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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3442 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Why don't we have a real competitor to YouTube yet? It has turned to utter shit. Google can eat my ass.

What are your issues with Youtube? I think it's amazing. There are so many people making so much good, varied content.

Here's my workflow: Daily, my server runs a script that calls yt-dlp to download a text file list of channels and custom searches, strips out the ads and uses SponsorBlock to strip the sponsor segments. Then it repackages it into an XML podcast feed. My phone has an app, Downcast, that pulls these videos like a podcast and plays them offline.

  1. Most creators produce trash for clicks, gaming the algo etc. There are some good, serious ones though, not denying that.

  2. All the buffering lately.

  3. My Firefox addon works sporadically now.

Interesting methods... Might try that out later!

Oh, I'm also running an Invidious instance for one-off searches/views. It also strips ads and sponsor segments, but obviously can't work offline.

Network effects leading to strong winner-take-all dynamics, same as every other social media site. If you want people to see your video you upload it to Youtube because that's where people are looking, and if you want to watch a video chances are it's on Youtube because that's where people upload videos.

Compare to Amazon Web Services - sure AWS is expensive to run and benefits from economies of scale and so on, but there's still plenty of alternatives, especially if you're just planning to host a website. That's because of the far lesser network effects, users don't need to use a new browser or even a new URL if you switch hosting providers. At no point are they having to choose between the Amazon internet and the DigitalOcean internet, HTTP works the same regardless. In a world where discovering and watching videos was site-agnostic it wouldn't matter (perhaps where the dominant way to watch internet videos was a third-party application or a search engine which searched and suggested videos in the same way that Youtube does via some standardized protocol), but in the real world the network effects for a video site are strong. That's why all the big social media sites offer different things, overcoming network effects requires strong differentiation otherwise you're just like the biggest site in your niche but worse because of less content and less audience. Even on the rare occasion where an incumbent is overcome by a newcomer in the same niche (which was probably easier when the sheer number of users was less) they don't evenly divide the market between them, rather the newcomer reaches a tipping point where it benefits from the network effect instead and takes over, like Reddit and Digg or Facebook and MySpace.

Replace YouTube here with any of the major tech platforms; Netflix, Amazon Prime (only their digital catalog. Put aside physical goods from Amazon for a moment), the rest of the Google services (Gmail, Google meet), Zoom etc.

It all comes back to the infrastructure underpinning it and cost. The memory/compute/storage cost alone for these runs into 100s of millions to 10s of billions annually. Add on the management complexity on top and it's not possible for a competitor to emerge. A better investment would literally be a nuclear power station.

This is the problem at the root of decentralized web product ideas. The only way to compete is to actually play a different game; decentralization. We can never "trust" that an infra provider or a platform built on top of it will ever actually play nice indefinitely. Maybe you get an Elon Musk type willing to pony up $10 bn of his or her own money to build the alternative but then - "die a hero or live long enough to become the villain." How long before the management executives of that company decide to start charging or running ads or walling off users own data?

The chicken and egg problem, however, is user adoption and friction. Any actually decentralized web applications (take IPFS for instance) requires technical ability that - while actually pretty simple - only exists in, maybe, 5% of users? Now, add on the fact that for 99.9% of users it isn't actually solving a functional problem, but a half philosophical one. Nobody is complaining that there's "no easy and low cost place to host videos on the internet!" Sure, general homepage YT is dogshit, but people shrug it off because being fed pop culture content (and being happy with it) is as old as the radio.

The internet isn't dead, it's better than it has ever been. But the low-friction, easy to use internet is mindless garbage much like the low-friction, easy to use television was before it. I'll admit that the ubiquity of internet slop is at a whole new level of maddening - the experience of using a cell phone for any sort of activity beyond comms (text, calls) is now a net negative to overall life satisfaction. The browser setup to enjoy surfin' the net! (as the kids say) is non-trivial. Social media is literally brain cancer, and most political news is never ending rage-jaculation. Ours is a culture of hyper-abundance where the key is self-moderation, not maximal self-indulgence.

I guess what I'm saying is the true competitor to YouTube is touching grass and leafing through the pages of a physical book. I'm being like ... fucking deep here, Bro.

I was mainly just yelling at a cloud but I got some informative answers here.

Somehow, it seems like most people like the slop that's produced?

I truly don't understand why one would consume like, 90% of popular YouTube content. To the point where people who extravagantly complain about the ads confuse me, because I'm just like ok stop using it?

But clearly there's a market for Mr Beast to the point where his chocolate bars wind up at the local grocery store? So there must be millions of people out there who like stuff so totally orthogonal to what I consume on YouTube that of course the stuff I consume is going to be kinda hidden.

Somehow, it seems like most people like the slop that's produced?

I think it's less a case of 'this person likes this thing' and more a case of 'This person is used to this thing and not pissed off enough to switch yet'.
And the initial adoption window was because 'everyone is doing it'.

Hosting billions of videos is expensive. Most companies can't turn that into something actually profitable. It's debatable if Google even is getting anything nearly worth its investment.

Google was able to lose $2 billion a year on YouTube for over a decade. Additionally Google tweaks search results to favour YT over other platforms. Also it's integrated with Google's ad sales so any competitor needs to come up with an entire ad tech stack to compete.

Rumble is an alternative video hosting site but it's clearly behind YT tech wise. They are having success hosing rightish content that YT throttles to hell. Also they have two ongoing lawsuits against Alphabet for their business practices around YT.

It's very obvious that Rumble has to settle for a lower quality of advertiser.

Google was able to lose $2 billion a year on YouTube for over a decade. Additionally Google tweaks search results to favour YT over other platforms. Also it's integrated with Google's ad sales so any competitor needs to come up with an entire ad tech stack to compete.

I would assume those two things are connected. People always point YouTube being run at a loss as a reason why no competitor will appear. But I wouldn't be suprised if it was the case that YouTube is effectively just a loss leader for Google (I mean "Alphabet"). YouTube is such an incredibly effective data harvesting tool that would improve the value dramatically of Google's other services and products.

YouTube also likely has huge administrative bloat, as the Twitter firings demonstrated was the case for Twitter.

yt-dlp and mpv are your friends.

The problem I personally have with YouTube is the awful clickbait content being produced because of the site's incentives, not my inability to download the content.

There's just so much crap and it's impossible to find the gems buried in it. If only there was an addon for that.

Subscribe liberally and turn on notifications for high-quality channels you really like, and only ever open slop in Incognito. I've got my YouTube algorithm tuned way the fuck in and am generally happy with what it surfaces.

Perhaps I'm just lucky with the kinds of things I'm interested in.

I still get a lot of clickbait thumbnail spam in recommend, but you're right it does get a lot better when you're judicious and slam clickbait channels with "do not recommend"

It's that which I'm most concerned with. Then there's all the technical (deliberate) hiccups. They added a new premium playback mode and now the regular one buffers all the time. And half of the videos have some different code that makes my browser addon for YT not work correctly. I suspect they're trying to kill off ad-blocking.

I haven't had any buffering at all, except when accidentally running at 4k 2x speed, which is 100% my browser's fault. Isn't the premium just higher bitrate at 1080?

nobody uses vimeo or dailymotion! youtube is the defacto standard!

Because YouTube is the default search engine for video and the only competitor is literally Google.

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