i do think the search, recommendations, following, ease-of-uploading, and unlimited hosting capacity that youtube gives you are of real, incredible value. i can

i do think the search, recommendations, following, ease-of-uploading, and unlimited hosting capacity that youtube gives you are of real, incredible value. i can find videos on youtube of how to do practically anything, uploaded by every kind of person imaginable. practically speaking, people creating their own webpages and hoping to get indexed by a search engine or included in a hand-curated directory is not going to get anywhere close to that. you restrict your creators to a tiny, tiny fraction of the population w/ those skills. so the trick is how to have the great ux of these centralized services without the downsides of centralized control. seems like there's a good chance it's possible. (for other services, we did used to have (well, still do) pretty good decentralized variants. slack vs irc, reddit/hn vs newsgroups, email vs fb messenger. but even the more minor usability improvements of the centralized alternatives seems to be enough for them to displace what came before. maybe the tide will swing back.)