Some of these services are roughly interchangeable with competitors; others, not so much. Vimeo, for example, has nowhere near the (truly insane) variety and d

Some of these services are roughly interchangeable with competitors; others, not so much. Vimeo, for example, has nowhere near the (truly insane) variety and depth of YT, content-wise (such that it doesn't even try to compete with them, on that level). If you think you can decide to just "never open a YouTube video, ever"... you're just not going to see a lot of stuff that's happening in the world. Similarly with Google Docs. Its viability has very little to do with the simple feature of it being a cloud-editable word-like doc -- but rather the fact that it's easily sharable (or "easily enough", provided you have a Google Doc). It's incredibly popular for a whole lot of basic collaboration tasks. If you think you can boycott it... you're just not going to be able to collaborate with a whole lot of people. Network effects (and in particular, lock-in) are very real. Even though you may not like them very much, pretending that you can just make them go away (by using lesser-known alternatives) just isn't going to work.