this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Crappy Design
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Noticed that theres no equivalent to r/crappydesign here yet so i made one
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The internet used to be free before corporations got here.
It was never free. It was paid for and used by universities and research institutions. There was no world wide web, just gopher, ftp, usenet, chat, telnet. Any kind of advertising was really frowned upon, it was basically treated like a library. But, there wasn't a lot to do there.
How are they supposed to pay for the infrastructure that you're using to watch it. Do you even have a clue what it costs to run YouTube for a month? The ads keep the servers up. BTW it's in the tens of millions a month if not more to run YouTube.
No one has a clue what it 'costs' because YT isn't honest about revenue, and being a subsidiary its P&L statements can be adjusted to spread any narrative around profitability it considers useful. In the context of Alphabet its operating cost is probably negligible.
You're already paying them data tribute through daily interaction with much of the corporate web.
I literally don't have a job and host a website with 249971 requests served april-october. This shit isn't expensive, google makes it expensive. Before YouTube we just had other websites with videos.
e: I got it wrong, it's 525154 (valid) requests april-october with 85340 unique IPs after filtering my own.
Requests cost nothing, data storage and bandwidth usage do.
People upload over 500 hours of videos every minute, that's 256.320.000hours each year. Let's say that most of it is lower quality instead of 4K, so each hour takes 0.5GB of storage. That's 128PB every year. Youtube overall size probably reached Exabytes in the last few years.
Their daily bandwidth usage probably ranges way into Petabytes too, something you were orders of magnitude away over the whole life cycle of your site.
Literally everyone is not listening to what I'm saying so I'll just say it here again as clear as I can:
YouTube costs money because infrastructure costs are exponential. It doesn't have to be that way. Host your own shit, it's so unbelievably cheap.
I have my own live-streaming infrastructure. I have my own music streaming infrastructure. I have my own video sync infrastructure that so far has not even stuttered for people on the other side of the globe even with 30+ people watching at once. This costs jack shit to do. Spread it out. Host your own.
This is of course ignoring that corporate executive pay is insane and you could definitely cut that in half, but we don't. We pass the costs of the fifth execute yacht to the consumers, and here we have like 5 people defending that structure as if it just has to be that way. It doesn't. It wasn't like that before Google started owning everything.
And yes, for the record, I am not using YouTube. YouTube currently barely works on my browser so I just don't use it.
And if you were streaming the volume of videos they are, your costs would be astronomical too. Your argument is completely senseless.
What he's saying is there are alternative methods that cost less, theres a few youtube competitors that use p2p for instance, which'd cut down on hosting costs SIGNIFICANTLY
And you are still missing what I am saying. I don't care if it's P2P or not. If he is personally sending out TB's of data from his server everyday, being P2P means nothing. If TB's of data are leaving his server, then he will have an exponential cost growth to be able to send TB's of data. You're not making an apples to apples comparison. Sending TB's of data a month, let alone a day has an enormous cost to it. There is no avoiding that.
And he is arguing they are eating costs they dont have to eat, that they are CHOOSING to eat
Do you know the enormous amount of data it takes to stream video? And how much infrastructure to have such seamless loading as youtube does, caching copies of popular videos all across the world?
There used to be a free youtube before google? Someone has to volunteer to pay for the site servers unless you pay them my ignorant bro. Youre always free to stop using the evil corporation sites but you want their stuff for free instead and complain about it. Get a grip
imagine licking the corporate boot this hard
Youre the one begging them for free content here, stuff costs money get a job bum
yeah sure let me just go to the job factory and pick one of the many jobs they have available..
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/17-9-percent-of-people-with-a-disability-employed-in-2020.htm?view_full
It's nearly impossible to find a job when you've got a disability.
No youtube for you then, being disabled doesnt mean the universe owns you free videos and you can insult others for reminding you that stuff costs money
Edit money not even required just watch ads, the entitlement jesus
you sure seem like a pleasant person to be around
says the guy who insults me because he thinks universe owns him free videos for getting him disabled
Oof.
Yeah bro just wanted to hear it, u cant help it with some people. " aakshually i cant walk no job for me so give me youtube" then u get called unpleasant for not agreeing
I literally don't have a job and host a website with 249971 requests served april-october. This shit isn't expensive, google makes it expensive. Before YouTube we just had other websites with videos.
e: I got it wrong, it's 525154 (valid) requests april-october with 85340 unique IPs after filtering my own.
"Videos always existed on internet" People upload 500 hours of video to youtube per minute how simpleminded are you Jesus Christ
Because it's the video platform, King.
By your logic, my website shouldn't exist because it's too expensive. By your logic, videos didn't exist before YouTube. You are at odds with reality.
Wow your reading comprehension is astounding, ill try to use as few words as possible, more videos = more money needed to host them
Who was it that told you YouTube was so expensive to run? Google? I couldn't imagine why the company, with a vested interest in making you think ads are essential, would tell you that YouTube is like super duper totally expensive.
Please explain to me how it is that my website, despite serving lossless music and video streaming and a photogallery, doesn't actually cost me anything except the electric bill which is so negligible that I don't even bother considering it in my low-income no-job budget. I would love to hear why this isn't possible.
I, too, remember the days before YouTube where videos literally did not exist on the internet! So innovative of Google, inventing video hosting.
Storage isn’t cheap
Network bandwidth isn’t cheap
Data centers aren’t cheap
Add on Electricity, Transcoding, Multiple AZs, Backups, cached content with ISPs and engineer salaries and you’ve got a very expensive system.
That’s not even factoring in payments to creators, which are necessary if you want people to make quality content for the platform.
Your website serves multiple orders of magnitude less traffic than a single YouTube page. Web costs aren’t linear. It’s an S-Curve where it’s incredibly cheap to get started, but gets exponentially more expensive until you’ve reached some level of critical mass where revenue exceeds costs.
Video hosting pre-YouTube was terrible. It barely existed, and it wasn’t accessible. They sure didn’t invent it, but they made it possible for the masses to host video.
No other web content platform has taken off since YouTube. There’s a reason for that, and the majority is cost. To reach a widespread audience you have to invest hundreds of millions into infrastructure. Same reason Twitch still has the critical mass of livestreamers.
I already covered those points in my previous comments: 500 hours uploaded per minute, more videos = more money needed to host them. I can't dumb it down further, sorry
What if, and bare with me man I know this is complicated shit, you spread those out a little bit? You know, like it was before Google exterminated independent platforms? I promise you 490 hours of those 500 hours uploaded sits at 3 views for eternity.
YouTube was convenient and free before Google bought it, and that's why we all congregated here. Google then used that power to entrench themselves and now it's YouTube or nothing. If YouTube is too expensive to host, so be it. Let it die. It's the internet, someone will make a better version that's completely free. Peertube already exists and is scalable.
the 3 views dont matter youtube has to HOST it, STORE it somewhere, STORAGE costs money oh my god. Youtube was free when they didnt have to store 500 hours of video per minute and if you dont care if youtube dies why do you care if they ask for money, just dont use it?? and yes someone will make a free youtube and host 500 hours per minute for free I hope u dont actually believe this and youre trolling bro
Good luck
With what, creating free youtube?