Hacker News Reader

Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

Honest and serious question, if Youtube were to shut down tomorrow, do people think that whatever alternative (or even better, competing alternatives) would have a different model?

I'm curious to know what exactly would you do differently if you were to make a replacement for Youtube.

View on HN

I believe, based on conversations I've had, that the target audience of NewPipe overlaps with the target audience of solutions such as PeerTube, Mastodon, and other FOSS, privacy-centric alternatives.

I'm the target audience of NewPipe and also the target audience of Bandcamp, which is by far my preferred way of giving money back to the artists

Does PeerTube pay people? Or is the assumption that creators should get all their revenue from external sources?

PeerTube is not a company, it's an open source implementation of a peer-to-peer video sharing platform. Any person or company that wants to can pick it up and build a commercial platform on top of it. Whether that includes advertising or not is up to them.

Sure, but my point is that this doesn't answer my question. I wasn't asking which technology would the next company use. If Youtube used P2P, it still wouldn't solve many of the issue people have with Youtube.

The assumption is: yes, the content creators who host their videos via P2P solutions like PeerTube would have to rely on external sources such as Patreon, or in-video sponsorships, or as another user pointed, use the built-in donations feature.

> If Youtube used P2P, it still wouldn't solve many of the issue people have with Youtube.

What issues in particular are you talking about and how would P2P fail to resolve them?

This very thread is about an ad-free client for Youtube. How would P2P change ads?

You dodged my question, but I could try to answer yours.

Firstly, no one in this comment thread has claimed that PeerTube can solve all of the issues of YouTube. Privacy-oriented folk, and some FOSS advocates see it as a potential solution. Further, I do not personally use PeerTube, but I do use Mastodon and have read about PeerTube in passing.

Another major component of PeerTube aside from the P2P video is the decentralization aspect powered by ActivityPub, which is also used by Mastodon. So not only are the videos decentralized themselves, but so is the service; you can joined one PeerTube instance, and view videos that other instances can also view. If you grow unhappy with the administration of your current instance (maybe they added ads to the page, or maybe they are privacy-invading), you can simply move to another but still have access to the same videos.

In addition, since the videos are P2P, this reduces the server loads on each respective instance and thus lowers the baseline cost of having to host every video uploaded. This could reduce the need for ad revenue to keep the servers running.

It would solve all of them, because people would control their own video. Unless you're defining the "problem" Youtube solves as "Google gets revenue and then shares it back to some degree."

If Pewdiepie switched to Peertube, that would be a problem for Google. But probably not for Felix.

You don't have to look very far. This very thread is about an "ad-free, open-source Android YouTube client". How would P2P change anything about ads being shown?

Yes. Before youtube we just sent each other video files directly, posted them on our own websites, or found them with p2p software, all of which worked fine. Web services are traps promising ease of use, while actually aiming for lock in based on network effects. That so many people think the centralized third party hosting and bundled viewing software are critical to the general functionality just goes to show how insidious they've become.

So much of what you write is true, yet ignores a vital value that the centralised websites do provide: discoverability. Not only does YouTube provide (sub-mediocre) search over all the [mb]illions of videos it hosts, it also is a hub: if I'm looking for a particular video/clip ("Leyla's Beans Advert from Futurama") the hub is the first place I'm going to search. These are really hard problems in usability that we need to solve to make a p2p/fediweb viable and attractive to use.

For sure, and discoverability/aggregation is critical if Free solutions are to gain mindshare while competing with proprietary ones. I was just responding to what would replace Youtube if it went away due to lack of surveillance revenue, pointing out that we've had workable video sharing long before Youtube.

So this is your design ? Have mkbhd zip his file and send it to his million subscribers ?

Not who you asked and I’m not up to date when it comes to the world of video streaming but personally I’d prefer a web where content creators would have to pay to distribute their content. Pay as in have some server, domain, bandwidth and whatnot. It’s then up to the creator to decide how/if to monetize their content. Just like the old days.

In addition to vimeo as a sibling commenter mentioned, there are probably at least a dozen services offering video hosting catering to all sizes of customers.

> It’s then up to the creator to decide how/if to monetize their content.

And this is why the creators gravitate to youtube. The real tangible service google provides is an automated ad sales rep. That's not an easy job, roughly 0% of creators would succeed at this on their own.

> Just like the old days.

My guess is that this still exists and never even stopped growing. It's just that youtube grew so much faster that it's easy to miss. Again, because youtube is most creators' only good chance at monetization (not that its their only option for hosting).

We would not have any of the creators we had today. You're gatekeeping not only in the developed world but also in the developing world. A slew of people would be discouraged to even start given that they don't have money for bandwidth, servers, domains. Such a parochial, insulated view.

Sounds like Vimeo.

Sounds like a great use-case for torrents.

Like a podcast? It works for audio. As another poster has pointed out torrents could make distribution more efficient.

A decentralized video service powered by P2P, with content creators retributed by donations and/or ads and sponsorships inside videos.

Does this exist?

There's PeerTube: it's federated, downloads can be p2p, you can ask for donations (built-in) or write your own plugin for ads.

Let's make it linkable and embeddable, and anyone could run a server.

Perhaps we could call it the world wide web?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com