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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

This exactly, but even one step further - it’s time consuming and expensive to produce the videos themselves! Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?! This is the major value YouTube provides. They bridge the gap between consumers who don’t want to pay with producers that NEED to get paid.

Want free peer to peer streaming? Hard to build a content ecosystem on that.

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The problem is that YouTube consists of two fundamentally different services.

One is a content hosting service like Imgur. The people hosting the content are the users. If there are any expenses involved, it's a matter between them and the service provider. The audience doesn't use the service deliberately. They just go there because someone wants to show them something.

The other is a platform where people try to make money with the content they produce. The audience are the users, and it's fair to expect them to pay one way or another. I'm not personally interested in using that YouTube, because I seem to be incompatible with videos as a content format. Pretty much every YouTube video like that I've seen would have been better as a written article.

The comparison to imgur is interesting, as imgur is itself trying hard to make money now by removing lots of content. The history of image hosting websites is a history filled with image hosts failing for the exact same reason.

This post should be an interesting read:

https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...

The thing is, there is no way to provide a free content hosting service in the long run (whether image or video)

> Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?!

Many Youtube creators are Demonetized. They make money from other sources.

Also, not all creators making money are creating Quality Content. In fact a lot of content is recycled.

Yes correct, for most streamers that I watch, YouTube seems to be an important part of their income. PeerTube will not magically create incentives for people to create content.

20 years ago there was no such job as “YouTube Creator”. If 20 years or less from now there once again isn’t, oh well.

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