Comment by 🚀 stack
Re: "Tilting at Windmills: Youtube case"
It is a tough nut to crack. I don't think it's possible without bullshit financial crap.
I think it´s important to recognize that multinationals like Google do not play by the same rules of business as we do. That is, they do not have to balance their books for individual products, or have their products actually generate cash. People are not their customers -- money often comes from complicated exchanges with other businesses or leverage of customer base in other products. The bulk of their operating funds comes from their unlimited ability to borrow and often straight from the government. And given their wingspan they have an unlimited ability to create structured financial arrangements. They can run a losing business for decades and undercut and sue you until you go bankrupt or die.
In the meantime you will be faced with very real issues of finding capital for the infrastructure, or having to rent it from Google or Amazon!
You could try some distributed network where storage is shared, but getting reasonable streaming is likely difficult that way due to unpredictability of such infrastructures, and managing millions of videos is expensive enough without some of them disappearing and reappearing.
I have to admit that I admire the Youtube algorithms. They are incredibly fast at identifying my fears and desires and engaging me almost instantly. They also very quickly figure out who I am on different machines and geographic locations. I think it takes maybe 3 searches and I have my favorite topic popping up as if I am home.
None of the alternative viewers like Grayjay are anything like that -- what they feed me is annoying and I get tired of looking at the handful of things I explicitly subscribe to or search. Youtube is just so much better at providing me with new 'discoveries'...
2025-11-28 · 5 months ago
4 Later Comments ↓
👻 darkghost · Nov 29 at 10:41:
There is a people component you are not considering. In a free service where users may post, you invite the very worst of humanity to see what they can get away with. Who will moderate that and how? Without moderation, the best you can hope for is tons of pornography and copyrighted material being uploaded en masse. This presents a liability problem to the platform as you must play whack a mole with every new copyright violation and challenge the age of the performers. Wikipedia has a dedicated lawyer they pay to handle this and the volunteer editors are the first line of defense. I applaud the Athenian ideals but the target species is driven mostly by id when given anonymity.
🚀 AlexusBlack [OP] · Nov 29 at 10:58:
That is indeed and obvious aspect that I haven't considered at all, focusing mostly on technical aspects. My first thought is that volunteer moderators might be a possible approach. It works for wiki, and for some community sites like reddit. Something to think about for sure.
🐦 wasolili [...] · Dec 03 at 05:54:
Something you're missing is that people post on YouTube because YouTube pays them. If you want to snatch creators from YouTube, you'll have to pay them competitively.
There have been attempts, though the project names escape my memory, to try to use torrenting or similar p2p file sharing to reduce storage and traffic cost. The idea is usually some play on users seeding videos after watching them. But that has privacy implications (3rd parties can easily monitor whose watching what), among other issues.
👻 darkghost · Dec 03 at 13:51:
ISPs can get annoyed with you if you're seeding torrents under the assumption it is piracy, ignoring the perfectly legitimate uses such as helping to distribute Linux ISOs.
Original Post
Tilting at Windmills: Youtube case — So I have this insane project in my head and I need people to challenge it. As a lot of people in geminispace have technical background or ability this seems to be an appropriate place. Problem Definition I like watching videos on Yutube as it gives creatives a convinient video hosting platform, while users have search, subscriptions and discussion platform. It has incredible educational value, artisting value and part of human wealth of knowledge. I hate...