Yup Pornhub serves much more video than Netflix and they do so without that insane amount of complexity.

Isn't pornhub free, their only monetization being ads? Also does Pornhub have personal recommendations, per country and region libraries, an android, ios and android TV apps? Probably not.

That is a much easier business model and a lot lower level of complexity than Netflix. I imagine running pornhub is essentially running a large website that hosts video. Probably just the billing side of Netflix is more complicated than the entirety of Pornhub operation.

PornHub has significantly more content than Netflix, not to mention the ability for users to upload content and have it immediately available worldwide. That alone makes it significantly more complex than Netflix.

Pornhub is not about waving the engineering flag up and down to signal how cool their infra is though.

Honestly Pornhub's stack is genuinely impressive. More start-ups should just use PHP and get shit done

I think one of the reasons behind PornHub's tech stack is that their industry doesn't really lend itself to VC, so building an engineering playground for PH would be a waste of money as no amount of complexity would net them VC money (nor an invite to a cloud provider conference), where as most startups live and die based on the VC funding their complexity and buzzwords allow them to grift.

I think the takeaway was that choice of language might be less important than engineering strategy, because PH are successful despite their choice of stack :)

Yup I remember that. Netflix seems to be the poster child for overengineered architecture - for something that is almost entirely commoditised nowadays (one-way over the internet video streaming).

Uber's problem space is significantly more complex than Netflix, so I'm unsure it's a fair comparison. But they do seem to have quite a lot of overengineering going on. At least that's how I feel each time I read an Uber tech article.

About the only companies which seem to justify their complex architectures are Google/Meta/Amazon imo.

> Uber's problem space is significantly more complex than Netflix

What makes you say this? Netflix serves probably several orders of magnitude more bytes and online video is hard. At its core Uber is basically a Passenger Service System and we had systems like these implemented in software since 1950s

There are a lot more use cases in taxi and food delivery space than in video streaming. At least by an order of magnitude. Consider various user personas for one, legal considerations and so on. Technically each use case might be less demanding than video streaming, but overall much more complex.