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 or millions of people, especially when it involves videos and pictures, quickly adds up into millions per month.

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