[deckard1]

for what it's worth, YouTube still uses 11 character base64 strings for their video ids, which are assumed to be 64-bit ints. They also allow unlisted videos, which people usually take to mean "semi-private".

It's an interesting tradeoff. The UX of the smaller YouTube video id links is probably of some benefit to them. Plus they have private videos for when you really don't want your video to be viewed, with unlisted being the middle ground of easy sharing but also keeping it exclusive.

[kstrauser]

Sure, and it makes sense there: write a service that returns unique 64 bit ints and encapsulate the complexity inside that one location. That’s easier than making every `insert` in your app code have to do a `while not unique` loop.