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.
