• manned_meatball@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    oh boy, I wish youtube kills itself like reddit is doing right now so decentralized alternatives can become widely adopted

    • pinwurm@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      YouTube is a bit of a different animal.

      YouTube allows creators to monetize content - so there’s a sense of shared success. Channels from Tom Scott or Captain Disillusion are amazing, because their production in part relies on that revenue model.

      YouTube also understands that without paying for popular content, you won’t get the consistent cavalcade of medium content from people that want to earn a living or notoriety through YouTube. And that include anything from videos of cats falling over, blogs about life in remote places, DIY home improvement or niche guitar technique lessons.

      Meanwhile on Reddit, if a user gets thousands of upvotes and a million page views for a short story they wrote exclusively for the platform, Reddit won’t pay them a cent. The very thought is laughable.

      The other thing to consider is that the technology just doesn’t exist for there to be a viable ‘federated’ YouTube. YouTube has 800 million videos - many in HD and many are hours long. That’s a big ask in terms of storage and maintenance - even several thousand videos.

      Video compression has a long way to go before that changes. For now, it makes sense for leave that storage to the companies with resources.

      Text, however… well, all of Wikipedia can fit on around 20 gigs - 60 million odd articles. And for the record, that can pretty much fit on an iPod from 2002.

      I do wish that YouTube wasn’t a monopoly. Twitch is the only thing that’s close, and it has it’s own special lane for live streaming. Back in the old days, there was some competition - including Google Video. But that went away when Google bought YouTube. I guess there’s Vimeo, but they’ve got a very different approach.

      I mean, the Justice Department is suing Google for monopolizing ad tech - and I think we could see antitrust laws used in the next few years to breakup YouTube. Maybe the successor companies would federate - like when Bell was broken up into what became Verizon and ATT - who now directly compete for customers.

    • RoqueNE@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Decentralized services also cost money to operate. Servers, bandwidth, developers. Where is the money for that supposed to come from?

      • manned_meatball@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        LBRY solves it by creating their token and rewarding peers for storing and serving the media. The same goes for most P2P solutions, there’s no entity that has to pay for the costs, all the network shares it. More users and peers mean higher resources, but the individual costs remain roughly the same.