Compared to text and images and audio, the economics of hosting video seem to overwhelmingly favor massive centralized services. Youtube had an early mover advantage and "won" and Google owns youtube. And they also own Chrome, and control a substantial % of the standards processes governing the web. Also, they are a fucking advertising company.
I've seen some people approach this with "Pay for Youtube Premium then! Show them that there is an eager customer base for non-ad-supported!" but my rather large problem with that is that youtube's "North Star" of maximizing watch time led them to build their business around white male grievance and other such socially corrosive shit, and when you can support individual video creators more directly (eg Patreon, which of course has developed its own problems), rewarding the platform for essentially being the monopolist nobody can afford to walk away from is totally out of the question for me. Hearing from video creator friends about what it's like dealing with a spurious DMCA takedown from some copyright troll makes it very clear to me that this company behaves as if they have no competition. And they're largely correct to assume that.
If I were making this post on Mastodon a bunch of people would show up to recommend PeerTube and while it's neat and I'm glad people built that, it really really does not seem like it or any other decentralized/distributed solution could ever achieve even a fraction of youtube's scale (and many of its users probably argue that that has never been its goal). Like I said, the economics of hosting video are incredibly capital-intensive, and I don't know if that is something we can clever our way past.
This is the part where I'd say "but wait, there's hope! [promising new development] might offer us a way out of this mess" - alas, as the title says, I have no idea where we go from here. I just know that video, more for ill than for good maybe, has attained a frighteningly central social importance and lots of bad things will happen downstream if one of the least responsible companies on earth continues to have a monopoly on it.
start reading again?
these feel like equally fanciful solutions
It's monopoly, same as anything else. We beat it by organizing, we have to, trying to compete on the capitalist plane is just not effective; if it was, right-wing nonsense about "just outcompete them!!!" would be correct and it pretty clearly is not. We're going to have to fight from the ground up.
Video is expensive if you approach it like YouTube, gigantic vertical and horizontal integration where everyone is on one site. If you want to do smaller scale, people do it! They do it now! They were doing it in 2008 when Baldurdash was stood up! I have a stream on my website that I use sometimes and it's basically free for me, and would not cost that much if I actually used it aggressively and started getting good viewers. Video bandwidth is expensive in aggregate but much more manageable if you're not trying to be Comcast. I believe Floatplane is currently profitable and seems to work out well for a lot of the broadcasters too, like Wade Dankpods.
Yeah, breaking down to smaller sites and self-hosting and Peertube and whatnot doesn't "compete on Youtube's scale" but who gives a shit? Is that really what we want or need? There are other ways to build critical mass but we have to start thinking along different axes than "how do we beat them on their playing field, under their rules?" As usual.
breaking down to smaller sites and self-hosting and Peertube and whatnot doesn't "compete on Youtube's scale" but who gives a shit? Is that really what we want or need?
i found the same arguments floating around when twitter was first imploding-- "we're losing the global town square" and a despair around the idea that we will no longer have a central place for conversation and this will be bad for artists and protestors and whatever. and i'm just confused by them. like do you really want your movements and careers to be shackled to the ambitions of venture capitalists?? any platform with that level of hyper-scale should not be trusted and certainly shouldn't be relied upon to stay the same. venture backed companies are always looking for their exit and rarely does that plan give two shits about the community its poured billions into growing and fostering.
"we're losing the global town square" and a despair around the idea that we will no longer have a central place for conversation and this will be bad for artists and protestors and whatever.
We did lose it and it has eviscerated my ability to keep up with protest movements and ground level politics (like, moms for housing activism messaging, not talking about electoral news bs), and especially any meaningful level of commentary from people who aren't white. While I love cohost, it is dogshit for this, and the fediverse is no better. Bluesky...we'll see.
There's no question of whether the corporations behind social networks are trustworthy -- they are categorically not. But more "ethical" platforms don't inherently or automatically produce more equitable consequences. It doesn't matter how good the tool is if it won't be used by the people that we, collectively, most need to use it.
Anyway, that's all off topic to youtube, really, as politically youtube is already irredeemable. What we stand to lose on youtube is mostly technical information, tutorials, and product reviews. The question re: alternatives to youtube and twitch I would imagine is basically, for folks who are able to make a living doing those things, will they be able to make a living on alternate platforms, especially if they aren't a really huge name already. And for everybody else, will it be possible to find the information they need.



