4 ms·

> Seems like there's gotta be a better way. Video "channels" should be like podcasts: hosting and discovery largely separate. Subscription, client-side. YouTu

> Seems like there's gotta be a better way. Video "channels" should be like podcasts: hosting and discovery largely separate. Subscription, client-side. YouTube shouldn't exist.

deltree7 4y ago
Only a seriously out-of-touch elite dude will claim that something which organically became popular shouldn't exist. By your brilliant logic, Hacker News shouldn't exist.
- corrral 4y ago
  People are upset about Spotify trying to own the podcast market. Meanwhile Web video is already in the position everyone dreads podcasts reaching, and has been for its entire existence. Assuming folks aren't wrong about RSS-based host-anywhere podcasts being better than having the entire market controlled by one provider, seems obvious video'd be better with the same model.
  - Nasrudith 4y ago
    The why is obvious - the bandwidth involved isn't quite so hospitible to small scales as podcasting. Either we need to revive Moore's law or start flogging electrons and photons for not going fast enough.
    - corrral 4y ago
      I know (believe me, I know) that bandwidth is expensive, but I'm also pretty sure YouTube's margins leave plenty of room for competitors to come in with less-effective monetization schemes and still turn a profit. There's no reason a host couldn't put ads on videos hosted under some kind of free tier, after all. I'm quite sure we wouldn't end up with no free hosting. Worst case, I think it'd tend to be quality capped to SD-quality or something, and that's worst-case.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
selfhoster11 4y ago
[para removed due to tone] Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and Spotify, so that analogy isn't great.
- corrral 4y ago
  You're not following me. I'm not saying youtube channels should be podcasts. I'm saying that the problem with YouTube is its monopoly, driven by coupling hosting and discovery in one platform, and a podcast model that separates those would improve the ecosystem and solve most of the problems with YouTube being able to dictate terms for an entire super-popular form of creative content. > Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and Spotify, so that analogy isn't great. Right, and podcast fans largely hate that trend.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    My bad, I misunderstood your comment. FWIW I agree on both counts, but I'm also saying is that podcasts are falling to centralisation pressures that plagued video since the very beginning.
    - corrral 4y ago
      > My bad, I misunderstood your comment. Heh, no big deal, that "like" in the original was crucial and easy to scan past. These things happen. > FWIW I agree on both counts, but I'm also saying is that podcasts are falling to centralisation pressures that plagued video since the very beginning. More generally I think the Internet and the markets growing on it would be a hell of a lot healthier if we outlawed the creepy & dangerous mass data collection that encourages lock-in and monopolization, and the video market specifically (including streaming services like Netflix and friends) if we outlawed certain kinds of vertical integration there. Economy of scale is quite enough to push things toward monopoly, no need to have those factors amplifying the effect and increasing the harm of such monopolies.
slillibri 4y ago
In theory that would be great, but video is in general much larger than audio. There would be no way for many channels to even get started, given the costs involved. I expect most people getting started on YouTube would be driven out of business simply by the bandwidth costs alone.
- corrral 4y ago
  I'm confident hosts would step in to make money if YouTube's monopoly on combo hosting+discovery were broken. Folks tend to like making money. No reason they couldn't put their own ads on the videos, like YouTube does, to cover costs for creators who want free hosting. All kinds of angles to provide free hosting to feed the ol' marketing funnel, just like all kinds of other hosts, like limiting quality (so, drastically reducing bandwidth costs—SD video with modern codecs can be tiny) I find the push-back on this baffling. It's like if web hosting were all but completely controlled by one monopolist and questioning that drew all kinds of "LOL how could web hosting even work without one monopolist controlling the whole thing and dictating what can and cannot be hosted, it's impossible, you're nuts, no-one could ever start a hobby website again without that monopolist".
  - Goronmon 4y ago
    I'm confident hosts would step in to make money if YouTube's monopoly on combo hosting+discovery were broken. Folks tend to like making money. No reason they couldn't put their own ads on the videos, like YouTube does, to cover costs for creators who want free hosting. Who is buying these ads on this new video site that no one is using yet?
    - corrral 4y ago
      You posit the alternative, that no-one would figure out how to make money off this market? I find that implausible. If we take that objection aside, the question looks a lot like "how does a business possibly start?" which... well, look at the site we're on.
mrkramer 4y ago
In the pre Facebook era people thought social networking would be distributed over thousands and millions of blogs with the help of RSS but that didn't happen because it turned out that centralized commercial services are better than FOSS distributed ones. That's why Facebook and Google won; they offered better services because they were centralized commercial services which were constantly updated and improved all because ad revenues were skyrocketing and all the best engineers decided to work for them instead of trying to pursue decentralized/distributed FOSS solutions. Bitcoin is an exception to this and it was most likely made by one guy as a FOSS payment solution which would compete against Visa/Mastercard, commercial banks and central banks all at the same time. On the other hand Satoshi could've patented his ideas and go straight to the VISA and try to sell them the Blockchain story but he decided to make it FOSS and truly decentralized.
- corrral 4y ago
  > In the pre Facebook era people thought social networking would be distributed over thousands and millions of blogs with the help of RSS but that didn't happen because it turned out that centralized commercial services are better than FOSS distributed ones. That's why Facebook and Google won; they offered better services because they were centralized commercial services which were constantly updated and improved all because ad revenues were skyrocketing and all the best engineers decided to work for them instead of trying to pursue decentralized/distributed FOSS solutions. I think they mainly won because they figured out that capturing a huge amount of data about user behavior (i.e. industrial-scale spying) was incredibly lucrative. That's also part of why, despite being free services, they despise anything that might take your activity (so, valuable data) somewhere else for even a second, so, open standards and any kind of inter-operation. This let them provide free services with tons of income to put into development and, vitally, promotion. I think the key insight from there is that that sort of situation doesn't just discourage use of free alternatives—it discourages development of them. I'm certain we'd have more and better free (and paid!) alternatives, and way more developers putting free work into that space for protocol and client/server development, if not for the huge moat that is creepy data-hoarding to feed monetizable AI. Competing—even on a volunteer basis—against unassailable behemoths with what may as well be an unlimited advertising & development budgets is discouraging, to put it lightly. I'd never think of working on that kind of project right now, because the market, enabled by the legality of mass-scale stalking by corporations, means it's pointless no matter how good a product you make.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Yeah I don't like your solution. Not everyone has plenty of money like HN commentors tend to have. Some are fine with ad supported channels. They just want youtube to cut the funny business and require those who are claiming "copyright infringement" actually show real, concrete proof of their claims.

> Seems like there's gotta be a better way. Video "channels" should be like podcasts: hosting and discovery largely separate. Subscription, client-side. YouTube shouldn't exist.

deltree7 4y ago

Only a seriously out-of-touch elite dude will claim that something which organically became popular shouldn't exist. By your brilliant logic, Hacker News shouldn't exist.

corrral 4y ago
People are upset about Spotify trying to own the podcast market. Meanwhile Web video is already in the position everyone dreads podcasts reaching, and has been for its entire existence. Assuming folks aren't wrong about RSS-based host-anywhere podcasts being better than having the entire market controlled by one provider, seems obvious video'd be better with the same model.
- Nasrudith 4y ago
  The why is obvious - the bandwidth involved isn't quite so hospitible to small scales as podcasting. Either we need to revive Moore's law or start flogging electrons and photons for not going fast enough.
  - corrral 4y ago
    I know (believe me, I know) that bandwidth is expensive, but I'm also pretty sure YouTube's margins leave plenty of room for competitors to come in with less-effective monetization schemes and still turn a profit. There's no reason a host couldn't put ads on videos hosted under some kind of free tier, after all. I'm quite sure we wouldn't end up with no free hosting. Worst case, I think it'd tend to be quality capped to SD-quality or something, and that's worst-case.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

selfhoster11 4y ago

[para removed due to tone] Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and Spotify, so that analogy isn't great.

corrral 4y ago
You're not following me. I'm not saying youtube channels should be podcasts. I'm saying that the problem with YouTube is its monopoly, driven by coupling hosting and discovery in one platform, and a podcast model that separates those would improve the ecosystem and solve most of the problems with YouTube being able to dictate terms for an entire super-popular form of creative content. > Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and Spotify, so that analogy isn't great. Right, and podcast fans largely hate that trend.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  My bad, I misunderstood your comment. FWIW I agree on both counts, but I'm also saying is that podcasts are falling to centralisation pressures that plagued video since the very beginning.
  - corrral 4y ago
    > My bad, I misunderstood your comment. Heh, no big deal, that "like" in the original was crucial and easy to scan past. These things happen. > FWIW I agree on both counts, but I'm also saying is that podcasts are falling to centralisation pressures that plagued video since the very beginning. More generally I think the Internet and the markets growing on it would be a hell of a lot healthier if we outlawed the creepy & dangerous mass data collection that encourages lock-in and monopolization, and the video market specifically (including streaming services like Netflix and friends) if we outlawed certain kinds of vertical integration there. Economy of scale is quite enough to push things toward monopoly, no need to have those factors amplifying the effect and increasing the harm of such monopolies.

slillibri 4y ago

In theory that would be great, but video is in general much larger than audio. There would be no way for many channels to even get started, given the costs involved. I expect most people getting started on YouTube would be driven out of business simply by the bandwidth costs alone.

corrral 4y ago
I'm confident hosts would step in to make money if YouTube's monopoly on combo hosting+discovery were broken. Folks tend to like making money. No reason they couldn't put their own ads on the videos, like YouTube does, to cover costs for creators who want free hosting. All kinds of angles to provide free hosting to feed the ol' marketing funnel, just like all kinds of other hosts, like limiting quality (so, drastically reducing bandwidth costs—SD video with modern codecs can be tiny) I find the push-back on this baffling. It's like if web hosting were all but completely controlled by one monopolist and questioning that drew all kinds of "LOL how could web hosting even work without one monopolist controlling the whole thing and dictating what can and cannot be hosted, it's impossible, you're nuts, no-one could ever start a hobby website again without that monopolist".
- Goronmon 4y ago
  I'm confident hosts would step in to make money if YouTube's monopoly on combo hosting+discovery were broken. Folks tend to like making money. No reason they couldn't put their own ads on the videos, like YouTube does, to cover costs for creators who want free hosting. Who is buying these ads on this new video site that no one is using yet?
  - corrral 4y ago
    You posit the alternative, that no-one would figure out how to make money off this market? I find that implausible. If we take that objection aside, the question looks a lot like "how does a business possibly start?" which... well, look at the site we're on.

mrkramer 4y ago

In the pre Facebook era people thought social networking would be distributed over thousands and millions of blogs with the help of RSS but that didn't happen because it turned out that centralized commercial services are better than FOSS distributed ones. That's why Facebook and Google won; they offered better services because they were centralized commercial services which were constantly updated and improved all because ad revenues were skyrocketing and all the best engineers decided to work for them instead of trying to pursue decentralized/distributed FOSS solutions. Bitcoin is an exception to this and it was most likely made by one guy as a FOSS payment solution which would compete against Visa/Mastercard, commercial banks and central banks all at the same time. On the other hand Satoshi could've patented his ideas and go straight to the VISA and try to sell them the Blockchain story but he decided to make it FOSS and truly decentralized.

corrral 4y ago
> In the pre Facebook era people thought social networking would be distributed over thousands and millions of blogs with the help of RSS but that didn't happen because it turned out that centralized commercial services are better than FOSS distributed ones. That's why Facebook and Google won; they offered better services because they were centralized commercial services which were constantly updated and improved all because ad revenues were skyrocketing and all the best engineers decided to work for them instead of trying to pursue decentralized/distributed FOSS solutions. I think they mainly won because they figured out that capturing a huge amount of data about user behavior (i.e. industrial-scale spying) was incredibly lucrative. That's also part of why, despite being free services, they despise anything that might take your activity (so, valuable data) somewhere else for even a second, so, open standards and any kind of inter-operation. This let them provide free services with tons of income to put into development and, vitally, promotion. I think the key insight from there is that that sort of situation doesn't just discourage use of free alternatives—it discourages development of them. I'm certain we'd have more and better free (and paid!) alternatives, and way more developers putting free work into that space for protocol and client/server development, if not for the huge moat that is creepy data-hoarding to feed monetizable AI. Competing—even on a volunteer basis—against unassailable behemoths with what may as well be an unlimited advertising & development budgets is discouraging, to put it lightly. I'd never think of working on that kind of project right now, because the market, enabled by the legality of mass-scale stalking by corporations, means it's pointless no matter how good a product you make.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

Yeah I don't like your solution. Not everyone has plenty of money like HN commentors tend to have. Some are fine with ad supported channels. They just want youtube to cut the funny business and require those who are claiming "copyright infringement" actually show real, concrete proof of their claims.