Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Gangnam Style - not quite the internet, but it got so many views that YouTube had to change the code used for displaying views count because it had more than 2,147,483,647 views (some of you may recognize it as the maximum number a signed 32 bit integer can store).
Yeah, I think that was the last viral thing that was so popular that it (even in this small way) broke the Internet.
Did no one before that look at the schema and question the use of a signed int for a counter? That’s just bad design.
"No way a video gets more than 2 billion likes... "
It was a fairly reasonable guess back when they designed it, especially since you need an account to like a video.
That would mean close to 1/3 (~33%) of the world's population "like"d the video.
Nowadays it's only about 1/4 of the world's population (25% for those who don't get fractions).
It'd take massive amounts of bots to like a video that many times, and what would be the point?
Of course, they probably never imagined they'd scale quite this much.
It wasn't the like counter they needed to change. It was the view counter.
I mean, yeah, it is a bad design but you have to remember that YouTube wasn't always a Google owned service, this sounds exactly like the kind of thing that gets overlooked in a hobby project because no video ever will have more than 2 billion views, right?
So yeah, bad design but really easy to forget about for a video view counter.
The guy who made that code is probably loooong gone to another job. And it worked before.