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Posted by geerlingguy 4 days ago

YouTube is a mysterious monopoly(anderegg.ca)
368 points | 477 commentspage 5
brador 4 days ago|
Views are down reasons: AI bot catchers now live and new ip blocks on vpns and cloud servers.
goku12 4 days ago|
Likes and comments are steady, apparently. How do you reconcile the reduced views with that? Anyway, nearly one-third to one-half of my video suggestions are bot videos. Honestly quite distasteful. They should just ask the users to flag them, instead of employing even more bots who're ever so enthusiastic to kick out those who do not belong to their race.
3RTB297 4 days ago|||
I didn't make the comment you're replying to, but views can exist independent of comments and likes, and bots can just as easily like and comment.

Likes and comments by real humans can remain steady and bot views can vary dramatically. Likes and comments aren't metrics that produce revenue for creators.

brador 4 days ago|||
There’s also black hats bulk producing AI videos and pushing those with bot farms, which reduces slots available to non AI/farm creators.

Survival of the clickbaitiest.

gitprolinux 3 days ago||
I try and compete with https://UltraHotTV.com but it's not youtube in name.
mrkramer 3 days ago||
YouTube's biggest strength is its scale; there is no web service out there that let's you upload literally unlimited amount of data for free.
whatevaa 4 days ago||
Good luck competing with youtube. They are something called natural monopoly. Even if you get the technicals right, networks effects will kick in. You would need to bring in something revoliutonary to get people to move. Or youtube to fuck up something really badly.

And getting the technicals right won't be easy. Video delivery is not text. Will need dedicated datacenters if you ever get popular and want to keep prices under control. It's expensive.

djrj477dhsnv 3 days ago||
TikTok and Instagram seem to be doing just fine..
bl4kers 4 days ago||
Grayjay can neutralize the network effect
baxuz 3 days ago||
YouTube needs to be broken up and have the video hosting separate from the viewing platform itself.
MinimalAction 4 days ago||
YouTube is a marvelous platform. I know how to live life, thanks to the innumerable passionate souls that produced relevant content and put their voice out there. This library of videos never fails to amaze me on how many weird, fun, informative tidbits of humanity it contains. As much as it is a for-profit endeavor, I wholeheartedly support this well managed space.
syncsynchalt 4 days ago|
I watch my son grow up learning to DIY from youtube videos. I'm marveling at the wealth of instructional video he has easy access to, and I wish I had it too when I had my first home, learned to work on my first car, etc.
Funes- 3 days ago||
Every monopoly is predicated upon abusive, anti-competitive and unlawful practices, as well as exemptions and unearned subsidies from governments. Always. Many people aligning with megacorporations wouldn't support "capitalism" if the playing field was even.
Frieren 3 days ago||
People cannot deal with today's complexity.

I have seen the argument: all my games in Steam, all my movies in Netflix, all my videos on YouTube, etc.

To have to pick and choose between different apps makes everything more complex, and it is too much for the average user that has other things to worry about.

All this is really bad for capitalism, as it creates monopolies that no competition can fight against. It concentrates power and eliminates competition.

E-mail is still alive because it is the one place that one can get registration messages, invoices, goverment communications, etc. It is based on a standard so I can use my own provider but interact with all the rest of the world without caring what do they use. This is the future of the web.

For example, I should be able to download any movie app an see all the movies from Sony Pictures and Disney, and Ghibli, and all of them. Once purchased, I should be able to see all of them in the same app. The standard offers interfaces so I can choose one provider that connects to the world. Prices are the same on all apps, but they can differentiate themselves thru localization, recommendations, etc. This is feasible but it requires strong regulatory intervention as current monopolies are the best option to maximize profit and eliminate competition.

Ads are also perfectly fine to finance on-line videos. It is the tracking and invasive privacy practices what is dystopian and horrifying. Most of the revenue of YouTubers comes anyway by paying users (Patreon, etc.) or external traditional ads (NordVPN, SkillShare, etc.) that still ask for metrics for the channel but are not individually targeted.

Standards over platforms is the only possible future, but it will require to topple down the current status quo and that is what is difficult to do.

edg5000 3 days ago|
This. Email and text is one of those things were you are not stuck to a single provider. Anything closed and proprietary is a problem. I'd say this is also the case for banking. Banks often require Google Play or iOS, severely constraining the user. Governments somehow need to put a stop to this, especially in the EU where we are becoming a US colony due to all our IT being in the hands of US companies. We need to take back control!
game_the0ry 4 days ago||
Is it really a monopoly if alternatives like rumble and vimeo exist?
p1necone 4 days ago||
It's a hard question to answer for products that rely on user created content like this.

Rumble and vimeo provide basically the same service, but if you got fed up with YouTube and wanted to take your money (eyeballs) elsewhere, you can't, because rumble and vimeo don't have the same content at all. And if you were a creator you can't take your content elsewhere because there's no viewers.

ChrisMarshallNY 4 days ago||
I prefer Vimeo, as a content publisher, but I don’t monetize, nor have I posted many vids. I’ve simply used the “pro” option, which I have recently let lapse.

I just feel that Vimeo’s video quality is better, and it gives more direct control of the content.

But I do so little video work, that it hasn’t been worth it to maintain the subscription.

whywhywhywhy 3 days ago||
Have you looked at Vimeo lately? It's hard to tell it even serves videos anymore, the platform part is completely hidden unless you get a direct link.
ChrisMarshallNY 3 days ago||
No, but that doesn’t matter to me, because I only ever used it as a CDN for my videos, anyway.
leemelone 3 days ago|
Youtube is garbage now. Never use it.
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