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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Fuck YouTube
YouTube had a good humble beginning before monetization fucked everything up. It was a bad idea to begin with. For now, best stick with piped and all the apps that use piped as backend. NewPipe and LibreTube. Want to support a creator? Go buy merch or something. Dont give Google a second of your time.
I mean it’s a fine idea it’s just been capitalismed to death
I read this as monetization being the bad idea, and that is basically the same thing as being capitalismed to death.
So the amount of up front investment required for something on an infrastructure level is massive. It’s the type of thing that really needs to be centralized, because it isn’t just storage. It’s massive amounts of bandwidth, a distributed content distribution network close to your end users(which is even harder on a global scale).
Don’t get me wrong I don’t think the purely profit driven nature of YouTube is healthy at all. It’s an active detriment. But it’s hard to think of another practical way that isn’t hellaciously expensive.
Introducing.. PeerTube. Bandwidth is not a problem because if a video gets popular people will be watching it and therefore sharing it to their peers Infrastructure costs don't matter because channels would be on small instances That would not cost much to run, etc. A single company need not pay millions of dollars to host something like this when each individual who wants to be a content creator can put up a few dollars a month like maybe four or five and do it. That way the cost is distributed and not a burden on one entity.
The issue with PeerTube, is monetization.
You need to be able to tell anchors that draw people in and make their living from YouTube like LinusTechTips, Phillip DeFranco, and MrBeast why PeerTube is the platform for them... and losing all the money YouTube gives them is a big problem in any argument (as much as they might not like some of YouTube's policies themselves).
Also, storage costs are going to explode if PeerTube gets popular and maintains the "anyone can upload in 4k" that YouTube allows. Linus did a video about how expensive 4k video is compared to the 1080p videos that have been dominate in the platform for most of the platform's life, and how that increased cost has contributed to discussions of changes (at the time) which have evidently manifested as adblocking and promoting premium (speculatively, this is in part because Google feels regulars are going to hurt its advertising business badly and they need to get subscribers that could keep the platform afloat -- going back to "old models" before the Google advertising money machine made the Internet "free").
I totally get that they had to find some way to financially support the massive infrastructure that was necessary to do what YouTube does.
I was fine with an ad every now and then.
I was fine with an ad at the start and end of a long video.
Ads on a 30s video? Ads on an Ad? Multiple ads at the start, multiple ads in-between and at the end? Jesus h. Christ. Removing the dislike button?
That was when I switched to ReVanced.
Wasn't YouTube unrelated to Google at first?
Yes, they bought it (in 2006). However, it wasn't what it is today, and IIRC it was "in the red" (losing money). It was in the red for years after Google bought it as well. There's not a lot of good information on this unfortunately with regard to the current state. The last update we had was in 2015 that YouTube wasn't making money https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-for-youtube-1424897967
That's 9 years of operating at a loss, and probably the 9 years people think of most fondly... We were getting the service at a loss to Google.