Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.
It has been THE viteo platform for literally decades. There is so much content there; it would be a tremendous effort to direct that elsewhere.
And that other site would quickly succumb to storage and bandwidth costs. What options could exist?
Nebula is interesting. You pay for a subscription, which funds creators and platform costs.
Same for Floatplane
Sounds like a survivable approach. Except: has anyone heard of it? I hadn’t.
It’s owned and populated by history and science/engineering YouTubers, so if you’re not usually watching that side of YouTube, you might not find much on Nebula for you.
On the flipside, that’s most of what I watch, so I hear about it all the time.
So… YouTube Premium.
Yup, but no Google tracking, but they seem to do other tracking.
The only option left would be PeerTube if it federated with every other PeerTube instance by default, like Lemmy
Wishfull thinking. Sadly the truth.
It’s nearly impossible to have that high of a federation and preventing a centralization to not loose any videos (except if the creators chose so).
Do you have any idea how many billions with a B it would take to even start a viable, proper competitor to youtube? and how quickly that capital B could end up becoming a Capital T?
I hate people who keep screaming about let youtube die and alternatives will be born.
Youtube has been shit for years. No ones made an alternative that is viable.
Any an all alternatives are subscription based services, and tiny. Like Floatplane, Utreon and whatever the gunfocused one is that I cant remember off the top of my head, if it even still exists.
Anyone that has that kinda money are probably already in bed with googles capitalistic hellscape ideals for hte internet and not interested in going against them.
If you tried to create a centralized one? Yeah, it would take a lot. Would a decentralized one be as expensive? I’m not sure.
I think the best goal would be to try to create a platform for creators that has a low barrier to entry - both in terms of cost and skill - that gives them the ability to easily and quickly set up a “channel” to “broadcast” from and earn some revenue somehow.
Why build one competitor to YouTube when we could build a billion of them?
Why build one competitor to YouTube when we could build a billion of them?
Because thats the very reason why people hate current streaming services, and you’re arguing to not only make it worse, but to make the end users eat the costs of storage and bandwidth.
You don’t understand why people hate streaming fragmentation.
You can have a billion decentralized openyoutube all on the same page, just look how lemmy already does it.
Podcast also did it with RSS. Agglomeration isn’t an issue on a decentralized open platform
If they shared the same protocol, or at least reasonably compatible versions of it, you could have one app that does all of them.
The protocol isn’t the hard part. It’s the monetizing that is. Creators aren’t looking to provide content for free, especially if they are also now paying for hosting costs.
Ad spots (like Google does) work well because they can inject an up to date ad into an old video. In something like the fedeverse today a creators only option would be ads baked into the video, but they would only get paid for that up front which isn’t ideal…
Sponsors pay much more than views. So does patrons.
The true issue is discoverability in my opinion.
Sponsors pay more upfront. If creators are only using sponsors than their whole back catalogue is basically valueless. If it costs a creator 2-10 cents a month to host a video (based off S3 pricing), but they only made 1000$ on it upfront when the video was made, overtime the back catalogue becomes a pretty significant financial burden if it’s not being monetized
Also it’s worth keeping in mind that many people are also using tools to autoship sponsor spots, and the only leverage creators have for being paid by sponsors are viewership numbers.
Patreon is irrelevant, that’s just like Nebula, floatplane etc, it’s essentially a subscription based alternative to YouTube.
Discoverability is pointless if the people discovering you aren going to financial contribute. It’s the age old “why don’t you work for me for free, the exposure I provide will make it worth your time”, that haset been true before and likely isn’t here. Creators aren’t looking to work for free (at least not the ones creating the high quality content were used to today)
…i think pornhub’s leaving money on the table not starting a SFW video platform…
Users spend hours on YT, and 30 secs on PH. They’d have to scale their infrastructure up massively.
Look at this guy and his whole 30s
Normhub, the hub for normal videos.
Notpornhub
Yet bittorrent does youtube fives times over with central governance. You have drunk too much cloud coolaid. My laptop could host my youtube channel without issue and I would still have enough juice to play counter strike and download the latest marvel slop movie.
Your laptop would become suicidal the second it had to start serving streaming, 4k video to dozens of people, much less hundreds or thousands.
Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you’ll get depends on who you’re getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they’re downloading it from may not all have the entire file’s worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there’s no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there’s no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.
Yep, that would be a great system. /s
If the file is that poorly seeded, and therefore extremely sparsely watched, then the laptop with a broken screen in my closet can serve it to anyone who wants it.
The only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand / broad appeal media and in that case, what you describe WON’T happen.
For low demand media, https off my mom’s coffemaker will do just fine.
That means anyone posting 100-200 video to youtube today, can easily handle all these situation with less expense than the price of whatever camera they filmed the content with to begin with.
Youtube only exists, because us, old internet fucks, got lazy and relied on google for mail and video.
We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.
A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It’s fundamentally unreliable.
only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand
Scalability isn’t just about distribution. It’s about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.
We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.
This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That’s the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have…nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
Blockbuster is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
Exactly.
I’m feeling like this whole “distrubuted youtube!” argument is nothing but a variant of the blockchain fantasy. Seeing a lot of the same style of arguments and ignorance.
I fail to follow how a competitor can pop up if the main users it’s attracting are ones that don’t want to view ads or pay for subscriptions.
How can a competitor that is courting people that aren’t revenue sources compete
The alternative should be libraries hosting the peoples internet.
You may balk at the idea, much like you would have at the idea of free public libraries when originally conceived.
We’ll just copy the video and recast without ads I guess? I do watch several videos many times over for diy, so it would be relatively painless to just download and modify.
Finally a use case where AI/Machine learning would absolutely make sense. If we can have AI that can generate text or images, imitate people’s voices or write code, we can also have a lightweight model that can detect ads and skip them during playback. There’s a model trained on SponsorBlock data for detecting sponsored segments https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
I’m sure that we can have something similar but for embedded ads.It’s hard to run AI on phones and low-end hardware though. It’s not that easy.
Give it 5 more years in hardware performance improvements and software/model optimization and I don’t see a problem. The important part is that improvements are made public for everyone to use and improve upon instead of letting openai and microsoft take the whole cake
It already exists. Although it’s not AI, and mostly works best when using channel logos to work out the ad breaks.
It’s called a classifier and it could easily detect an embedded ad. The issue is now everyone needs to run it on their hardware to detect and this will cost some electricity.
Fine with me
Well I’m not happy about potentially adding new type of load on the electrical grids around the world.
Do you understand what we’re still talking less energy than the monitor it displays on. I would bet even untuned VGG16 could do that without even a fine tune. Advertising is starkly different to content and the output is a “ad=yes/no” signal. It’s a very small amount of data, probably less than the plain hardware video decoder. It’s also not a new type of load, it runs off the same power supply as any computer, a slight capacitive load, it won’t even change the grid powerfactor.
Ads have definitely added more load on electrical grids in aggregate than locally hosted and lightweight models, especially given that ads are fucking everywhere all the time. Websites, apps, the servers, even 24/7 electric billboards. I’m not worried about a few nerds using slightly more electricity sometimes for their own benefit and joy (it’s still less power than gaming), as opposed to a corp that burns through power and breaks their climate pledges (Microsoft) for the benefit of their bottom line and nothing else. Corps don’t get to have a monopoly on AI that was built with our data, only to have it fed back to us to pull more data and siphon more money.
So basically fuck Google and fuck ads.
I accidentally watched YouTube the other night without adblock, OMFG what an experience.
If I can’t watch with adblock I’ll just stop using it, it’s only a rabit hole to waste time for me anyway.
Same, just like when reddit killed 3rd party apps
Yup, and I’m not willing to pay for Youtube Premium because the app kinda sucks and I don’t like Google keeping track of what I watch. I’m willing to pay, but I’d really like to keep using the 3rd party apps I prefer (Grayjay and NewPipe).
So like Reddit, I’ll drop Youtube if my 3rd party apps stop working. That’s my line in the sand. If Youtube wants to get money from me, it needs to be through an API disassociated from my identity.
Finding and innovating new ways to fuck people with ads.
What impossible? There’s sponsorblock. Just add a new category.
I think it is time to bring back The Wadsworth Constant!
Meaning they can bury that toxic ad placement bidding now?
No need to answer, i know they wont.
Fuckin bring it, we’ll adapt
We used to just get up and do the dishes while whatever injected nonsense interupted what we were watching on TV. And when it became too much we turned to DVDs or piracy. Then streaming was the “savior” until whoever funded it realized that more users do not equal more money. And now we are almost back to square one. This is just played out at this point. Google/Yt/TIktok etc are just betting on the addictive nature of instant gratification to survive.
At some point, I think, all the effords of adblocking (grayjay, newpipe, sponsorblock, ublock) will seem impractical when a download (and maybe now scan to cut out ads and sponsor segments) will achive the same. And then peer to peer is the most practical way to share that instead of redoing all the work.
Until downloading is hindered too much and someone somewhere just has OBS with some adhoc script on top running 24/7 to capture youtube videos. The conversation of when is adblocking piracy etc seems to me to be coming to a natural end (at least as far as legalilties go).
One saving grace the internet has bestowed on media is that it is easier to follow creators and fund their work (if you can afford it).
How it works is that once you start getting them, the video will create a sort of queue with ads before each video that can’t be skipped and have a red bar (not yellow). They are not literally part of the video stream, it’s a separate stream that tries to act as the legitimate ad. It’s called SSAP and I’ve been experiencing it from the last weekend.
Ublock Origin has released a temporary fix yesterday here
Alternatively, you can use this extension to redirect from YouTube videos to piped.video I used it, it works very well, can’t guarantee for much more.
Anything that makes it distinct gives a blocking opportunity, I assume?
Yeah, there’s ways around this. It’s just that most of the ublock origin blocking specific code, isn’t reusable here and the team will need to start over to deal with this new tactic/approach from Google.
The cure might eventually be worse than the disease though. If not now, or tomorrow, then the next day.
I’ll let the unblock team carve demonic sigils into me and sacrifice my grandma if that’s what it escalates to, I’d sooner lose YouTube entirely than sit through those ads
You could also use something like GrayJay, I’ve been using it for a while now and haven’t had any issues with it.
I already barely watch YouTube but for a couple people I subscribe to, and I already pay membership for their content so I get no ads. YouTube has already whittled me down to the minimum thanks to their overbearing ad content.
I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.
It’ll only affect me when I need to fix something I’m unfamiliar with, and it’llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.
I don’t know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it’ll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
Have you looked at the Unhooked extension. You can choose to hide recommended videos, which was a game changer for me.
Disabling my watch history did the trick lol
YouTube’s recommendations are such absolute trash if you turn that off (I’m assuming intentionally, to get you to enable it).
The day I’m forced to watch YouTube ads is the day I’ll stop using it.
devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn’t been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.
I pay for premium… but also like my sponsorblock… and 3rd party clients. Let me have it all momma Google.
Over the past years I’ve been reducing my youtube and twitch viewership anyways. Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching. I’ll just do something else. Most youtube content sucks anyways. I don’t even remember most of the channels I used to watch.
They’re just going to increase their own server costs chasing some tiny fraction of viewers who will do anything to avoid ads. they should be grateful for the adviewers they have.
