Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 226 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#71

Post by ItsMonkk »

_hyn3 wrote: post #25

It's interesting that TikTok is a formidable competitor that focused on a different experience and a slightly different format (short form). Tiktok seems to work by choosing for you and only showing a single video at a time (esp on mobile, which is where it's really most at home), but allowing you to quickly reject that choice and learning from your rejections. Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different e…

And the reason they are able to do so is because by rejecting a video, you don't see it anymore. On the other hand, if you are given a view of 5 videos on YouTube and you click next, what YouTube should be doing is rejecting all 5 and showing you a new 5. For some reason this doesn't happen on YouTube. When you come back to the frontpage, you see the same videos over and over and over again unless you manually tell YouTube you're not interested.

So it's not the auto-play that's crucial, it's realizing that the user is giving you a signal. YouTube has been ignoring that signal. Perhaps it's a performance issue that makes them unable to?

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#72

Post by coldtea »

ravenstine wrote: post #20

It does have competitors. IMO, Odysee/LBRY is the most viable one but only time will tell because all the competitors lack some things and have been slow to develop. The competitors have a hard time gaining traction because in the way many of us would expect because we live in a different world from when YouTube first became a thing. YouTube in 2005 was way different. You could find just about anything on there. Pran…

>IMO, Odysee/LBRY is the most viable

As a competitor? It's not even a bug on their radar...

It's like waiting for Mastodon to replace Facebook and co...

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#75

Post by anderspitman »

I don't think we'll see a real competitor to YouTube until someone manages to decouple hosting from discovery. No startup can compete with free unlimited video hosting. But it would be relatively easy to make a better discovery algorithm. The problem is the network effects moat. But I think if you started in a specific community (say tech talks or ASMR) it might work.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#78

Post by gregn »

wruza wrote: post #52
wheybags wrote: post #7

CEO of vimeo will cry themself to sleep after reading this post

I tried to use vimeo, but even if it had content on it that interests me, I find it very frustrating to use for some intuitive reason. Maybe it’s constant flashing of wait-spinners, maybe no place to discover things. It feels like yet another pic hosting but for videos. https://vimeo.com doesn’t look like a promising landing for 99% of users either. I also signed up for a curiosity stream trial (or was it its competi…

this. Vimeo is great, but we've seen hardly any continued development in the last 10 years. It looks exactly the same now as it did 10+ years ago. In order to pursue the market you need to keep coding, adding things, trying things. Discovery, yes! W/o discovery you're sunk. But there are 20 other things you could do to defrictionize the platform. And 20 more you could do to improve its reach. Scale will come with the audience graph justifies the expenditure. I would argue that YouTube's recent machine-learning suggestions actually totally ffing suck. The way they were 8 years ago was incredibly better. This is one area you could challenge them in. Be a YouTube of 2014 and you could beat them in suggestion.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#79

Post by wpietri »

WJW wrote: post #14

> Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly This is like asking "why don't we live on the moon except that there is no atmosphere there and it's pretty far away?". Those two reasons are the main reasons Youtube is the clear winner in its field, saying "apart from that" does not make a lot of sense. If you'd want to start a competitor to take on Youtube, you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well serv…

For sure. And I would add that Google bought the network-effect leader at just the right time to put Google's massive ops resources behind it. They basically killed off the competition and then made if very hard for anybody to compete.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#80

Post by lolpython »

WJW wrote: post #14

> Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly This is like asking "why don't we live on the moon except that there is no atmosphere there and it's pretty far away?". Those two reasons are the main reasons Youtube is the clear winner in its field, saying "apart from that" does not make a lot of sense. If you'd want to start a competitor to take on Youtube, you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well serv…

> you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well served by Youtube (extreme far right or far left personalities perhaps, or porn)

Other niches are history videos and music analysis videos, the former which gets demonetized and the latter receives copyright strikes with abandon.

Many history channels are on Armchair History TV: https://armchairhistory.tv/content-creators/

Adam Neely (music analysis) is on Nebula: https://nebula.app/

Post reply on HN