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by btinker
1969 days ago
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Yep, that's part of why reddit is so great. > Fundamentally i think the solution is competitors. This was a much easier position to take when the web did not just have a few social media giants with network effects, but still: if youtube becomes to dranicon, start a new website. The tools to stream video (albeit not at scale) are just an apt-get away. There's no serious YouTube competition because YouTube is not (just) a video host. Video hosting isn't that big a deal (though hard at scale). YouTube is a network of videos, creators and viewers powered by recommendations, subscriptions advertisements (paying creators) and massive network effects. You could build yet another video host and even have niche success with it. But you have no chance of providing the equivalent effect of a video landing on the YouTube frontpage. |
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Most people on Youtube never even have their videos land on the frontpage, and yet many of them are successful. That network effect and scale isn't necessary for the ability to broadcast and disseminate speech online, so it doesn't really contradict the premise that free speech on the web (as far as video is concerned) requires Youtube as a host, or that competition couldn't be as effective as, say, repealing Section 230 or having the government take over Youtube and force it to act as a public utility.
At the end of the day, all Youtube is, is popular. They're not like J.P. Morgan, holding monopoly power by physically controlling infrastructure and making competition impossible. The reason there isn't "effective" competition isn't because Google controls the web, it's because no one considers anything less than Google-scale to be "competition," so they write off the tons of other media streaming sites and social media platforms as irrelevant because they can't gain dominant market share. But this conflates the free speech argument with arguments about effective business strategy.