32%), we
+find an approximate net profit of $12.50432 billion / year. Actual net
+profit could differ from this, but since we are concerned with how much
+data storage this could support, we don’t need to factor in how this
+would be taxed.</p>
+<h2 id="storage-needs">Storage Needs</h2>
+<h3 id="total-videos">Total Videos</h3>
+<p>YouTube states on their official blog there are over 20 million
+videos uploaded per day [5]. While I don’t trust YouTube very much, and
+they don’t have many incentives to be honest on this topic, they seem
+more trustworthy in this context than the slop factory sites as they
+are, in fact, the ones who are hosting the content. As such, I will
+accept this metric.</p>
+<h3 id="average-video-size">Average Video Size</h3>
+<p>I wrote a python script that uses a curated list of popular Google
+Trends searches over the past few decades [6] to search YouTube for
+recently uploaded videos. I ran this script and compiled a list of ~7.65
+million YouTube videos.</p>
+<p>Before continuing, I will list a few limitations of this
+approach:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>YouTube likely imposes some amount of algorithmic filtering when
+sorting by ‘recently uploaded’</li>
+<li>The videos in question are all public (not inclusive of
+private/unlisted videos)</li>
+<li>Less popular search terms may have a different distribution of video
+sizes</li>
+</ul>
+<p>These are the main flaws in my methodology, but any approach will be
+imperfect without being able to get the data directly from YouTube.</p>
+<p>Of these 7.65 million videos, I sampled 615,222 of them and queried
+YouTube using <code>yt-dlp</code> [7] to find all video resolutions and
+formats YouTube will serve. It seems unlikely to me that YouTube stores
+each of these resolutions on their servers, but I think it is very
+likely that YouTube is storing the highest resolution version they are
+willing to serve to users.</p>
+<p>Based on my findings, I propose a lower bound of ~396.17 MB / video,
+which assumes they are only storing the highest resolution version and
+all other versions are generated in real time via transcoding (I am
+confident this isn’t the case, but it provides a nice lower bound). I
+also propose an upper bound of ~1.44 GB / video, which assumes they are
+storing every resolution and format for each video they are serving.</p>
+<p>All of the code used for this is available on my git server [8].</p>
+<h3 id="annual-storage-increase">Annual Storage Increase</h3>
+<p>Using my findings above about video size and YouTube’s stated video
+upload rate, we find:</p>
+<p>Lower bound:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>7.923 PB / Day</li>
+<li>2.89 EB / Year</li>
+</ul>
+<p>Upper bound:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>28.895 PB / Day</li>
+<li>10.547 EB / Year</li>
+</ul>
+<p>Note: These values may vary depending on rounding, but they should be
+similar to what anyone else would find.</p>
+<h2 id="storage-cost-by-volume">Storage Cost by Volume</h2>
+<p>GCP currently charges $26 / month for 1 TB of standard multi-region,
+US based, cloud storage [9]. If we assume the same 32% profit margin as
+before, this would cost ~$17.68 / TB / month or $212.16 / TB / year. I
+don’t know if this is high or low relative to what they actually pay.
+YouTube requires quick access to many of their videos, but many of their
+videos are likely retrieved infrequently. Additionally, it seems likely
+Alphabet’s cloud storage margins are higher than the average margins
+across the organization. Additionally, these are only US storage prices
+so this could vary depending on the regions this data is being hosted
+in. In any case, I think this is a fair estimate.</p>
+<h2 id="answer-to-the-question">Answer to the Question</h2>
+<p>Given YouTube’s approximated net profit of $12.50432 billion / year
+and an estimated cost of $212.16 / TB / year for cloud storage, we find
+their profits can support an additional ~58.94 EB of data.</p>
+<p>At the lower bound of 2.89 EB / year we find YouTube’s storage costs
+will surpass their current profits in ~20.39 years.</p>
+<p>If we assume our upper bound of 10.547 EB / year we find YouTube’s
+storage costs will surpass their current profits in ~5.59 years.</p>
+<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
+<p>These are very rough bounds, especially given how difficult it is to
+estimate the cost per TB / year for storage of this data given their
+retrieval needs, but we find that in ~5.59 - ~20.39 years, YouTube will
+be forced to start purging old content to remain profitable at their
+current profit rate.</p>
+<h2 id="citations">Citations</h2>
+<p>[1] - <a
+href="https://killedbygoogle.com/">https://killedbygoogle.com/</a></p>
+<p>[2] - <a
+href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/">https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/</a></p>
+<p>[3] - <a
+href="https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-surveillance.html">https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-surveillance.html</a></p>
+<p>[4] - <a
+href="https://abc.xyz/assets/cc/27/3ada14014efbadd7a58472f1f3f4/2025q2-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf">https://abc.xyz/assets/cc/27/3ada14014efbadd7a58472f1f3f4/2025q2-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf</a></p>
+<p>[5] - <a
+href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250911091711/https://blog.youtube/press/">https://web.archive.org/web/20250911091711/https://blog.youtube/press/</a></p>
+<p>[6] - <a
+href="https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/dhruvildave/google-trends-dataset">https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/dhruvildave/google-trends-dataset</a></p>
+<p>[7] - <a
+href="https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp">https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp</a></p>
+<p>[8] - <a
+href="http://git.laack.co/blog/log.html">http://git.laack.co/blog/log.html</a></p>
+<p>[9] - <a
+href="https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#multi-regions">https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#multi-regions</a></p>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/posts/site/wikipedia-and-truth-on-the-internet.html b/posts/site/wikipedia-and-truth-on-the-internet.html
@@ -1,139 +0,0 @@
-<!DOCTYPE html>
-<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="" xml:lang="">
-<head>
- <meta charset="utf-8" />
- <meta name="generator" content="pandoc" />
- <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes" />
- <title>wikipedia-and-truth-on-the-internet</title>
- <style>
- code{white-space: pre-wrap;}
- span.smallcaps{font-variant: small-caps;}
- div.columns{display: flex; gap: min(4vw, 1.5em);}
- div.column{flex: auto; overflow-x: auto;}
- div.hanging-indent{margin-left: 1.5em; text-indent: -1.5em;}
- /* The extra [class] is a hack that increases specificity enough to
- override a similar rule in reveal.js */
- ul.task-list[class]{list-style: none;}
- ul.task-list li input[type="checkbox"] {
- font-size: inherit;
- width: 0.8em;
- margin: 0 0.8em 0.2em -1.6em;
- vertical-align: middle;
- }
- .display.math{display: block; text-align: center; margin: 0.5rem auto;}
- </style>
- <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
-</head>
-<body>
-<h1 id="truth-on-the-internet">Truth on the Internet</h1>
-<h2 id="claim">Claim</h2>
-<p>Wikipedia is an okay source for purely factual information like
-mathematical topic, CS topics, etc., but it is not a good source for
-other kinds of information. Similarly, there are other internet sources
-that are good for academic information, but there is a lack of rigor in
-most other topics.</p>
-<h2 id="reasoning">Reasoning</h2>
-<p>Wikipedia has been a good source of information on computer science
-and math topics for me. In general, articles are correct and I
-appreciate the formatting of the site working in my preferred web
-browser, lynx. When it comes to more subjective topics, it has not been
-a very good source for me. This also applies to the broader internet as
-well, albeit it is not consistently good on academic topics.</p>
-<h3 id="gemini">Gemini</h3>
-<p>Consider the Gemini protocol article on Wikipedia [1]. Most of the
-information in the article is acceptable, discussing actual information
-about the protocol, its history, and other related concepts, but the
-reception section is quite problematic. I will allow you to read it
-yourselves.</p>
-<blockquote>
-<p>Gemini is praised for its simplicity but criticized for “excluding
-people who use ordinary web browsers”. Gemini’s usefulness has been said
-to be “dependent on the kinds of content available on Gemini and whether
-it appeals or not”. Stéphane Bortzmeyer has said Gemini is retro but
-with modern features. Daniel Stenberg reviewed the 0.16.1 protocol spec,
-and criticized it as weak on security (Trust on first use) and slow in
-performance (short-lived bursty TCP connections) if it was ever used to
-transfer resource heavy HTML pages.[13] Gemini pages are usually
-downloaded as gemtext only without requesting fonts or linked resources
-such as images.</p>
-</blockquote>
-<p>Let’s break down a few things.</p>
-<h4 id="gemini-excludes-people">Gemini Excludes People</h4>
-<blockquote>
-<p>Gemini is praised for its simplicity but criticized for “excluding
-people who use ordinary web browsers”.</p>
-</blockquote>
-<p>A correction to this may be “it was once criticized by an individual
-for being exclusive, but said individual was misinformed”. The only
-exclusion that is happening is browser makers do not support the
-protocol. There is no reason a normal web browser can’t support Gemini,
-and no one who is developing the gemini protocol pushes back against its
-adoption in major web browsers.</p>
-<p>Such a criticism is similar to criticizing HTTP because none of the
-Gemini browsers support it. Gemini is an exceptionally easy protocol to
-implement and to criticize it for exclusivity is a bit silly.</p>
-<h4 id="security-concerns">Security Concerns</h4>
-<blockquote>
-<p>Daniel Stenberg reviewed the 0.16.1 protocol spec, and criticized it
-as weak on security (Trust on first use)</p>
-</blockquote>
-<p>I view his first criticism as a selling point of Gemini. TOFU is how
-I believe the internet should work, or maybe DANES, but certainly not
-CAs. CAs are antithetical to the spirit of the internet. The internet is
-supposed to be free of authorities, but when CAs are considered the
-authority on who is able to host a website with HTTPS, which is
-functionally a necessity to have a voice on the internet, we do have
-arbiters of who can speak, and we lose freedom.</p>
-<p>I think the term CA is a misnomer because there is nothing
-authoritative about CAs, and there is no authority on the internet.
-Furthermore, there have been many CA incidents in the past [2] [3],
-which is to be expected when authorities are appointed.</p>
-<h4 id="slowness">Slowness</h4>
-<blockquote>
-<p>slow in performance (short-lived bursty TCP connections) if it was
-ever used to transfer resource heavy HTML pages.[13] Gemini pages are
-usually downloaded as gemtext only without requesting fonts or linked
-resources such as images.</p>
-</blockquote>
-<p>I seem to be missing something here. A sportscar is slow when it is
-towing a tree up a hill, but that doesn’t make a sportscar slow. If the
-Gemini protocol were saddled with the burden of HTML then yes, it would
-be slow, but that’s the thing, it’s not. It’s made for gemtext not
-HTML/JS soydevery.</p>
-<h3 id="youtube-video-uploading-metrics">YouTube Video Uploading
-Metrics</h3>
-<p>YouTube video upload metrics are what prompted me to write this post.
-I was doing research for a project where I wanted to determine how long
-YouTube’s business model of not deleting any videos on the platform,
-apart from those breaking ToS, could be sustained [4]. I started with a
-duckduckgo search and the top search result claimed that in February
-2025 2.6 million videos were uploaded every day [5]. This cite then
-linked to another site [6] which made no such assertion. I returned to
-the original site to realize I’d been tricked. I should’ve known the
-domain SEO.ai was an AI slop SEO farming site, but it was the top one. I
-then went to Google to see what results I would get there. The same
-result showed at the top, but this time I got an AI summary which stated
-the exact same hallucinated claim.</p>
-<p>Truth can’t be found on the open web anymore. There are too many
-layers of nonsense. We have an AI summarizing an AI that summarized an
-unsubstantiated blog post that didn’t even make the claim the first AI
-summary thought it did.</p>
-<h2 id="what-can-be-done">What Can Be Done</h2>
-<p>At present, we can stop, or limit, our usage of search engines. I
-plan to replace search engines with going directly to sites that I know
-are useful, using RSS, and trying to reference books as much as
-possible. It’s modestly disappointing, but good options are lacking
-right now. If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to email me!</p>
-<h2 id="sources">Sources</h2>
-<p>=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) Gemini Protocol
-Wikipedia Article => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar CA
-Hacked =>
-https://sslmate.com/resources/certificate_authority_failures Even More
-CA Issues => gemini://blog.laack.co/sustainability-of-youtube.gmi The
-Sustainability of YouTube =>
-https://web.archive.org/web/20250814122654/https://seo.ai/blog/how-many-videos-are-on-youtube
-AI Summary of an AI Summary =>
-https://web.archive.org/web/20250304100048/https://photutorial.com/how-many-videos-on-youtube/
-AI Summary of a Poorly Researched Blog Post</p>
-</body>
-</html>
diff --git a/posts/entries/wikipedia-and-truth-on-the-internet.md b/posts/wip/wikipedia-and-truth-on-the-internet.md
