I think the Youtube comparison is a good one up to a point. It's a niche product. Everyone wants to be part of it, competing for a very very limited resource which is our attention. While with technologies like GPT or whatever comes next we empower anyone to excel in any area and create whatever (for now non-material things).
At some point in the future, YouTube competitors will probably become cost effective - probably 30-50 years in the future.
If you've ever imagined someone coming from the future with futuristic technology, it would probably look something like YouTube. It's a piece of technology we effectively can't replicate that we're entirely beholden to because removing our dependence on it would set us back decades socially, technologically, and functionally.
Agree on both points. It's become fashionable to speak ill of youtube, but it's one of the very few major things that has truly changed the world for the better; not just entertainment but all fields related to education or life-long learning, or science vulgarization, etc.
And yes, YT should have worthy competitors, and it's surprising that it doesn't. YT is obviously very profitable; why don't other big competitors don't give it a try, with a similar angle? TikTok is wildly different, and so is Twitch; but a version of Twitch that would directly compete with YT doesn't seem that hard to implement if you're Amazon?
I hear the example of youtube thrown out a lot, but I don't think it's a good comparison. YouTube had an incredibly useful function beyond sharing copyrighted material. It was also miles ahead of competing services (e.g. google video) in usability.
I more often experience the facepalm of watching an uncomplicated idea turn into a global sensation.
It's 2005 (hardly the distant technological past), and someone gets the idea for a site where you can store and watch videos. This is not some kind of radical technological innovation. This is not something beyond the ambit of current capabilities. This is not some brazen insight into the future. This is a site. Where you store videos. And watch them.
This, of course, is YouTube -- a site that was eventually sold to Google for $1.6 billion dollars.
YouTube videos have a Trillions of hours of worth of videos, many of which of which will potentially change your life.
Comparing it to shitty Music Services is seriously underrepresenting it's value
I'd say there is more competition, but on much more specialized platforms with different purposes and smaller user bases- MOOC sites, other types of online learning sites, remote workout class platforms, Patreon, etc. There is a good amount of that video content which could be hosted on YouTube, but would be less easily accessible or monetizeable if it was.
I think that's less of a huge difference when a small number of platforms dominate online media and aggressively use algorithms to determine or strongly influence what content people see. Yes, you can still absolutely find beautiful niche content on YouTube, and I value that a ton, but YouTube still has immense control over people's viewing in aggregate. It's a little bit like traditional broadcast TV if there were a billion channels but after every 3 minutes of viewing the TV chose which channel to flip you to unless you were constantly diligent about manually choosing what you want to watch.
The only problem with YouTube is that it's not organized. It's not indexable or printable. Videos are on Google's servers - here today and gone tomorrow. Videos are GREAT for stuff that you can't put into text, and YouTube excels at getting info out there from people who aren't that good with computers :)
What I'm thinking is a real-life open-source "tech tree".
I've been doing lots of research on video games and some other niche areas, it's staggering how much information is on YouTube and only on YouTube. There are millions of hours of super high quality user-generated content locked up in videos that can't be (or aren't) indexed properly, all of which are effectively owned and maintained by Google.
The number of alternatives to youtube is approximately zero. No one wants to upload to a new platform because it's a lot of work and you don't get paid for it (once you hit a certain number of YT views you start getting paid and there's real incentive there, you can potentially get relatively wealthy from it).
Perhaps peertube will be the solution, but I suspect we need something groundbreaking to conquer the monopoly here.
YouTube is a centralized service that's likely not even economically sustainable in the long term, given the sheer amount of random video junk that gets uploaded on there every minute. I'll take this argument more seriously when a comparable service can be built on 100% commodity tech (probably using some variety of IPFS for cdn-like distributed sourcing) and be made economically sustainable for creators as well (the various crowdfunding platforms are showing that something like this can work).
A viable YouTube competitor, including its social and recommendation features, but without the ad-based business model making it so... fraught. I am happy with (and pay for) YouTube, but I'd love competition in this space.
This isn't an effective analogy. The Internet is one big concrete square. YouTube and Facebook occupy one part of this big concrete square. You're free to occupy your own section of the square, too. The fact that YouTube and Facebook are so popular isn't because their portion of the square is any better than others - it's because the content they're offering is better (at least in the eyes of most people). There's nothing inherently better about YouTube or Facebook's portion of the square, their popularity is the product of the content they offer.
I watch some youtube channels regularly. Broadcast TV and Netflix have economics that don't really allow for niche content.
For example, if you want to to watch someone take oscilloscopes apart [1] or tell you the amount of glass fibre reinforcing in different brands of electric drill [2] or pick hundreds of specially made locks [3] or watch hundreds of performances from a serious ballet competition [4] Youtube can provide that. Content like this wouldn't have any chance on Netflix or broadcast TV*
Of course, 99.9% of the content on youtube is absolute junk, and they do an awful job of highlighting stuff, the logged out homepage is full of absolute dreck, and so on. And I certainly don't see the creators I follow posting a video every day or any of that stuff.
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