[autoexec]

The good news is that none of the content you care about is Google's. As soon as someone else provides a space for content creators to move to you can get rid of Youtube and never miss a single thing about it. Google has successfully pissed off enough youtubers that they're just waiting for the first chance to jump ship, just like we are as watchers.

In the meantime, try to give as little as you can to Google. Use Newpipe and youtube-dl so you never see an ad.

[hot_gril]

This generously assumes that the new provider won't take the same steps YouTube did. I feel like the only solution is to not care all that much about watching videos.

[AmpsterMan]

Nebula is such a streaming service. From what I understand, they are a subscription based company that has a profit share incentive for it's creators. Consequently, the creators skew toward educational-esque content.

[annexrichmond]

Yeah but operating a service like YouTube is such a money pit (given on recent HN threads I've read). It seems like they've been mostly able to work because of their huge ad network, targeting, etc.

[marcosdumay]

It's not inherently a money pit.

Google and Facebook have a complete oligopoly over the ads market and are manipulating it so nobody else can prosper.

[hot_gril]

It seems like inherently a money pit to me. Was Google even profiting off it before they started cramming in ads and offering YT Premium?

[malfist]

Serving video data to, potentially, billions of users is absolutely expensive.

You can't, "in a weekend" a youtube clone that can stand up to the first viral hit.

[skeledrew]

That's what BitTorrent is for. The main issue with torrenting is that non-viral content is going to have very low availability.

[smaudet]

Yeah, the important 3rd wheel of the video space:

1) Hosting space/cpu/bandwidth. Video is one of the most intense data jobs out there, behind I suppose maybe AI and Big Data (if anyone is still doing that). You need Terabytes of drive space, petabytes of traffic, all the CDNs, processors capable of encoding inefficient video uploads to efficient video downloads. 2) Network effect. People need to actually want to come, so that people come. 3) Paying for all this - People don't like donating, don't like paying, but hard drives/servers/power banks are not free. So you either charge premiums or use ads.

I wish more people had been willing to pay for Youtube Pro, e.g. (I still do), they're (still) getting worse because the ad-supported version(s) are still the bulk of their income. And so the ad-supported version is messing up everything, being very aggressive, etc. You/I pay for Netflix, why wouldn't you pay for Youtube?

You can't influence the dynamic with capitalism at all when something is free. Sure, companies can "en-shittify", but at least for video this is fairly simple - when it costs too much/works too terribly on one video platform, you can move to the next one. 1) and 2) Make it harder to start a new paid platform, but not impossible - you can directly reflect the costs to your users. YT is just a black box at present...but would have been less so if Youtube Pro had been more popular (ads might have been easier to block, even).

[b112]

There's a space for Netflix here. They have the "TV" class subscribers, they have all the networks, knowhow.

All the initial groundwork is done.

All they need is a platform for the youtube class content provider. They already have ad deals too.

They could, if they found some model that works, snap up loads of talent.... and that talent could even stay on youtube too.

As long as they keep content in its own category...