I appreciate the reply, and I’m not out to pick a fight either :).

I think for the foreseeable future it’s just going to be rinse and repeat of imgur, as an example. A service is created to fit a need/desire, with good intentions of being free and bloat-free, but then starts showing ads and offering paid subscriptions, and takes investor money at which point you know it’s only a matter of time before it’s where we are now with imgur. It’s just the nature of popular services unfortunately - the cost to host them is astronomical, and I am pretty sure that 99% that even a rough estimate of what people in here think it costs is probably off by a factor of 1000x or more. Hosting anything that is used by thousands of people, especially when it involves videos and pictures.

Unless there is some revolution in internet speeds/bandwidth/etc there’s just no getting around this.