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Comment by herewulf | Hacker News Reader

This is a good chance to suggest viable alternatives? TIA.

Unfortunately there's a black-hole-like gravitational inescapability from Youtube due to its network effects over its lifetime. Hopefully this can be slowly and eventually counteracted.

In the meantime, there's Invidious, LibreTube, NewPipe, Skytube, ReVanced and probably a few others that can be used as protest. In addition to browser extensions that manage to filter out YT ads. One of my favourites is iSponsorBlockTV which, when casting to a TV, automatically skips ads once the button is enabled, and mutes the ad in the meantime.

None of these answer your question, but your question has a number of aspects. Nothing can replace Youtube one for one if you're counting all of its "things" - and this is mentioned in the article.

There are numerous alternatives to certain parts of Youtube which are likely easily found via search or AI query: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/list-some-alternatives-to-y...

The viable alternative is to stop watching all the crappy content you don't need anyway. Their restriction to 3 videos for people with ad blocker was a wake up call for me, helping me realize how much content I consume from youtube that not I only don't have a need for, but is actively occupying a sizable portion of my mind. I am old enough to remember the world without youtube, when you could read a book, talk to people, do sports etc, without staring at the screen mindlessly. A 30 min video might not look like much, but that is the equivalent of a decent stretching workout, drinking a cup of tea while relaxing or a multitude of other activities that will actually help you become happier and healthier.

Thank you youtube for helping me realize how harmful you really are!

Don't watch youtube?

Want educational content? Read a book or a technical blog post or documentation.

Want entertainment? Read a book or watch a movie or TV show.

I've never found anything that great about YouTube.

Those are alternatives for youtube _consumers_ but none of those are replacements for _producers_ on youtube.

30 years of playing the piano and listening to all kinds of music and harmony never really clicked with me even after studying music theory. But watching YouTube videos made an instant impact.

YouTube is a distracting mess full of doom scroll bait but if you have never found anything useful on YouTube, you haven't been looking very hard.

Would you mind sharing the videos that helped music click? Thank you!

Open Studio (OpenStudioJazz) and Nahre Sol I like. Charles Cornell gets an honourable mention.

Watching Nahre Sol break down Chopin's E flat Nocturne (Op9#2) gave me a penny drop moment. I have often had trouble memorizing the left hand for that piece even after writing out the harmonies but seeing her play out the progression as flat chords led me to realise I can change the pattern and then play the left hand as a very quick broken chord to hear the harmonic progression while also cementing in the muscle memory a lot more effectively.

I am not sure why this is actually downvoted. I was a YouTube premium subscriber, but then they started with their shenanigans and I decided to shift my attention to other things. It is not like I cannot go there once in a while to check on a particular video, but it is not for entertainment anymore.

I want edutainment. Nowhere has anywhere close to the level of content as YouTube when it comes to that.

> a movie or TV show

Any movie or TV show recommendations from the past 10 years that is actually enjoyable?

I am pretty much done with movies. I don't even remember the last one I really enjoyed. Sunshine, Interstellar, Hateful Eight, Once Upon a time in Hollywood... Nothing notable in the past 5 years though.

TV shows? Most require a subscription, which I am not willing to do for just a show or two.

just over the 10 year mark, but i enjoyed "east side sushi". nice feel-good movie.

I've enjoyed quite a few movies from the past 5 years, but I don't know what you like, so who knows.

Baby Assassins - japanese movie about two teenage girls who are assassins. Very weird and funny movie and the fight choreography I found fascinating. I can only describe as "floppy".

Tetris - this was on Apple TV. A fictionalized retelling of the story of getting Tetris out of the USSR and licensed to distribute in the US.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story - A music biopic of Weird Al Yankovic, in true Weird Al style

Nobody - action / revenge flick with Bob Odenkirk

I could go on. No need to limit yourself to the past 5 years though. Surely you haven't seen every movie from before 2020?

Lots of great shows too, and you don't need any subscriptions on the high seas...

Baby Assassins sounds interesting, I see there’s a few movies with that name from the past few years, maybe some are sequels I’m not sure. Is the one you’re talking about from 2021 with director Yugo Sakamoto?

That’s the one

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt15028452/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

There is a sequel, but I haven’t watched it yet

Thanks!

Youtube Alternatives :

https://odysee.com

Bitchute

Rumble

As much as we need an alternative to YouTube, Rumble’s whole gimmick is basically “we don’t block nazis”. Insofar as supporting problematic businesses goes, that’s out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Whats the issue? Are you afraid of being swayed? Feels a bit like homophobia at times. Those being most vocal are likely trying to hide something about their own personality...

The issue is that I don't want to be part of their revenue streams, or DAUs, or anything else that helps build their business.

The common opposition to Nazis is bigger than freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is just the baseline talking point Nazis use to get you to listen to them. Not that you'll be swayed but disarmed.

Nebula, NicoVideo, Dailymotion.

Wish I could find a front-end like an invidious for Rumble/Bitchute. The ads they serve are shittier than YouTube.

Just get UBlock, even the lite version works.

When I turned my adblock off there for a second I couldn't stop laughing at the absolute crack-potness of their ads. If you like a creator, and they stream, you can dono to them.

PeerTube is nice, and you can self-host an instance that can mirror your favorite channels.

there was also the one that louis rossman was pitching, but i can't remember as i didn't actually look in to it, since i know how to run https://www.turnkeylinux.org/avideo because it's four clicks on any host that supports turnkey linux containers. They'll have the template, you just request a container running avideo.

Download videos from YouTube to Jellyfin or Plex.

Yeah, there's no real alternative to YouTube for most people.

There's Vimeo, BitChute, Odysee, and Rumble, and even Substack and the Internet Archive support video uploads. Not to mention Twitch, Kick, and the newer cohort.

But YouTube has recognition, and insane infra. That's very hard to match, let alone beat.

The most serious alternative I think is Rumble.

Bitchute allows only low quality. Odysee is slow as balls. Dailymotion has some lower limits (but might be the runner-up)

But nowadays Rumble finally allows for actual high resolution uploads, and loads quite fast, not taking forever to buffer like Odysee does. Rumble also feels like it has some momentum and content/userbase. Just don't watch their crackpot ads lol.

Rumble also has a very functional streaming product not dependent on Amazon's infrastructure, while having rewind and forever VODs, only limited to 28GB per VOD (yes I tested it!)

The data as I know it: Rumble: Allows for 1080p uploads. Old max duration was 46 mins for them, but that is no longer in place, at least as a Premium user I can upload 6hour+ 1080p videos.

Bitchute: Max resolution is low at 480p, doesn't even have quality tiers in player. Max upload size is 2GB, but uploads and watching is quite seamless.

Odysee: Haven't hit limits, those are possibly as high good as Rumble. But has been quite slow to use and upload to for me, it varies. If you upload a ton you need to deposit some LBRY. Used to have a youtube->odysee automatic sync which probably increased their "normie" population.

Dailymotion: 2 hour / 4GB limit for free users, BUT has limit on amount of videos uploaded daily that I hit mirroring some content.

Streamable: Fast and requires no account but deletes videos after 2 like days. Has its uses.

Honorary mention: X. Allows for 4k60p nowadays. But requires account to upload and view. Most have one though, and X obviously has the strongest brand recognition for the uploader (as an account X is considered "the" authorative one for people and brands), while it can be good it can also feel weird to upload long-form content there (and their TV app is totally cooked, I've tried to contact them to fix it myself to no avail)

Those that like censorship don't have a problem as they can just replace watching videos with looking at a white wall for an experience they won't get offended about.

Vimeo and self-hosting are two alternatives. Are they realistic alternatives? That's another question.

Vimeo hasn't been a real alternative for like the last 10 years. It's meant for very specific kind of content and they really clamped down on that, stuff like game related videos gets taken down. Only person I know that uses Vimeo is a guy that works in more traditional video (making ads, short films, trying to get funding for his indie movies etc)

For a replacement, Rumble is the best for "general" content for its video quality without paying

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