Youtube doesn't f*** care. Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? Oh, they only upload on our platform? Thought so.
They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user.
In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view.
Some of the more well-known YouTube creators are also on
- Curiosity Stream/Nebula (Adam Neely, Mary Spender, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Super Bunnyhop)
- LBRY/odysee (DistroTube)
- FloatPlane (Linus Tech Tips)
None of these has a nice recommender like YouTube, so you'll likely either have manual curation (Nebula, Floatplane) or drown in a sea of bad/uninteresting content (LBRY)
Firstly, the entire point of YouTube for me is the long tail. I don't watch any of those channels you listed, and the only two I've heard of are Linus and Adam Neely.
But the more important point is that even if all the many dozens of mostly small channels I subscribe to were on some other paid video service, I wouldn't want to track down and check in on all those services. Even just 3 would be a vastly worse experience than YouTube, especially since there would almost certainly be huge variation in the features and quality of their various web, mobile, and TV apps.
RSS/Atom feeds and video files you can play with whatever video player you want seems like it'd cover most of those concerns? The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.
The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.
> RSS/Atom feeds and video files you can play with whatever video player you want seems like it'd cover most of those concerns?
Absolutely, as long as there was widespread agreement in both the distribution mechanism and important video features like closed captions.
> The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.
No, but the consistency and ability to get everything in one place is pretty vital, and is something you pretty much get for free from single centralized sources. The closed nature is obviously one of the huge downsides.
> The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.
Yep. Another big one is the cost of serving videos.
Probably i don't watch any of the YouTubers you're watching either - the long tail is exactly why people watch YouTube (and maybe a handful of 10k-1M subscriber channels) rather than, or in addition to, TV programme and streamable shows that are modeled after it that are less niche.
The main point of that list was: there are multiple platforms that try to be a "YouTube for people who don't like YouTube, for a point in time when YouTube gets horrible", with some people creating content there, and e.g. odysee lets creators sync their videos so you get exactly the same videos from them on YT and on Odysee. But for most creators this is still additional work for little benefit since their main audience is on YT.
It would take over a hundred years for a person to watch a single day's worth of YouTube uploads. At this point it would take the literal apocalypse to stop them.
>"I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view."
That's why I choose to reward them through non YouTube platforms like Patreon. I've also noticed a huge trend in content creators making sponsorship deals that they embed in their own videos. I sense that canceling your YouTube premium won't hurt them as much as it used to in the past. Plus, you can give a portion of your subscription to them directly, should you so choose.
I use Patreon for 10 different creators, but I watch at least 50 different ones on YouTube in a given month I might want to support. Some perhaps only for that month. And I don't want to spend $500/mo in Patreon either.
Monthly donations are cool but limited as they only distribute the money among few people because they're expensive and a commitment.
My dream, if I had the patience to build it, would be a platform that distributes some amount of budget among every content creator you have watched. Out of my $100, everybody gets $2. A bit like Brave Rewards, without the crypto stuff.
> In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest
Long running project of mine. "Corporate change bounties". Customers leave some supplier and then state why and somehow demonstrate how much cash has exited with them as a customer.
Here's an example. Let's say att lobbies hard against net neutrality and customers were fed up and left. They could go to this site and somehow select "att + net neutrality + i will return if they support it" and then through some black magic prove that they were a long time att customer that paid $X/month that just cancelled.
There's a way to avoid the black magic by making it a "crowd funding" style site but in many conversations effectively zero people would want to give, say Nestle or Walmart, a gift in return for them not being an evil prick.
So there's gotta be some kind of balance. A number representing potential money on the table that can be captured if a policy change happens.
I made two versions of it a while back but new ideas are hard so oh well. But maybe a third time it will work, who knows
I believe it was one of Steve Blank's fairly complicated books that differentiated different kinds of new[1]
Simplifying dramatically, there's new solutions to acknowledged problems and unacknowledged problems.
What you say satisfies the first one.
The unacknowledged problem requires you to first connect desperate ideas and consolidate them together in the prospect's mind. Then you need to convince them that it's a suboptimal state of affairs. Then you need to convince them that an amelioration is attainable. Then you need to convince them that you provide it.
Contrast this to the first one. The prospect knows things are suboptimal, has a current insufficient remedy and is open to a better one. You need to convince them that you provide it.
That's way way easier - like orders of magnitude, a "completely different problem domain" kind of easier (It's worth noting that elevator pitch templates address the easier type of new)
Next task, solve the first one in under 5 or so seconds of exposure: connect ideas, show it's a problem, demonstrate the mechanism, and propose a plausible solution that's easy to participate in.
Maybe that's trivial for you but I personally have very little aptitude for that and struggle immensely with it
[1] all those startup books become a giant soup after you read a bunch so sorry if this was like Moore or Christensen, I think it's Blank. If anyone remembers exactly where this was I'd love to find it again.
There's also the issue that solutions to "unacknowledged problems" can be perceived as grifts.
"Your app predicts when my lightbulbs will go out and it costs $1? Wait, why wouldn't I just do what I do now which is have some spares and wait till one actually goes out?"
Nice insight. Reminds me of another problem: targeting.
If the target customers have already found each other, it's an easier sell. If they haven't then you have a "customer diaspora"
For instance, if I have a new game, there's plenty of organizations, institutions, and forums I can introduce my game on.
If instead, I have productivity software that helps disorganized people manage time better, there's no "disorganized users group" or "decluttering news" website to find the people ... it's a slog. Where would those people concentrate? A bar on a weekday night maybe? The most inconvenient parking spaces of an office park? I don't know.
I'd like to see torrent hosting become a thing. I don't like to leave my computer\network connected to the internet all the time, but would like to make video/audio I've produced available. A hosting provider that lets me upload my content and host it as a torrent would solve many of the problems we currently face with private gatekeepers deciding what can and can't be hosted, displayed, voted on, commented on etc.
You don't need a full sized computer to be connected 24/7, Just grab a Raspberry PI or any (sometimes even cheaper and less power hungry) equivalent, flash the smallest OS of your choice that does what you want: serving videos and files, seeding torrents, hosting a node of your favorite communications platform, etc. You can keep the system on SD then use two USB drives for data, the second rsynced to the first, so you have some sort of redundancy without RAID. Total cost less than $100, possibly a lot less if you already have some parts (used hard drives and USB enclosures, SD card, etc). SSD drives would be overkill and more costly.
If well tuned (drives spinning down when not used after a safe limit, say 2 hours, efficient CPU throttling, etc) It could draw less energy than the smallest lamp in our house: totally sustainable.
About the software, I have a dream (tm): NNTP expanded so that it can be integrated with other services, include small binaries natively, or magnet links when above a certain size, the torrent being automatically created, seeded and linked by the originating user's client, employ enough security to become troll/vandal proof, etc. The infrastructure is already here, but the protocol is too tied to the limitations of the Internet in the 70s and 80s and takes for granted that everyone is a gentleman, which makes it hardly usable today.
The generalization of the premise of Bittorrent to easy file hosting is IPFS, and there in fact are IPFS hosting providers (and decentralized protocols for such, including Filecoin).
Filecoin is only for paying others to host your content; you can host it yourself (as I do) or on a VPS and ignore Filecoin, and IPFS still works great.
Maybe not what you want/need, but I suspect you could accomplish this by just buying a seedbox, then seed your content into it so it's always online, then just make sure you use an open tracker. This isn't an area I've done much in so I may just not be thinking in the right direction :)
Not related to the dislike feature in particular, but Youtube is definitely losing the next generation of creators. Plenty of people are using TikTok as their main platform nowadays, as it has bigger reach for their markets.
Some are already hedging their bets. Linus Tech Tips, which is a pretty big channel to say the least, launched their own Floatplane service which they use to give exclusive access to paying subscribers. Like early viewing, live streaming and videos that don't even end up on YouTube. They offer it to other channels as well. As far as I'm aware, it has no discovery so far (you need to know a channel URL).
I wish Peertube or something would take off. The kind of centralization YouTube has isn't healthy, and it's easier and cheaper to host video now than ever since HTML5 video became a thing. If you're running a business, depending on the goodwill of a third party company's free offering (which costs them a fortune to run) is nonsensical.
That would be cool, but vertical integration does have a bunch of obvious advantages, which is why you see open source options often struggle compared to proprietary equivalents, like here, or with Discord vs IRC.
Yeah I know that it is your point. In any case, are we sure there really is no open source alternative? Maybe there is not because Discord is a bit "unique". Perhaps since then open source alternatives have spawned, or will spawn.
> TikTok is targeting a different type of content, there is no competition with YouTube as we know it
I something learned from the MMO boom back in the days of WoW. After WoW came out, there were a glut of other MMOs. Game companies were like, "Look at WoW! Players love MMOs! If we make MMOs, we'll be rich!"
Almost all of them failed. The problem wasn't that the games were bad. Many were technically and artistically better. It definitely wasn't that gamers couldn't afford them. Cost was within the level of disposable income for most. The problem wasn't even network effects and userbase, though those do have an effect. Gamers move to new games all the time.
The problem was that there is one fundamentally scarce commodity: human time.
Thinking of competition in terms of physical goods is using an Industrial Age definition of competition when we're living in an Information Age. Consumers need a wide variety of unrelated physical things, so competition is only really meaningful between the products of the same kind. Also, producing goods has a significant per-unit cost.
With information—especially entertainment media—anything that takes user attention competes with every other product that does the same. It doesn't matter if the products are completely unrelated: they burn the same scarce resource, so users using one are less able to use the other. And this is the only scarce resource in the equation since the marginal cost of streaming the same movie to one viewer or a million is essentially the same.
YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Fortnite, Instagram, Fox News, Minecraft, Reddit, Spotify, they're all competing against each other.
As Reed Hastings said once, "You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep. And we’re winning."
I'd say there is more competition, but on much more specialized platforms with different purposes and smaller user bases- MOOC sites, other types of online learning sites, remote workout class platforms, Patreon, etc. There is a good amount of that video content which could be hosted on YouTube, but would be less easily accessible or monetizeable if it was.
Longer videos aren't suited to the tiktok formula(endless feed of videos and you where you never know what's next). It works for 30 second video, maybe for 3 minute video, not for two hour video and not even for twenty minute video.
Which Twitter bought and promptly shit down. I never understood it; Vine was hugely popular (I was in college at the time, such things tend to spread pretty rapidly on a college campus), even getting celebrity attention. I really questioned the idea that Twitter couldn’t make the product work when we see TikTok doing just that. I guess Vine was, literally, ahead of its time.
All communities including online ones take less outsiders over time and grow old and tired. Google and Facebook are no exceptions to the inevitable business lifecycle treadmill on which they could be on the downtrend. As the companies become dominated by decision-makers who are no longer agile and a user base who are ever more inert (read: old), their products lose mindshare and their companies lose vitality, to be replaced as a community by upstarts.
I cancelled my premium, unsubscribed from all my channels, and have stopped browsing YouTube (which I did daily for years).
Basically, I've stopped using YouTube as a source for finding new content. If I get linked to a video from a trusted source (here, reddit, etc), then I'll watch the video, but they lost me as a member of the community.
Gotta pay the Premium, or burn 1500 mAh / hour because you can't turn your screen off without Premium. You and about 4 billion others can't afford the Google toll, so pay for electricity instead. One way or another, you will pay.
Gotta get that gold.
If only I could calculate the total electricity burn planet wide because 4 billion people can't turn their screens off. I wonder how a 4 billion screenburn compares to 1 million Bitcoin miners, or whatever the total is.
I listen 95% of the time, lectures, opera, podcasts, other stuff, and there are multitudes of data that don't need me to be staring at my screen.
No, I just explained that nobody will move out of the platform because everybody's there. Where are you going to watch your favourite USB gadget reviewer that only uploads on YT?
Over time means nothing until there's actually competition, and there's nothing on the horizon that can compete to the scale of YouTube. Your content creator is not moving anywhere any time soon.
Competition can only appear if there's a selling point and demand for it. If creators get paid on YT, they have less incentive to seek out an alternative. If they stop getting paid (because people like you cancel their Premium subscription) they become potential customers for an upcoming alternative that does pay them.
>Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators?
Rumble and Rokfin, where more and more them are moving. History is littered with bankrupt companies who thought they were untouchable because people had nowhere else to go.
Rumble is going public soon via a SPAC[1]. They have 30 million active users, up from 1 million a year ago. 50% of the voting public who voted for Trump is a pretty good demographic for starting a big new Internet company. It's as if Microsoft in the 90s said they wouldn't sell software to Republicans or something and everyone had to switch to Apple. I think it's unprecedented in the history of American business that a company would alienate such a large demographic purposefully.
Content creators are already moving to TikTok. YouTube has a weaker position now than they’ve ever had.
You may be a HN TikTok skeptic (there are many) but TikTok is already expanding to things you’d find on YouTube historically, like tutorials, DIY, arts and crafts.
The important aspect is less of where the video is hosted, but where people are looking for content discovery. With the removal of dislikes, YouTube is actively making their content discovery worse. On the margin people should be looking for new content discovery options. You might see people drift to Reddit, you might see people drift to DIY StackExchange. That's the message we should be pushing in these conversations as a result of this, you should be changing your behavior.
Once you move the discovery off YouTube, it becomes trivial to move the content to another video host. The discovery is the lock-in.
2 platforms I have never heard of before this post. It's like saying Mastadon is a replacement for _______. Yeah, no it/they are not replacing. Those sites are like the catch can for those willing to step away from THE place. Until those creators actually leave YT to 100% commit to other places by no longer posting to YT, then the masses are not leaving YT (or FB/Twit/etc).
Edit: Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos? If not, then they are not really convinced of their staying power themselves.
Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos?
Yes. EEVblog mentions Odysee all the time, and many many channels mention Nebula when shilling Curiosity Stream. They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma.
> They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma.
Why so? Are these other platforms unable to payout as much as YT? Seems natural that ad revshare would not be the same on a site that nobody has heard of compared to the numbers available from YT. Doesn't seem too enticing for creators to go to other platforms where there is less revenue potential.
I'm just not seeing the prisoner's dilemma here. I just see people placating a noisy herd by offering content on other sites while still firmly attached to the teet of YT.
The (reverse, sort of) prisoner's dilemma comes from the perceived risk of being banned by YT for promoting competitors on their site. If a single creator defects (from YouTube) too early, that creator loses, so creators have to cooperate.
I assume this is less of a risk now than it used to be, because more creators are promoting alternative sites, and I'm even seeing ads for TikTok on YouTube itself.
Was this a real risk or just a perceived one as you stated? I think banning people because they advertised an alternate site would have put YT in a spot of bother.
I think if you feel like YT is in the wrong and still care about your favorite creators the right thing to do is to cancel your Premium membership. The greater good here is to team up against YT since in the long run removing dislikes is bad for majority of YT users including the creators.
What's stopping publishers from publishing to multiple platforms? Publishing is free, why wouldn't you cast a wide net to increase reach as much as possible?
They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user.
In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view.