4 ms·

(maker of this thing) > If I use Streambus, how will I get others to see my content? If I want to find new stuff on Streambus, where do I see others' streams?

• hedora 5y ago
  It would be nice if your service automatically handled submitting the RSS feeds to duck duck go. Their video search has started including a wider range of sources; I imagine they’d welcome your content (especially since you’re likely to have a better privacy policy than YouTube).
  • flaque 5y ago
    This is cool, we'll look into this
• ajuc 5y ago
  Have you heard of twitch? Cause it sound a lot like twitch, and they already exist and have huge userbase.
  • throwaway316943 5y ago
    This seems much more difficult to use than twitch and much fewer features too.
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  What’s your content policy like? YouTube is famous for aggressively censoring views that don’t align with progressive sentiments, which makes sense since they’re a part of Google, who has the same cultural traits. People have been pressuring Substack to censor/ban content as well, which would probably cause subscribers to abandon them (I know I would). What is your policy?
  • jjeaff 5y ago
    This is the narrative. But I haven't seen much censorship that wasn't well deserved. Perhaps there are a lot of left wing hate speech personalities out there that are not getting taken down, but I have seen little empirical evidence that google really is targeting non-progressive views.
    • throwawaysea 5y ago
      Would you expect evidence that isn’t anecdotal to be easily available to the public? It’s not like Google publishes a transparent public log of every act of moderation, so compiling evidence beyond a list of anecdotes is simply not possible. However, I would argue their publicly stated policies on disallowed content is enough to see the progressive bias. To me and other moderates, and I imagine conservatives, the bias is clear. In this last year I’ve seen Google ban content relating to BLM riots, COVID (like the lab leak hypothesis), trans issues, firearms, and more. If you take an issue like whether transwomen should be allowed participation in women’s sports, enough content is taken down that what’s left as a result of Google’s censorship is a significant amplification of the views of dedicated trans activists relative to everyone else. Google doing this at their scale amounts to propaganda - after all, they are more influential than most governments given the large number of users they have. Your definition of “well deserved” may fit your own worldview. But for me, I see a brazen suppression of free inquiry, and in many cases, the truth. These actions are framed as being positive, by defining censored content as “hateful” or “violent” or whatever, but they’re actually just damaging and dishonest, since they inhibit open discourse. It’s an important enough problem to me that I can’t support any new service that simply recreates the same oppressive mess - I just don’t see the point because whatever other features they might have, it will still feel mostly the same if this problem isn’t fixed.
• larsiusprime 5y ago
  I’ve been thinking along the same lines, but regarding the games industry: https://mobile.twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1412881397375803392 https://mobile.twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1412881397375... I think the challenges in my industry are greater, but I think what you’re doing is part of a growing trend I call the “digital crowbar” model. Supercast is an example of one in your space that has already had some major success stories, though their latest poster child (Breaking Points) piggybacks still off YouTube. And of course Substack and Ghost are doing well with newsletters and blogs. Curious what you think of my framing and how much it applies to your space or not.
  • Danieru 5y ago
    Wow Lars you're on Hacker News, that's awesome. As an Indie who started way way back in the flash portal era, I think the current situation with Steam and consoles is a vast improvement over what I experienced back then. Sure I had direct contact with players in theory, and no barriers to publishing my game. Except players had zero interest in me and my poorly made games. Every indie looks at their conversion rate and goes "I would do so much better if my game got more attention" missing on the reality that attention is the gold of the modern age. Given enough attention anything can succeed, hey you can even sell attention to others by putting up ads. Thus any platform which is both open, and gives attention (discoverability) is creating an unsolveable market issue. The attention is valuable, so giving it to anyone will just push the market into a market for cheapest converter of attention into dollars: porn. We see this already with Steam where the top lists always contain some sort of porn-lite games. Thus my own take is: I don't want an open market. I want a market which heavily selects for quality. Then I want to develop and polish my game to meet that quality bar: since in such a situation I know my little train game will not need to compete with fake japanese hentai.
    • meheleventyone 5y ago
      > Thus my own take is: I don't want an open market. I want a market which heavily selects for quality. Then I want to develop and polish my game to meet that quality bar: since in such a situation I know my little train game will not need to compete with fake japanese hentai. This actually makes the attention thing worse. Now you’re competing for the attention of a few people who are sitting under a deluge of games. Established players with an existing relationship get entrenched and you better find a way to build a relationship outside of the official channels if you have no name. Plus some market wag will be along to tell you that the open market already heavily selects for quality. Which is fairly true and the issue for an individual developer isn’t really the result of the aggregate market. The actual issue is that there is a very strong power law in terms of actual sales. Success begets larger success as the algorithms take notice, word of mouth hits scale and the developer can afford to reinvest with worthwhile advertising. Secondary to that is that there is just too much information for players to make a fair assessment of all the games they could buy which further amplifies this issue with the market. Basically discoverability sucks still For the developers who would be automatically on a closed platform, yes less games would fix it but they’re probably already riding high in the curve. For developers who wouldn’t you want to be very sure you’ll definitely be one of the anointed. Be careful what you wish for. I’d like to see instead the Steam open up a bit, curators exist but it’s hard to make that a job as it doesn’t pay. Tackling that and turning Steam into a collection of stores rather than a store might help flatten the curve by allowing niches room to breathe and paying curator businesses to mine for gems. The games press used to be this way but now outside of tiny outlets it’s all pretty homogenised and they all talk about exactly the same games.
• double0jimb0 5y ago
  Have you interviewed both successful and unsuccessful YouTubers and asked them about their growth story? Questions like: What tactics worked and didn’t work for their own subscriber growth? You could even ask them how they think they would recreate their growth story through your proposed platform.