this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Technology
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Doesn’t matter. People will still eat that shit up! YouTube is the best example of Stockholm syndrome I’ve ever seen. This shit should be taught about in schools.
It's much more banal. YouTube is simply a monopoly abusing its market power. People would use alternatives if they existed.
They exist!
They are not alternatives because they don't have content. Streaming video is fairly trivial. Having content is not.
Streaming video is NOT trivial.
Video files are big. There's so much costs involved in hosting, compression, transcoding, distributing across CDNs, and serving, that "free" tiers on those services are just not feasible long-term. Even a multi-billion corporation like Google/Alphabet was only willing to burn cash on that for so long.
PeerTube offloads distributing and serving across the viewers, so the more popular a video becomes, the more "CDN" its viewers provide.
It only has the "downside" of less control and the inability of the platform to insert ads, so all promotions are directly controlled by the content creators themselves, who "in exchange" only need a minimal server to host their videos.
While it's been hard to find good stats, something to the effect of several hundreds of hours of video footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
Processing, storing, and streaming that is not remotely a trivial task.
I'd say content is trivial, but having the sheer variety of content that youtube has is not. Odysee has some decent stuff on there- even some decent original stuff that isn't just a mirror of someone's youtube channel. But it's not going to have the same niche, specific content I might look up on youtube.
They are for me at least since all of my favourite Youtuber upload videos on Odysee and Peertube too.
Are those actually hosting videos or just accessing YouTube? Because for the latter, most people still want the algorithm and the interaction/support to the creators they follow
All of those host videos themselves, they're not like piped or invidious.
Oh that’s nice. Are many YouTubers cross posting there?
No one is really posting content to any of the alternatives really. Maybe if you are really into crypto-hype or other very niche topics, there will be a little content. But not much.
Hardly any, even though Odysee has an option to auto upload whatever you're uploading to YT on their platform.
Personally I can't understand doomsrolers that "prefer" the "algorithm".
The problem is that there is no valid alternative at the moment, so I wouldn't call that Stockholm sybdrome. Hosting that much content for free costs ungodly amounts of money to Google
No valid alternative isn’t an excuse to continue consuming shit. That’s abused wife mentality.
Just leave. You don’t need an alternative.
This is the way.
We've been able to survive for 200,000 years without any of this s***.
I've massively reduced my time spent with youtube over the last year or so when I noticed that the overall experience was just getting worse and worse.
Previously I'd watch a video, and from there jump to another interesting video, and so on - now pretty much all the top level suggestions are useless already, and it's rare that after watching a video you get something worth watching recommended.
I assume it's not just youtubes fault - while I do think youtube is pushing those videos even from people I used to like I now see more videos where they go on for 20 minutes about something that should've been said in 3 minutes max.
I now almost exclusively use youtube to watch videos from people I've subscribed years ago, and as they either become annoying to go with youtubes algorithm, or eventually stop/slow uploading my usage goes down. Nowadays I often enough don't open youtube for two weeks, while previously there rarely was a day without checking at least a few videos.
Ok people, time to decide. Do you want targeted recommendations or do you want privacy?
Because the only way for YouTube to figure out what you may find interesting today is to go through your watch history, rummage through your engagement metrics, and suck up your profile details. Then collate and process a ton of data about you and your preferences, compare that knowledge against a vast library of channels & streams to try and figure out what would likely make you click on a given video. All while fighting spam, misinformation, and people trying to game the system with SEO and clickbait. All in real-time, as over 300,000 hours of content is being uploaded every minute.
To be clear, I'm not defending YouTube or Google. I'm just saying it's not all cut-and-dried as many people think.
While most of the rest is true, clickbait makes you click, so it isn't something YouTube necessarily wants to combat.
Same with "rage-bait", or content that you'll click on just because it's so preposterous that you'd want to criticize it in the comments.
Both are trash, yet not against YouTube's interests.
This is my view. I went the privacy route. The result is the addictiveness of the service went way down. For me, that's a win.
There are other ways to give us content we might like. For example, have a list of topics and categories we can select. This reduces invasiveness while providing some benefit.
The problem is that does not give Google what it wants out of the relationship.