Here[1] is the video. At the time of me writing this
comment, the ratio is 53 likes to 15,486 dislikes.
When people ask, "Why hasn't someone disrupted YouTube?" I think the more boring answer that keeps getting overlooked is that it still meets the expectations of enough users, and the dissatisfied constitute a small percentage.
> Many have started seeking alternative revenue streams to mitigate platform risk.
What's wild about this is that the content creators doing this still use YouTube! Even after fully acknowledging the problems, and actively mitigating those negative consequences, they still return to the platform.
I just don't see how that'd happen if it were actually a "bad" service.
Youtube gets a sort of pass for the crap it's pulling since it's pretty much alone (Sorry - who's this Vimeo fellow you're talking about?) but any other major video service would be held up in comparison against Youtube, as is the way with society, the negative will shine through. If you start writing video suggestion algorithms today how long will it take you to be confident that "Pussy cat strolling across the back porch on a wet afternoon" isn't immediately followed up by WAP?
I think people often overstate just how locked into Youtube they are
I've seen a couple of attempts come and go. The ones that wrote a post-mortem after closing often emphasised how many resources—human, software, and hardware—video hosting websites consume. Not even because of the storage or the reencoding, but the sheer amount of bandwidth one needs to run such things globally. And it won't get profitable until a few years later, if ever. The goog is simply one of the few companies that can actually afford doing that.
I personally have been glad that alternatives like Nebula[1] are popping up still. Even if their model is different.
For the first time I think they've got a real competitor though - Nebula has managed to somehow eek out a year long survival and is now scooping up a lot of creators on the educational/informational side of things - and it looks like the platform is essentially a co-op structurally where everyone involved is getting a much larger share of the take home. I think the big question coming up for Nebula is what it will do about "The Algorithm" - will they try and create a suggested feed and invest into that sort of algorithmic video promotion or entrench harder into the "see what you subscribe" approach that will end up hurting small creator discoverability - oh also their platform needs some UX work but I don't think that will be a serious concern.
The interesting long term view for me is that I think subscription based services are going to win out over the freemium ones as those freemium ones continue to dig deeper and deeper into the dark magics of advertiser based revenue - freemium services aren't free, instead of demanding cash for your product they're devaluving their product to recoup their costs.
YouTube can absolutely be widely disliked and keep chugging along for the foreseeable future. All it needs to do is not be so bad that people would rather spend their time on something completely different. There is no BingTube with a robust ecosystem that users can easily jump to.
Are you familiar with cable television?
The reason YouTube has no competitor yet is because you'd need $10 billion just to get the platform off the ground - that's servers, developers, datacenters, peering agreements, etc.
Very few people have $10 billion lying around, and no one is interested in tackling Google on their home turf.
Don't worry, Youtube has already proposed to hide dislikes numbers. That would be a good place to start.
Edit: wow, 3 comments saying the exact same thing and all 3 starting with "don't worry". Interesting.
(Note clicking a vid shows more detail, eg: https://81m.org/videos/juH2Mfre_oM/ )