YouTube was one of the jewels of the internet. Now that Google is furiously yanking it's teats, YouTube has become just another "fuck you, pay me" ad infested hellscape. Video distribution is ripe for disruption.
I'm not sure what you mean by "disruption" here. Offering video content at scale costs a lot of money, it's gotta come from somewhere. And the options are users directly (YouTube Premium), users indirectly (ads), product investment by a large company (old YouTube), or financial investment by VC. Pick your poison?
Nevertheless there are a ton of very high quality, and seemingly successful, streamed-prerecorded pirate video sites these past few years, and One might assume their users be more adblocky than google's users.
Oh and also porn sites I guess, and what's the advertising worth there vs on youtube
Ok, and why should I as a user care about this? No one asked youtube to become a monopoly and I don't exactly have much compassion for the engineering woes that come with this.
I'd be perfectly fine with an upload cap if that reduces the hosting cost in any way. But of course that would be against the "groth at any cost" mantra.
You don't have to "care", but I think this is a huge reason (in addition to the network effect) that people continue to use Youtube. Where else can you store an unlimited amount of video for free, for approximately forever?
Peertube uses Peer to Peer connections between users to share bandwidth and use less managed infrastructure.
But it's not centralized, so capitalists are not happy with it
It's pretty great still if you pay for YouTube Premium (which IMO is a good deal given you get YouTube Music too). The sponsor ads are easy to skip too. Half the videos even mark the ad sections in the timeline or even have an on screen timer to make it easier.
I started using an adskipper Chrome extension called Clear Skies.
I use Firefox and ublock Origin for every other website but I use Chrome/ Clear Skies just for youtube because those dogs are blocking me with Firefox/ublock and even with ublock disabled they are nerfing Firefox by throttling it to make the experience unbearably laggy.
It’s not just the ads now, they slip gross out and shock content into search results because people can’t help but click it.
Really wish Neal Mohamed would realize when I’m searching for recipes to cook for dinner I do not wish to see: black head videos, hair lice infestation, CCTV of a Chinese child dying in a faulty elevator, ear cleaning videos in my search results. All of which Neal Mohans algorithm has served me when searching for recipes and I’ve never clicked a single one.
I know its a purpose build in shock video cos it always shows in an extra box that includes 1 video I have watched before, 1 gross out video, 1 mainstream video all unrelated to the search
I think you're underestimating the popularity of that kind of content, if reality TV is anything to go by.
And personally, I think I may have seen a pimple popping video...once? And I just hit the "not interested in this" button and have never seen one again. Though, I've always made sure to keep my watch history tidy, so the vast majority of recommendations I see are spot-on
Noone is underestimating those kind of videos are popular, but given how much information google ingests (and sells) about us, is it too much to ask to stop being reccomended popular bullshit? Just because 8 out of 10 people watch that doesnt mean everyone needs to be served that.