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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

We have to distinguish delivery and discovery. Any competing video platform will have a very skewed selection of content at the start, biased towards stuff YouTube doesn't want to show its users, and in most cases, with good reason (i.e, stuff the users wouldn't want to see). Any kind of popularity-on-the-platform based filtrering will also not work, due to this skew.

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yes! i think we also need to keep reminding people that discovery is not an euphemism for advertisement. and if they expect it to be this passive, detached process of being told what the good shit is and then fed it, then they're part of the problem.

i've had good experiences with discovery on decentralized platforms. it's proceeded by means totally unlike advertisement, hmm, i wonder if anyone remembers what those were?

what i find funnier is how the platforms that have actual content hate crypto, and the platforms that have crypto ... i'm not sure if they even remember what "content" was. that ain't a way to starve youtubers, it's the exact opposite. shame.

This is nice but I have zero idea how I can surface interesting or useful videos. The search function on PeerTube doesn't give me anything useful for my topics of interest.

As a result, I wind up wasting hours and I simply do not have that time.

I'm basically saying, you can't rely on on-platform discovery. You'll have to find the links to good stuff on peertube somewhere else than peertube - anywhere else. It could even be here.

Or to take it from the other perspective, if you make videos on Peertube you need to give people some way different than doomscrolling/built in search to find your stuff.

Yeah this is a good point. I have been thinking about doing some video creation and I really don't want to be locked into YouTube's platform. I want people to find my video content in some other way because I do not want YouTube to be dominating how my content is shown or becomes visible because then, they are in control of my creative process, not me. So I will stick to posting links on my website and surfacing my content by posting on sites like this. Maybe someday I will find any more automatic way of doing this at some point. I wonder if that is allowed on HN?

how do you manage to waste entire hours without ever finding anything interesting or useful to watch?

Before there was doomscrolling, there was channel surfing. It can be very easy to end up spending a lot of time looking for something good.

fair point! depends on the search space, though. can't do much channel surfing on 2 channels, one of which broadcasts in russian on fridays. (actually turns out you can; you catch cable from the neighbors' leaky wiring and discover lil kim.)

i don't think you can do much doomscrolling on peertube, either. but then, that's probably a non-goal for their project. instead i think i'll go look if there's a 3rd party frontend for that now, blessings :-)

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