Hacker News Reader

Comment by castratikron | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am being naive but could this not be accomplished with simply a self hosted website with links to torrent files of the videos? Nobody can take down your personal website (relative to what youtube can do now), and distribution by torrent solves the bandwidth and storage problem.

Of course, not as convenient as streaming, and you lose the comment section (is that truly a bad thing, though?), but it is a viable solution that can be implemented right now. People are talking about "alternative" websites as if they will find some magic bullet on that path. But who will create that website? Who will maintain it? And if the answer to those two questions isn't "me", how can you guarantee that the same problem won't eventually happen?

View on HN

The problem that YouTube solves isn't simply delivering video content. People could make videos available for download long before YouTube existed, yet YouTube still quickly rose to prominence.

People use YouTube because it aggregates content for people in channels, makes engaging with videos and their creators easy, makes discovery easy for users through search and suggestions and allows people to roughly measure notability and quality of videos through up/down votes, views, and a creator's channel subs. They make becoming a content creator as easy as making an account and hitting upload. They make monetizing that content as easy as hitting a checkbox.

Similarly, people could get around the privacy concerns and constrictions of big social media sites by having a self-hosted blog or something along those lines... but we all know that the chance of someone— even someone you care about— breaking the comfort of their daily digi-routine to visit your site and comment on your happenings is pretty much nil. If all of their "friends" did it, then the whole ecosystem... well it wouldn't be an ecosystem anymore.

Everything comes down to UX. If you don't have a strong UX, you aren't going to be able to accumulate users. A webpage pointing to a list of torrent files is mechanically sufficient, but isn't going to be able to accumulate users.

This approach has issues with discovery. The hardest prt about producing content these days is getting people to watch it.

Sometimes I miss the days when the internet wasn't one great big monolith and you had to discover things organically through word of mouth. But those days are gone.

Maybe, but having a pipeline to get people to content is overall better for everyone involved. So many creators would have no audience (or revenue) at all without YouTube and its (often touchy) algorithms.

EEVBlog is a good example of content that wouldn’t exist without youtube. Dave is a full time youtuber who can focus on creating content instead of making money some other way.

Dave is trying to move away from being dependent on YouTube, and he absolutely should, but he built his audience on YouTube in a way that isnt feasible in a world without algorithms pushing content towards people

Right now you have a choice between youtube, which pays you money for your content, or hosting your own videos, which costs you money. even distribution by torrent still has some minor infrastructure costs, but the bigger problem is that by quitting youtube you are giving up that youtube money.

as long as there's no easy revenue model for non-youtube content, people will continue to put their videos on youtube, because that's how they get paid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com