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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

People don’t really want another step in the already arduous process of making videos - especially when the return on investment will be $0. This website will die off in a couple years and everyone who wastes time on it will be worse off for it.

You need to build a product so good that my statement above sounds INSANE. Not just “I think he’s wrong” but “dude absolutely no way. Everyone will want this. Are you stupid?”

And this is not that product.

Edit: yeah. I was curious so I went searching for ASMR videos. The default search brought some (terrible-looking) ones up, but half of them were in French? I sorted by views instead, and even though I literally only searched for “ASMR”, there were no longer any ASMR videos near the top of the results. For something trying to compete with YouTube, this is a very mid experience. Nobody is going to waste time migrating.

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Your use of the word "product" here reminds me of the now infamous McDonald's video.

It's a decentralized, open source, video sharing platform. It's not a product. It's okay for products to exist, but not everything needs to be one.

In Youtube, you are the product...

Sure, but as I explained, it doesn’t really work well anyways, so who cares?

Exactly, but good luck convincing a horde of morons of it

> This website will die off in a couple years

While that might be true, it's worth noting that the project has been running for seven years already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

It's hard to discuss things online because the dumb people will make stuff up, then when you correct it they disappear but leave the wrong info up, confusing even more dumb people. Like an idiot-tsunami growing ever larger

this isn't an appropriate response on HN, please read the guidelines on how to conduct yourself https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think for most people you're right, they just want to upload their videos, and maybe make a couple of bucks on the side. I was referring to folks who are truly committed to making this their career and want to have their own brand. Many, many people are already doing this, so it isn't something theoretical. Most YouTubers are automating their production pipeline, so another upload step isn't too hard, especially nowadays where it is easier than ever to build a bespoke, deterministic pipeline with agents writing scripts and programs.

> I think for most people you're right, they just want to upload their videos, and maybe make a couple of bucks on the side.

Sadly, those won’t make a couple bucks anymore. You can’t get a cut of the revenue until you have 1000 subscribers.

The couple bucks a month from my 1 video that was more useful than professional was nice until the moved that goalpost.

In case you were wondering why every bloody publisher, big or small, asks you to subscribe, even if, well, why would you subscribe to a channel that helped you fix your phone one day but their next video couldn’t be more unrelated?

Meanwhile in my “blogging” days, that first couple cents/bucks a month from Adsense convinced me to spend more time on it & make $20/month, then $200. Was $2000/month for a while. Now they expect you to work for free to prove yourself?

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