YouTube will robot-moderate themselves into the ground. Too many people are leaving the platform. It’s just a trickle now but soon it will be a flow.
It’s the inevitable result of moderation based only on who’s paying you.
It’s the inevitable result of moderation based only on who’s paying you.
A quick google search shows the platform has 2 billion monthly active users[1]. A number that has only been growing. Why do you claim people are leaving? Is it because of a handful of high-profile cases, or maybe you live in a hackernews/techie thought bubble where everyone is annoyed at youtube? The claim that people are leaving, or will leave is just completely baseless imo. This reminds me of the saying "there are 2 types of programming languages: those that people complain about, and those that no one uses".
You're not wrong, but that logic doesn't hold forever.
People are leaving, and if YouTube doesn't fix its moderation, it'll only get worse. There are alternatives, just none that have done anywhere close to as well as YouTube does. It's a good product, it literally just needs to not be moderated into the ground.
And soon after that it will be a torrential exodus. Myspace died within the space of a few months during my time in high school. YouTube could easily face a similar downfall.
I'm not saying "YouTube will die in a year!" I'm saying if they don't fix their moderation problems, their auto-bans, etc... they will start to lose bigger and bigger customers more frequently.
I claim people are leaving _because they are_. Just because people are joining faster than they're leaving doesn't invalidate the point that people are leaving the platform for a place where their channels won't get completely demonetized for background music that an AI flagged. Youtube has a serious moderation problem, and it will be their bullet wound when another competitor comes along.
I see no reason why the search feature within YouTube couldn't return videos that people were hosting on their personal sites or on competitors to YouTube (including Twitch VODs and livestreams). Even subscriptions and recommendations could work across platforms.
YouTube could still run adverts in/on the videos, and the revenue from that would be split with the site where the video was actually published. For a greater share of the ad revenue, YouTube could also offer to stream (a copy of) the video from their own servers.
Even if sites (or Multi-Channel Networks) had to pay a $1000 fee to be included in this system, and YouTube kept its rules about moderation and demonetisation, it would still greatly improve discoverability and hopefully competition generally.