Twitch announced similar changes in the last few months. These services aren’t viable without user-generated content, but the vast majority of that content a) isn’t worth storing and b) has a Pareto distribution where most of the earnings are going to be concentrated within a few months of the video being uploaded. Now that interest rates have gone up, you’ll see a lot of social media platforms pivoting towards the more ephemeral content delivery models that exist in radio and television broadcasting. They won’t actually delete the content because it will be getting fed into AI models, but they’ll save on the cost of caching and serving it years after the majority of the audience has finished watching it.

The majority of data is rarely accessed after the first week. However, that data represents 99% of the costs. If storing data is not your primary business, then why keep it around? This is what most of the large companies are realizing now that growth is slowing down.