> How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?

Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation.

When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content

This effectively silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.

Posting video on someone else's hardware is not a human right.

> Posting video on someone else's hardware is not a human right

Straw man. Nobody in this thread argued it is.

has anybody tried to argue this here? who are you replying to?

That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet.

Disadvantaged groups will already have less free time to share content, less exposure to the technical skills needed to do so, less attention, respect, and opportunity from doing so, etc. Advertising places a fig leaf over unequal access, but really makes the inequality worse by centralizing wealth and control in the hands of a few rent-seeking operations.

> That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet.

Yes, but advertisement showed that it wasn't a structural limitation and that other options were available. Even if said options themselves had downsides.

Donations were and are a thing for covering hosting costs in many communities.

Not if the site serves videos and has 2024-levels world traffic.

Cap it at 720p and ask for donations. 2024 levels of traffic should mean donations scale too

> This silences a large number of people

I'd argue advertising silences many more.

Any niche topic is already so SEO'd to death with keyword rich but contentless content that those with something truly relevant to say are unlikely to ever be heard.*

* Unless commenting in a niche subreddit, a web-ring indexed by small web engines, or the like, where the audience are like minds who've previously found the niche.

The thing is, if your community is small costs are probably in the couple dollars a month range. An order of magnitude lower than the costs of hardware like your computer. If communities are large where an individual cannot trivially bear the costs, donation models have worked where the community itself funds its hosting.

Not nearly everybody on the Internet has ever bought their own computer. There's schools, public libraries etc., to say nothing of the billions of people that have only a smartphone and no desktop or laptop at all.

So what? Takes nothing from the point that hosting is in the dollars a month paid for by a half hour of work in most of the western world. I’m sure developing countries have cheaper hosting costs to match to purchasing power in these locations.

I'd happily provide hosting to a whole lot of media that I enjoy myself and would love to share. I might have bandwidth limits each month, but within reason, I'd share.

predatory lawyers and greedy creators is the reason I don't.

Honestly, when the internet was younger the costs to host content were basically zero. Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs. Many ISPs offered shell accounts and provided basic webhosting at no additional cost. These could be scaled up as needed, but everybody with a modem and an ISP had the opportunity to take part in sharing content on the internet.

> Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs.

On dialup?

Yes. Websites back then didn't have hundreds of MBs of javascript bloat though so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. The internet over 56k was surprisingly usable.

Maybe in terms of bandwidth, but unless you were fine with never being able to make or receive any more phone calls, how would hosting a website have worked without a second dedicated phone line?

In addition to that, dialup was paid per minute where I grew up, so either option would have been prohibitively expensive.

It did need a dedicated line. Same with the people who ran a BBS out of their home. I knew people who had 3-5 dedicated phone lines running into their houses to support that. Paying per minute for dial up was thankfully not something I had to deal with (unless I was calling into a PoP that was long distance). I can see how the costs of that would get insane very quickly.

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.

Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by.

The content shared was mostly text and a small amount of images. Video and audio were largely non-existant.

> I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.

You're describing hobby content creators which didn't have the volume and quality of individual content creators nowadays.

I would argue that the average quality was higher by a few magnitudes due to the higher entry barrier alone. The average production value is higher these days, but that doesn't correlate with quality too much. Simple truth is that hobbyists, enthusiasts and professionals are often one and the same people.

There was also always a way to accommodate a large amount of users through mirrors and other channels, which people shared frequently.

With "the web" they meant their business idea for their specific platform isn't viable without advertisers exploiting user data to the largest degree possible. That is something entirely different. On if they just paywalled the content, people would probably again use alternatives.

Of course I didn't mean to say that infrastructure costs are negligible. On the contrary, it is the largest expense for certain platforms and services. But if a platform has advertising as a business model, it is not on my browser to accommodate that. Then they need to let someone else fill the space they cannot serve without manipulating my user agent.

I do even approve of platforms enabling some creators to make a living with online content creation. But I am still not interested to accommodate advertisers. It is a toxic industry that strives on exploiting users and their privacy. There is no sensible means of cooperation possible and I want my browser have realistic perspective here.

> which didn't have the volume

agreed

> and quality

filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

Agree. Production quality != overall quality. I'd much rather have great content badly produced than professionally produced crap.

Most people still seem to watch Hollywood quality movies so I don't know if your taste is very representative.

If by Hollywood quality you mean that it's professionally produced to a high standard (of production, of course), than I don't see what's bad about that. I only said I value content quality much more than production quality. Great content produced to a high standard is better than the same content badly produced.

There are some great movies out of Hollywood.

Would they watch so many if they weren’t available at every movie theater in town and every streaming service on earth? A lot of attention has been devoted to such movies that would have been invested elsewhere in other efforts if movies didn’t exist.

High sales != quality. Maybe high sales ~= lowest common denominator?

High sales doesn't mean quality but it does reflect the choice of the majority.

So if we were to move to a world where high quality productions were not feasible anymore for some reason or another then by definition most people would find this to be a problem.

No, I think the majority would just take what they're given.

Most "content" is "consumed" just to have something to do.

> filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

Quality is also a factor of time which unpaid people usually do not have enough of.

Through torrents, for example.

The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents.

And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.

> The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents.

Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.

> Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.

No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.

The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.

> Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.

I doubt it because a lot of this content doesn't exist outside of Youtube and because the content does exist on external drives has not internet connectivity or capacity to get it.

> No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.

It seems to currently have 220K users, not exactly what I would call representative or a success for that matter.

> The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.

Only if they agree to themselves share the content they host which is not necessarily the case.

Seems like you think the whole collection has to be in one single torrent, rather than a separate torrent for each video, and that the complete works of all channels have to be seeded from a single source?

The Pirate Bay existed… huh, still exists, OK… without requiring any single person to have all the pirated content on any single system — the combined size of all videos on YouTube may be 10 to 15 exabytes or whatever, but no single video, no single creator, is close to that. Even LTT is about 3.6 petabytes for their entire working-archive backup system last I heard, and if they wanted to stream those as a torrent, well, the files are right there.

It may not suit the current way YouTube content is consumed, where you share a link to a specific timestamp and whoever follows that link can see that moment almost immediately, but that doesn't detract from "can people share videos, perhaps even ones they made themselves, using this system?"

I pay my telecom for 500mbit up and down, what other infrastructure must be paid for to support torrenting?

Each individual seeder is paying for electricity, storage, and internet access to make those torrents available to you.

Right, and I'm one of them!