this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

No. This is why if a service loses sight of its core value proposition, it dies.

If youtube is actually successful in killing adblocking on their service - which I suppose a server-side timer could actually do - then they will only succeed in killing their relevance, just like so many social media seem to be doing right now.

I pay for services like a debrid and VPN, because they provide me with the services I need. For very few dollars a month I can get 4K streaming from their servers 24/7. That is all hosting should cost. If the fediverse version of youtube, peertube, became mainstream then collectively people should have absolutely no problem maintaining those costs from the users' side.

Once that happens and mainstream video streaming is part of the fediverse, I think the network effect that governs social media might snowball until eventualy centralised social media is a thing of the past.

Do not pay for youtube, whatever you do. Let them die.

[–] Pregnenolone 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You think too much of the average person. This sort of thing might affect you, but it won't affect your friend's 8 year old brother or his parents who just want a convenient way to watch pewdiepie

[–] AgentOrangesicle 12 points 1 year ago

Perhaps, but you can only crush so much blood from a stone and the masses are slowly becoming destitute.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Social networks don't succeed or fail on casual viewers alone. Youtube is a video sharing site, not a content producer. If they get so toxic that the content producers start finding alternatives, then the casual viewers won't all leave right away.

If it gets so bad that big creators, like pewdiepie, have alternatives that grow in relevance and youtube loses its critical market share then it will eventually lose the casual viewers too, especially if those alternatives aren't up to their eyeballs in ads.

We saw this with digg losing its place to reddit, where they sold out their content to publishers. Content got thinner and worse until the vast majority of users left for reddit.

This may not be the straw that breaks the camel's back. For reddit it was the API lockdown, for twitter it's... well I could point to any number of individual decisions but let's just call them Elon Musk. Facebook hasn't quite hit that tipping point yet I don't think.

With youtube I can easily see this being part of a string of decisions to promote publisher content over user content. They're already selling views which could really sink them in the end.

[–] SocialMediaRefugee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Speaking of suicide, Tumblr found out that most of its content was porn and most people were coming for it when it banned it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/CtUuab1Aqg0

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] peopleproblems 9 points 1 year ago

"Soon we will have a new web. One far younger and far more powerful."