Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sqrt17 1653 days ago
Some of the more well-known YouTube creators are also on

- Curiosity Stream/Nebula (Adam Neely, Mary Spender, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Super Bunnyhop)

- LBRY/odysee (DistroTube)

- FloatPlane (Linus Tech Tips)

None of these has a nice recommender like YouTube, so you'll likely either have manual curation (Nebula, Floatplane) or drown in a sea of bad/uninteresting content (LBRY)

3 comments

Firstly, the entire point of YouTube for me is the long tail. I don't watch any of those channels you listed, and the only two I've heard of are Linus and Adam Neely.

But the more important point is that even if all the many dozens of mostly small channels I subscribe to were on some other paid video service, I wouldn't want to track down and check in on all those services. Even just 3 would be a vastly worse experience than YouTube, especially since there would almost certainly be huge variation in the features and quality of their various web, mobile, and TV apps.

RSS/Atom feeds and video files you can play with whatever video player you want seems like it'd cover most of those concerns? The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.

The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.

> RSS/Atom feeds and video files you can play with whatever video player you want seems like it'd cover most of those concerns?

Absolutely, as long as there was widespread agreement in both the distribution mechanism and important video features like closed captions.

> The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.

No, but the consistency and ability to get everything in one place is pretty vital, and is something you pretty much get for free from single centralized sources. The closed nature is obviously one of the huge downsides.

> The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.

Yep. Another big one is the cost of serving videos.

Your list also doesn’t have a single YouTuber I actually watch. Well known or not, viewers have very fractured tastes.
Probably i don't watch any of the YouTubers you're watching either - the long tail is exactly why people watch YouTube (and maybe a handful of 10k-1M subscriber channels) rather than, or in addition to, TV programme and streamable shows that are modeled after it that are less niche.

The main point of that list was: there are multiple platforms that try to be a "YouTube for people who don't like YouTube, for a point in time when YouTube gets horrible", with some people creating content there, and e.g. odysee lets creators sync their videos so you get exactly the same videos from them on YT and on Odysee. But for most creators this is still additional work for little benefit since their main audience is on YT.

Just 99.99% to go

It would take over a hundred years for a person to watch a single day's worth of YouTube uploads. At this point it would take the literal apocalypse to stop them.