YouTube Alternatives at a Glance | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Alternatives at a Glance

ionos.com

I'm not sure how this made it to the front page, it's not really providing any useful information. Platforms like Twitch aren't really equivalent to Youtube, it's a different platform with different strengths and weaknesses, it's not something most people would want to use as a primary video host.

It's also an incredibly short list that doesn't mention any of the more interesting, uncommon alternative platforms that are popping up nowadays. You're building a list of video hosting platforms 'at a glance', and you can only come up with 5 of them?

> Vimeo claims to be an exchange platform for creative minds, which is reflected on the website

Sentences like this read like an AI scraped each site's marketing pages and automatically generated a list from the content.

What's going on with this, is it just an SEO article designed to point people towards the company's blog, or is there some kind of actual value that I'm missing?

It also doesn't seem to have a byline which is... unusual.

Most people use Youtube because of the huge archive of footage, a really great search engine, and a good algorithm.

Do any of these sites attempt to beat them in these areas? Can you even do that?

I know I watch YouTube because there's a handful of specific channels whose content I really enjoy, and those channels are based on YouTube primarily because their audience - or potential audience - is there. That sort of established, two-way relationship is weighty enough to be difficult to shift.

Exactly. I don’t necessarily care about the YouTube pet se, but I do care about the specific content from the creators I follow. And the content creators go to where the users are. And the cycle repeats.

And while some of the same types of content may be available on other platforms, the personalities are almost completely focused on YouTube.

That's mostly true, but even if every single one of the creators I followed were also on platform X, there's also all the instrumentation around Youtube, such as TV apps, Chromecast support, third party support from other sites, etc. The site itself has so many features that people take for granted until one of gone.

Hell just removing a tiny portion of one feature (user submitted subtitles) had a huge uproar from the community. Most of these alternatives on the other hand don't have 80% of the features Youtube does.

The content seems quite outdated (repost?). Notably, Dailymotion does not accept user generated content anymore. Only partners can upload videos.

It looks like generic filler SEO content 1&1 are trying to do

It is crazy, how the mighty has fallen. At some point Dailymotion was actually the only serious alternative to Youtube. What's the point of buying a business to make it useless like that?

Two that didn't make the list are Curiosity Stream:

https://curiositystream.com

for documentaries, and Nebula:

https://standard.tv/pages/nebula-creators

For a bunch of other content creators that may also be on YouTube.

There's various promo links where you can sign up for both at a discount:

https://curiositystream.com/legaleagle/

Aren't those closer to Netflix, where you have to be a cherry picked creator to have your content on there?

LBRY is the best YouTube alternative because it is the only one that fundamentally changes social video in a way that YouTube cannot copy.

LBRY uses a public blockchain to allow creators to retain complete control over their publishing identity. It also has a beautiful consumer app experience at https://lbry.tv, which was used by about 4M people last month (P2P apps at lbry.com/get).

You can read more in our IEEE paper here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9126007

Or dig into the specification and APIs at https://lbry.tech

Is a blockchain really necessary? Why not simply use an RSA key pair?

The blockchain provides a searchable index of content.

You can have a searchable index of content without blockchain. The web has searchable content indexes without blockchains for almost my entire lifetime. What does a blockchain actually solve here? Without a blockchain, at a bare minimum, all you would need is for creators to post signed content to an index, and anyone can verify the content with the creator's public key. Whether a piece of published content has a hash that precedes the previous one seems irrelevant.

> What does a blockchain actually solve here?

Immutability. Once a link gets on the blockchain you can depend on it not changing. The content it points to can go away, but with an immutable index, that is discoverable. Censorship and link rot are more evident.

So if someone uploads a 2 hour version of a rickroll and tags it with the name of the latest blockbuster movie and then takes it offline, there is now going to be a permanent record that at some time there was a copy of this movie uploaded? When in fact that never happened?

How is this in any way better, or even something beneficial?

Tamper evidence. The blockchain link would include a hash of the contents, making it impractical to modify rather than disappear content.

Sure. It will contain the hash of the rickroll video. That doesn't help with the question as to who proves that the content is what it claims to be?

A blockchain retains a complete, coherent, censorship-resistant listing of what's available on a network in a way that local or federated key-pairs can not.

There is no search all of PeerTube. There is search all of LBRY.

But what's available on the network isn't permanent.

How do you handle when a video stops getting hosted? Does it just keep showing up in search results, and then give an error whenever anyone tries to view it?

And if that's not the case -- if an unhosted, missing video can be removed from the blockchain by adding a revoke transaction or something, then how is it censorship resistant? If entries can be removed from search results when they go missing, haven't you just created a shared database where objectionable content can be removed from search for everyone at once?

That seems strictly worse than Peertube. At least on Peertube if you want to remove a video you'll need to target all of the instances that are mirroring it; you can't just attack one ledger that everyone is forced to use.

How do video/audio creators content protected from people stealing their videos? Is there a ContentID like system?

Can creators make money on this platform like YouTube?

The latter is the key point. Considering all the controversy there is on Youtube about individual videos getting demonetized, I don't see why creators would move to platform that doesn't even pay to start with, or even worse you have to pay to use (Vimeo).

Those platform definitely have a purpose, but replacing Youtube is not one of them. They're fine for putting fun video to share with friends and family, but if you want to be a content creator and make a living from it, there isn't an alternative. If you already have a huge following and make most of your money from Patreon, maybe you can move, although you'd lose a lot of viewers.

Nice - if people steal videos how is that handled on the platform? Similarly for copyright infringement such as uploading full length commercial movies. Porn?

Also it should be easy to cross-post to LBRY from youtube

It is easy. https://lbry.com/youtube

I also don't get why LBRY is so underrated on hacker news. It is the best content platform especially in terms of free speech and monetization. Every update very few weeks makes the platform even better and more convenient.

Interesting turn of events I remember when 98% of the population was laughing at Google when they bought them for a 1.6 billion. Holy shit was that a great investment.

I kind of was expecting DTube, peertube and LBRY on there, tbh. Centralized services are just in danger of becoming the new youtube.

"Why does Microsoft not have a video platform like YouTube?":

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Microsoft-not-have-a-video-pl...

Future To-Do: Get Microsoft to create/buy its own video sharing service...

They had Mixer and gave up on it rather abruptly.

Wasn't that more of a Twitch alternative than YT?

Well, YouTube also competes with Twitch, but yes. Still doesn't bode well for a YouTube competitor though.

A twitch competitor failed for what I believe will be the same reasons a youtube competitor will fail.

They did a deal with Facebook which is planning to launch a Twitch competitor.

TikTok? :D

Not if Oracle and Sequoia have anything to say about that.

While more competition is good, I'm ultimately not very excited about content hosting, discovery, and distribution being owned by any one entity or handful of entities.

In the long run, humanity has to find some robust, egalitarian, decentralized models of communication or we're all going to be beholden to their owners who are going to have ever more control over what we say, think, and do.

I hope one day we'll have post offices of the internet. Government-run, not for profit but at a balanced budget, with services provided at cost, and subject only to the communications laws of the countries in which they operate.

> post offices of the internet. Government-run

I sure hope not, who would run it in US, NSA?

How about the US Postal Service?

I remember a few YouTube competitors from Microsoft 10+ years ago - e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Soapbox

There's also the Web Monetized site Cinnamon: https://www.cinnamon.video/

What about BitChute?

Neo-Nazi YouTube is not a viable alternative for average folks.

What about PeerTube?

tl;dr YouTube sucks in some regards but is in general better in every way than the alternatives.

I don't think Youtube would be able to survive on its own outside Google. Are they even making a profit?

Yes. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

(Disclaimer: I work at YT)

That link doesn't say anything about profitability, only revenue.

lol, and im pretty sure YT separated from google would be operating at a profit defecate

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