Hacker News Reader

Comment by gillesjacobs | Hacker News Reader

In the space of distributed video platforms, I think Peertube has the right idea: Bitchute is gaining a lot of traction, but the core issue of centralized control remains. Distributed content delivery is not enough to prevent censorship and viewer manipulation. Federation will allow many platforms to proliferate and solves this problem.

I hope Peertube gains traction, but they're fighting an uphill battle when it comes to the centralized competition. The problem that PeerTube cannot solve is engagement and stability:

- Engagement: Unlike Youtube they cannot use a recommender system like for suggestions. Most Youtube views are from recommendations and related videos. - Stability: As a business or media outlet, I will link to a Youtube video but not a PeerTube video because I know Youtube will host it indefinitely.

View on HN

> Stability: As a business or media outlet, I will link to a Youtube video but not a PeerTube video because I know Youtube will host it indefinitely.

If you want the video to stay up indefinitely (or at least as long as your company continues operating) you should probably host it yourself (e.g. on your own PeerTube instance), because YouTube might take it down whenever they feel like it.

I've started to see _engagement_ as a mal-feature. One thing I prefer about Mastodon is that its much less engaging than twitter, which is psychotically optimized to keep my eyeballs on it.

> Unlike Youtube they cannot use a recommender system like for suggestions. Most Youtube views are from recommendations and related videos.

Maybe they could recommend content by storing the content metadata/viewcounts/social graph in a FLOOD style network like Aether[1].

Then the content itself is just linked via an IPFS/DAT url within the metadata.

[1]: https://getaether.net/

I wonder if a decentralized recommendation system is really impossible though. If it's possible to get a user to rate and classify a few videos along some dimensions, and made those classifications public, it might be possible to find other users who similarly classified those videos and recommend videos based on the ratings of those similar users. This would mitigate many attempts at censorship, though it probably worsens echo chamber issues.

Also, a new platform doesn't have to solve every problem with the old one to be an improvement. Decentralized content delivery with a centralized recommendation engine might still be enough to compete if centralized content delivery platforms screw up badly enough.

>- Engagement: Unlike Youtube they cannot use a recommender system like for suggestions. Most Youtube views are from recommendations and related videos

I won't be missing yt's recommendations at all. If peertube can implement related videos only based on the current video and nothing else, that would be great though.

Recommender system could be content based

Reply on news.ycombinator.com