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YouTube already was built on the "distributed" premise. That You can "broadcast yourself" as the slogan says, you use the platform to make your own presence, us

YouTube already was built on the "distributed" premise. That You can "broadcast yourself" as the slogan says, you use the platform to make your own presence, users can subscribe to you specifically and the platform merely connects the audience and the video makers. No longer are you beholden to the old ways of cable TV producer filters and gatekeepers. You just find and manage your own audience and the platform gets out of the way. So when grayjay says "Follow Creators, Not Platforms" I'm pretty sure that the minute that regular people on the street know about the existence of "grayjay", they will become essentially also a platform that enshittifies in the same way (cf. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/). It's a common pattern. Be an aggregator first, then slowly introduce exclusives, and become a competitor that climbed up on the backs of the others. Somewhat similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

rglullis 1y ago
GrayJay is just a client for the different platforms, like a regular web browser. They can't put themselves between and the consumer. > YouTube already was built on the "distributed" premise. What a load of BS.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  > They can't put themselves between and the consumer. Of course they can. If they smell money and sell, they can change it to whatever they want. It's just a client for now. It's like arguing for Skype back then based on tech aspects. It's P2P! Yes, P2P until it wasn't. Youtube wasnt distribute in tech, but was in marketing and if you were there around 2007-10, you remember it was much less social-media-ified and felt more direct and raw. Subscribe and get notified. Just a platform. The only way to avoid that same path is by remaining obscure and small. I guess every new generation of tech enthusiasts has to get burned to get sufficiently disillusioned.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    The code is open source and FOSS. They could try a bait-and-switch and they would see a dozen forks 30 minutes after the announcement.
    - hnlmorg 1y ago
      Consumers don’t use protocols, they use branded software. Hence why Microsoft’s “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is/was so effective.
      - rglullis 1y ago
        How is "Extinguish" part going for them in regards to Linux? There is no "Extinguish" for open source applications, systems and protocols. The closest attempt at EEE that one could try to argue was Facebook/Google leveraging XMPP at first for their messenger apps (FB Messenger/Google Talk) and then closing them down, but even that would not be accurate, given that the number of people using "truly open" XMPP has not gone down. Talking about "branded" software is nonsense. People use what is most convenient and helps them achieve their goals. If there are no significant vendor lock-in, the cost of swithcing from open source vendor to another is essentially zero. GrayJay has no lock-in, all they do is aggregation of different video platforms.

rglullis 1y ago

GrayJay is just a client for the different platforms, like a regular web browser. They can't put themselves between and the consumer. > YouTube already was built on the "distributed" premise. What a load of BS.

bonoboTP 1y ago
> They can't put themselves between and the consumer. Of course they can. If they smell money and sell, they can change it to whatever they want. It's just a client for now. It's like arguing for Skype back then based on tech aspects. It's P2P! Yes, P2P until it wasn't. Youtube wasnt distribute in tech, but was in marketing and if you were there around 2007-10, you remember it was much less social-media-ified and felt more direct and raw. Subscribe and get notified. Just a platform. The only way to avoid that same path is by remaining obscure and small. I guess every new generation of tech enthusiasts has to get burned to get sufficiently disillusioned.
- rglullis 1y ago
  The code is open source and FOSS. They could try a bait-and-switch and they would see a dozen forks 30 minutes after the announcement.
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    Consumers don’t use protocols, they use branded software. Hence why Microsoft’s “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is/was so effective.
    - rglullis 1y ago
      How is "Extinguish" part going for them in regards to Linux? There is no "Extinguish" for open source applications, systems and protocols. The closest attempt at EEE that one could try to argue was Facebook/Google leveraging XMPP at first for their messenger apps (FB Messenger/Google Talk) and then closing them down, but even that would not be accurate, given that the number of people using "truly open" XMPP has not gone down. Talking about "branded" software is nonsense. People use what is most convenient and helps them achieve their goals. If there are no significant vendor lock-in, the cost of swithcing from open source vendor to another is essentially zero. GrayJay has no lock-in, all they do is aggregation of different video platforms.