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This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostl

This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for content creators to be fairly compensated, but I will still miss it.

r_singh 7y ago
This resonates with me so much. On a slightly unrelated note: When these to-be monopolies are just starting and raising dollars, their service and everything is on point. Once their too big to have competitors, there is absolutely no way of even contacting them (even if you're in the clear and they're wrong). Customer service from these tech monopolies really makes me feel like we're all cattle.
- input_sh 7y ago
  If you have, let's say, a billion users, each of which can report stuff, and have some algorithm that weeds out 90% of bogus reports, how big would your customer support team need to be to handle the remaining 10% in a reasonable time span?
  - r_singh 7y ago
    I get this argument about having millions of users reporting stuff. But just have a look at Facebook and Google's balance sheet, and the figures that other non profitable monopolies raise. However big the support team needs to be should be their problem, or rather part of their plan. And if they don't have enough money for a big enough team (or just don't prioritise support enough), then honestly, I don't think it's truly scalable or sustainable. And eventually we as consumers will learn. This whole tech pump and dump (or promise something and change it later when it's time to profit[1]) wave is new, and we're just beginning to learn how companies change once they have enough leverage. I'm sure if they don't take customer support seriously, they will pay a price for it in the long run. Would just like to clarify, that I don't think expecting personal support for non-paid services is reasonable. But as a paid customer (for e.g. of Uber), one should at least be able to call an IVR. But these cos. deliberately make it harder for you to get their numbers. [1]for e.g. how youtube was free speech and niche artists, how google would get you to the result the quickest
    - r_singh 7y ago
      Update: 10% of 1B is 100M. 100M tickets in how much time? Let's say a year. And it takes on average 5 minutes to respond to 1. That is 500M minutes. So you need a team of ~1500 people to respond to 100M tickets in a year. Not that bad eh.
      - jefftk 7y ago
        500M minutes is 8.3M hr. Full-time is 2080hr/y, so ~4,000 people. Separately, your time estimates are much too low.
        r_singh 7y ago
        Thanks for correcting. True that 5 mins per ticket is too less. But I don't think any paid tech service has 1B customers. (users yes, customers, I don't think so).
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    That's a side effect of too much centralization. Grocery stores handle billions of customers daily and have no problem processing even 10% of them complaining about something, because there's lots of stores and each handles complaints themselves. Customer support scales linearly with the scale of the sector. You could say it's one of the negative side effects of globalization - instead of small market entities serving their local populations, you have large market entities that try to handle everyone themselves.
    - r_singh 7y ago
      Yes exactly. A good example of this in a centralised system however, is Indian Railways. They have a billion customers and still have a simple phone number, a mobile app and physical counters for customer service.
RugnirViking 7y ago
Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things. They might try to make something look nice and be slick for the end user, but they won't usually hire people or use big studios. This contributed to a culture where the very best people in the field are making things that any user could also go away and do themselves easily, which led to creativity. Nowadays the best people get money, and lots of it, which leads to their production becoming better and better, which leads to a better product, but less innovation.
- pjbk 7y ago
  > which leads to their production becoming better and better, which leads to a better product, but less innovation. "Better" in the sense that they are more polished and edited, but unfortunately that means more filtered, targeted and biased. There is an intrinsic, authentic value in raw productions that gets lost or doesn't exist in the former.
  - StudentStuff 7y ago
    Hence https://joinpeertube.org/en/ https://joinpeertube.org/en/ existing and growing. YouTube has demonetized & banned LGBTQ+ mentioning videos[1], and continues to tighten the noose around those that make it a viable platform. 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21110752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21110752
    - sschueller 7y ago
      I wrote an Android client [1] for PeerTube in case anyone is interested. Help is welcome. [1] https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    So they all “sold out” to reach a bigger audience? Man! I used to like that band before they became popular. Now they just suck! Sheesh...
friendlybus 7y ago
It's all going to consolidate into two or three services as well. It's going to get really boring. The web we used to know and love is dead.
- davidmurdoch 7y ago
  We may see a lot of web 1.0 ideas renewed/reinvented in the "Web 3.0" world. I'm hopeful distributed computing will make the web feel like the Wild West again.
iroeo0nd 7y ago
Does YT have a quantifiable monopoly it abuses in an economic sense? Or of your attention? I find a lot of similar content as text & video not hosted on YT via DDG search The content is still out there. Google chose not to host it on their servers.
- otakucode 7y ago
  >Does YT have a quantifiable monopoly it abuses in an economic sense? I really don't see how YouTube could be seen as anything but anticompetitive in many of its practices. Primarily, the fact that they have used and continue to use revenue driven by search from Google to maintain the tremendous infrastructure necessary to run YouTube. This means that anyone who wishes to compete with YouTube needs to be able to find investors (or pay themselves, but the number of people or organizations that could do that can be counted on one hand) willing to foot the bill to build billion-dollar infrastructure and then expect to run it at a profound loss, burning hundreds of millions of dollars a year for potentially a decade or more. Google is probably making some money on YouTube now, but they ran it at a mountainous loss for years and years for no reason other than suppressing the possibility of competition being developed. There also other smaller things, like the US government deciding to host all of their video content on YouTube without even considering following the legally-required bidding process - because there was no realistic competitor. That's pretty telling.
  - jkoberg 7y ago
    The US government can't put MP4 files on a web server?
    - CapricornNoble 7y ago
      The Department of Defense does: https://www.dvidshub.net/ https://www.dvidshub.net/
bitL 7y ago
Exploration vs exploitation. Initially all businesses are trying to figure out how to make money by quickly exploring possible business ideas. That's when the most fun but also most start-up tragedies happen. Once some revenue stream is found, the company can start growing, getting into collaborative phase, where it is viewed as a super cool place and most people inside can change things. At some point business opportunities get exhausted, other measures need to be put in place, company grows too big for everybody to have a voice; bureaucracy and formalism sets in, company starts to be perceived as losing its edge and being stale, optimizing for its core profit, exploiting as much as it can and stopping most of the exploration. Innovative people move on to other spaces allowing exploration, reliable business types move in.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Don't forget how the rest of the story goes. As businesses mature and margins evaporate, they start ruthlessly optimizing and cutting corners on everything they can to maximize their profits. Qualities that made the space interesting in the first place are the first to be thrown under the bus.
lacampbell 7y ago
High speed internet is better and more available than ever before. Storage is also much cheaper than before youtube came along. If it could happen back then, it can happen much easier now.
m463 7y ago
At first I agreed with you - imagining walmart coming into town and bankrupting the mom-and-pop stores. But can't folks still create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap? domain name, virtual server, upload? (don't know about monetization)
- chii 7y ago
  >But can't folks still create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap? because of the network effect. Users end up flocking to the bigger platform and thus never even find out about the mon&pop store webpage with interesting content (not to mention the monetization is non-existent there).
  - nine_k 7y ago
    They can use YouTube as a storefront window to reach the audience. But it may be not completely prudent to use YouTube as the only place your videos are available. Through the same videos, it is possible to constantly advertise the other sources of one's videos. The problem, of course, is monetization, or lack thereof outside YouTube.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap? domain name, virtual server, upload? If you become successful, this will lose you money. If you become successful on Youtube, you can gain money. That's all there is to it.
  - bufferoverflow 7y ago
    That's not true anymore. Video CDNs are cheap. As long as you can put ads in your videos, you should be profitable. The real problem is getting traffic, YouTube is the monopolist in that area.
nerfhammer 7y ago
it's the discovery. anyone can still put a video somewhere else. it's just that it's pointless putting it somewhere where it's hard to discover if you also want monetization.
- jkoberg 7y ago
  Maybe it's that the primary discovery mechanism is YouTube's parent company? hmmmm
drdeadringer 7y ago
> Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things True Honest Question. What were these sights? I was a teenage in the 1990s. I seriously and literally do not know and now I want to.
- naikrovek 7y ago
  Most were small sites that had a few videos about a specific topic, and whose videos were not optimized for search engines or anything other than the topic at hand. Why do you hear the words "hey guys" or "you guys" in virtually every YouTube video today? Because it's an approved (and extremely boring, meaningless, and effortless) way to address your audience in a non-specific manner. Internet videos had a lot more character before they were a source of income. Of course that same income potential produces a lot of garbage 20 minute videos about the latest Nintendo Switch rumor, for example, and they also allow truly passionate people to make money creating the videos they would not have time to create without that income, so it's a mixed bag. The internet in general 20 years ago had a lot more character overall before people figured out how to make it profitable.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Perhaps "character" is just another term for "caters to a small audience."
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  They didn’t exist. This person is full of it. There was no “golden age of internet video” before YouTube. Period. Video was all through real player and was grainy, postage stamp affairs that constantly suffered from buffer underruns. It sucked. There was no independent dudes exploring abondoned buildings with high quality production (the proper people). No dudes picking locks in under 30 seconds (lock picking lawyer). No people taking apart power tools (ave). None of that existed before YouTube. YouTube has dramatically changed the content landscape for the better—both for the producer and consumer. We’ve never lived in a greater time of independent content than now.
elznebelyk 7y ago
Its still there, you just don't use it apparently. I have a pirate audio books site that gets tons of use.
ALittleLight 7y ago
I put together this website over the past three or four days partly as a response to the same feeling. https://stumblingon.com https://stumblingon.com But also because I was bored and googled for the old StumbleUpon and was surprised to discover it no longer seems to exist. Basically my goal here is to find a bunch of weird, random, and unique sites and give people a way to randomly explore or adventure through them.
- seomint 7y ago
  I miss StumbleUpon. It was a fun way for discovering unique out-of-the-way sites. One could lose oneself for hours much in the same way people do now on Reddit. It's a shame it's gone. Thanks for taking the time and putting together your site.
forgotmypw 7y ago
Now is your chance to start one with whatever videos you can snag off YouTube before they're gone.
buboard 7y ago
Why don't they come back through some p2p technology?
spookthesunset 7y ago
What are you talking about? What niche video sites existed before YouTube? Seriously. Video on the internet wasn’t really a thing before YouTube. Give me a break...
- bsamuels 7y ago
  newgrounds
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    So 10 second clips of grainy 300x300 cat videos stolen from broadcast tv? If you think that is all that is on YouTube, you are sadly mistaken. Again. Give me a break. YouTube has absolutely transformed content distribution for then independent producer. We’ve never had a better age for independent content.
    - netsharc 7y ago
      Your last statement needs the standard smallprint: Some restrictions apply. See Terms and Conditions. And actually T&C which can change on a whim and aren't even always transparently visible.
    - thrwn_frthr_awy 7y ago
      I didn't say it wasn't better and I didn't say it didn't transform content distribution for the independent producer. What I said was 1.) there used to be a lot of niche video sites 2.) many of those sites are gone 3.) The standardization of YouTube is one of the reasons many of those sites are gone. The first two are facts and the second is my opinion, but which of those things do you not agree with? I can miss something and understand that what we have now is better overall.
  - root_axis 7y ago
    newgrounds still exists. https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/pico https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/pico
root_axis 7y ago
I think this is just rose tinted glasses. The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude more content available today than in the 90s across the full spectrum of human affairs. Although highly visible to the individual content creators, the slivers of content that get removed from YouTube are drops in the ocean compared to the massive amount of content made available on just YouTube alone. Most people on the internet today weren't even online during the supposed golden era, and for many others today's internet is the only internet they've ever known.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Agreed, in part. The Internet audience as of 1999 was about 250 millions of users, with penetration of <50% even in many advanced nations. As of nearly eight years ago, it was 2.5 billions, and is probably on the order of 5 billion now. https://bus206.pressbooks.com/app/uploads/sites/10536/2013/05/InternetGrowth.png https://bus206.pressbooks.com/app/uploads/sites/10536/2013/0... And that's neglecting to address the amount of content and traffic available. I'm not making a "more is better" argument, rather, I believe that "more is different", often in hard-to-appreciate ways. The 1999 audience, and contributors, wanted to be on the Internet, for the most part. They didn't have to be there, and more importantly, most use was not directly remunerative, though some may have been self-interested (expression, proselytising, shingle-hanging, tech advocacy, targeted sales, and yes, a nascent advertising niche). Creators could rarely hope for direct benefits, with rare exceptions ("Million Dollar Homepage", etc.) Use now is vastly broader, it's all but essential, being widely recognised as a basic human right. Devices are easier to use, but far less generative. Even traditionally creative platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows) increasingly get in the way of, rather than facilitate, creation (the time I spend nursing rather than using systems is ... depressing). And whilst many of the newcomers are welcomed, a large share really aren't. Their use is not aimed at general benefit, but at private and personal appropriation, often through deception and fraud. More is different.
- thrwn_frthr_awy 7y ago
  > I think this is just rose tinted glasses. To some degree yes, but the feeling of belonging to niche forum in the 90's and 00's, really had a different feeling today's sub-reddit, discord, slack communities. > The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude This is very good point, and maybe what I'm mostly uncomfortable with. I'm uncomfortable using large web sites (like YouTube or Reddit) for community building. This could be tied to certain personality types, or lacking from something emotionally for me, but that may be what causes the feeling of missing those sites.
shadowgovt 7y ago
Can you name three such sites? Because I'm pretty sure you might be thinking of some other media; video was expensive to host efficiently because of the file size, and it's only right around the time of the inception of YouTube that costs came down far enough and bandwidth came up far enough to enable simple video sharing.
- andoofthewoods 7y ago
  One example of a niche video site back then is Channel101 https://www.vulture.com/2012/04/the-complete-dan-harmon-channel-101-canon.html https://www.vulture.com/2012/04/the-complete-dan-harmon-chan...
coretx 7y ago
Although YouTube's market position or "monopoly" as you'd like to call it certainly has drawn a crosshair on it's forehead; a more causal relationship between the take-downs proliferates to me as what people describe to be "cancel culture".
dredmorbius 7y ago
Sorry, but having been there at the time, and looking at technical requirments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21256674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21256674), I'm calling bogus. Online downloadable audio was barely tractable in 1999 or earlier, let alone streaming video. What was this golden age, what were the sites, and what was the usage? Streaming video is almost wholly 2004 and later, generally years later.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  Text. With pictures. You know, like books. Which you can actually use while, say, fixing something, unlike a video which you need to pause, rewind, watch again, while balancing pieces of a torn down laptop on your hands.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    I'm aware there was text. And some pictures. Sometimes of pretty girls. But the assertion I'm addressing was a golden age of online video specifically. (I also typically prefer text to video, though good, well-produced, audience-respecting video and audio can be of value.)
  - baud147258 7y ago
    Text with pictures suffer horribly from link rot when the pictures aren't on the same site (for example forum threads), with all the image hosting services that had closed in the last decade (or even dropbox stopping to serve as image host, even for paying clients)
- thrwn_frthr_awy 7y ago
  You are absolutely correct about the timeline! My experiences with independent video sites were mostley between 2000 and 2007 I'd guess. I do not think this contradicts any of my other statements, though. Looking back further before video, we had web-rings which allowed for finding some of the best and worst sites on a subject :) I can't be the only card carrying member of the HTML Writers Guild here, can I?
simonh 7y ago
I see this sentiment mentioned often, but all the things we could do back in the day are not only still possible, they are actually still being done by people out there. What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though. Fortunately, in my experience niche sites and communities are still thriving through social transmission, and the fact that so many more people are active online nowadays.
- wazoox 7y ago
  > That's on us though. I'd like people to stop harping on "individual responsibility". It's not "on us". We are social monkeys, we are not perfectly rational autonomous individuals. Monopolies are emerging from collective behaviour that can't be subsumed into the simple aggregation of random personal choices.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Fair enough, but it's not really on Youtube that it's users are all a bunch of social monkeys that are too lazy to use other services alongside it, either. Ook!
- StavrosK 7y ago
  How would you track them down today? In the old days, you typed "knitting" into Lycos and you got this wonderfully weird site of someone for whom knitting was a passion, along with a webring full of similar sites. Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise? My only hope at this point is Neocities.
  - kuu 7y ago
    "knitting -youtube" should remove quite large part of the results...
  - krapp 7y ago
edoo 7y ago
I see in this scenario Google as more of a natural monopoly. They really only got into censoring recently. The more people they alienate the bigger the opportunities for competition. A natural monopoly has the ability to fail itself out of the market.
tanilama 7y ago
More people are now on the internet, and it is getting worse. Inevitable TBH.
yahwrong 7y ago
Of course back then video hosting was really expensive... Now I can find an instructional video on fixing my car and chopping down trees with ease.

r_singh 7y ago

This resonates with me so much. On a slightly unrelated note: When these to-be monopolies are just starting and raising dollars, their service and everything is on point. Once their too big to have competitors, there is absolutely no way of even contacting them (even if you're in the clear and they're wrong). Customer service from these tech monopolies really makes me feel like we're all cattle.

input_sh 7y ago
If you have, let's say, a billion users, each of which can report stuff, and have some algorithm that weeds out 90% of bogus reports, how big would your customer support team need to be to handle the remaining 10% in a reasonable time span?
- r_singh 7y ago
  I get this argument about having millions of users reporting stuff. But just have a look at Facebook and Google's balance sheet, and the figures that other non profitable monopolies raise. However big the support team needs to be should be their problem, or rather part of their plan. And if they don't have enough money for a big enough team (or just don't prioritise support enough), then honestly, I don't think it's truly scalable or sustainable. And eventually we as consumers will learn. This whole tech pump and dump (or promise something and change it later when it's time to profit[1]) wave is new, and we're just beginning to learn how companies change once they have enough leverage. I'm sure if they don't take customer support seriously, they will pay a price for it in the long run. Would just like to clarify, that I don't think expecting personal support for non-paid services is reasonable. But as a paid customer (for e.g. of Uber), one should at least be able to call an IVR. But these cos. deliberately make it harder for you to get their numbers. [1]for e.g. how youtube was free speech and niche artists, how google would get you to the result the quickest
  - r_singh 7y ago
    Update: 10% of 1B is 100M. 100M tickets in how much time? Let's say a year. And it takes on average 5 minutes to respond to 1. That is 500M minutes. So you need a team of ~1500 people to respond to 100M tickets in a year. Not that bad eh.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      500M minutes is 8.3M hr. Full-time is 2080hr/y, so ~4,000 people. Separately, your time estimates are much too low.
      - r_singh 7y ago
        Thanks for correcting. True that 5 mins per ticket is too less. But I don't think any paid tech service has 1B customers. (users yes, customers, I don't think so).
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  That's a side effect of too much centralization. Grocery stores handle billions of customers daily and have no problem processing even 10% of them complaining about something, because there's lots of stores and each handles complaints themselves. Customer support scales linearly with the scale of the sector. You could say it's one of the negative side effects of globalization - instead of small market entities serving their local populations, you have large market entities that try to handle everyone themselves.
  - r_singh 7y ago
    Yes exactly. A good example of this in a centralised system however, is Indian Railways. They have a billion customers and still have a simple phone number, a mobile app and physical counters for customer service.

RugnirViking 7y ago

Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things. They might try to make something look nice and be slick for the end user, but they won't usually hire people or use big studios. This contributed to a culture where the very best people in the field are making things that any user could also go away and do themselves easily, which led to creativity. Nowadays the best people get money, and lots of it, which leads to their production becoming better and better, which leads to a better product, but less innovation.

pjbk 7y ago
> which leads to their production becoming better and better, which leads to a better product, but less innovation. "Better" in the sense that they are more polished and edited, but unfortunately that means more filtered, targeted and biased. There is an intrinsic, authentic value in raw productions that gets lost or doesn't exist in the former.
- StudentStuff 7y ago
  Hence https://joinpeertube.org/en/ https://joinpeertube.org/en/ existing and growing. YouTube has demonetized & banned LGBTQ+ mentioning videos[1], and continues to tighten the noose around those that make it a viable platform. 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21110752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21110752
  - sschueller 7y ago
    I wrote an Android client [1] for PeerTube in case anyone is interested. Help is welcome. [1] https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  So they all “sold out” to reach a bigger audience? Man! I used to like that band before they became popular. Now they just suck! Sheesh...

friendlybus 7y ago

It's all going to consolidate into two or three services as well. It's going to get really boring. The web we used to know and love is dead.

davidmurdoch 7y ago
We may see a lot of web 1.0 ideas renewed/reinvented in the "Web 3.0" world. I'm hopeful distributed computing will make the web feel like the Wild West again.

iroeo0nd 7y ago

Does YT have a quantifiable monopoly it abuses in an economic sense? Or of your attention? I find a lot of similar content as text & video not hosted on YT via DDG search The content is still out there. Google chose not to host it on their servers.

otakucode 7y ago
>Does YT have a quantifiable monopoly it abuses in an economic sense? I really don't see how YouTube could be seen as anything but anticompetitive in many of its practices. Primarily, the fact that they have used and continue to use revenue driven by search from Google to maintain the tremendous infrastructure necessary to run YouTube. This means that anyone who wishes to compete with YouTube needs to be able to find investors (or pay themselves, but the number of people or organizations that could do that can be counted on one hand) willing to foot the bill to build billion-dollar infrastructure and then expect to run it at a profound loss, burning hundreds of millions of dollars a year for potentially a decade or more. Google is probably making some money on YouTube now, but they ran it at a mountainous loss for years and years for no reason other than suppressing the possibility of competition being developed. There also other smaller things, like the US government deciding to host all of their video content on YouTube without even considering following the legally-required bidding process - because there was no realistic competitor. That's pretty telling.
- jkoberg 7y ago
  The US government can't put MP4 files on a web server?
  - CapricornNoble 7y ago
    The Department of Defense does: https://www.dvidshub.net/ https://www.dvidshub.net/

bitL 7y ago

Exploration vs exploitation. Initially all businesses are trying to figure out how to make money by quickly exploring possible business ideas. That's when the most fun but also most start-up tragedies happen. Once some revenue stream is found, the company can start growing, getting into collaborative phase, where it is viewed as a super cool place and most people inside can change things. At some point business opportunities get exhausted, other measures need to be put in place, company grows too big for everybody to have a voice; bureaucracy and formalism sets in, company starts to be perceived as losing its edge and being stale, optimizing for its core profit, exploiting as much as it can and stopping most of the exploration. Innovative people move on to other spaces allowing exploration, reliable business types move in.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Don't forget how the rest of the story goes. As businesses mature and margins evaporate, they start ruthlessly optimizing and cutting corners on everything they can to maximize their profits. Qualities that made the space interesting in the first place are the first to be thrown under the bus.

lacampbell 7y ago

High speed internet is better and more available than ever before. Storage is also much cheaper than before youtube came along. If it could happen back then, it can happen much easier now.

m463 7y ago

At first I agreed with you - imagining walmart coming into town and bankrupting the mom-and-pop stores. But can't folks still create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap? domain name, virtual server, upload? (don't know about monetization)

chii 7y ago
>But can't folks still create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap? because of the network effect. Users end up flocking to the bigger platform and thus never even find out about the mon&pop store webpage with interesting content (not to mention the monetization is non-existent there).
- nine_k 7y ago
  They can use YouTube as a storefront window to reach the audience. But it may be not completely prudent to use YouTube as the only place your videos are available. Through the same videos, it is possible to constantly advertise the other sources of one's videos. The problem, of course, is monetization, or lack thereof outside YouTube.
pjc50 7y ago
> create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap? domain name, virtual server, upload? If you become successful, this will lose you money. If you become successful on Youtube, you can gain money. That's all there is to it.
- bufferoverflow 7y ago
  That's not true anymore. Video CDNs are cheap. As long as you can put ads in your videos, you should be profitable. The real problem is getting traffic, YouTube is the monopolist in that area.

nerfhammer 7y ago

it's the discovery. anyone can still put a video somewhere else. it's just that it's pointless putting it somewhere where it's hard to discover if you also want monetization.

jkoberg 7y ago
Maybe it's that the primary discovery mechanism is YouTube's parent company? hmmmm

drdeadringer 7y ago

> Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things True Honest Question. What were these sights? I was a teenage in the 1990s. I seriously and literally do not know and now I want to.

naikrovek 7y ago
Most were small sites that had a few videos about a specific topic, and whose videos were not optimized for search engines or anything other than the topic at hand. Why do you hear the words "hey guys" or "you guys" in virtually every YouTube video today? Because it's an approved (and extremely boring, meaningless, and effortless) way to address your audience in a non-specific manner. Internet videos had a lot more character before they were a source of income. Of course that same income potential produces a lot of garbage 20 minute videos about the latest Nintendo Switch rumor, for example, and they also allow truly passionate people to make money creating the videos they would not have time to create without that income, so it's a mixed bag. The internet in general 20 years ago had a lot more character overall before people figured out how to make it profitable.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Perhaps "character" is just another term for "caters to a small audience."
spookthesunset 7y ago
They didn’t exist. This person is full of it. There was no “golden age of internet video” before YouTube. Period. Video was all through real player and was grainy, postage stamp affairs that constantly suffered from buffer underruns. It sucked. There was no independent dudes exploring abondoned buildings with high quality production (the proper people). No dudes picking locks in under 30 seconds (lock picking lawyer). No people taking apart power tools (ave). None of that existed before YouTube. YouTube has dramatically changed the content landscape for the better—both for the producer and consumer. We’ve never lived in a greater time of independent content than now.

elznebelyk 7y ago

Its still there, you just don't use it apparently. I have a pirate audio books site that gets tons of use.

ALittleLight 7y ago

I put together this website over the past three or four days partly as a response to the same feeling. https://stumblingon.com https://stumblingon.com But also because I was bored and googled for the old StumbleUpon and was surprised to discover it no longer seems to exist. Basically my goal here is to find a bunch of weird, random, and unique sites and give people a way to randomly explore or adventure through them.

seomint 7y ago
I miss StumbleUpon. It was a fun way for discovering unique out-of-the-way sites. One could lose oneself for hours much in the same way people do now on Reddit. It's a shame it's gone. Thanks for taking the time and putting together your site.

forgotmypw 7y ago

Now is your chance to start one with whatever videos you can snag off YouTube before they're gone.

buboard 7y ago

Why don't they come back through some p2p technology?

spookthesunset 7y ago

What are you talking about? What niche video sites existed before YouTube? Seriously. Video on the internet wasn’t really a thing before YouTube. Give me a break...

bsamuels 7y ago
newgrounds
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  So 10 second clips of grainy 300x300 cat videos stolen from broadcast tv? If you think that is all that is on YouTube, you are sadly mistaken. Again. Give me a break. YouTube has absolutely transformed content distribution for then independent producer. We’ve never had a better age for independent content.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    Your last statement needs the standard smallprint: Some restrictions apply. See Terms and Conditions. And actually T&C which can change on a whim and aren't even always transparently visible.
  - thrwn_frthr_awy 7y ago
    I didn't say it wasn't better and I didn't say it didn't transform content distribution for the independent producer. What I said was 1.) there used to be a lot of niche video sites 2.) many of those sites are gone 3.) The standardization of YouTube is one of the reasons many of those sites are gone. The first two are facts and the second is my opinion, but which of those things do you not agree with? I can miss something and understand that what we have now is better overall.
- root_axis 7y ago
  newgrounds still exists. https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/pico https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/pico

root_axis 7y ago

I think this is just rose tinted glasses. The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude more content available today than in the 90s across the full spectrum of human affairs. Although highly visible to the individual content creators, the slivers of content that get removed from YouTube are drops in the ocean compared to the massive amount of content made available on just YouTube alone. Most people on the internet today weren't even online during the supposed golden era, and for many others today's internet is the only internet they've ever known.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Agreed, in part. The Internet audience as of 1999 was about 250 millions of users, with penetration of <50% even in many advanced nations. As of nearly eight years ago, it was 2.5 billions, and is probably on the order of 5 billion now. https://bus206.pressbooks.com/app/uploads/sites/10536/2013/05/InternetGrowth.png https://bus206.pressbooks.com/app/uploads/sites/10536/2013/0... And that's neglecting to address the amount of content and traffic available. I'm not making a "more is better" argument, rather, I believe that "more is different", often in hard-to-appreciate ways. The 1999 audience, and contributors, wanted to be on the Internet, for the most part. They didn't have to be there, and more importantly, most use was not directly remunerative, though some may have been self-interested (expression, proselytising, shingle-hanging, tech advocacy, targeted sales, and yes, a nascent advertising niche). Creators could rarely hope for direct benefits, with rare exceptions ("Million Dollar Homepage", etc.) Use now is vastly broader, it's all but essential, being widely recognised as a basic human right. Devices are easier to use, but far less generative. Even traditionally creative platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows) increasingly get in the way of, rather than facilitate, creation (the time I spend nursing rather than using systems is ... depressing). And whilst many of the newcomers are welcomed, a large share really aren't. Their use is not aimed at general benefit, but at private and personal appropriation, often through deception and fraud. More is different.
thrwn_frthr_awy 7y ago
> I think this is just rose tinted glasses. To some degree yes, but the feeling of belonging to niche forum in the 90's and 00's, really had a different feeling today's sub-reddit, discord, slack communities. > The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude This is very good point, and maybe what I'm mostly uncomfortable with. I'm uncomfortable using large web sites (like YouTube or Reddit) for community building. This could be tied to certain personality types, or lacking from something emotionally for me, but that may be what causes the feeling of missing those sites.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Can you name three such sites? Because I'm pretty sure you might be thinking of some other media; video was expensive to host efficiently because of the file size, and it's only right around the time of the inception of YouTube that costs came down far enough and bandwidth came up far enough to enable simple video sharing.

andoofthewoods 7y ago
One example of a niche video site back then is Channel101 https://www.vulture.com/2012/04/the-complete-dan-harmon-channel-101-canon.html https://www.vulture.com/2012/04/the-complete-dan-harmon-chan...

coretx 7y ago

Although YouTube's market position or "monopoly" as you'd like to call it certainly has drawn a crosshair on it's forehead; a more causal relationship between the take-downs proliferates to me as what people describe to be "cancel culture".

dredmorbius 7y ago

Sorry, but having been there at the time, and looking at technical requirments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21256674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21256674), I'm calling bogus. Online downloadable audio was barely tractable in 1999 or earlier, let alone streaming video. What was this golden age, what were the sites, and what was the usage? Streaming video is almost wholly 2004 and later, generally years later.

pmlnr 7y ago
Text. With pictures. You know, like books. Which you can actually use while, say, fixing something, unlike a video which you need to pause, rewind, watch again, while balancing pieces of a torn down laptop on your hands.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  I'm aware there was text. And some pictures. Sometimes of pretty girls. But the assertion I'm addressing was a golden age of online video specifically. (I also typically prefer text to video, though good, well-produced, audience-respecting video and audio can be of value.)
- baud147258 7y ago
  Text with pictures suffer horribly from link rot when the pictures aren't on the same site (for example forum threads), with all the image hosting services that had closed in the last decade (or even dropbox stopping to serve as image host, even for paying clients)
thrwn_frthr_awy 7y ago
You are absolutely correct about the timeline! My experiences with independent video sites were mostley between 2000 and 2007 I'd guess. I do not think this contradicts any of my other statements, though. Looking back further before video, we had web-rings which allowed for finding some of the best and worst sites on a subject :) I can't be the only card carrying member of the HTML Writers Guild here, can I?

simonh 7y ago

I see this sentiment mentioned often, but all the things we could do back in the day are not only still possible, they are actually still being done by people out there. What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though. Fortunately, in my experience niche sites and communities are still thriving through social transmission, and the fact that so many more people are active online nowadays.

wazoox 7y ago
> That's on us though. I'd like people to stop harping on "individual responsibility". It's not "on us". We are social monkeys, we are not perfectly rational autonomous individuals. Monopolies are emerging from collective behaviour that can't be subsumed into the simple aggregation of random personal choices.
- simonh 7y ago
  Fair enough, but it's not really on Youtube that it's users are all a bunch of social monkeys that are too lazy to use other services alongside it, either. Ook!
StavrosK 7y ago
How would you track them down today? In the old days, you typed "knitting" into Lycos and you got this wonderfully weird site of someone for whom knitting was a passion, along with a webring full of similar sites. Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise? My only hope at this point is Neocities.
- kuu 7y ago
  "knitting -youtube" should remove quite large part of the results...
- krapp 7y ago

edoo 7y ago

I see in this scenario Google as more of a natural monopoly. They really only got into censoring recently. The more people they alienate the bigger the opportunities for competition. A natural monopoly has the ability to fail itself out of the market.

tanilama 7y ago

More people are now on the internet, and it is getting worse. Inevitable TBH.

yahwrong 7y ago

Of course back then video hosting was really expensive... Now I can find an instructional video on fixing my car and chopping down trees with ease.