• Not_mikey@slrpnk.net
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    9 days ago

    You forgot the part where they pay the video creator 50% of the money and use the other 50% to run one of the most computationally expensive and complex services on the internet.

    • Michal@programming.dev
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      9 days ago

      I don’t know about computationaly expensive. Once video is processed, it’s mostly just a fancy CDN.

      • Eiri@lemmy.ca
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        9 days ago

        Wouldn’t serving video and bandwidth concerns count as complexity?

      • Not_mikey@slrpnk.net
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        9 days ago

        I was sort of lumping storage and compute costs together as “compute” but compute itself is probably astronomical too.

        Even if it was just a CDN, a cdn at that scale streaming that much content simultaneously would require a huge amount of compute just to handle the streaming request traffic.

        There’s also the recommendation algorithm which is powered by ai and takes a shit ton of parameters, at that scale that would be a massive computational task in and of itself.

        Even video processing they probably send it through a couple Ai pipelines to add subtitles, make sure it’s not porn, check if your discussing topics with high misinformation so it can put that Wikipedia link below the video, etc.

        All that plus probably another million other little problems that comes with running a service at that scale.