Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

I think Google is choosing a particularly terrible point to start alienating users of YouTube. It seems like everywhere I go online these days, the YouTube hatred is universal. It's regarded as uncool, boring, obnoxious, and just generally yesterday's news. This is merely an observation, however a few years ago I rarely saw the kind of negative sentiment toward YouTube that is now very common.

If I were a betting person, I'd say that YouTube's days as the champ of their segment of the online video world is nearing an end. They'll straggle on with massive volume, courtesy of the barrier to entry that is the cost of streaming zillions of petabytes, but their product will be strongly disliked, and competitors will flourish. I believe users are desperate for a high quality alternative at this point.

I personally don't see that YouTube presents an overwhelming value proposition any longer, compared to the hassle that it's becoming. As it is now, I use a separate browser, in incognito mode, to view YouTube because they're scumbags about trying to force a connection.

Youtube's strength has never been as a portal, but as infrastructure. They tried feeding video bloggers with video responses (though that feature is going away), there are channels, which were always terrible to navigate, and there is of course the cesspool of comments. Youtube grew huge because it was easy to embed stuff and link to and upload with.

So what's the high barrier to entry that you're talking about? Vimeo has its creative community and Wistia has great embedding tools, but what other sort of niches do you see popping up that steal power users away from Youtube? What sort of business plans even make sense without Google's infrastructure and deep pockets?

The bandwidth issue is a small obstacle for a potential competitor (solvable by venture capital) relative to the issue of video copyrights and offensive content moderation.

in the US, yeah.

I definitely agree on the copyrighted content problem.

The VC issue is interesting. It would probably cost... hundreds of millions of dollars in capital over a few years to compete with YouTube properly (requiring HD, long length video), given the time it will most likely take to get up to speed on revenues / build a functioning business model, and the speed at which adoption often happens these days with successful products (wake up tomorrow with 50 million users wanting to stream your brains out).

We live in the age of pervasive offensive Internet content. Reddit is half offensive content, and then there's Tumblr and Snapchat, which thrived partially due to 'offensive' content. I view that as a trivial problem.

Whatever replaces YouTube, will likely be built on the back of sensationalistic offensive content. Nothing sells like sex / sex appeal, and that will never change. Indeed, people get accustomed to it, and then it takes even more dramatic content to get that sensationalism buzz.

> Snapchat, which thrived partially due to 'offensive' content

Assuming you mean sexting, I think the percentage of sexually explicit images sent on Snapchat has been wildly exaggerated — by tech journalists looking for clicks, and by older folks not in Snapchat's target market who don't really get the point. Snapchat's appeal for everyday, non-sexual use seems to go over the heads of most tech people I know, but has been described eloquently by, e.g., Nathan Jurgenson[1] and Dustin Curtis[2].

Porn on Tumblr and sexts on Snapchat make for interesting headlines, but I'd hesitate to credit either as a major reason for the platform's success without actual numbers on its prevalence. To my knowledge those numbers don't exist.

1. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/pics-and-it-didnt-happen/

2. http://dcurt.is/photos-for-communication

Just found out some numbers do exist thanks to Survata: http://survata.com/blog/is-snapchat-only-used-for-sexting-we...

Their conclusion: a smaller percentage of Snapchat users use the service to sext than text-messaging users.

This is the feeling I get too. We try to host content on YouTube due its reach, but a lot of our content creators (and viewers) have requested that we use Twitch instead. Esp. for its xbox integration. (We're a gaming site btw)

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