Hiker, software engineer (primarily C++, Java, and Python), Minecraft modder, hunter (of the Hunt Showdown variety), biker, adoptive Akronite, and general doer of assorted things.

  • 2 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • The fediverse as designed is actually pretty inefficient. If it ever were to go to Reddit scale it would melt down.

    That’s because there’s effectively no batching for federation currently … every single vote from an instance is forwarded back to the instance hosting the community and must be processed individually. So if you get 500k votes on something even if it’s from 200 servers, the servers hosting the community have to be able to withstand the flood of votes and store the associated data… And that’s just votes.

    Worse yet, those votes then get replayed to every single one of those 200 servers one by one. So every server needs 500k vote entries and all the associated traffic … even if half of the servers are just 1 guy looking at cat videos once a month.

    Federating actually is way more expensive than just adding another user as designed.


















  • I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.

    I do agree but their costs have also skyrocketed because the resolution and frame rate of videos has skyrocketed.

    Linus Tech Tips did a video about this … which agree with his conclusions or not, he paints a clear picture about how YouTube is more expensive to run than it used to be https://youtu.be/MDsJJRNXjYI

    Google also isn’t in the business of “running things at a loss in hopes of future profit” anymore … so they need YouTube to be profitable. Maybe it’s “too profitable”, maybe they could cut down on the amount of advertising they use … but you’re absolutely right that they do test this stuff and find the threshold between “annoying but profitable” and “annoying but we’re losing users.”

    More competition is always good … but Google isn’t stopping competition from showing up, just like Valve isn’t stopping competition from showing up, they’re just providing a better service that creators keep coming back to (because it’s ultimately good for those same creators to get their content out there and monetize it).



  • More like regional pricing is an attempt to maximise value extraction from consumers

    And right there I’m done with your comment. Regional pricing is incredibly important, without it everyone pays the US or EU price and there is no service provided period.

    However, you can be assured that they are charging the people they’ve identified as less wealthy (e.g. in a low average income region) more than their marginal cost. Since YouTube is primarily going to be driven by marginal rather than fixed costs (it is very bandwidth and server heavy), and there is no reason to expect users in high-income locations cost YouTube more, it is a safe assumption that the gap between the regional prices is all extra profit.

    Even if true, that’s not what this hoopla is about. It’s about someone from say … the US using a VPN to get Kenyan pricing. As another person said “The internet’s most beloved company, Steam, also bans people for abusing the store using VPNs.”

    Regional pricing is the only reason people in these countries even stand a chance at access to the service (because ultimately their costs might be a bit lower in these countries but not by much … I would not be surprised if regional pricing is pretty much just above the break even mark). People in other countries abusing those slashed prices threatens the whole system.

    This is people in “first world” countries trying to rig the system: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/15hz5ys/found_country_that_works_to_get_youtube_premium/

    Someone in Uzbekistan for instance would feel as the average US consumer would if a year of YouTube premium was $829.