this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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Paying for services?
Absolute evil.
"Absolute evil" is a bit of a stretch, but it's YouTube/Google's fault (by closing off and centralizing their video platform) that it is impossible to go elsewhere for videos.
I don’t really understand how that’s YouTube’s fault. They created a good product so people used it and there were no alternatives when it got shit. There’s no lock in. They don’t force you off the platform if you post elsewhere (like twitch did). You can literally post the same video to as many platforms as you want. Sites like Instagram and GitHub have more lock in than YouTube does.
They created an inherently centralizing implementation of a video sharing platform. Even if it was done with good intentions (which it wasn't, it was some capitalist's hustle, and its social importance is a side effect), we should basically always condemn centralizing implementations of a given technology because they reinforce existing power structures regardless of the intentions of their creators.
It's their fault because they're a corporation that does what corporations do. Even when corporations try to do right by the world (which is an extremely generous appraisal of YouTube's existence), they still manage to create centralizing technologies that ultimately serve to reinforce their existing power, because that's all they can do. Otherwise, they would have set themselves up as a non-profit or some other type of organization. I refuse to accept the notion of a good corporation.
That's a good point, but while there isn't a de jure lock-in for creators, there is a de facto lock-in that prevents them from migrating elsewhere. Namely, that YouTube is a centralized, proprietary service, which can't be accessed from other services.
Google just made it really hard for creators to go anywhere else and created a monopoly of sorts.
Literally every corporation does or attempts to do the same thing. What we would need is to revive the politicians that broke up rockefellers empire and tell them to do the same with apple, microsoft, google, meta, amazon and every tech „giant”.
No more providing every imaginable service under one company.
I agree that YouTube is Google monopoly, but I I've been wondering... They handle massive amounts of data. Would any other non-trillion dollar company be even capable of storing, processing, and presenting videos on the same scale, with the same quality, and with what is arguably very good latency world wide?
What could competitors do to beat Google without hemorrhaging their money just trying the manage the overhead?
If they use the same monetization no probably not, other platforms that do work like that (like Odysee) have some limits, for example Odysee doesn’t transcode the videos and has a limit of 16mbits and 15gb total. It may be possible for platforms like Vimeo or Nebula as they have a relatively high subscriber count compared to their size and accordingly more money available per person, or something like peertube (or general torrent based) could work if the workload is split between instances and users, but peertube has no monetization so it’s problematic to maintain
They don't need all of the data that's on Youtube. The vast majority of it is crap.
That's not answering my question. Crap or not, it is an important consideration.
My opinion is content creators could host their own content and then links to these could be aggregated on sites like lemmy/reddit/twitter/etc for the purpose of discovery. This way one site doesn't get to control the narrative by manipulating what videos people see and creators can monetize their content however they like.
People are free to do this. It turns out hosting video content is expensive. Most YouTubers aren’t exactly rolling in cash. The ones everyone knows, sure, they’re making a living from it now. But that also wouldn’t have been possible for most of them starting out.
Like it or not, YouTube provides something important to the internet: a place for content creators to get started with comparatively little upfront cost.
Exactly. Every single corporation is evil and should be dismantled 🔥🔥🔥. This is just one of a thousand reasons to do so.
I mean this is every ecosystem though right? YouTube, Apple, Steam, everyone tries their best to do it because they want you locked in.