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by notnap 2061 days ago
I was living a few blocks away from YouTube HQ building and with 1gigabit up/down fiber optics cable had YouTube stutters. They [YouTube] definitely don’t optimize for that
1 comments

Watching TV shows about manufacturing process (e.g.: How It's Made) made me realise that manufacturing is not just about "making things perfect", but also "discarding the outliers".

You can make something quite bad on average, and that's okay, you just have to be able to filter out everything you don't want and keep what you want. When CPUs are manufactured, this is what they mean by the "yield". It's the percentage of the product that can be kept, with the rest of the wafer discarded.

Chef's Gallery had a scene that actually shocked me a bit -- this award winning chef was making this deep-fried puff thing that was absolutely perfect. They showed his process, which was to make dozens of them and then plate just the best one for the customer. He never had a knack at all for making them perfect! He was just throwing out 99% of the puffs that he made, using the same technique as anyone else would.

You just have to change your perspective: You're the product. You're the deep fried puff.

If you're an outlier, you will be discarded. You're the bent piece of framing. You're the slice of the silicon wafer that failed the test.

Nobody feels the slightest bit bad about rejecting a faulty product on the production line. No tears are shed. No phone calls are made to the product to see if there's anything the manufacturer can do to fix the situation.

This is Google and by extension YouTube in a nutshell. They're an advertising company manufacturing ad impressions and ad clicks. Viewers are their product.

Viewers on 1 Mbps or 1 Gbps are equally outliers. Both are too weird to cater to, less than optimal, unpredictable, difficult to advertise-to viewers.

Rejected.

> Viewers on 1 Mbps or 1 Gbps are equally outliers. Both are too weird to cater to, less than optimal, unpredictable, difficult to advertise-to viewers.

Viewers on 1Gbps give off two important signals to advertisers.

1) Probably living near a city to get fiber coverage, which these days is usually a signal of wealth

2) Can afford a fiber internet monthly subscription, also usually not cheap.

This is most likely somebody that advertisers are very interested in getting their ads in front of!

> 1) Probably living near a city to get fiber coverage, which these days is usually a signal of wealth

> 2) Can afford a fiber internet monthly subscription, also usually not cheap.

Unless you’re assuming US residents these are not really signals or helpful. In Japan or Korea you can get GBPs fiber for $30. In Eastern Europe you can get fiber for as low as €10 in Romania I think, in western you can get that for 50 in Switzerland.

Meanwhile there are places where it’s not an option at all unless you get into “contact us” price ranges.