this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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Content creators won't follow because there isn't any monetary incentive to do so. I have been regularly checking out Peertube for 4 years now and it is mostly a backup option for those that one day YouTube might delete their channel.
I remember early YouTube where there wasn't a financial incentive to make content and they clearly did not suffer from a lack of content.
People weren't saying "Oh, well, you can't make money on YouTube so why would you" back then. They made content because they wanted to and because it was fun.
YouTube is just entrenched in the public consciousness much like television was when YouTube came around.
I hate saying that it was different back then, but it just was. Social media was not seen as the way normal people become famous the way it is now.
It was just people attempting to create cool stuff and find a community.
The way we have PBS and NPR, I really think we need to start talking about community shared content hosting. It could go a long way in preserving knowledge without succumbing to corporate greed.
It's technically still a thing you're not supposed to do, for the most part. Still something can be sued for, civilly liable, and when you get to hosting for a massive group of people, you're risking entering criminal liability territory. However, private torrent trackers exist, and those generally function as those types of communities. Some trackers even have nice people on them.
Further, the depth of knowledge these people have about encoding/color profiles/sound engineering etc. is fucking astounding. It's always people doing it for the good of the community who seem to have the most real competence over a variety of disciplines. It's not surprising a lot of them live and breathe FOSS and GNU/Linux.
I am talking about publicly funded data hosting.
It wouldn't be used for piracy, obviously, but for what people were originally using YouTube for.
Think of all those video series from back in the day where some random dude just walked you through step by step of a house building process. Those videos are still there, but no matter what you type, you are unlikely to find the videos you really need. Just fully forgotten by the algorithm and buried on page 14 or 15, long after you gave up.
Whereas your local National Public Hosting affiliate would have every reason to prioritize that content.
It's an interesting idea, but as many have pointed out before: if you tried to propose Public Libraries in modern America, the idea would be shot down.
This proposal is Public Libraries on steroids and opens a lot of questions about ownership of the data and who can request their data be removed, etc. If its publicly funded, they can't hide behind "we own all this content because you uploaded it" like, say, Facebook does. They would be much more liable for people wanting to control their data, and if people wanted videos removed, they'd have fewer legal precedents to lean on.
Like I said, interesting idea, but it raises a multitude of questions in my mind. Who do you entrust to run it? Would it be a government organization, or something more like the BBC, where it's government-funded but separated?
I don't necessarily know how the British system is different than the US or Canada but I am a strong supporter of the US and Canada model where the federal government essentially funds the infrastructure and then the other 80℅ is through donations and fund drives and the government by law can't dictate the actual content beyond ensuring a certain percentage of funding is earmarked for educational material.
But yeah, people should decide if what they upload can be deleted
Wait, what? I don't think they were talking about piracy. They sound like they're talking about something more like a C-Span type thing, envisioned as a YouTube alternative.
Compare the production values of channels like e.g. philosophy tube and old AVGNs. Times have changed.
Philosophy Tube is available on Nebula. I think that place is a viable alternative to YT if you’re mainly watching educational stuff.
It is but there's just not enough content to get me to fully stop YouTube yet. YouTube still has so much long form content only on YouTube.
That being said, nebula is amazing and you all should check it out and support the creators using it.
I don't think anyone is proposing an overnight switch. You've got to take the long view. That said, I do think when it comes to federated activity pub style projects, Mastodon has gotten off the ground, Lemmy has exploded, pixel-fed seems to be doing pretty good, but the video stuff appears to be a tougher nut to crack.
My gradual migration from YT has resulted in a very fragmented landscape. Many cool vids on Nebula, some on Odysee, but still way too many in YT. Let’s just hope the enshittification of YT speeds up and people respond accordingly by switching to another platform.
At least regarding the enshittification, I've started using FreeTube to access all my YouTube content and it has completely negated all enshittification so far. It's such a great way to watch my subscriptions.
That solves some of the problems, so I’ll count that as a step toward. However, the people who make the videos can suddenly be ignored by the algorithm or their channel can suddenly be deleted without a warning.
As a member of the audience, I’m frequently annoyed by the quality of the search results. They clearly serve YT more than they serve me.
I miss the old days of Youtube where people made stuff for fun or because they were passionate about a topic, before the big Youtubers pushing shit out the door to get as many views as they can.
watch a video from brahkie
People nowadays are greedy. Youtube it is.
Peertube etc need a monetary incentive.
Not really, what it needs is a strong niche community with some reach
Exactly. For any proposed change, it's going to run up against what I like to call Status Quo Extremism, which is a mindset that suggests that "But that would be different from the status quo" counts as a defeater argument against proposed changes.
The combination of incentives would, as you note, need to be driven by niche interests rather than attempting to reproduce the incentives of the top 0.01% of YouTube creators.
Greedy, yes. But also lots of people believe since long ago that some things on the Internet should be "at no monetary cost" (gratis) It should become common for people to donate money for some things even if it is very little.
As long as trash like mrbeast is watched by so many people, I have no hope that the broad public will use anything like what we want in the near future.
Monetization shifted the focus from niche hobbyist content to gimmicky shit that is tailored to get a bunch of views. When I see a thumbnail of someone with a weird facial expression, it's my cue to look elsewhere.
Peertube needs a quick and easy way for people to donate:
No ads needed.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Look up Nebula
Does nebula work for small YouTubers? I imagine it would be extremely hard for a small youtuber to get accepted into a platform like that.
My understanding is this: The model of Nebula is basically like a co-op. Everyone gets paid according to the views they get. And the higher Nebula's total monthly revenue, the more each view is worth.
Production quality will drop, sure. But how youtube spent years in the beginning was from just people wanting to help, people wanting to share stuff, and people wanting some attention, and there's still massive amounts of those people making videos. A lot more than the people just after hoping to get paid. Then, of course, even most of the people getting paid would do just fine. They'd just operate like Gamers Nexus and actually speak their ads and sell some merchandise. "This video is brought to you by ....."
Platform paying you or not, there's still a lot of money to be made if you get popular.
As far as I know the majority of YouTubers revenue still comes from youtube ads and not sponsorships.
Yeah. Because youtube pays them for ads. If they didn't, it would all be sponsorships, donations, and merch.
Yeah I 100% understand and to a large extent agree with this. I think money should be involved , creators should get paid. I don’t think peertube has become “the answer” yet and there is some combination of market level event and technology/feature set that needs to be in place to create enough moment for people to move off YouTube. It will happen eventually ( I think ) but what exist today isn’t enough of a pull to overcome the momentum YouTube has but that doesn’t mean that “we” should give up.