this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Youtube is the only truly great social media platform left. It pains me to say it, but the bar is quite low! It pays creators better than its rivals and its premium subscription is generally considered good value. Remember - it's both users and creators that need to migrate.
Really, there cannot be an alternative until there's one that can afford to pay content creators the same or more than YouTube can. No content, no platform.
It also needs to be able to distribute the cost for hosting insane amounts of video data, which is notoriously expensive. A single instance could bankrupt a person if it got hit with a large influx of users. Some lemmy instances has to brace for a rough ride as Reddit refugees jumped ship, and YouTube has a lot more users than Reddit. Even a tiny migration could be hell to deal with.
There will also need to be a purge of extremist content from any platform that wants to invite a migration. If all you have is weirdos evangelising dodgy cryptocoins and conspiracy theorists complaining about being booted off YouTube, nobody will want to go.
Peertube just isn't the platform for this to happen. At least not yet.
I only disagree with one thing on that: youtube is not a social media platform. It is horrible for discussions, topic discovery and organization, the comment sections and chat are worse than 4chan. It is a video diffusion platform, but not truly social media.
Which is sad, because it used to be a much more social platform. I used to run a small channel in 2007 and I'd get people messaging me, or adding me to friends (yes, that was a thing on YouTube).
Nothing can really be worse than 4chan. Youtube users are primed to say genuinely stupid things and enjoy reinforcing ignorance, while 4chan users have always had the primary goal of causing as much harm and destruction as possible including but not limited to suicides, poisonings, and proliferation of genocidal ideologies.
Ok, when I said worse, it was from this point of view: in some subchans, I've seen some smart conversations and advice there among the 95% neverending jungle of slurs (they probably see that as a feature, not a bug). In yt: never, the medium simply doesn't work to make people talk.
I've had a different experience. On 4chan there is a high degree of deliberate malice. On Youtube there is a lot of ignorance, but because of the extremely general audience of the platform it seems to me that it's more average people expressing their honest beliefs rather than trying to make your life worse because you entered their line of sight. I have learned through comments under my video essays and politic channels that many are willing to engage in conversation, even if it isn't always in good faith. I've had some interesting discourse over paragraphs at a time in a few cases.
"and its premium subscription is generally considered good value"
That's funny. You must live in a different world than I do.
Well at least the hosting is cleverly helped by having the videos be shared by every user watching it at the same time. So viral videos are a lot less likely to take the platform down. But even though thats most of the bandwith cost its not all.