this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

When you have a goose that produces a reliable daily supply of golden eggs do you:

  1. keep collecting your daily egg
    or
  2. see if giving it a good kick or two gets you more eggs
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

"The ~$10MM in profit we booked last year is not enough!" The curse of infinite growth.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Youtube most likely never made any money. Hosting these vast amounts of video is expensive. Google stopped telling us how much they money youtube made them lose. You would think they would start bragging when they could make a profit off of it.

That being said, this still sucks of course.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Although they don't profit directly from youtube, it's a strategy they take to impede competition from arising and keeping their name as the main one. It's the kind of strategy only multibillionaire companies can do, and, in my opinion, something that should be restricted, because it affects smaller businesses to the point of becoming inviable.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

As YouTube increases the number and length of ads, the amount of traffic behind blockers rises accordingly.

This is also just... a function of the evolving digital space. The consolidation of the internet ownership sphere and the modernized APIs/coding tools afford server-side content warehouses more and more power over what the end user receives.

Because AWS owns all the fucking rack space, because ISP monopolies are the defining feature of western net access, and Microsoft force-feeds people their proprietary interfaces, we're moving away from the point where clients control what they display and closer to the point where everything's just a dumb-terminal for big business.

We're effectively backpeddling from Web 2.0 to Terrestrial TV.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (6 children)

oh boy, I wish youtube kills itself like reddit is doing right now so decentralized alternatives can become widely adopted

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

YouTube is a bit of a different animal.

YouTube allows creators to monetize content - so there's a sense of shared success. Channels from Tom Scott or Captain Disillusion are amazing, because their production in part relies on that revenue model.

YouTube also understands that without paying for popular content, you won't get the consistent cavalcade of medium content from people that want to earn a living or notoriety through YouTube. And that include anything from videos of cats falling over, blogs about life in remote places, DIY home improvement or niche guitar technique lessons.

Meanwhile on Reddit, if a user gets thousands of upvotes and a million page views for a short story they wrote exclusively for the platform, Reddit won't pay them a cent. The very thought is laughable.

The other thing to consider is that the technology just doesn't exist for there to be a viable 'federated' YouTube. YouTube has 800 million videos - many in HD and many are hours long. That's a big ask in terms of storage and maintenance - even several thousand videos.

Video compression has a long way to go before that changes. For now, it makes sense for leave that storage to the companies with resources.

Text, however... well, all of Wikipedia can fit on around 20 gigs - 60 million odd articles. And for the record, that can pretty much fit on an iPod from 2002.

I do wish that YouTube wasn't a monopoly. Twitch is the only thing that's close, and it has it's own special lane for live streaming. Back in the old days, there was some competition - including Google Video. But that went away when Google bought YouTube. I guess there's Vimeo, but they've got a very different approach.

I mean, the Justice Department is suing Google for monopolizing ad tech - and I think we could see antitrust laws used in the next few years to breakup YouTube. Maybe the successor companies would federate - like when Bell was broken up into what became Verizon and ATT - who now directly compete for customers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The other thing to consider is that the technology just doesn’t exist for there to be a viable ‘federated’ YouTube.

Well, Peertube exists. But I agree it is very hard to get close to the amount of videos YouTube hosts without it becoming too expensive. But that is even true for companies like Google, which is why they are pushing these changes. It seems like people need to accept that a video platform must either show ads, make you subscribe, or receive substantial donations.

I almost can't believe Wikipedia is only 20GB btw. Does that include all the pictures on there?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does that include all the pictures on there?

It can't. 60 million odd articles with pictures only taking 20GB? I doubt it. Just the text taking up so few space that I can believe.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Right there with you on that one. The biggest problem is video hosting is a pain in the rear, particularly at such a grand scale. Hopefully, video hosting platforms will go niche, thus reducing bandwidth costs for each platform and "YouTube" will be the whole federation.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (6 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That was a wild read. The 4chan guys can write better dystopias than Hollywood.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They have really gone all out on the whole enshittification process during the past couple of years, haven’t they?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As fill-in ads are a vector for computer viruses and other malware I for one will NOT be disabling my ad blocker unless YouTube is willing to provide a lifetime subscription to something like Life Lock and make me whole for anything lost to whatever malware arrives as a part of an ad.

Where else can I watch sci-show, Linus-tech-tips, and all the other channels I subscribe to?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just use newpipe. It's youtube without the ads. Doesn't have casting support, but it allows you to download the videos. You can also listen/download to the audio of videos, without fetching the video.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Newpipe will probably be blocked as well if youtube is doing this. Honestly not sure why youtube hasn't blocked yt-dlp and others already.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It's not easily block able as it scrapes the YouTube website. They'd have to stop having a website for that to happen.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The problem with scraping is that while it’s difficult/impossible to block completely, it’s pretty easy to keep making changes to your site to disrupt scrapers. The work required by the scraper to adapt to those changes is usually way more than the work you put in to disrupt them.

So if a commercial site wants to make scraping unreliable and impractical, they almost certainly can.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Then I’m going to begin not fucking watching YouTube.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The tricks YT doesn't want you knowing about...

NewPipe

Piped

Invidious

[–] champion 5 points 1 year ago
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[–] kadu 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There is a federated version of YouTube...

But storing video is a massive challenge, way harder than dealing with a Lemmy or Mastodon instance.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

My rational mind realises it’s such an expensive system to run that it’s reasonable for them to charge or show ads. The problem is they’ve been extremely aggressive with ads and pushing subscriptions, to the point where I’m pretty resentful of the idea. Plus they’ve neglected so many things (like allowing aggressive copyright predators and refusing to implement sensible human-based appeals processes) that they really should have dealt with and instead embraced an algorithm that I’m pretty sure is at least partially responsible for the radicalisation of large groups of people.

I.. don’t mind paying for shit. I just don’t want to give them money.

Also: wow there’s federated video sharing? Bet that’s not cheap to run.

[–] vividspecter 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also: wow there’s federated video sharing? Bet that’s not cheap to run.

It's called PeerTube for the record.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Yeah, good luck making me watch ads trough newpipe

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The great thing about using free open-source software is the immunity from corporate shenanigans.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, all the open-source Reddit clients are pretty drastically affected by Reddit's shenanigans.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Newpipe or even better, LibreTube, for even more privacy (and included sponsorblock!).

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can watch any YouTube video on Invidious, Peertube is a federated alternative to Youtube, Odysee is a blockchain based Youtube alternative that kicks back to creators and users, and many creators use Nebula as a subscription platform that directly pays them.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

When will companies finally understand that some people won‘t watch ads no matter what tricks they employ. I‘d rather watch no video at all than a single ad. If that is their goal, fine.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems like it's profit squeezin season on every major platform.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We did the Twitter to Mastodon migration. Now we are doing the Reddit to Lemmy/kbin migration. When are we doing the YouTube to Peertube migration?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's impossible or at least very difficult, right now. Video content is very expensive. LBRY is the only feasible option.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Great, now YouTube is being further enshittified.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Just FYI for anyone reading: Invidious and Piped are great YouTube mirrors, and Piped even blocks in-video sponsor sections!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

YouTube is the only Google service I use on a regular basis. Happy to leave them behind if they continue with this type of behavior.

It would be less convenient, but it is what it is and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s ads.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hopefully we get a decent alternative soon

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

PeerTube exists but it is not popular. It has a lot of potential though

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It's about to have more potential for growth.

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