[javajosh]

Remember, convenience trumps all other concerns in capitalism. So your distributed solution has to be as convenient, or more so, to use than YouTube for content creators. You also didn't mention monetization, and again, it needs to be convenient. Allowing "roll your own" monetization is great, but putting a default revenue method is essential.

I think it can be done. The product looks to me like a cross-platform thick-client application that manages your content, both serving it locally, but also putting it on various platforms. I think it could be a real winner if done right! You might even be able to give it away, open source it, if you can sell default space, like Mozilla does.

The obvious starting point for this product would be the content creation tool itself. I'm sure Adobe (and Apple!) would love it if this was a reality, just to stick it to Google. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.

[ryandrake]

Honestly, I think if you deliberately left monetization out, you could really improve the quality of videos you host. Gone would be all those "filler" videos that exist just to juice the ad algorithm. You'd also lose all that "Hey guys! Remember to Like and Subscribe!" junk because there's be no monetary incentive.

When I go searching for videos, I really don't want to see all those videos people pumped out in order to make a buck. I have TV for that. I want to see silly cat videos and how-tos from people's garages.

[javajosh]

Not sure why you're downvoted, I think its a useful contribution. There is a TON of horrible content on youtube - text-to-voice slideshows that are clearly the output of someone clever enough to put it together, but not clever enough to actually contribute anything to society. If they had to host their own stuff, I think that would put a damper on it too. OTOH if you self host there would be NO gatekeeping at all, for good or ill (and honestly, I think it would turn out pretty badly if todays info-space is any indication).

The key, I think, is to overlay a network of blacklists over distributed content, and enforce one new law: communication requires consent. I can see a new industry of small, interconnected groups of curators helping individuals weed out the noise - all while maintaining an individuals right to consume as much noise as they want. Reputation would no longer be a single number, but rather in the context of these groups, to which individuals voluntarily belong.

The important thing would be to connect content to the creator, such that the blacklist is more effective. So, it may not be a real identity, but it should be consistent: that is, your id can't be used to find you in the real world, but it can (and should) be associated consistently with everything you make and distribute. (Although I would certainly want some sort of decay function there, since I don't think people should answer to the same degree for the stupid shit they did 10 or 20 years ago.)