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Comment by OzzyB | Hacker News Reader

> I would say that now is the time for a wannabe competitor to YouTube

Yes, but how does the new upstart try to get traction from under an avalanche of useful shills that will start to smear them as "NaziTube"?

Edit/Addendum: Do you honestly think a new upstart would enjoy an "understanding press" in their "growing-pains years" like our current incumbents did?

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Looks like I hit a nerve! which is shame b/c there are some good comments from people who understand that the tech landscape today is a lot different from "way" back in 2005/6; which means making a new YouTube today isn't so much a technical problem as much a political one.

It may be technically easy but you still have to deal with network effect, bandwidth costs, and a multitude of the legal issues before we even get to political issues. There already exist alternatives to Youtube that solve various aspects of this. Peertube, BitChute, Mega, heck there's no reason one couldn't use the the tech behind popcorntime for setting up something useful and legal. You still run into network effect every time.

Yep, I agree it's Network Effects every time, which is why I was trying to make the point (badly I guess) that it's easy to kill any upstarts' chances of getting any kind of network effects when they're immediately called out as a cesspool (I used "NaziTube" as a descriptive buy ya'll know what I mean).

I remember in those early days how TechCrunch (under Arrington) did a great job easing concerns and guiding the narrative to be favorable for those startups, which I just don't see happening today... but then I guess he got stock options for some of that xD

Possibly the more interesting question is "How will they attract advertisers when their content is an avalanche of Nazi-sympathetic videos?"

It's hard to compete with YouTube if your revenue model is ads and your content is "The stuff that YouTube wouldn't touch." Most of the ad industry doesn't want to associate with that content; that's part of the reason YouTube doesn't want to touch it. So a competitor going the road of trying to host that content would probably need to find a revenue model that isn't ad-based, for starters. That's gonna be a challenge (subscription-based model for Nazi-sympathetic content? ;) ).

> It's hard to compete with YouTube if your revenue model is ads and your content is "The stuff that YouTube wouldn't touch."

Um, there is an established industry that manages this just fine.

You are correct; I completely discounted porn (which is also picking up the advertisers that YT sheds).

But porn sites generally aren't going to be hosting pro-Nazi garbage because their advertisers also don't want to be associated with it. Reduces to the same problem. It does, perhaps, point to a possibility; much as the porn sites gain on the fact that YT filters both the content and the advertising it allows on the network, one could imagine a hyper-niche site that is combining content YT kicks off with another (non-porn) category of advertisers YT kicks off.

Gun manufacturers come to mind.

Well, you could do it for porn.

But yeah, not much else.

Certainly no one's gonna pay for the usual suspects' videos.

To downvoters: This already happened with Twitter and Gab. Asking what would prevent it here is a very apt question.

It would if it had a legitimate new take on the video hosting problem and wasn't just "YouTube, but for free speech", which would immediately become "YouTube, but for Nazis".

Folding Ideas (on YouTube) had a solid video about VidMe, which is a case study in how NOT to do this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI

I do. Media love an underdog story, especially when the underdog is taking on the companies that are costing them revenue.

I suspect the "NaziTube" nicknames (did this happen somewhere? Or is it more of a hypothetical example) are because upstarts don't have the resources to ensure Nazi videos are blocked. Thus, they become a breeding ground for that pernicious type of scum that has been evicted from the larger, better resourced, systems.

Forget the nazi shit for a minute: I doubt a youtube competitor upstart could get away with the sort of flagrant widespread copyright violation that was once common on youtube. Youtube itself got away with that for a few years, but can that stunt be replicated? I doubt it.

Good point. OTOH, there wasn't as much amateur digital content back then -- pretty much anything I wanted to watch was owned by a larger company. Nowadays, hobbyists and retirees and all kinds of people own the rights to content that I would want to see.

The environment has changed a lot, and it might not be a prerequisite to copy YT's growth model.

Unfortunately, that becomes a reason not to support YouTube alternatives if one doesn't actually want to create a breeding ground for that content that cannot practically be moderated.

It's a vicious cycle.

Among quite a significant portion of the vocal participants in social media anyone right of Bernie is a nazi. They call orthodox jews (Prager, Shapiro), lefty academics (Haidt, Peterson, Weinstein), and liberal gays (Rubin) Nazis.

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