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Comment by Racing0461 | Hacker News Reader

We need more alt-tech companies competing against youtube and the like. They have too much power to silence people.

I think it will come eventually. Bandwidth is getting cheaper (at least I think it is) and video compression is getting better all the time (saving on storage and bandwidth), both lowering the cost of operating such a service.

This is why I feel YouTube’s crusade against ad blockers is short sighted. Sure they can get away with it now but it might cost them in the future against potential competition. Even viewers who don’t watch ads might add value to your platform’s content in the form of comments and votes.

Energy would be better used trying to find out why viewers hate their ads so much and if there is a way to remedy it and get some kind of compensation.

> Bandwidth is getting cheaper

4k video would like a word.

The cost of streaming 4K now is probably lower than the cost of streaming SD when YouTube started.

That may be so, but it's still stupidly expensive and the free investor money seems to have dried up. Not to mention that you'd be competing with an incumbent, which investors don't like unless you have a very clear and hard to replicate edge.

There have been plenty of attempts. The problem is the high barrier to entry. Hosting videos costs a lot and you need a lot of content to keep viewers engaged/paying. If you go the advertizing route, companies don't really want to invest time and money into a platform that doesn't have a wide enough userbase. The only reason why YouTube worked like this is the silly amount of money Google was willing to sink into it.

There is something to be said about more specialized sites like Nebula, but I, for example, canceled my subscription there because the focus was too narrow.

maybe time to build a YTclone on top of IPFS?

How would that work for the average user?

I don't think users would notice but the IPFS network might collapse.

I think they would if the mobile phone app started uploading a bunch of content and eat into bandwidth and battery. If the app doesn't upload, we still have a centralized system with a very inefficient transport layer.

Besides, even if you work around that problem somehow, YouTube has an insane amount of videos with very few views. That means there are not enough people to upload content, the centralized server or the original uploader needs to keep hosting them.

if it did collapse from a YT clone, IPFS was not set up to handle what we really need it for, firehose science data sources.

Nebula is trying to compete, they seem like a good alternative to support.

Nebula isn't really a competitor. It's more of a life raft for a select few YouTubers. A competitor would let people outside a group of already successful channels upload stuff.

A competitor has got to be a sustainable business first. Opening the floodgates to host everyone's videos can be a very quick way to burn all your money.

Not to mention their moderation burden is way down if they only accept people who are known quantities and are unlikely to get them in trouble by posting copyrighted material or other problematic things.

To be clear: I think it's fine to be exclusive. A bunch of YouTubers got together to make a backup in case YouTube did what YouTube often does. If they ever open it, I'll call it a competitor. Right now, it just isn't unless you have some unconventional definition of competitor. They're trying to survive YouTube, not beat it or even operate in the same space. Nebula is currently a backup for a (large) niche of YouTube.

Do you think Tik Tok is a YouTube competitor? Netflix?

You can compete with YouTube without cloning YouTube.

> A competitor would let people outside a group of already successful channels upload stuff.

Why compete with YouTube on YouTube's terms? You cannot beat on e.g. storage costs. There may be a market niche for a smaller, more cost-efficient platform that pays established creators a bigger fit than YouTube can.

nebula is like one youtube channel being hosted off a server. a more comparable example would be rumble that pretty much has each major feature of youtube on its own.

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