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Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

457 points by mikesabbagh 6y ago

trinovantes 6y ago
Seeing how many channels are randomly getting nuked by false copyright strikes, shadowbans, account termations, it makes sense that they want to move off YouTube. However as a consumer, there's just so many services/websites competing for my limited attention that if they're completely off YouTube, I doubt I'd ever watch them again -- especially if there's a paywall -- I'd just watch someone else the YT algorithm recommends.
GermanDude 6y ago
You should always try to have your personal website, as it's almost the only internet asset that you can actually own.
- slezyr 6y ago
  You don't own its domain, however. It can be revoked at any time.
  - michaelbuckbee 6y ago
    Yes. But if you consider it in terms of "potential to be messed with" - the surface area is much less.
  - quonn 6y ago
    Not if you have a trademark.
    - zchrykng 6y ago
      Tell that to the people who have be completely de-platformed over the last few years. Everyone agrees that most, if not all, of them are horrible people, but it is totally possible to lose your domain name if no one will provide registrations and such services to you.
      - viraptor 6y ago
        I can't remember any of them losing domain registration. They lost hosting providers and DNS hosting. Did I miss someone?
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Technically you do own the domain, although the registry and most registrars retain the right to revoke it based on their abuse policies; There are enterprise-grade registrars that have contracts without these provisions (like CSC Global[0], which Disney uses[1]) if you'd like to remove this risk. 0: http://corporatedomains.com http://corporatedomains.com 1: https://who.is/whois/disney.com https://who.is/whois/disney.com
  - tux1968 6y ago
    It's impossible to be completely impervious to all threats, but for your domain name there are some options that may help. For instance there are domains sold outside the reach of specific jurisdictions[1] and there are blockchain dns efforts as well[2]. [1] https://bulletproofhosting.org/bulletproof-domains/ https://bulletproofhosting.org/bulletproof-domains/ [2] https://blockchain-dns.info/ https://blockchain-dns.info/
  - pizza 6y ago
    Technically your IP address could too
- nicbou 6y ago
  Even then, you're at Google's mercy, since they control search traffic. I run my own website, but 85% of my traffic comes from Google. It's pretty much like getting 85% of your income from a single client.
  - jimbob45 6y ago
    More Cloudflare’s right? Because they can drop your DDOS protection or just block you from their DNS lookups, right? Like they did to 4chan/8chan.
    - Jenk 6y ago
      If you own a site that has systemic issues with child pornography sharing and other illegal material, you probably deserve it.
      - throwaway45349 6y ago
        4chan is a shady place, but it is definitely not a bastion of child porn. The owners do not allow anything like that.
        Jenk 6y ago
        /b/ has been an epicentre for decades.
        cbozeman 6y ago
        That is total horseshit. Yes, there are points in time when posters have attempted to post child pornography there, but it gets taken down swiftly and gets reported to moderators as swiftly as its posted. Your "epicentre" of child pornography on the Internet is Facebook, not 4chan.[1] [1]: https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras/213-worst-epidemic/ https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras/213-worst-epidemic/
        6y ago
- Barrin92 6y ago
  This isn't just about a personal website though. This is Linus Tech Tips (with a staff of about 20 people) building his own platform for delivering content as the article points out. That's a considerable development effort and probably out of reach for youtube creators who are large enough to make a living and depend on youtube, but not large enough to justify that kind of investment.
  - piplikoc 6y ago
    Linus Media Group has 32 employees [1] with 7 massive YouTube channels. As the article pointed out they also have other tech YouTubers releasing content of Floatplane, not just their own channels. [1] https://linusmediagroup.com/our-team https://linusmediagroup.com/our-team
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Exactly. I doubt even the big ones like Pewdiepie can even retain a following with their own website, much less a s small independent creator.
  - a_hard_time 6y ago
    > That's a considerable development effort and probably out of reach for youtube creators who are large enough to make a living and depend on youtube, but not large enough to justify that kind of investment. YouTube revolves around free content - this places creators on the platform at an immediate and significant disadvantage in terms of monetising their audience. Many YouTubers who are stuck in that rut of being dependent on YouTube, despite having a fairly large audience, would likely make a lot more money if they started producing content on platforms which offer better options for monetisation (ideally, their own). A great example of this is Twitch. Direct monetisation of the audience is a fundamental part of the culture on Twitch. The site is optimised for it. Even before the Amazon Prime subscriptions, Twitch was FAR more profitable than YouTube for creators with audiences of comparable size.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dghughes 6y ago
  Your comment for some reason reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Personal websites were a given there was a major urge to have your own website. Whether you had your own domain name or a Geocities type of page you just had to have one. On dialup people tended to be more independent you jumped on the Internet then jumped off to preserve your precious 60 hours/month (and to allow your landline phone to get calls). That time offline was used learning about things and you couldn't Google every little thing. I was much more into the fundamentals of the computer itself more than the stuff you could see on it. Making boot disks, adjusting settings in Windows, discovering Linux, learning HTML, sending lots of email, some IRC. The Internet grew in complexity and usefulness, and always on cable got cheaper but early on the computer itself was my main focus. Now it seems as if a computer is simply a conduit to watch YouTube videos. It seems like people are realizing they need to be more independent.
  - antoniuschan99 6y ago
    The first video I tried to download was the first South Park Short on dialup. It took around 6 or 8 hours. This was in 1997/98. The next year I got cable and it was super fast like a couple of minutes. Now it takes a few seconds! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T_RZOoVlzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T_RZOoVlzc
aninuth 6y ago
Here I thought it was because of Squarespace...
- benbristow 6y ago
  Was expecting that as well haha
jcims 6y ago
it wasn’t that long ago that it would be unusual for somebody to publish all of their videos on YouTube rather than their own site, And when he did it was to save money/performance, not for the network effects of the platform.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Because they are finally learning that existing on someone else's platform sucks. Much better to get your own domain which is actually property registered to your name and can't be taken away from you because you offended some advertiser.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Discoverability provided by someone else's platform is a very big boon, however. Having one's own website is a luxury for the big man, the little man aspiring to be big one day has no choice but to kneel for “what he calls his “benevolent overlord””.
- jasode 6y ago
  >Because they are finally learning that existing on someone else's platform sucks. Much better to get your own domain [...] A lot of people already know they're the less powerful economic actor on Youtube platform. Regardless, people upload videos to Youtube instead of their own domain because of tradeoffs. For unknown creators with no audience, Youtube doesn't suck (in comparison to hosting videos on personal domain) because: (1) you don't have the money to pay for variable hosting bandwidth costs (2) you don't have any business relationships with advertisers to monetize which helps with (1) (3) you have no network effect platform recommending your videos (e.g. repair smartphones and drones) to audiences of like-minded channels such as Linus Tech Tips -- which helps with (2) There is a timeline that creators can't avoid to build financial/platform independence and leverage. Today, Linus can realistically host videos on his Floatplane alternative because he already used Youtube to build his 13 million subscribers. He also already built his own advertiser relationships to embed native ads with him as spokesperson outside of Youtube pre-roll and mid-rolls. In contrast, it's quite a different challenge for him to start in 2008 with his own Floatplane.com domain and build an audience of 13 million outside of Youtube.
  - PartiallyTyped 6y ago
    Besides FloatPlane, other streaming websites that educational channels upload content to are nebula [1] and I think curiosity stream [2]. [1] https://watchnebula.com/ https://watchnebula.com/ [2] https://curiositystream.com/ https://curiositystream.com/
simias 6y ago
I think that's a great decision. Many people like to complain about Youtube and its policies and its algorithms but it's simply very hard to compete with it. Its offering is really unparalleled. Hopefully these creators will manage to carve enough of a niche to create healthy competition, especially with a business model that doesn't rely entirely on ad revenue. It's going to be very hard though, making money from video hosting is a very difficult thing to do.
g42gregory 6y ago
I did not even know that Linus had his own site. Fantastic. I won’t be watching his videos on Youtube anymore! Hopefully, everyone I watch will have their own websites, so that I don’t have to visit Youtube.
- simongr3dal 6y ago
  If only there was some kind of really simple syndication so I didn’t have to visit 40 different sites to check if my favorite video creators have released anything new.
  - Franciscouzo 6y ago
    Is this sarcasm? RSS has been a thing for years.
    - sodality2 6y ago
      RSS stands for really simple syndication, so yes, sarcasm
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Fun fact for those who watch videos by creators who haven't moved off of YouTube yet: YouTube channels expose RSS feeds of uploads and you can watch videos directly without ads via youtube-dl automatically using MPV[1]. [1] https://mpv.io/installation/ https://mpv.io/installation/
    - crocodiletears 6y ago
      Youtube will restrict your IP if you do this enough. I can't say I lost too much value when it happened, but it's been obnoxious having to go to the main site on my mobile to answer a battery of captchas every time I want to watch a video.
  - 1000mA 6y ago
    RSS feed for videos?
marshmallow_12 6y ago
so now what? Instead of millions of channels competing on one very good and easily accessible site, designed to show videos, they will compete on a much larger scale, with far bulkier channels on a site that displays other things as well. The punchline is that both sites are controlled by the same company. I can predict that exactly nothing will be gained by this, except the flooding of internet by many more videos.
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  Define “very good” You mean we get more websites? Oh my god! What if the internet has too many websites! Whatever will we do?! If only we had a way to crawl websites and make them into some kind of list for searching, like some kind of engine for search.
  - marshmallow_12 6y ago
    you misunderstood me. a quick google search reveals that YouTube uses 15% of internet traffic. You suggest getting rid of YouTube and putting 15% extra workload onto google. you think that won't be an issue? as for the "very good" part, yes, youtube is extremely successful at aggregating and displaying useful videos. It is also extremely good at searching through its library and displaying individual users useful videos. Google is far less effective at this, of course. Also, replacing channels with individual websites will vastly increase the internet traffic, not just a minor surge.
    - imwillofficial 6y ago
      Thanks for the clarification! I disagree on youtube being very good at its job, however that is a very subjective assessment. I think as it stands now, you are correct, but I believe these sites will give rise to more decentralized video sharing infrastructure as people slowly see the need to control their own destinies.
      - marshmallow_12 6y ago
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Because they are finally learning that all it takes to destroy their business is an algorithm glitch, or having 'wrong' political views, or just falling on the wrong side of an overzealous moderator. When you use someone else's platform you are completely dependent on the owner of the platform, and being dependent on something you don't control is a huge business risk.
- devoutsalsa 6y ago
  Even if you keep up with what’s politically correct, your old content can become increasingly unfavorable. You can get railroaded for something you said 10 years ago that was seemingly alright at the time. I cringe at myself 10 years ago.
  - xyst 6y ago
    thankfully I never recorded my cod:black ops sessions :)
  - hobofan 6y ago
    And how is that different on any other platform?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - sithlord 6y ago
      Youtube could easily just obliterate a channel today, for some video posted 10 years ago if they deem it bad enough. Doubt if you had your own platform you'd delete yourself for something cringe you said 10 years ago
      - katsura 6y ago
        Yes, but most people don't build their own server farms, don't have their own internet cable, so basically there is always some company in the middle that could easily cancel you.
scrose 6y ago
I can’t help but wonder why services like Vimeo don’t come up more often when getting off of YouTube? It seems like Vimeo offers similar functionality already. Is there something about it that I’m missing / is it just not cool for content creators?
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  What does Vimeo offer that YouTube doesn’t do better? What reduction in risk does Vimeo offer that is any different than YouTube?
  - erk__ 6y ago
    DRM Free movie downloads, also it supports better quality video. Though those are things that work because they do not have the same kind of customers/creators as YouTube in general.
    - imwillofficial 6y ago
      You're right, but that misses the point of the exodus from Youtube, people aren't leaving over DRM or video quality. They are leaving because the precarious relationship with a capricious overlord. Their livelyhoods are in somebody elses hands.
      - erk__ 6y ago
        Yeah, but they are not leaving to vimeo, and vimeo are not trying to get them to use it.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      > DRM Free movie downloads This isn't even remotely related to Vimeo or YouTube. If you're talking about movies legitimately published by the rights owners not being DRM'd on Vimeo, then there's nothing stopping the studio from uploading a DRM-free version to YouTube as well. IF you're talking about piracy simply because Vimeo doesn't have Content ID, then that's also just a failure of Vimeo and/or the studios not really caring about 480p streams with relatively few views.
Swizec 6y ago
Youtube is fantastic top of funnel. 2nd or 3rd biggest search engine online. Google also loves promoting it on search results. But YouTube isn’t where you should keep the rest of your business.
- duxup 6y ago
  Honestly I find them sometimes not promoting it enough. Granted, they probably shouldn't give it any favoritism... but often I'll google for a video clip and have to refine search to just show me youtube results as i don't want to deal with some beast of another site.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
We are still a very long way from distributed discovery. Back in the day at Demon Internet (well known 90s UK ISP) every customer got a free 10MB of webspace - barely any of them used it. But it should have been how we all hosted our blogs and our videos. And it would solve a multitude of social media issues. If Facebook and youtube did not host its hard to see how they could compile trustable usage stats (#) and so hard to see how we could all find out we must watch Gangnam Style. Similar problems seem to hover over crypto-currencies. Edit: some random thoughts - DNS: In a world of individual producers, curated aggregation still has value as it provides a quality / interest gate. A TV channel implies curation, a review guide the same. Perhaps it is no coincidence Marvel has found its footing in a world where choice is infinite and curation zero. Every TV show hopes to land a few million dedicated fans. - Social media companies basically have zero curation (this is weirdly tending towards including Amazon who are dumbing down curation in marketplace) - Our natural curation signals are usually based around proximity (geography, recommendation, similarity). These fall apart where the same DNS hosts nazis and nannies. Especially where recommendations are controlled by (one?) algorithm. - If enough viewing moves off YouTube (not merely the bits over pipes, it off the influence of the algorithm) then these other effects might start to show through. - But even if we could gather reliable distributed usage stats (book publishers managed it for decades), distributed discovery becomes a strange animal. A dumb algorithm that recommends what is the most watched video in the world, followed by the second, would have some strange chaotic behaviour but would at least have twin virtues of simple and transparent. Start adding in anything else (here is my past history, make a recommendation, or here is my aspirational set of people (my twitter follow list is watching) or just show me what Barry Norman recommends, all of these can be made transparent - and open to a cottage industry of discovery algorithms. - This cottage industry fascinates me - it's like the other industries I expected to exist but don't (decent job search, dis-intermediated real estate). Duck Duck Go seems the model here - there is likely to be a (regulated?) split in discovery - much like railways or phone lines - where the underlying monopoly bit (we scraping) gets hived off and everyone can access it at common fees - and the add on bits, the start of distributed discovery - appears as a more competitive market. And one hopes a less behaviour driven one (I am still wanting to know the revenue difference between Google storing my every move and returning what it thinks I want and Duck Duck Go just using the context of my query - and returning what I asked for. - But hopefully after a Cambrian explosion of companies offering discovery - not just search or for videos and entertainment but even shopping (as Amazon hits the same split the Google inevitably will), after all that, we are still a long way from where I hope we can get. - Everything online should treat me as a citizen, as even a patient - where do no harm is the first principle. If we live in an internet where my individual best interests are the legal and cultural norm, as professions are supposed to be, then we enter a totally different equation. We are all exploited online now, and the discussions are about harm reduction. But that's not the real end goal. Making sure quacks don't charge too much for the snake oil is not what made medicine work. (#) ignoring facebook lying to advertisers etc etc
john11johng 6y ago
I don't really see what they've done that Patreon/Vimeo do. Youtubers will still be reliant
madprops 6y ago
Peertube would work nicely for high traffic videos, since the data transfer can be shared among viewers https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/
- teekert 6y ago
  +1 for peertube, seems to be as easy as youtube (client side) and indeed all peers help streaming. Works very well.
christkv 6y ago
Now let’s bring back RSS so we can subscribe.
a_hard_time 6y ago
This is a lesson that YouTubers need to learn far earlier. I know a number of creators with relatively small audiences (under 50,000 subscribers on YouTube) who earn six figure incomes because they properly monetise. Even with the massive pay-outs from sponsor spots in videos, content creators fail to recognise the true value of their relationship with their audience. It is easier than ever to accept payment directly from an audience in exchange for access to premium content or products. It isn't for everyone - but if their goal is to make a business out of their content, it should be one of the first steps taken.
graeme 6y ago
I follow CGP Grey’s stuff and it’s been interesting and instructive to see how he diversified. * His Youtube channel is his main platform * However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there * He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex * The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts * He had a second podcast, hello internet, currently on hiatus. If ever something went catastrophically wrong with youtube this could be reactivated via the feed * He has a large email list which he uses to reach people directly and drive traffic to videos if people request these updates * He is also prominent on twitter etc and maintains secondary youtube channels, useful if main one taken down * He runs a large subreddit for his following So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss) Still faces a youtube risk but it would take a an earthquake across platforms to truly wreck his income streams. As someone who runs an online business and follows him it’s been impressive to watch how diversified he has made his comms channels.
- verve_rat 6y ago
  Also he has a channel on Nebula, a streaming service set up as a clear hedge against YouTube doing bad things. He was one of the driving forces behind Nebula, but I believe he is no longer involved in running it.
  - georgebcrawford 6y ago
    I thought he started standard.tv, or did that become Nebula?
    - BoysenberryPi 6y ago
      Standard.tv is Nebula
- simias 6y ago
  > However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there Did he break that down publicly or do you get your info from elsewhere? I've always been curious to know what a typical high profile youtuber income flow looks like, and how much they're really tied to Youtube.
macspoofing 6y ago
Why wouldn't you? It's becoming increasingly clear that you cannot trust your web presence (and by extension, your business) to one or two social media companies ... though that should have been obvious in hindsight. And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email. My take is this: whenever I see a startup being described as "disrupting" some market, I interpret it in the other sense of the word: disruption, as in the effect of a disruptor, a fictional energy weapon used predominantly by the main villains of Star Trek franchise, Klingons and Romulans.
- JProthero 6y ago
  I share the scepticism about the ability of startups to disrupt away the network effects that underlie these quasi-monopolies, but it does seem to me as though decentralisation is the logical and desirable end-point. How and when that point could be reached though, I couldn't say.
dblooman 6y ago
Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier. The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large and seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon. What is sad is that you see youtubers talking in code on videos, not saying words, self censoring because youtube's detection is so good, videos get demonetised instantly. This is also why most people have seen an Ad in a video for PIA or surfshark or worse, raid shadow legends.
- regnerba 6y ago
  > Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier. You support creators by giving them money. In return for supporting a creator you get video content in return. Floatplane as a platform for the most part doesn't dictate what that content is other than it being in the format of a video. LTT themselves have actually been moving away from pushing videos early to Floatplane and more towards giving unique video content on Floatplane such as behind the scenes videos. You run into issues with promising videos early to only part of your community. For example when you have review embargos and want to make drop a video at the same time as every other YouTuber, > The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large It isn't that crazy really. Unlike YouTube which streams most of it's video for free and has to recover that cost via ads, every person streaming on Floatplane has paid money to stream that content. Floatplane has been scaling slowly which has allowed them to stay on baremetal instead of going to the cloud. They don't need a lot of the advantages the cloud has, such as the ability to scale on demand. This isn't your normal unicorn startup from silicon valley that needs hyper growth to attract more investors for an eventual IPO or buyout. Linus and Luke are putting their own money into it because they want to have a fallback incase YouTube pulls the plug on them. They are not taking lots of investment to try and build a YouTube competitor. Their costs are actually really reasonable. They have a much better profit sharing model with other creators than YouTube does. They recognize that they have a base line cost for a given creator, that is the cost of storing the video and processing it for example. Then they have a cost per user of that content. This may have changed but their model was recover that base line cost from the subscriptions and then take a much lower cut afterwards. So from a creators point of view you get more value as your scale the number of users from your community on the site. > seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon. Eh, maybe. It does however let them focus very much on that video aspect and provide users with a solid experience dedicated to videos. I imagine over time they will add more features to Floatplane that help differentiate it. One example of that is live streams. If you want to live stream to your Patreon members they suggest you use Crowdcast, something you have to pay for separately (https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002973506-Make-a-Livestream-post-with-Crowdcast https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002973506-M...). Floatplane supports live streaming.
xwdv 6y ago
I wonder if there could be a good business in building “deplatforming” type content websites for people with large audiences who want to decouple from centralized platforms.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Like Parlor?
FpUser 6y ago
Because when you have business that brings money you do not let the somebody else control it to the point that they can kill it next day just because they can. One of the reasons why my backends are based on self sufficient architecture that I can move to any arbitrary VM / dedicated server in no time. There is no cloudy dependent stuff in my stack at all.
gerash 6y ago
This is the same as centralized app stores where the only difference is that here you do have an alternative.
GNU_James 6y ago
>linking to bbc without using archive.is Son...
dalbasal 6y ago
This article is a little on the surface level, but it's true. People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air. Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole thing. There either needs to be some neutrality, competition or youtubers need to organize somehow... unionize even. Trying to have a relationship with audiences that doesn't run through youtube won't work for most channels... even ones with millions of views. I always expected a porn company to come in and compete with youtube at some point. They have the infrastructure. I've also been surprised at how restricted youtube manage to be, and still succeed... just the skin censorship if nothing else.
- um_ya 6y ago
  There needs to be "content as a protocol" in the same way email is. If I don't like one email provider, I can always move to a different provider without losing access to all the user's that remain there. If I could make a Facebook post and have it's content propagate to other providers, websites would act more like UI filters rather than gatekeepers.
  - dfcowell 6y ago
    This sounds like ActivityPub?
  - kiwidrew 6y ago
    That content protocol is called HTTP and the service discovery protocol is called DNS. I know that it's a bit cliche to say that these days, but acquiring a domain name (either directly from a TLD registrar or indirectly through e.g. a DynDNS provider) and pointing it at a webhost is what allows content publishers to "mint" their very own globally unique URLs. Any consumers that are equipped with a suitable user agent can then plug that URL into their browser and view that publisher's content. Now let's be serious, there are numerous barriers that stand in the way of "normal" users that want to escape the evil platforms. Why not direct our ire at the real problem: Why Johnny Still Can't Host a Website! And if we fix that, perhaps we can move on to Why Johnny Can't Get Any Visitors (Because Google Won't Index It) and Why Johnny's Visitors Don't Receive His Updates (Because Google and Mozilla Killed RSS).
guerrilla 6y ago
If they don't want to end up on islands that nobody ever visits then they better start thinking about getting together and starting cooperatives or non-profits to host and list themselves.
dang 6y ago
All: please let's try to avoid repeating the generic discussion about how being on someone else's platform leaves you vulnerable to someone else. It's not wrong, of course, but it's been repeated for many years and won't lead to fresh conversation. The goal on HN is curious conversation. Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place. The easiest way to do this is to respond to the specific new information in an article. As a nudge in that direction, I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases). You don't only have to react to the specific new information in an article. Whimsical tangents and reactions are also ok. Just ask yourself if it's expected or unexpected [4], and prefer the unexpected. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=diffs%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- Triv888 6y ago
  I appreciate all of your work but I think that you are wrong with this comment... I think that talking about leaving platforms that have monopolies can spur innovation.
  - dang 6y ago
    For sure there are important and interesting questions there. I'm not asking people not to talk about those!—just to do it in a way that isn't just repeating what always gets said. Otherwise there's a power-law dropoff in information transfer...like telling the same joke or repeating the same word over and over. There's nothing wrong with repetition per se. There is pleasure in it—it's just a different kind than the pleasure of curiosity. The problem is that we can't have both pleasures at the same time, and HN is a site for curiosity. This is one of those moderation calls that seems arbitrary and obscure until you take literally that we're trying to optimize for just one thing, and then it follows rather straightforwardly. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280 (It's really a sweet spot to have only one thing to optimize for—one gets to have fun being radical about following it to all its counterintuitive consequences.)
smoldesu 6y ago
>"We refuse to be an accidental vehicle for right-wing, neo-Nazi propaganda. And it's really easy for fringe platforms to turn into that if you leave the doors open," he says. Kudos where it's due for fighting fascism and all that jazz, but it does raise a pretty large concern: where do people draw the line for this stuff? A private platform like that can ultimately decide which videos they want to accept and which they want to reject, which really defeats the purpose of making your own platform in the first place. It doesn't matter if there's no content aggregation algos, since everyone consumes a homogeneous slurry of videos. Instead of preventing gatekeeping in the first place, they just changed who can open the gate. I don't think I'll ever be very interested in a platform like Nebula, and I'm really only tangentially interested in Floatplane. YouTube will always be a dominant market because it's free and offers a functional user experience. Even if half of the people watching YouTube videos got a Nebula subscription, they're still going to be using YouTube alongside it. As long as that YouTube audience exists, people will continue to capitalize it. As long as the two platforms compete, they'll be in a constant struggle for power over their viewers. It's the definition of a lose-lose situation.
sjg007 6y ago
I think the question us hackers should think about is not about how do you beat youtube? But how do you make it irrelevant. Twitch was one answer. TikTok is another.
swlkr 6y ago
The ideal platform for something like youtube would be to separate discovery from content. You host the content, and you can pick from UIs/algorithms for the discovery.
- JProthero 6y ago
  This is my view too. I'm hopeful that eventually some combination of technologies that already exist (peer-to-peer sharing, tor, blockchain, homomorphic encryption, maybe even wireless mesh networking) will evolve into a decentralised hosting and delivery system that everyone will use. I'm woefully uninformed to speculate about how feasible this might be though, so it remains just a hope for me.
  - TobTobXX 6y ago
    Peertube is an alternative. You usually host your own instance (or if someone is generous, they can five you some space) and it is fully decentralized. It uses ActivityPub and works with p2p. Recently they introsuced livestreaming and cross-instance search. https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/
    - JProthero 6y ago
      Thanks for mentioning PeerTube — I've been keeping an eye on it for a while now. It has some of the features I noted, including one I didn't but should have; it's open source. I think PeerTube or systems like it have a lot promise — particularly if more estblished channels on YouTube, and other media producers, were to start to promote them as alternative methods for accessing their output.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  So Google video search plus your own website?
  - foobar33333 6y ago
    Same idea but with a full UI so it works like youtube where you can scroll through suggested content and subscribe to things
loosetypes 6y ago
Even with their own frontend, creators' content is still hosted and served via YouTube just with an embedded video player, no? Are there any viable alternatives out there? Vimeo? I'm not particularly knowledgeable on video streaming, is cost the main barrier?
- xwolfi 6y ago
  Floatplane is self hosted. It s a replacement not a frontend (goal being if youtube kicks them out, they had least can try to survive)
hashingroll 6y ago
> There is no algorithm, they're going to be served everything you make. I am not sure how is this (lack of) feature mentioned as an advantage over youtube. Afaict there's certainly a video tab on the yt channel that displays videos sorted with time uploaded (and probably is modifiable). I understand that the point must be that people may want to not see the recommended videos, but don't most such visitors directly visit the yt channel. At least I use it like that. (mandatory: googler, don't work on youtube)
- joshschreuder 6y ago
  I don't know if it's a bug or intentional, but I have absolutely had cases where the thing you're talking about (Subscriptions) either refuses to show me a new vid from a channel I'm subscribed to, or refuses to notify me when a new video is out, despite having asked to be notified.
  - james-skemp 6y ago
    I'm a big user of the Subscriptions tab (283 subs, probably more than half from creators that stopped posting), and I've had no issues with lost videos. Well, unless they got temporarily delisted due to an illegitimate copyright claim. (How do I know? Because most creators I follow will mention their last video.) Limited experience with the bell, since I only did that for one channel, which I'm also a Patreon for. (Chrontendo: I usually watch the episode early and then listen to it again when it's public.) But 100% success rate with that notification thus far.
    - joshschreuder 6y ago
      I am the same, 310 subs here. I didn't mean to imply this was frequent behaviour, as it's not. My point is more that I can understand Youtube channels wanting to have more control over their distribution and ensuring people who want to watch their content are aware of it, because sometimes Youtube won't make them aware. I have seen a case where a video from a channel I'm subscribed to did not appear in my Subscriptions feed, and only appeared when going directly to the channel. From reading the comments I wasn't the only person this happened to. Though I can't see whether this was a bug on Youtube's end, or one of its endless tweakings to "the algorithm".
znpy 6y ago
a good story about floatplane: i signed up pretty much as soon as it was announced, then i forgot about it and also forgot my password. i was billed -very little- for a while then i opened a support ticket to have my account restored, since i had been billed for a while i at least wanted to watch some content. but apparently something in the backend had changed and they plainly refunded me from the time i had my last login (iirc) and then they allowed me to re-signup. it's been nice because i had then been able to re-signup and also recover some money that were pretty much lost, and i wasn't expecting that nor asking for it. i really hope to see floatplane grow!
- Bakary 6y ago
  Can you imagine Google doing such a thing? I'm chuckling just thinking about how improbable that would be. This is why those services as so necessary.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  The problem with Floatplane is that new creators who have ideas and skills but aren’t publishing elsewhere online (e.g., because they dislike the ad-driven model and don’t want their videos to appear alongside junk content) have nothing in terms of online optics that they could put into the application form—so they’d have to either support the likes of YouTube first by publishing there, or be capable of running their own site. I wish Floatplane charged a moderate fee upfront rather than having the vetting/review flow (which could still be an option for those who can’t afford the fee).
  - t0astbread 6y ago
    Vimeo (if I'm not mistaken) offers a plan where you pay them to host your videos and they don't roll any ads on them.
    - strogonoff 6y ago
      That’d be a great feature compared to the majority of platforms. The big question would be whether they force recommendations from other channels elsewhere on the page or at the end of a video.
walrus01 6y ago
> Linus Sebastian Something to understand, for those who might have just seen some youtube videos of him being goofy, is that he's an actor. The guy on camera doing stupid stuff is a stage persona. It's an intentionally cultivated image and media persona to get as many video views as possible. I sort of see him as one possible aspect of the low/medium budget TV production stuff which is common in his home city, Vancouver BC. People who've met and worked with him in person report that he's a much more normal, calm, rational individual off screen. I won't judge him for being goofy on camera because it's hard to make a living as a working actor. For every person who gets a job in a vancouver-produced TV drama that might last 2 or 3 seasons, there's dozens more people who are working as restaurant servers while trying to get their big break.
- Zak 6y ago
  People watch videos largely for entertainment, even when the subject matter is a review of computer hardware or advice concerning technology. For pure informational value, a written format with occasional short illustrative video clips is usually more useful. I think every successful youtuber has a cultivated stage persona because that's more entertaining than just watching an everyday person talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes.
  - leoc 6y ago
    You can in fact watch a professional chemist talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes on a pretty successful YouTube channel, but he's definitely going to be using his larger-than-life stage persona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui_wOiUDPvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui_wOiUDPvM .
- leoc 6y ago
  Sebastian and Linus Media Group seem to be pretty frank and open about a lot of this: see for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA&list=PL8mG-RkN2uTxJiNGHnLrb-i-XP6s3y87K&index=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA&list=PL8mG-RkN2u... on putting up gurning thumbnails and navigating the YT algorithm (and that whole playlist, including a revenue breakdown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t73wXF8IF-8&list=PL8mG-RkN2uTxJiNGHnLrb-i-XP6s3y87K&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t73wXF8IF-8&list=PL8mG-RkN2u... ), the Gamers Nexus video on LTT's production process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdOBFu-mYpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdOBFu-mYpw and the coverage LTT regularly lavishes on its own production setup and process, from a nearly-12m video about the awkwardness of ingesting video from their new 12K cameras https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfGBQZUSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfGBQZUSI to seemingly quite genuine fly-on-the-wall coverage of temporarily losing their data to a RAID failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k . Obviously you always have to take anyone's self-presentation with a grain of salt. But they're certainly not hiding the fact that there's a more grounded reality behind the "on" personas.
rreichel03 6y ago
I spent some time a while back trying to build the “Shopify for Video streams” where creators could have a custom hosted channel that enables them to monetize however they’d like! Ultimately I didn’t do a great job of marketing it, but if anyone’s interested in giving it a spin for their channel feel free to fill out the beta interest form here: https://yourchannel.rreichel.dev https://yourchannel.rreichel.dev
- alex-wallish 6y ago
  I think there's definitely a need for this and have thought about building something similar myself. I think one thing that is crucial which I don't see mentioned in any of your pricing plans is the ability to self host. You could dockerize your application and make it super easy for creators to set it up on their own infra. Otherwise they still have a large platform risk, they've just shifted it from youtube to your company.
thoughtstheseus 6y ago
Ally Law needed to do this. He regularly trespasses to the top of sky scrapers and other unique buildings. YouTube tried to bring him down so he started his own site. He still posts on YouTube but it was a long process to get back. If you want to see a guy living, check out Ally Law. It’s a madness.
drummer 6y ago
A reminder: John Gilmore, one of the founders of the EFF, once famously wrote, “The ‘net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
chewxy 6y ago
Funnily I'm subscribed to Corridor Digital and Nebula. These were the first things I thought about when I saw the headline. And now I know where Luke from LTT went and why despite "not working at LTT anymore", Linus seemed to have a good relationship with Luke whenever he appeared.
donaldtheduck 6y ago
Lametube is a communist company that cancels those that rebel against the cabal. Only sheeps and communist scums use lametube. Red-pilled, grown up people use free speech platforms like rumble.
jccalhoun 6y ago
It seems really weird that BBC would do a story on these alternates to youtube, mention them, and then not link to them. I watch Linus Tech Tips so I've heard of floatplane but I haven't heard of the others mentioned. Even one of the three links in the article just goes to another site called tubefilter which itself doesn't link to this nebula thing. It took me ten minutes to find the site because I had to read the articles trying to see if they linked to https://watchnebula.com/ https://watchnebula.com/ (admittedly, that link doesn't really do a great job of selling the product either) What is the point of doing stories about other web sites without linking to them?
- brigandish 6y ago
  The BBC is publicly funded and for years was very strict about no advertising or product placement in their output (which has relaxed somewhat in recent years but it’s still there) so perhaps it’s because they don’t want the article to be seen as “newsvertising” (is there a special term for this?)
  - orojackson 6y ago
    You're thinking of "native advertising" or "advertorial."
    - brigandish 6y ago
      Advertorial! Thanks. If newsvertising as a word takes off, you know who to blame :)
donaldtheduck 6y ago
Only sheeps and communist scums use lametube. Red-pilled, grown up people use free speech platforms like rumble.
KorfmannArno 6y ago
Could a platform like notify.me become a great beneficiary of this trend of segregation?
kodah 6y ago
Personally, I think the way to end centralization is to introduce enough viable options that are willing to cohabitate and even cooperate. These viable alternatives can't be interested in total dominance and probably need to have agreements that allow transfer of content and data. Personally hosted sites backed by centrally maintained software is a logical choice if you can optimize for the lack of bandwidth sharing economy. If my hypothesis is true, then this is the tide turning in video sharing, though the tide may be a long tide.
- dageshi 6y ago
  There's a fundamental tension between competition/choice and low friction. On the internet it seems like whatever has the lowest friction wins. Examples... People hate the fact that there are so many paid streaming services now, they just want one, that has everything and pay about $15 a month for it. People don't and won't switch away from twitch.tv, mixer tried to compete by poaching two of the biggest streamers in the world, their own audiences wouldn't follow them from twitch to mixer.
amarant 6y ago
I wonder if there's a businessmodel for selling self-hosted video streaming solutions for this kind of content creators. Would be a fun product to build if nothing else. Putting the "you" in YouTube
- valzam 6y ago
  Hosting the videos is not the issue but discovery. Not being on youtube might work for big channels but even they probably get a large % of their views from searches/recommendations.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    Hosting the videos is definitely an issue. The cost for distributing a single FHD video with a million views is staggering. YT benefits from Google infrastructure to do it “for free”.
02020202 6y ago
multiple adpocalipses, arbitrary rules, massive censorship,... youtube did this to itself.
dalu 6y ago
If you need paid help, I'm available
selykg 6y ago
Maybe not totally on subject here. But Cleetus McFarland is one of the people I think is starting to make his move away from YouTube, or at least, diversifying dramatically. Merch is huge for YouTubers in a lot of ways. He's been doing solid merch for a long time. He also has been doing his Cleetus & Cars events for a few years now and those bring in big numbers. Last year he announced purchasing an abandoned race track. Which he opened officially this year. This past weekend he had an event and the place was packed (COVID not withstanding... it feels like in Florida, where this is all located, COVID isn't a thing). He seems to have successfully saved an abandoned race track. In an extremely creative maneuver they had to tear up part of the race track for repairs. To help fund the repairs he sold chunks of the track in a bottle with a t-shirt and a few other merch goodies. He literally sold chunks of the track. He's now doing Pay-per-view events, which he started last year. I'm sure a good chunk of his income still comes from YouTube, but in a lot of ways he's seemingly finding creative ways to make his business bigger. Eventually, I anticipate that YouTube and him part ways and he starts his own platform where he can make it more of what he wants it to be.
LockAndLol 6y ago
Are there opensource product/apps/website that allow distributing media to multiple outlets at once? Like uploading to YouTube, peertube, daily motion, vimeo and others from one interface as well as managing and responding to the comments left on them? I could develop something myself but it would be way better if someone already put the effort into it. Also because I suck at UI and would probably wrote a CLI for it, which probably doesn't mesh with content creators.

457 points by mikesabbagh 6y ago

Seeing how many channels are randomly getting nuked by false copyright strikes, shadowbans, account termations, it makes sense that they want to move off YouTube. However as a consumer, there's just so many services/websites competing for my limited attention that if they're completely off YouTube, I doubt I'd ever watch them again -- especially if there's a paywall -- I'd just watch someone else the YT algorithm recommends.

GermanDude 6y ago

You should always try to have your personal website, as it's almost the only internet asset that you can actually own.

slezyr 6y ago
You don't own its domain, however. It can be revoked at any time.
- michaelbuckbee 6y ago
  Yes. But if you consider it in terms of "potential to be messed with" - the surface area is much less.
- quonn 6y ago
  Not if you have a trademark.
  - zchrykng 6y ago
    Tell that to the people who have be completely de-platformed over the last few years. Everyone agrees that most, if not all, of them are horrible people, but it is totally possible to lose your domain name if no one will provide registrations and such services to you.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      I can't remember any of them losing domain registration. They lost hosting providers and DNS hosting. Did I miss someone?
- judge2020 6y ago
  Technically you do own the domain, although the registry and most registrars retain the right to revoke it based on their abuse policies; There are enterprise-grade registrars that have contracts without these provisions (like CSC Global[0], which Disney uses[1]) if you'd like to remove this risk. 0: http://corporatedomains.com http://corporatedomains.com 1: https://who.is/whois/disney.com https://who.is/whois/disney.com
- tux1968 6y ago
  It's impossible to be completely impervious to all threats, but for your domain name there are some options that may help. For instance there are domains sold outside the reach of specific jurisdictions[1] and there are blockchain dns efforts as well[2]. [1] https://bulletproofhosting.org/bulletproof-domains/ https://bulletproofhosting.org/bulletproof-domains/ [2] https://blockchain-dns.info/ https://blockchain-dns.info/
- pizza 6y ago
  Technically your IP address could too
nicbou 6y ago
Even then, you're at Google's mercy, since they control search traffic. I run my own website, but 85% of my traffic comes from Google. It's pretty much like getting 85% of your income from a single client.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  More Cloudflare’s right? Because they can drop your DDOS protection or just block you from their DNS lookups, right? Like they did to 4chan/8chan.
  - Jenk 6y ago
    If you own a site that has systemic issues with child pornography sharing and other illegal material, you probably deserve it.
    - throwaway45349 6y ago
      4chan is a shady place, but it is definitely not a bastion of child porn. The owners do not allow anything like that.
      - Jenk 6y ago
        /b/ has been an epicentre for decades.
        cbozeman 6y ago
        That is total horseshit. Yes, there are points in time when posters have attempted to post child pornography there, but it gets taken down swiftly and gets reported to moderators as swiftly as its posted. Your "epicentre" of child pornography on the Internet is Facebook, not 4chan.[1] [1]: https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras/213-worst-epidemic/ https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras/213-worst-epidemic/
        6y ago
Barrin92 6y ago
This isn't just about a personal website though. This is Linus Tech Tips (with a staff of about 20 people) building his own platform for delivering content as the article points out. That's a considerable development effort and probably out of reach for youtube creators who are large enough to make a living and depend on youtube, but not large enough to justify that kind of investment.
- piplikoc 6y ago
  Linus Media Group has 32 employees [1] with 7 massive YouTube channels. As the article pointed out they also have other tech YouTubers releasing content of Floatplane, not just their own channels. [1] https://linusmediagroup.com/our-team https://linusmediagroup.com/our-team
- fakedang 6y ago
  Exactly. I doubt even the big ones like Pewdiepie can even retain a following with their own website, much less a s small independent creator.
- a_hard_time 6y ago
  > That's a considerable development effort and probably out of reach for youtube creators who are large enough to make a living and depend on youtube, but not large enough to justify that kind of investment. YouTube revolves around free content - this places creators on the platform at an immediate and significant disadvantage in terms of monetising their audience. Many YouTubers who are stuck in that rut of being dependent on YouTube, despite having a fairly large audience, would likely make a lot more money if they started producing content on platforms which offer better options for monetisation (ideally, their own). A great example of this is Twitch. Direct monetisation of the audience is a fundamental part of the culture on Twitch. The site is optimised for it. Even before the Amazon Prime subscriptions, Twitch was FAR more profitable than YouTube for creators with audiences of comparable size.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dghughes 6y ago
Your comment for some reason reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Personal websites were a given there was a major urge to have your own website. Whether you had your own domain name or a Geocities type of page you just had to have one. On dialup people tended to be more independent you jumped on the Internet then jumped off to preserve your precious 60 hours/month (and to allow your landline phone to get calls). That time offline was used learning about things and you couldn't Google every little thing. I was much more into the fundamentals of the computer itself more than the stuff you could see on it. Making boot disks, adjusting settings in Windows, discovering Linux, learning HTML, sending lots of email, some IRC. The Internet grew in complexity and usefulness, and always on cable got cheaper but early on the computer itself was my main focus. Now it seems as if a computer is simply a conduit to watch YouTube videos. It seems like people are realizing they need to be more independent.
- antoniuschan99 6y ago
  The first video I tried to download was the first South Park Short on dialup. It took around 6 or 8 hours. This was in 1997/98. The next year I got cable and it was super fast like a couple of minutes. Now it takes a few seconds! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T_RZOoVlzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T_RZOoVlzc

aninuth 6y ago

Here I thought it was because of Squarespace...

benbristow 6y ago
Was expecting that as well haha

jcims 6y ago

it wasn’t that long ago that it would be unusual for somebody to publish all of their videos on YouTube rather than their own site, And when he did it was to save money/performance, not for the network effects of the platform.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Because they are finally learning that existing on someone else's platform sucks. Much better to get your own domain which is actually property registered to your name and can't be taken away from you because you offended some advertiser.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Discoverability provided by someone else's platform is a very big boon, however. Having one's own website is a luxury for the big man, the little man aspiring to be big one day has no choice but to kneel for “what he calls his “benevolent overlord””.
jasode 6y ago
>Because they are finally learning that existing on someone else's platform sucks. Much better to get your own domain [...] A lot of people already know they're the less powerful economic actor on Youtube platform. Regardless, people upload videos to Youtube instead of their own domain because of tradeoffs. For unknown creators with no audience, Youtube doesn't suck (in comparison to hosting videos on personal domain) because: (1) you don't have the money to pay for variable hosting bandwidth costs (2) you don't have any business relationships with advertisers to monetize which helps with (1) (3) you have no network effect platform recommending your videos (e.g. repair smartphones and drones) to audiences of like-minded channels such as Linus Tech Tips -- which helps with (2) There is a timeline that creators can't avoid to build financial/platform independence and leverage. Today, Linus can realistically host videos on his Floatplane alternative because he already used Youtube to build his 13 million subscribers. He also already built his own advertiser relationships to embed native ads with him as spokesperson outside of Youtube pre-roll and mid-rolls. In contrast, it's quite a different challenge for him to start in 2008 with his own Floatplane.com domain and build an audience of 13 million outside of Youtube.
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  Besides FloatPlane, other streaming websites that educational channels upload content to are nebula [1] and I think curiosity stream [2]. [1] https://watchnebula.com/ https://watchnebula.com/ [2] https://curiositystream.com/ https://curiositystream.com/

simias 6y ago

I think that's a great decision. Many people like to complain about Youtube and its policies and its algorithms but it's simply very hard to compete with it. Its offering is really unparalleled. Hopefully these creators will manage to carve enough of a niche to create healthy competition, especially with a business model that doesn't rely entirely on ad revenue. It's going to be very hard though, making money from video hosting is a very difficult thing to do.

g42gregory 6y ago

I did not even know that Linus had his own site. Fantastic. I won’t be watching his videos on Youtube anymore! Hopefully, everyone I watch will have their own websites, so that I don’t have to visit Youtube.

simongr3dal 6y ago
If only there was some kind of really simple syndication so I didn’t have to visit 40 different sites to check if my favorite video creators have released anything new.
- Franciscouzo 6y ago
  Is this sarcasm? RSS has been a thing for years.
  - sodality2 6y ago
    RSS stands for really simple syndication, so yes, sarcasm
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Fun fact for those who watch videos by creators who haven't moved off of YouTube yet: YouTube channels expose RSS feeds of uploads and you can watch videos directly without ads via youtube-dl automatically using MPV[1]. [1] https://mpv.io/installation/ https://mpv.io/installation/
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    Youtube will restrict your IP if you do this enough. I can't say I lost too much value when it happened, but it's been obnoxious having to go to the main site on my mobile to answer a battery of captchas every time I want to watch a video.
- 1000mA 6y ago
  RSS feed for videos?

marshmallow_12 6y ago

so now what? Instead of millions of channels competing on one very good and easily accessible site, designed to show videos, they will compete on a much larger scale, with far bulkier channels on a site that displays other things as well. The punchline is that both sites are controlled by the same company. I can predict that exactly nothing will be gained by this, except the flooding of internet by many more videos.

imwillofficial 6y ago
Define “very good” You mean we get more websites? Oh my god! What if the internet has too many websites! Whatever will we do?! If only we had a way to crawl websites and make them into some kind of list for searching, like some kind of engine for search.
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  you misunderstood me. a quick google search reveals that YouTube uses 15% of internet traffic. You suggest getting rid of YouTube and putting 15% extra workload onto google. you think that won't be an issue? as for the "very good" part, yes, youtube is extremely successful at aggregating and displaying useful videos. It is also extremely good at searching through its library and displaying individual users useful videos. Google is far less effective at this, of course. Also, replacing channels with individual websites will vastly increase the internet traffic, not just a minor surge.
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    Thanks for the clarification! I disagree on youtube being very good at its job, however that is a very subjective assessment. I think as it stands now, you are correct, but I believe these sites will give rise to more decentralized video sharing infrastructure as people slowly see the need to control their own destinies.
    - marshmallow_12 6y ago

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

Because they are finally learning that all it takes to destroy their business is an algorithm glitch, or having 'wrong' political views, or just falling on the wrong side of an overzealous moderator. When you use someone else's platform you are completely dependent on the owner of the platform, and being dependent on something you don't control is a huge business risk.

devoutsalsa 6y ago
Even if you keep up with what’s politically correct, your old content can become increasingly unfavorable. You can get railroaded for something you said 10 years ago that was seemingly alright at the time. I cringe at myself 10 years ago.
- xyst 6y ago
  thankfully I never recorded my cod:black ops sessions :)
- hobofan 6y ago
  And how is that different on any other platform?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sithlord 6y ago
    Youtube could easily just obliterate a channel today, for some video posted 10 years ago if they deem it bad enough. Doubt if you had your own platform you'd delete yourself for something cringe you said 10 years ago
    - katsura 6y ago
      Yes, but most people don't build their own server farms, don't have their own internet cable, so basically there is always some company in the middle that could easily cancel you.

scrose 6y ago

I can’t help but wonder why services like Vimeo don’t come up more often when getting off of YouTube? It seems like Vimeo offers similar functionality already. Is there something about it that I’m missing / is it just not cool for content creators?

imwillofficial 6y ago
What does Vimeo offer that YouTube doesn’t do better? What reduction in risk does Vimeo offer that is any different than YouTube?
- erk__ 6y ago
  DRM Free movie downloads, also it supports better quality video. Though those are things that work because they do not have the same kind of customers/creators as YouTube in general.
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    You're right, but that misses the point of the exodus from Youtube, people aren't leaving over DRM or video quality. They are leaving because the precarious relationship with a capricious overlord. Their livelyhoods are in somebody elses hands.
    - erk__ 6y ago
      Yeah, but they are not leaving to vimeo, and vimeo are not trying to get them to use it.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    > DRM Free movie downloads This isn't even remotely related to Vimeo or YouTube. If you're talking about movies legitimately published by the rights owners not being DRM'd on Vimeo, then there's nothing stopping the studio from uploading a DRM-free version to YouTube as well. IF you're talking about piracy simply because Vimeo doesn't have Content ID, then that's also just a failure of Vimeo and/or the studios not really caring about 480p streams with relatively few views.

Swizec 6y ago

Youtube is fantastic top of funnel. 2nd or 3rd biggest search engine online. Google also loves promoting it on search results. But YouTube isn’t where you should keep the rest of your business.

duxup 6y ago
Honestly I find them sometimes not promoting it enough. Granted, they probably shouldn't give it any favoritism... but often I'll google for a video clip and have to refine search to just show me youtube results as i don't want to deal with some beast of another site.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

We are still a very long way from distributed discovery. Back in the day at Demon Internet (well known 90s UK ISP) every customer got a free 10MB of webspace - barely any of them used it. But it should have been how we all hosted our blogs and our videos. And it would solve a multitude of social media issues. If Facebook and youtube did not host its hard to see how they could compile trustable usage stats (#) and so hard to see how we could all find out we must watch Gangnam Style. Similar problems seem to hover over crypto-currencies. Edit: some random thoughts - DNS: In a world of individual producers, curated aggregation still has value as it provides a quality / interest gate. A TV channel implies curation, a review guide the same. Perhaps it is no coincidence Marvel has found its footing in a world where choice is infinite and curation zero. Every TV show hopes to land a few million dedicated fans. - Social media companies basically have zero curation (this is weirdly tending towards including Amazon who are dumbing down curation in marketplace) - Our natural curation signals are usually based around proximity (geography, recommendation, similarity). These fall apart where the same DNS hosts nazis and nannies. Especially where recommendations are controlled by (one?) algorithm. - If enough viewing moves off YouTube (not merely the bits over pipes, it off the influence of the algorithm) then these other effects might start to show through. - But even if we could gather reliable distributed usage stats (book publishers managed it for decades), distributed discovery becomes a strange animal. A dumb algorithm that recommends what is the most watched video in the world, followed by the second, would have some strange chaotic behaviour but would at least have twin virtues of simple and transparent. Start adding in anything else (here is my past history, make a recommendation, or here is my aspirational set of people (my twitter follow list is watching) or just show me what Barry Norman recommends, all of these can be made transparent - and open to a cottage industry of discovery algorithms. - This cottage industry fascinates me - it's like the other industries I expected to exist but don't (decent job search, dis-intermediated real estate). Duck Duck Go seems the model here - there is likely to be a (regulated?) split in discovery - much like railways or phone lines - where the underlying monopoly bit (we scraping) gets hived off and everyone can access it at common fees - and the add on bits, the start of distributed discovery - appears as a more competitive market. And one hopes a less behaviour driven one (I am still wanting to know the revenue difference between Google storing my every move and returning what it thinks I want and Duck Duck Go just using the context of my query - and returning what I asked for. - But hopefully after a Cambrian explosion of companies offering discovery - not just search or for videos and entertainment but even shopping (as Amazon hits the same split the Google inevitably will), after all that, we are still a long way from where I hope we can get. - Everything online should treat me as a citizen, as even a patient - where do no harm is the first principle. If we live in an internet where my individual best interests are the legal and cultural norm, as professions are supposed to be, then we enter a totally different equation. We are all exploited online now, and the discussions are about harm reduction. But that's not the real end goal. Making sure quacks don't charge too much for the snake oil is not what made medicine work. (#) ignoring facebook lying to advertisers etc etc

john11johng 6y ago

I don't really see what they've done that Patreon/Vimeo do. Youtubers will still be reliant

madprops 6y ago

Peertube would work nicely for high traffic videos, since the data transfer can be shared among viewers https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/

teekert 6y ago
+1 for peertube, seems to be as easy as youtube (client side) and indeed all peers help streaming. Works very well.

christkv 6y ago

Now let’s bring back RSS so we can subscribe.

a_hard_time 6y ago

This is a lesson that YouTubers need to learn far earlier. I know a number of creators with relatively small audiences (under 50,000 subscribers on YouTube) who earn six figure incomes because they properly monetise. Even with the massive pay-outs from sponsor spots in videos, content creators fail to recognise the true value of their relationship with their audience. It is easier than ever to accept payment directly from an audience in exchange for access to premium content or products. It isn't for everyone - but if their goal is to make a business out of their content, it should be one of the first steps taken.

graeme 6y ago

I follow CGP Grey’s stuff and it’s been interesting and instructive to see how he diversified. * His Youtube channel is his main platform * However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there * He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex * The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts * He had a second podcast, hello internet, currently on hiatus. If ever something went catastrophically wrong with youtube this could be reactivated via the feed * He has a large email list which he uses to reach people directly and drive traffic to videos if people request these updates * He is also prominent on twitter etc and maintains secondary youtube channels, useful if main one taken down * He runs a large subreddit for his following So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss) Still faces a youtube risk but it would take a an earthquake across platforms to truly wreck his income streams. As someone who runs an online business and follows him it’s been impressive to watch how diversified he has made his comms channels.

verve_rat 6y ago
Also he has a channel on Nebula, a streaming service set up as a clear hedge against YouTube doing bad things. He was one of the driving forces behind Nebula, but I believe he is no longer involved in running it.
- georgebcrawford 6y ago
  I thought he started standard.tv, or did that become Nebula?
  - BoysenberryPi 6y ago
    Standard.tv is Nebula
simias 6y ago
> However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there Did he break that down publicly or do you get your info from elsewhere? I've always been curious to know what a typical high profile youtuber income flow looks like, and how much they're really tied to Youtube.

macspoofing 6y ago

Why wouldn't you? It's becoming increasingly clear that you cannot trust your web presence (and by extension, your business) to one or two social media companies ... though that should have been obvious in hindsight. And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email. My take is this: whenever I see a startup being described as "disrupting" some market, I interpret it in the other sense of the word: disruption, as in the effect of a disruptor, a fictional energy weapon used predominantly by the main villains of Star Trek franchise, Klingons and Romulans.
JProthero 6y ago
I share the scepticism about the ability of startups to disrupt away the network effects that underlie these quasi-monopolies, but it does seem to me as though decentralisation is the logical and desirable end-point. How and when that point could be reached though, I couldn't say.

dblooman 6y ago

Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier. The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large and seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon. What is sad is that you see youtubers talking in code on videos, not saying words, self censoring because youtube's detection is so good, videos get demonetised instantly. This is also why most people have seen an Ad in a video for PIA or surfshark or worse, raid shadow legends.

regnerba 6y ago
> Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier. You support creators by giving them money. In return for supporting a creator you get video content in return. Floatplane as a platform for the most part doesn't dictate what that content is other than it being in the format of a video. LTT themselves have actually been moving away from pushing videos early to Floatplane and more towards giving unique video content on Floatplane such as behind the scenes videos. You run into issues with promising videos early to only part of your community. For example when you have review embargos and want to make drop a video at the same time as every other YouTuber, > The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large It isn't that crazy really. Unlike YouTube which streams most of it's video for free and has to recover that cost via ads, every person streaming on Floatplane has paid money to stream that content. Floatplane has been scaling slowly which has allowed them to stay on baremetal instead of going to the cloud. They don't need a lot of the advantages the cloud has, such as the ability to scale on demand. This isn't your normal unicorn startup from silicon valley that needs hyper growth to attract more investors for an eventual IPO or buyout. Linus and Luke are putting their own money into it because they want to have a fallback incase YouTube pulls the plug on them. They are not taking lots of investment to try and build a YouTube competitor. Their costs are actually really reasonable. They have a much better profit sharing model with other creators than YouTube does. They recognize that they have a base line cost for a given creator, that is the cost of storing the video and processing it for example. Then they have a cost per user of that content. This may have changed but their model was recover that base line cost from the subscriptions and then take a much lower cut afterwards. So from a creators point of view you get more value as your scale the number of users from your community on the site. > seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon. Eh, maybe. It does however let them focus very much on that video aspect and provide users with a solid experience dedicated to videos. I imagine over time they will add more features to Floatplane that help differentiate it. One example of that is live streams. If you want to live stream to your Patreon members they suggest you use Crowdcast, something you have to pay for separately (https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002973506-Make-a-Livestream-post-with-Crowdcast https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002973506-M...). Floatplane supports live streaming.

xwdv 6y ago

I wonder if there could be a good business in building “deplatforming” type content websites for people with large audiences who want to decouple from centralized platforms.

xiphias2 6y ago
Like Parlor?

FpUser 6y ago

Because when you have business that brings money you do not let the somebody else control it to the point that they can kill it next day just because they can. One of the reasons why my backends are based on self sufficient architecture that I can move to any arbitrary VM / dedicated server in no time. There is no cloudy dependent stuff in my stack at all.

gerash 6y ago

This is the same as centralized app stores where the only difference is that here you do have an alternative.

GNU_James 6y ago

>linking to bbc without using archive.is Son...

dalbasal 6y ago

This article is a little on the surface level, but it's true. People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air. Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole thing. There either needs to be some neutrality, competition or youtubers need to organize somehow... unionize even. Trying to have a relationship with audiences that doesn't run through youtube won't work for most channels... even ones with millions of views. I always expected a porn company to come in and compete with youtube at some point. They have the infrastructure. I've also been surprised at how restricted youtube manage to be, and still succeed... just the skin censorship if nothing else.

um_ya 6y ago
There needs to be "content as a protocol" in the same way email is. If I don't like one email provider, I can always move to a different provider without losing access to all the user's that remain there. If I could make a Facebook post and have it's content propagate to other providers, websites would act more like UI filters rather than gatekeepers.
- dfcowell 6y ago
  This sounds like ActivityPub?
- kiwidrew 6y ago
  That content protocol is called HTTP and the service discovery protocol is called DNS. I know that it's a bit cliche to say that these days, but acquiring a domain name (either directly from a TLD registrar or indirectly through e.g. a DynDNS provider) and pointing it at a webhost is what allows content publishers to "mint" their very own globally unique URLs. Any consumers that are equipped with a suitable user agent can then plug that URL into their browser and view that publisher's content. Now let's be serious, there are numerous barriers that stand in the way of "normal" users that want to escape the evil platforms. Why not direct our ire at the real problem: Why Johnny Still Can't Host a Website! And if we fix that, perhaps we can move on to Why Johnny Can't Get Any Visitors (Because Google Won't Index It) and Why Johnny's Visitors Don't Receive His Updates (Because Google and Mozilla Killed RSS).

guerrilla 6y ago

If they don't want to end up on islands that nobody ever visits then they better start thinking about getting together and starting cooperatives or non-profits to host and list themselves.

dang 6y ago

All: please let's try to avoid repeating the generic discussion about how being on someone else's platform leaves you vulnerable to someone else. It's not wrong, of course, but it's been repeated for many years and won't lead to fresh conversation. The goal on HN is curious conversation. Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place. The easiest way to do this is to respond to the specific new information in an article. As a nudge in that direction, I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases). You don't only have to react to the specific new information in an article. Whimsical tangents and reactions are also ok. Just ask yourself if it's expected or unexpected [4], and prefer the unexpected. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=diffs%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Triv888 6y ago
I appreciate all of your work but I think that you are wrong with this comment... I think that talking about leaving platforms that have monopolies can spur innovation.
- dang 6y ago
  For sure there are important and interesting questions there. I'm not asking people not to talk about those!—just to do it in a way that isn't just repeating what always gets said. Otherwise there's a power-law dropoff in information transfer...like telling the same joke or repeating the same word over and over. There's nothing wrong with repetition per se. There is pleasure in it—it's just a different kind than the pleasure of curiosity. The problem is that we can't have both pleasures at the same time, and HN is a site for curiosity. This is one of those moderation calls that seems arbitrary and obscure until you take literally that we're trying to optimize for just one thing, and then it follows rather straightforwardly. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280 (It's really a sweet spot to have only one thing to optimize for—one gets to have fun being radical about following it to all its counterintuitive consequences.)

smoldesu 6y ago

>"We refuse to be an accidental vehicle for right-wing, neo-Nazi propaganda. And it's really easy for fringe platforms to turn into that if you leave the doors open," he says. Kudos where it's due for fighting fascism and all that jazz, but it does raise a pretty large concern: where do people draw the line for this stuff? A private platform like that can ultimately decide which videos they want to accept and which they want to reject, which really defeats the purpose of making your own platform in the first place. It doesn't matter if there's no content aggregation algos, since everyone consumes a homogeneous slurry of videos. Instead of preventing gatekeeping in the first place, they just changed who can open the gate. I don't think I'll ever be very interested in a platform like Nebula, and I'm really only tangentially interested in Floatplane. YouTube will always be a dominant market because it's free and offers a functional user experience. Even if half of the people watching YouTube videos got a Nebula subscription, they're still going to be using YouTube alongside it. As long as that YouTube audience exists, people will continue to capitalize it. As long as the two platforms compete, they'll be in a constant struggle for power over their viewers. It's the definition of a lose-lose situation.

sjg007 6y ago

I think the question us hackers should think about is not about how do you beat youtube? But how do you make it irrelevant. Twitch was one answer. TikTok is another.

swlkr 6y ago

The ideal platform for something like youtube would be to separate discovery from content. You host the content, and you can pick from UIs/algorithms for the discovery.

JProthero 6y ago
This is my view too. I'm hopeful that eventually some combination of technologies that already exist (peer-to-peer sharing, tor, blockchain, homomorphic encryption, maybe even wireless mesh networking) will evolve into a decentralised hosting and delivery system that everyone will use. I'm woefully uninformed to speculate about how feasible this might be though, so it remains just a hope for me.
- TobTobXX 6y ago
  Peertube is an alternative. You usually host your own instance (or if someone is generous, they can five you some space) and it is fully decentralized. It uses ActivityPub and works with p2p. Recently they introsuced livestreaming and cross-instance search. https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/
  - JProthero 6y ago
    Thanks for mentioning PeerTube — I've been keeping an eye on it for a while now. It has some of the features I noted, including one I didn't but should have; it's open source. I think PeerTube or systems like it have a lot promise — particularly if more estblished channels on YouTube, and other media producers, were to start to promote them as alternative methods for accessing their output.
Daho0n 6y ago
So Google video search plus your own website?
- foobar33333 6y ago
  Same idea but with a full UI so it works like youtube where you can scroll through suggested content and subscribe to things

loosetypes 6y ago

Even with their own frontend, creators' content is still hosted and served via YouTube just with an embedded video player, no? Are there any viable alternatives out there? Vimeo? I'm not particularly knowledgeable on video streaming, is cost the main barrier?

xwolfi 6y ago
Floatplane is self hosted. It s a replacement not a frontend (goal being if youtube kicks them out, they had least can try to survive)

hashingroll 6y ago

> There is no algorithm, they're going to be served everything you make. I am not sure how is this (lack of) feature mentioned as an advantage over youtube. Afaict there's certainly a video tab on the yt channel that displays videos sorted with time uploaded (and probably is modifiable). I understand that the point must be that people may want to not see the recommended videos, but don't most such visitors directly visit the yt channel. At least I use it like that. (mandatory: googler, don't work on youtube)

joshschreuder 6y ago
I don't know if it's a bug or intentional, but I have absolutely had cases where the thing you're talking about (Subscriptions) either refuses to show me a new vid from a channel I'm subscribed to, or refuses to notify me when a new video is out, despite having asked to be notified.
- james-skemp 6y ago
  I'm a big user of the Subscriptions tab (283 subs, probably more than half from creators that stopped posting), and I've had no issues with lost videos. Well, unless they got temporarily delisted due to an illegitimate copyright claim. (How do I know? Because most creators I follow will mention their last video.) Limited experience with the bell, since I only did that for one channel, which I'm also a Patreon for. (Chrontendo: I usually watch the episode early and then listen to it again when it's public.) But 100% success rate with that notification thus far.
  - joshschreuder 6y ago
    I am the same, 310 subs here. I didn't mean to imply this was frequent behaviour, as it's not. My point is more that I can understand Youtube channels wanting to have more control over their distribution and ensuring people who want to watch their content are aware of it, because sometimes Youtube won't make them aware. I have seen a case where a video from a channel I'm subscribed to did not appear in my Subscriptions feed, and only appeared when going directly to the channel. From reading the comments I wasn't the only person this happened to. Though I can't see whether this was a bug on Youtube's end, or one of its endless tweakings to "the algorithm".

znpy 6y ago

a good story about floatplane: i signed up pretty much as soon as it was announced, then i forgot about it and also forgot my password. i was billed -very little- for a while then i opened a support ticket to have my account restored, since i had been billed for a while i at least wanted to watch some content. but apparently something in the backend had changed and they plainly refunded me from the time i had my last login (iirc) and then they allowed me to re-signup. it's been nice because i had then been able to re-signup and also recover some money that were pretty much lost, and i wasn't expecting that nor asking for it. i really hope to see floatplane grow!

Bakary 6y ago
Can you imagine Google doing such a thing? I'm chuckling just thinking about how improbable that would be. This is why those services as so necessary.
strogonoff 6y ago
The problem with Floatplane is that new creators who have ideas and skills but aren’t publishing elsewhere online (e.g., because they dislike the ad-driven model and don’t want their videos to appear alongside junk content) have nothing in terms of online optics that they could put into the application form—so they’d have to either support the likes of YouTube first by publishing there, or be capable of running their own site. I wish Floatplane charged a moderate fee upfront rather than having the vetting/review flow (which could still be an option for those who can’t afford the fee).
- t0astbread 6y ago
  Vimeo (if I'm not mistaken) offers a plan where you pay them to host your videos and they don't roll any ads on them.
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    That’d be a great feature compared to the majority of platforms. The big question would be whether they force recommendations from other channels elsewhere on the page or at the end of a video.

walrus01 6y ago

> Linus Sebastian Something to understand, for those who might have just seen some youtube videos of him being goofy, is that he's an actor. The guy on camera doing stupid stuff is a stage persona. It's an intentionally cultivated image and media persona to get as many video views as possible. I sort of see him as one possible aspect of the low/medium budget TV production stuff which is common in his home city, Vancouver BC. People who've met and worked with him in person report that he's a much more normal, calm, rational individual off screen. I won't judge him for being goofy on camera because it's hard to make a living as a working actor. For every person who gets a job in a vancouver-produced TV drama that might last 2 or 3 seasons, there's dozens more people who are working as restaurant servers while trying to get their big break.

Zak 6y ago
People watch videos largely for entertainment, even when the subject matter is a review of computer hardware or advice concerning technology. For pure informational value, a written format with occasional short illustrative video clips is usually more useful. I think every successful youtuber has a cultivated stage persona because that's more entertaining than just watching an everyday person talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes.
- leoc 6y ago
  You can in fact watch a professional chemist talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes on a pretty successful YouTube channel, but he's definitely going to be using his larger-than-life stage persona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui_wOiUDPvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui_wOiUDPvM .
leoc 6y ago
Sebastian and Linus Media Group seem to be pretty frank and open about a lot of this: see for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA&list=PL8mG-RkN2uTxJiNGHnLrb-i-XP6s3y87K&index=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA&list=PL8mG-RkN2u... on putting up gurning thumbnails and navigating the YT algorithm (and that whole playlist, including a revenue breakdown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t73wXF8IF-8&list=PL8mG-RkN2uTxJiNGHnLrb-i-XP6s3y87K&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t73wXF8IF-8&list=PL8mG-RkN2u... ), the Gamers Nexus video on LTT's production process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdOBFu-mYpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdOBFu-mYpw and the coverage LTT regularly lavishes on its own production setup and process, from a nearly-12m video about the awkwardness of ingesting video from their new 12K cameras https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfGBQZUSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfGBQZUSI to seemingly quite genuine fly-on-the-wall coverage of temporarily losing their data to a RAID failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k . Obviously you always have to take anyone's self-presentation with a grain of salt. But they're certainly not hiding the fact that there's a more grounded reality behind the "on" personas.

rreichel03 6y ago

I spent some time a while back trying to build the “Shopify for Video streams” where creators could have a custom hosted channel that enables them to monetize however they’d like! Ultimately I didn’t do a great job of marketing it, but if anyone’s interested in giving it a spin for their channel feel free to fill out the beta interest form here: https://yourchannel.rreichel.dev https://yourchannel.rreichel.dev

alex-wallish 6y ago
I think there's definitely a need for this and have thought about building something similar myself. I think one thing that is crucial which I don't see mentioned in any of your pricing plans is the ability to self host. You could dockerize your application and make it super easy for creators to set it up on their own infra. Otherwise they still have a large platform risk, they've just shifted it from youtube to your company.

thoughtstheseus 6y ago

Ally Law needed to do this. He regularly trespasses to the top of sky scrapers and other unique buildings. YouTube tried to bring him down so he started his own site. He still posts on YouTube but it was a long process to get back. If you want to see a guy living, check out Ally Law. It’s a madness.

drummer 6y ago

A reminder: John Gilmore, one of the founders of the EFF, once famously wrote, “The ‘net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

chewxy 6y ago

Funnily I'm subscribed to Corridor Digital and Nebula. These were the first things I thought about when I saw the headline. And now I know where Luke from LTT went and why despite "not working at LTT anymore", Linus seemed to have a good relationship with Luke whenever he appeared.

donaldtheduck 6y ago

Lametube is a communist company that cancels those that rebel against the cabal. Only sheeps and communist scums use lametube. Red-pilled, grown up people use free speech platforms like rumble.

jccalhoun 6y ago

It seems really weird that BBC would do a story on these alternates to youtube, mention them, and then not link to them. I watch Linus Tech Tips so I've heard of floatplane but I haven't heard of the others mentioned. Even one of the three links in the article just goes to another site called tubefilter which itself doesn't link to this nebula thing. It took me ten minutes to find the site because I had to read the articles trying to see if they linked to https://watchnebula.com/ https://watchnebula.com/ (admittedly, that link doesn't really do a great job of selling the product either) What is the point of doing stories about other web sites without linking to them?

brigandish 6y ago
The BBC is publicly funded and for years was very strict about no advertising or product placement in their output (which has relaxed somewhat in recent years but it’s still there) so perhaps it’s because they don’t want the article to be seen as “newsvertising” (is there a special term for this?)
- orojackson 6y ago
  You're thinking of "native advertising" or "advertorial."
  - brigandish 6y ago
    Advertorial! Thanks. If newsvertising as a word takes off, you know who to blame :)

donaldtheduck 6y ago

Only sheeps and communist scums use lametube. Red-pilled, grown up people use free speech platforms like rumble.

KorfmannArno 6y ago

Could a platform like notify.me become a great beneficiary of this trend of segregation?

kodah 6y ago

Personally, I think the way to end centralization is to introduce enough viable options that are willing to cohabitate and even cooperate. These viable alternatives can't be interested in total dominance and probably need to have agreements that allow transfer of content and data. Personally hosted sites backed by centrally maintained software is a logical choice if you can optimize for the lack of bandwidth sharing economy. If my hypothesis is true, then this is the tide turning in video sharing, though the tide may be a long tide.

dageshi 6y ago
There's a fundamental tension between competition/choice and low friction. On the internet it seems like whatever has the lowest friction wins. Examples... People hate the fact that there are so many paid streaming services now, they just want one, that has everything and pay about $15 a month for it. People don't and won't switch away from twitch.tv, mixer tried to compete by poaching two of the biggest streamers in the world, their own audiences wouldn't follow them from twitch to mixer.

amarant 6y ago

I wonder if there's a businessmodel for selling self-hosted video streaming solutions for this kind of content creators. Would be a fun product to build if nothing else. Putting the "you" in YouTube

valzam 6y ago
Hosting the videos is not the issue but discovery. Not being on youtube might work for big channels but even they probably get a large % of their views from searches/recommendations.
- jiofih 6y ago
  Hosting the videos is definitely an issue. The cost for distributing a single FHD video with a million views is staggering. YT benefits from Google infrastructure to do it “for free”.

02020202 6y ago

multiple adpocalipses, arbitrary rules, massive censorship,... youtube did this to itself.

dalu 6y ago

If you need paid help, I'm available

selykg 6y ago

Maybe not totally on subject here. But Cleetus McFarland is one of the people I think is starting to make his move away from YouTube, or at least, diversifying dramatically. Merch is huge for YouTubers in a lot of ways. He's been doing solid merch for a long time. He also has been doing his Cleetus & Cars events for a few years now and those bring in big numbers. Last year he announced purchasing an abandoned race track. Which he opened officially this year. This past weekend he had an event and the place was packed (COVID not withstanding... it feels like in Florida, where this is all located, COVID isn't a thing). He seems to have successfully saved an abandoned race track. In an extremely creative maneuver they had to tear up part of the race track for repairs. To help fund the repairs he sold chunks of the track in a bottle with a t-shirt and a few other merch goodies. He literally sold chunks of the track. He's now doing Pay-per-view events, which he started last year. I'm sure a good chunk of his income still comes from YouTube, but in a lot of ways he's seemingly finding creative ways to make his business bigger. Eventually, I anticipate that YouTube and him part ways and he starts his own platform where he can make it more of what he wants it to be.

LockAndLol 6y ago

Are there opensource product/apps/website that allow distributing media to multiple outlets at once? Like uploading to YouTube, peertube, daily motion, vimeo and others from one interface as well as managing and responding to the comments left on them? I could develop something myself but it would be way better if someone already put the effort into it. Also because I suck at UI and would probably wrote a CLI for it, which probably doesn't mesh with content creators.