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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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