[vundercind]

I don't think the vacuum left by Google exiting free video hosting would last long.

There are lots of potential solutions to the problem, that aren't all very-expensive centralized services, but YouTube existing takes up all the oxygen in the room.

[sbarre]

Wouldn't a new player in the space run into the same challenges though? I don't think this is a Google-specific problem (although they are particularly bad at it).

[vundercind]

Their moderation challenge is one of centralization and insistence on taking control of promoting videos. Nobody needs to, or does, police my email to make sure I haven't subscribed to any naughty newsletters. (you know, aside from five-eyes programs or whatever—but businesses don't). [EDIT] To pre-empt an obvious objection, yes, spam filtering exists and Google and others will absolutely sometimes blackhole email, but I can tune that personally, and I can use other email services and still get the exact same emails—my point is that it's not impossible for relatively unmoderated content distribution to exist on the Internet—what's impossible is Google doing it the way they've decided to without spending more money than they are, or without screwing over and silencing people for bad reasons far too often.

Their problems (not the problems of distributing video, but the problems of doing so as a centralized platform beholden to advertisers that also engages in automated promotion of videos) are a choice they made.

[sbarre]

Hmm interesting. I sort of see your point here..

I would worry that a much more decentralized approach would just lead to inconsistent and fragmented moderation, and it would feel arbitrary.. Most creators, and viewers, wouldn't know where to go to find their content.

For better or worse, YouTube's centralization makes discovery very easy, and incentivizes creators to invest in their work because they see greater returns from such a large audience.

I'm not sure I agree that in 2024 it's "not impossible" for a business to host completely unmoderated content on the Internet, especially video.. The amount of behind-the-scenes moderation (by humans or machines) that happens on the big platforms has been well documented..

I think video hosting is something that is hard to do not-for-profit, at least in a way that is approachable for the average viewer (i.e. doesn't have the barriers of something like PeerTube etc)..

And even if they could host unmoderated content, I think we all know what happens there (see KiwiFarms, 4chan, Rumble, etc)... they become spaces that the average creator doesn't want to be associated with because all of the extremists (of all kinds) end up there.

[vundercind]

Yeah, the inherent problems of video hosting are real and highly-devolved decentralized hosting (e.g. IPFS) is nowhere near a satisfactory solution in a world where most end user devices sleep much of the time and need to conserve battery power, but these are separate from the reasons that Google finds humane moderation too difficult to even credibly attempt—the reasons video hosting is necessarily hard, aren't the reasons YouTube moderation is hard. I do agree that discovery would be a problem to solve, but I don't think it's insurmountable. After all, I hear running a search engine can be profitable...

I think at least separating hosting and the not-necessarily-connected role of curation and promotion (plus, maybe, separating distribution from hosting) would go a long way to solving a lot of problems. That'd basically require regulation for it to actually happen, though, because there's too much value in capturing that entire vertical, effectively "dumping" on parts of that potential-market to feed network effects and build a moat around for whichever part of it (the ad-laden curation and promotion interface, in YouTube's case) you're making money on.

This is how a lot of Google's—among others'—properties work. It's frustrating because dumping "free" products for the purpose of marketshare-capture in adjacent markets stifles not just interest in other commercial efforts with different funding models, but also FOSS or truly-free hobbyist efforts. I think this kind of thing is also why we basically don't develop new open Internet protocols anymore, or if we do, they don't take off, even when the need is there—they compete with free but deliberately closed and non-interoperable services funded by ads or propped up by other wildly profitable services, so are DOA even if you can convince anyone that trying to develop them in such an environment is worth their time in the first place.