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I'm truly surprised there hasn't been a successful YouTube competitor in the last decade or so.
I suspect the problem is that people wouldn't even pay a penny per video to content creators. From what I've seen of other competing video sites, there's a really serious moderation issue stopping them from wide adoption... So many of the competing sites are full of flat earth / anti-vax / pro-fascism content...
I’m truly surprised there hasn’t been a successful YouTube competitor in the last decade or so.
Running a video service the size of YouTube carries astronomical traffic and storage costs. Google is probably one of the only companies in the world that can stem that.
There's smaller video sharing sites, like DailyMotion, but those would probably instantly crash and burn if their userbase were to suddenly grow to the size of YouTube's.
Youtube is a prime example of why monopolies are bad
Why? Can you elaborate?
If a company has no competition, being a monopoly, it's basically free to do whatever it wants. Youtube controls the video streaming market of the internet. If they choose to not pay content creators, to run 10 ads in a row every 3 minutes, or to ban content creators for saying something their automods think is a bad word, what will you do? Where else will you turn? Odds are there's nothing for you on Vimeo. So you either make do with how Youtube operates, or you don't get to watch cat videos, or video essays on WW2, or playthroughs of Super Mario Sunshine, or what have you.
I had as context in mind that they won't allow you to watch videos without paying for it via subscription or advertisment
Decentralize! FEDERATE EVERYTHING!
As much as I dislike ads, "Company wants to make revenue from its product" is not a prime example of why monopolies are bad.
I wonder how they will enforce this. If you can just open a private window to bypass it, it won't be very effective. Sure, they could do some fingerprinting, but I imagine avoiding false-positives would be very important, so I doubt they'd get very far with that.
Honestly, the only way I see is implementing a login wall, which I wouldn't put past them. And that's kinda scary. It would render so many links inaccessible to people without a Google account.
Or who knows, maybe they just want to make it more cumbersome and not completely prevent it, to get more people onto YouTube Premium, while the more determined people can continue adblocking because it's not worth fighting a small minority.
What absolute wankers! In case anyone's adblock goes south, here are some YouTube alternatives:
Thank you! Is Invidious going anywhere? I saw something about a DMCA takedown from YouTube.
I'd be surprised if Google completely stamped it out. They're on Codeberg now, so that'll make takedowns trickier. It's also distributed, so taking down the Invidious websites is virtually impossible.
Also, while Google probably has pretty good lawyers, I'm not sure how well they'll stand up if they go to court.
The official reason they gave for the takedown is also false. They claimed that invidious is using the youtube api without permission, which it isn't.
The beginning of the Youtube exodus. People use Youtube for convenience, but what if you have to wait for 2 min to watch your 10 min video?
Exodus where? Most creators are only on YouTube and it's not like there's really an alternative.
Well, people will get more and more upset about YouTube, and we already see a lot of new Twitter Alternatives, for example. I could imagine the same development for YouTube.
I actually used to have YT Premium because I'm a strong believer that nothing is free, so you either pay with data or money (on anything slightly commercial, not counting FOSS projects made as hobby or under foundations etc. as things get more complex then. But even then I pay/donate for some stuff in the same way of reasoning).
Yet I cancled the YT Premium subscription. Simply for one reason, privacy. I don't mind paying, but then I don't want just no adds, I also want no tracking. I pay with money, so I don't want to pay with data as well having a whole profile made.
Switched to NewPipe with sponsorblock on phone and TV and FreeTube on PC. Got a redirect extension in FireFox automatically sending YT videos to either Invidious or Pipe.
If you have an android phone with a Google account, you're being tracked already.
As I be see it, I'm going to be tracked by everything on the internet whether I like it or not. So in the case of YouTube, I may as well support the creators I watch hours of content from.
Software doesn’t has to be this way. Humans define their own way and the Fediverse is showing us this.
Would definetely prefer to pay than being tracked...
But i also feel like the time is mature to produce a new type of web where nor ads, nor user payments are required, i think we'll get there some day..
No ads and no user payment?
So...... who pays to keep the servers going? Who pays to produce the content?
That stuff is expensive! We're paying for it somehow.
There are a few options and none of them are great.
First we have to split between paying for content and paying for the delivery.
There is already a platform where people pay for the delivery by letting their device be part of the delivery system. That's Bittorrent. You can download by uploading. I don't see why something like the Bittorrent protocol couldn't be adapted to a Youtube like platform. And if the platform only serves a frotend that helps you find the correct torrent and then streams the content in a video player, the demands on the server would be low enough that it could be run using ddonations or something like that. It would basically be a legal version of the Pirate Bay.
For content creation on the other side, that's a whole different can of worms. Content creation takes much more money. I see only two alternatives to ads, sponsorships and direct payments: government-sponsored content and unpaid content.
Government-sponsored content like e.g. BBC stuff is good, but it doessn"t nearly fill every niche that Youtubers etc. currently cover.
Unpaid content could work for some media, e.g. there are a lot of great books or music made by hobbyists without commercial aspirations, but making high-production-value videos without propper funding is just not going to happen at scale.
So all in all, I don't see a future where we aren't going to pay for content in any way.
An issue with the torrent scheme is efficiency. Networks of home computers will suck down considerably more power from (potentially) less than ideal energy sources than dedicated servers in well-planned locations (i.e. near reliable renewable energy sources, with backup generators). I don't see a way to have this without involving large institutions, whether private or public.
Regarding media creation, there's a middle ground between direct payment and government-sponsored: Universal Basic Income, or a related scheme of generic grants for art/education producers. Ensuring people don't starve or become homeless as they start projects or grow large enough to be sustained by direct payments from an audience could foster this sort of growth.
Yeah, when you talk about ideal, home computers will not win. When you talk about an industry that overprovisions servers by ~50% and doesn't even turn these overprovisioned servers off when they don't need them, an industry that lobbies against any push to force them to put solar on their roofs, that lobbies against mandatory haste heat reuse and all that, I believe that a network of home computers will not be much more wasteful. Especially considering that the PCs are ildeing already anyway.
The problem with government-sponsored is, that we have to pay for it anyway. Unless you live in the Emirates, governments usually don't have a money surplus and they need to make money through taxes. So wheter you pay through taxes or through direct contributions, there isn't too much of a difference there.
If they will actually do that, I'll pay for a subscription. To Nebula.
I used the frequent YouTube but watch less and less as their ads become more invasive and unskippable.
EDIT
Not sure why unskippable to was autocorrected to unstoppable.
Google can be counted on to make everything worse at all opportunities.
Corporations in general. Reddit with their API prices, Adobe with their montly subscription for rotating pages in the Adobe Reader, Netflix with their lockdown on account sharing... Capitalism yay!