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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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.
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