271–280 of 318 posts
With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures. It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and st…
Now if HN were down...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least one vlogger I follow posts duplicate content on Bitchute (which is up).
Wow, the front page of bitchute is 100% conspiracy. Is that... umm... what it's known for?
When your main differentiator is "free speech" and your competitors don't actually restrict the speech they carry that much, you're pretty much only going to get the dross that was cast off the other platforms and very little else.
With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures. It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and st…
Neither do TV or movies for the most part; there are many examples of high art in those formats but the most popular examples thereof are hardly at all intellectually gratifying, educational, or otherwise "helpful", as you put it (a good descriptor). It's entertainment - it's there for fun, and in many cases, it's there for the sake of art. (That's not to say that e.g. popcorn flicks don't have any artistic qualities, just that they're aiming for the former, not the latter.) The issue is more in the ways that YouTube tries to keep you watching, like the other massive social media sites.
No one else, ever, has had a platform where an independent video creator could start with a handful of viewers and build up to millions, and even potentially make a career out of it. No, it's not common, there's a ton of work involved with no immediate payout, and it requires at least a bit of luck with the dreaded "algorithm", but it's probably more merit-based than what we had before, and that's a wonderful thing.
(I'm not entirely certain about that last bit, hence "probably". How merit-based was/is TV and film, precisely? I just find it hard to believe that they're better than YouTube, given the quantity of quality creators on it who could never find a slot, much less an audience, on any other platform or format that has ever been.)
With regard to the ubiquity: given the lack of competitors, apparently the capital requirements are so high and the lock-in effects so strong that there aren't any companies willing to give it a go. The closest thing we have, Twitch, filled a niche that YouTube wasn't technically capable of at the time, grew large enough before YouTube decided to try to enter that market so Twitch was able to acquire those same lock-in effects, and was bought by Amazon who provides the capital to ensure a smooth experience (Twitch prior to the acquisition was far more prone to performance issues).
"We're so sorry for the interruption. This is fixed across all devices & YouTube services," YouTube said in a tweet https://bit.ly/36r4sjz, without explaining what had caused the outage.
Google did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the outage.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-youtube-outages/youtube-b...
YouTube's tweet: https://nitter.net/TeamYouTube/status/1326709701526974464
With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures. It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and st…
Out of habit, I do go to youtube if I need to search a video of something.
But the technology isn't the problem. The problem is nobody is going to use your platform. We need to decouple discovery from hosting. We need a slick, simple aggregator that lets people submit video URLs from multiple platforms, then handles recommendations. If your video has an equal chance of blowing up regardless of where it's hosted, it opens the door for competition with YouTube.
Now that YouTube is back up I take this opportunity to put this thread to a good use and ask what does it take to create an alternative to YouTube? Would love your opinions/wish list/must haves.
Although I sometime upload things to YouTube, I'm primarily a YouTube viewer. Nevertheless, I think that the greatest strength of YouTube is the ease of uploading content. So many people have uploaded so much material on so many topics that just about anything you might want to learn about or enjoy is likely to be covered well on YouTube. Many people have pointed out issues with recommendation algorithms, both on You…
That would be sweetly ironic, considering Google's original success came from better search.
No it is not. Flagged.
On the technology side, I think we're pretty close to the point where small startups can create video hosting platforms. For low traffic, running them through ffmpeg and dropping a tag works pretty well. For higher traffic, I think something like BunnyCDN can be used for a reasonable cost. But the technology isn't the problem. The problem is nobody is going to use your platform. We need to decouple discovery from hos…
A useful app that I can think of is one that supports subscribing to various independent video publishing websites... but aggregates them in one app.