Obviously I don't use them, I'm just reading about how they work. And they seem to give you access to other hosters instead of hosting all the files on their own servers, right?

You haven't explained shit so far, all you did was say again and again "Debrid", "VPN"!

Which are just services, but you said zero about the infrastructure behind running them (besides mentioning it must be cheap). You could clear this up in a single sentence.

Now listen, Debrid isn't actually providing any meaningful bandwidth. It's a third party (fourth party?) service.

What they are doing is simple: For their paying users (no clue what it costs without making an account, $3 a month?) they offer fast direct downloads. But they aren't even storing the data themselves (besides caching)! They use premium accounts for other file hosters to get around the download throttling. So instead of you being limited to 1 MB/s or less for most downloads Debrid uses their account to download at full speed, then give you the file.

So they are pretty much abusing other hosters by allowing their own users to share a premium account for various file hosting platforms. Which will work so long until these hosters start aggressively blocking accounts that use too much bandwidth.

In addition to that you are paying Debrid money, $4 or something a month? If every YouTube user even paid $1 a month there would be zero need for ads. You are right, bandwidth is relatively cheap, but getting people to pay is difficult. Your suggestion would basically be that YouTube now forces everyone to pay $2 a month or they can't access the service (or only 480p videos or whatever), which would work! But is far less suitable than charging more for no ads and have only one out of hundred(?) users pay while the rest happily watches ads.

If every user threw in some coins per month we could have services with zero ads. But even a cheap subscription like $1 or $2 is often too much to convert users. The service has to be free, so that out of a million users maybe a few hundred actually pay.

You use a VPN when you either don't trust your ISP (or the current network connection you are on) or you want to hide who you really are on the internet. Both are absolutely unnecessary when accessing a video hosting platform (you can do this, but you don't have to). A VPN is also more on the user side of things to connect to a server, the server doesn't care if you use a VPN.

Debrid just makes accessing files easier as far as I can see. Like you give it a torrent link and it provides you a direct download? That's nice and all for piracy, but has absolutely nothing to do with a video hosting platform like YouTube. You could use Debrid to download the video file from a host, but we are talking about providing the actual host you store the videos on.

I absolutely do not get the points you are trying to make, do you have an example for an infrastructure like YouTube you could build out of a VPN and Debrid?

Peertube would be an alternative of course, but it obviously has tons of its own issues (mainly resources, it still costs too much to host a large instance and if you try to access one video a million times things would straight up implode). I don't see a realistic YouTube alternative without investing millions.

VPN has absolutely nothing to do with hosting a video platform, no clue why you even bring it up.

Debrids is just a file download service, isn't it? But even if it was a video hosting platform, a single server would never be enough. You need at least two (as a fall back). Then you need dynamic scaling for bigger user numbers, which works just fine for CPU and RAM (or even GPU resources), but doesn't work for storage. So you need extra storage somewhere all servers have access to, but when it comes to videos you'd be paying millions in no time.

So you need your own cheap storage and datacenters around the world. And CDNs on top to serve your content worldwide (otherwise the experience would suck on another continent if your server is too far away).

Look up how Google does it, they have their own data storage centers. And if your video is crappy and you're a nobody, it probably gets stored in a slower location on-demand. So it also loads slower. But if your video is in high-demand with millions of views it gets pushed into a more accessible location (and gets higher priority for CDNs). It's not just hosting, there is a massive amount of logic and software behind the stack.

Huh? That's weird. Internet always worked for me, both over Ethernet and over WiFi. The only issue I had once (where it took me an extra hour or two) was with a school network that had extra protections, like a login. That one was tougher, especially when I then wanted to route a tunnel through it so I could play games in class.

But usually internet works flawlessly on any Linux distribution.

I pay a very small fee for debrid and VPN servers that offer exactly the same server capacity with enormous bandwidth and virtually no downtime.

Did you just compare your small private server with YouTube's infrastructure? Jesus Christ.

Google had already been paying about 2 million a month for bandwidth in 2015 or so.

I work for a larger company as a software developer, even with a billion in gross sales, there is absolutely no chance to provide even a tenth of YouTube's service. Especially for free (without paywalls). The company would go bust in two years.

Yep! It only gets censored in two cases:

1. You are on an instance that censors words like this (e.g. lemmy.ml)

2. The user who wrote the comment is on an instance that censors this word (which actually replaces it in the comment), everyone sees it censored then

If a lemmy.ml user types 'bitch' in a comment it will actually get replaced with 'removed'. They just won't notice it until they check their own comments. That might be the reason why you see 'removed' even though your instance doesn't have an active slur filter.

demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer

Or you could say they have tolerated adblockers until now and allowed you to use their service without a paywall. Yes, it sucks, we're used to blocking ads, but it was like having free lunch.

whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide

There have been plenty of other platforms who tried to do what YouTube did, they all failed. YouTube provides a massive infrastructure, about one hour of video is getting uploaded to their servers every second. And it must be kept around, so the amount of data only goes up. A total nobody can upload a 100 hours of video and YouTube will gladly accept that and still make those videos available 5 years from now.

To say they don't provide a relatively unique (or at least very difficult) service is insanity.

Dude, you're on lemmy.ml which censors your words. Try to write 'bitch' for example, you can't. You also can't read it, it will show as removed (only for lemmy.ml users).

Not sure what kind of shit take that is if you bought a $70 game recently (Baldur's Gate 3, even I'm waiting for a sale and money is not tight for me), you have cats and probably a Nintendo Switch with Zelda, that's just what I read on the first page of your profile. So you obviously have money to spend on entertainment, like most adults.

$20 is clearly too much just to get rid of ads (though it also gets you YouTube Music, like Spotify), but I was talking about content creators who can easily afford this. And most people spend hours on YouTube, probably more time than they use Netflix if we're being honest.

I don't like Google either, but at some point they need to make money. That's the simple truth. If everyone used adblockers we'd see a lot more content locked down behind a paywall. It is what it is. Then you either pay or you find some other source of content.

And let's be real, people pay for entertainment. If I go outside and throw a stone it would probably hit someone with a Netflix/HBO/Disney+/Spotify/Prime or whatever subscription. It's difficult to find a person who doesn't have Netflix for example. If Google forces this through YouTube will just be another subscription service (or you get ads). Or they start limiting uploads to save on cost, which would actually kill their platform (as probably 99% of uploaded videos are barely or never watched, around one hour of video per second is getting uploaded right now).