in your opinion, what would meet the definition of "broke the Internet?" (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by Usernameblankface@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] rikudou@lemmings.world 38 points 9 months ago

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).

[-] Usernameblankface@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I think that was the last viral thing that was so popular that it (even in this small way) broke the Internet.

[-] invertedspear@lemm.ee -3 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] criitz@reddthat.com 16 points 9 months ago

"No way a video gets more than 2 billion likes... "

[-] otp@sh.itjust.works 9 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] bitwaba@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

It wasn't the like counter they needed to change. It was the view counter.

[-] rikudou@lemmings.world 8 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The guy who made that code is probably loooong gone to another job. And it worked before.

this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024

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