[enkiv2]

In both these cases, there's an entry level that people can get into without much skill, effort, or risk. (Running an email server, of course, is not part of the entry level: email is heavily gatekept.)

Most people who upload videos to youtube are going to have less than ten views total on those videos, which is fine, because why should they maximize views on a crappy phone video of their cat or something? Likewise, you can run lighttpd with little to no configuration in order to make some directory available, & nobody's likely to attack it even if it happens to be vulnerable, simply because most people are not hosting anything valuable enough to be worth exploiting.

The ideas we have of running a youtube channel or running a server are both affected by the hypervisible minority of highly polished professional versions: when we think of youtube videos, we're more likely to think of Hank Green than x_greenfan77_x, and when we think of web services, we're more likely to think of Facebook than we are to think of that python script we dashed off in ten minutes that's been working unobtrusively for eight years. The difference is that running a server has a mostly unearned reputation for a higher minimum technical skill involved: everybody knows that you can record a youtube video with no makeup & shitty lighting and sound, because everybody has seen amateur youtube videos, but not everybody knows that their torrent client is a server.