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Comment by brokencode | Hacker News Reader

Creators don’t control where the audience is. If there was a credible alternative to the centralized services, then maybe more creators would try that.

Nebula is one example where some of the more education-focused channels have been posting videos. Not sure if it’s been successful though.

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I don't buy it. Creators make audiences, and platforms know this. Users have to take what they get, but producers have options. This is why YouTube hosts content for free, makes advertising and monetizing easy, works to lower the barriers to entry and make independence unnattractive. If creators switched to distributing through their own servers or a different CDN or IPFS or bittorrent or whatever, they would have to figure out the fiddly unfun bits on their own.

Abandoning YouTube for any one creator would more likely result in the audience spending their attention on someone with similar content. What seems necessary (to this ignorant observer) is a union to negotiate with Google or move everyone en masse to a different platform.

Tell that to Vessel & Quibi!

Sure, competing platforms will be differentiated by their userbase, unless they're offering very favorable terms or paying for exclusivity. It's not like one platform is going to be all that different from the next. What reason is behind TikTok's rapid rise?

People open YouTube to feed their hunger for content with whatever they find. If a creator leaves, then they just have to switch to content from one of the 10 other channels that are similar. It’s a low friction, low loyalty world.

And from my experience, people overwhelmingly watch YouTube on phones or tablets, and wouldn’t be messing around with anything like BitTorrent. If you think that is a good alternative, then you are not representative of the average YouTube user.

> you are not representative of the average YouTube user.

Yeah, probably not, as I never visit the site except through links or if I need a how-to-repair video. There's no reason people can't consume video through torrent or other p2p tech though. Webtorrents, peertube, etc are relatively mainstream and completely painless to use. There also exist torrent clients on Android for maaany years.

> Creators make audiences

How well did creators do when they switched to Mixer from Twitch? Donald Trump had tons of Twitter followers, how many does he have on Truth Social? If you have a two sided marketplace, you need people on both sides for it to succeed.

I keep seeing channels being added to Nebula (feels like every week), so it's not bad. Then again, they have some persisting issues in the app, so it doesn't sound like lots of engineering capacity is available.

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