The term is quite over used in my opinion, it is very often used in hyperbole. Whether it is in terms of popularity and driving traffic to a website or a threat said to break the Internet, it doesn’t seem to live up to the meaning of the term.
The term is quite over used in my opinion, it is very often used in hyperbole. Whether it is in terms of popularity and driving traffic to a website or a threat said to break the Internet, it doesn’t seem to live up to the meaning of the term.
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.