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I love Youtube and consider it a major contribution to the modern world -- however it would have been "invented" within a few months regardless of who built if

I love Youtube and consider it a major contribution to the modern world -- however it would have been "invented" within a few months regardless of who built if first and would have grown regardless of who acquired it. It's important to recall that Youtube grew not because of "you" -- there was really not any kind of creator ecosystem for the first phase of massive growth. Youtube grew because of piracy and the posting/distribution of copyrighted content. Unlike Napster which was blatantly P2P and obviously tried to circumvent copyright protections, Youtube had an official way for content owners to take steps to remove unauthorized content. In the days or weeks that it took to get content removed, it was copied and re-posted, and all the while Youtube continued to earn ad revenue from it until finally, many dollars later, it would be removed and successfully blocked. In Today's world, Youtube makes money by incentivizing generatively created garbage content, much of which is shown to kids, and by spamming promoted content into playlists and generally always preferring to play content that was promoted over non-promoted content. It's not clear how much of Youtube's revenue comes from quality content that people consume intentionally vs content that nobody would ever pay for that has managed to hijack the recommendation algorithm in some way.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
If I had Facebook money, I'd use Peertube to create a clone of Youtube with the Internet Archive as the storage backend of last resort ($2/GB for perpetual storage). Trust and Safety team to keep the stuff out that could cause you to lose your safe harbor. Cloudflare for new, high demand content, serve from the datacenter long tail. Plug into ActivityPub, Wordpress, Mastodon, etc. Not quite Wikipedia for video, but similar governance and operating spirit.
- RajT88 3y ago
  You probably could do that just with MySpace money.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
83457 3y ago
I don't know about growth at different stages, but the reason it took off initially is that Flash added video capabilities and YouTube was built around that ubiquitous plugin. Before that, you needed a video player installed on your computer that then either loaded in-browser or played videos after download. You often needed multiple players installed as none supported every video format.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  This is a bit like saying car use grew because of differentials. Cars use differentials but the reason car use grew isn't the differential. If it wasn't the differential it would be some other mechanism that does the same thing. Don't attribute user interest (which is what made YouTube grow) to the technical aspects of the site. That is almost never the case.
  - irobeth 3y ago
    Back in the day you if you wanted to 'watch internet videos' then you needed a video player, you needed codecs, you needed to download the videos, you needed to find the videos If you wanted to share videos online, good luck? You needed somewhere you could upload them and a lot of forums had file size limits, so sometimes you just spread/discovered them via p2p services. For the non-technical person, there were a few places you could submit videos to or browse 'funny internet videos', but most video sites were an individual or community's curated collection Youtube bundled all of that up as "a video repository and search engine that provides a streaming player which is already supported by your browser", and (in the US anyway) that moment coincided with: (a) wide-spread broadband access and (b) digital cameras becoming accessible to consumers So in that context, I think it might be a bit like saying "interest in reading increased after book printing technology made libraries comparatively inexpensive"
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    Ease of use is not a technical aspect.
kiba 3y ago
I wouldn't be so dismissive of Youtube. The youtube recommendation algorithm brings up new and cool content over long period of time, and I cultivated my recommendation feed as such. It's a destination in itself. Sure, you could have a video site that just have a top ten video and a subscription list, but it wouldn't be as compelling. Now. There are a lot of things that youtube could rightfully be criticized for, and perhaps there should be major changes made to how youtube works. Better pay for youtube creators and payment to small channels for example. More promotion of youtube premium, and less advertising. I assume that youtube is profitable. The question is how much service that they can offer but still remain sustainable. If they're not profitable, how they could monetize it without destroying the value of the platform, ideally adding to the value rather than taking it away. I like some of the youtube scripted show, and I was disappointed that they canceled a show that I want to see continued.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  > The youtube recommendation algorithm brings up new and cool content For you. For kids it brings up amputation videos and seriously weird/predatory shit. Should they be cultivating their recommendation feed better? Try searching for '!' on the homepage. You'll get a mix of kid videos and fucked up animated softcore furry shit. It's been like that for fucking years. For me it brings up Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson shite constantly, despite my refusal to engage in such content whatsoever. It just figures, hey you like watching video game content so you'll love these smarmy shitheads. It's vastly inferior to TikTok's algorithm by all accounts, like it's not even close. And it's been horrendously gamed. All they have is the network effect and Google's monopoly powers. Their algorithm sucks, their ads suck, their policies towards creators suck (as you said yourself). Everything they've ever brought in that was actually good was cribbed from porn sites.
  - gambiting 3y ago
    >> so you'll love these smarmy shitheads. I've had success with just blocking these channels, or selecting "don't recommend this to me", after a while it stops suggesting right wing content to me, it hasn't for quite a while in fact.
francisofascii 3y ago
Youtube also found a way to allow content owners to monetize copyrighted content, so if it was pirated and uploaded, there was less incentive to take it down if it could earn some money in ads.
gambiting 3y ago
>>Youtube grew because of piracy and the posting/distribution of copyrighted content. The funny thing is, the second you take a step out of the anglosphere it still hosts an absolute tonne of copyrighted content that no one cares about. Just search for "full film" in Polish and you get lots of full films uploaded as-is and no one is taking them down https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pe%C5%82ny+film https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pe%C5%82ny+film
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  It is really random in the anglosphere. If you type "... full film" you will get the full film sometimes, just not all the time.
  - dyingkneepad 3y ago
    Or just S01E02.
  - tzs 3y ago
    I've not searched for full films but have had purported full films come up when search for reviews of or reaction videos for films I've recently watched. Most of these were (1) a full film, but not the film the title claimed, (2) looked like they were non-HD broadcast TV quality, (3) were not in English, and (4) had a URL overlaying the video which I would guess was to a site where the movie given in the title could be found.
b112 3y ago
But they have cats, thus your words fall upon deaf ears.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

toomuchtodo 3y ago

If I had Facebook money, I'd use Peertube to create a clone of Youtube with the Internet Archive as the storage backend of last resort ($2/GB for perpetual storage). Trust and Safety team to keep the stuff out that could cause you to lose your safe harbor. Cloudflare for new, high demand content, serve from the datacenter long tail. Plug into ActivityPub, Wordpress, Mastodon, etc. Not quite Wikipedia for video, but similar governance and operating spirit.

RajT88 3y ago
You probably could do that just with MySpace money.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

83457 3y ago

I don't know about growth at different stages, but the reason it took off initially is that Flash added video capabilities and YouTube was built around that ubiquitous plugin. Before that, you needed a video player installed on your computer that then either loaded in-browser or played videos after download. You often needed multiple players installed as none supported every video format.

LegitShady 3y ago
This is a bit like saying car use grew because of differentials. Cars use differentials but the reason car use grew isn't the differential. If it wasn't the differential it would be some other mechanism that does the same thing. Don't attribute user interest (which is what made YouTube grow) to the technical aspects of the site. That is almost never the case.
- irobeth 3y ago
  Back in the day you if you wanted to 'watch internet videos' then you needed a video player, you needed codecs, you needed to download the videos, you needed to find the videos If you wanted to share videos online, good luck? You needed somewhere you could upload them and a lot of forums had file size limits, so sometimes you just spread/discovered them via p2p services. For the non-technical person, there were a few places you could submit videos to or browse 'funny internet videos', but most video sites were an individual or community's curated collection Youtube bundled all of that up as "a video repository and search engine that provides a streaming player which is already supported by your browser", and (in the US anyway) that moment coincided with: (a) wide-spread broadband access and (b) digital cameras becoming accessible to consumers So in that context, I think it might be a bit like saying "interest in reading increased after book printing technology made libraries comparatively inexpensive"
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Ease of use is not a technical aspect.

kiba 3y ago

I wouldn't be so dismissive of Youtube. The youtube recommendation algorithm brings up new and cool content over long period of time, and I cultivated my recommendation feed as such. It's a destination in itself. Sure, you could have a video site that just have a top ten video and a subscription list, but it wouldn't be as compelling. Now. There are a lot of things that youtube could rightfully be criticized for, and perhaps there should be major changes made to how youtube works. Better pay for youtube creators and payment to small channels for example. More promotion of youtube premium, and less advertising. I assume that youtube is profitable. The question is how much service that they can offer but still remain sustainable. If they're not profitable, how they could monetize it without destroying the value of the platform, ideally adding to the value rather than taking it away. I like some of the youtube scripted show, and I was disappointed that they canceled a show that I want to see continued.

mandmandam 3y ago
> The youtube recommendation algorithm brings up new and cool content For you. For kids it brings up amputation videos and seriously weird/predatory shit. Should they be cultivating their recommendation feed better? Try searching for '!' on the homepage. You'll get a mix of kid videos and fucked up animated softcore furry shit. It's been like that for fucking years. For me it brings up Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson shite constantly, despite my refusal to engage in such content whatsoever. It just figures, hey you like watching video game content so you'll love these smarmy shitheads. It's vastly inferior to TikTok's algorithm by all accounts, like it's not even close. And it's been horrendously gamed. All they have is the network effect and Google's monopoly powers. Their algorithm sucks, their ads suck, their policies towards creators suck (as you said yourself). Everything they've ever brought in that was actually good was cribbed from porn sites.
- gambiting 3y ago
  >> so you'll love these smarmy shitheads. I've had success with just blocking these channels, or selecting "don't recommend this to me", after a while it stops suggesting right wing content to me, it hasn't for quite a while in fact.

francisofascii 3y ago

Youtube also found a way to allow content owners to monetize copyrighted content, so if it was pirated and uploaded, there was less incentive to take it down if it could earn some money in ads.

gambiting 3y ago

>>Youtube grew because of piracy and the posting/distribution of copyrighted content. The funny thing is, the second you take a step out of the anglosphere it still hosts an absolute tonne of copyrighted content that no one cares about. Just search for "full film" in Polish and you get lots of full films uploaded as-is and no one is taking them down https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pe%C5%82ny+film https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pe%C5%82ny+film

PaulHoule 3y ago
It is really random in the anglosphere. If you type "... full film" you will get the full film sometimes, just not all the time.
- dyingkneepad 3y ago
  Or just S01E02.
- tzs 3y ago
  I've not searched for full films but have had purported full films come up when search for reviews of or reaction videos for films I've recently watched. Most of these were (1) a full film, but not the film the title claimed, (2) looked like they were non-HD broadcast TV quality, (3) were not in English, and (4) had a URL overlaying the video which I would guess was to a site where the movie given in the title could be found.

b112 3y ago

But they have cats, thus your words fall upon deaf ears.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]