[dblooman]

Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier. The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large and seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon.

What is sad is that you see youtubers talking in code on videos, not saying words, self censoring because youtube's detection is so good, videos get demonetised instantly. This is also why most people have seen an Ad in a video for PIA or surfshark or worse, raid shadow legends.

[Applejinx]

That's the reality. I can't speak for other youtubers, but I have an audio DSP plugin called BitShiftGain. It does exact offsets of 6dB, because doing that alters the exponent and only the exponent of the floating point word without touching the mantissa, making it lossless if you had headroom for the adjustment (for instance, if you can go up without clipping, you can go up and down losslessly)

On YouTube I have to call it 'wordlength shift gain' because YouTube thinks I'm saying 'bitch'. And I don't know, maybe that would increase my YouTube discovery at some times when they're leaning more in the direction of provocation-for-engagement, but that's not the kind of channel I do, so I self-edit.

I don't find it sad so much as it's simply a step into the future: awareness means understanding what the algorithms will make of you. Fail to grasp that and you get caught in the gears. I also openly talk about how I allow YouTube to run ads even though I'm a uBlock Origin guy myself and encourage people to adblock likewise: I assume that if I balk YouTube on this, or fail to pretend that I'm after what meager revenue YouTube promises, that I'll be eventually punished for it. So, I keep up appearances, 'cos it's a key platform for me.

I'm currently watching the Linus Media Group playlist on how they make money and why they make clickbaity thumbnails, with interest. I could probably put some words into my thumbnails and construct them better. I earnestly believe Google is good enough to automate discovery of whether people are doing these things, and reward/punish them algorithmically based on whether they're in compliance, so I am probably blocking myself from discoverability by failing to include text on thumbnails even without a single Googler making a human decision on the matter. I don't know whether I need to make faces too: it's an experiment I could try if I felt like it. Gurning for dollars :)

[regnerba]

> Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier.

You support creators by giving them money. In return for supporting a creator you get video content in return. Floatplane as a platform for the most part doesn't dictate what that content is other than it being in the format of a video.

LTT themselves have actually been moving away from pushing videos early to Floatplane and more towards giving unique video content on Floatplane such as behind the scenes videos.

You run into issues with promising videos early to only part of your community. For example when you have review embargos and want to make drop a video at the same time as every other YouTuber,

> The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large

It isn't that crazy really. Unlike YouTube which streams most of it's video for free and has to recover that cost via ads, every person streaming on Floatplane has paid money to stream that content.

Floatplane has been scaling slowly which has allowed them to stay on baremetal instead of going to the cloud. They don't need a lot of the advantages the cloud has, such as the ability to scale on demand. This isn't your normal unicorn startup from silicon valley that needs hyper growth to attract more investors for an eventual IPO or buyout.

Linus and Luke are putting their own money into it because they want to have a fallback incase YouTube pulls the plug on them. They are not taking lots of investment to try and build a YouTube competitor.

Their costs are actually really reasonable. They have a much better profit sharing model with other creators than YouTube does. They recognize that they have a base line cost for a given creator, that is the cost of storing the video and processing it for example. Then they have a cost per user of that content. This may have changed but their model was recover that base line cost from the subscriptions and then take a much lower cut afterwards. So from a creators point of view you get more value as your scale the number of users from your community on the site.

> seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon.

Eh, maybe. It does however let them focus very much on that video aspect and provide users with a solid experience dedicated to videos. I imagine over time they will add more features to Floatplane that help differentiate it.

One example of that is live streams. If you want to live stream to your Patreon members they suggest you use Crowdcast, something you have to pay for separately (https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002973506-M...).

Floatplane supports live streaming.

[TulliusCicero]

> Floatplane as a platform for the most part doesn't dictate what that content is other than it being in the format of a video.

Do they allow, say, porn, or white nationalist videos? I'm always curious exactly where platforms set the bounds.

[Zak]

Porn and hate speech are specifically proscribed in their TOS.

https://www.floatplane.com/legal/terms

[Cu3PO42]

I seem to recall them explaining that porn is only banned because they might otherwise get in trouble with their payment processors.

[Applejinx]

That's correct, they would.

[gnicholas]

This seems like a vague prohibition:

> Do not post false or misleading information

Depending on how this is interpreted/enforced, it could make the platform much more or much less attractive to politically-oriented creators.

[theshrike79]

Some things are easily proven false, like anti-vaxxers or climate change denial. Or even flat earthers.

The gray area for false/misleading information isn't as large as people would think.

[dblooman]

> Floatplane supports live streaming

I guess for youtube content, this is sometimes needed, but again feels like a lot of effort for limited return. The cloud is one thing, but engineering costs, support etc must eat into profits.

I think from a support point of view, this is where merch sales are actually great, everyone gets something, even if it means that people charge $70 + shipping for a hoodie with a print.