Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

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At the moment, activists and hackers ("non-normal" people) are really the main audience for decentralized "censorship resistant" networks, since everyone else is happy with Youtube and other centralized services.

Regarding the instances page, it looks like they're pulling instances randomly, which would just be confusing to new users and in cases like you mention where the instance isn't popular, counterproductive.

The frontpage isn't much better - most of it is taken up explaining free software politics and things "normal" users won't care about, and it offers only three content examples - one video, one channel and one instance. Compare that to Youtube's frontpage, which is tiles and tiles of content, with a search bar right on top, basically choking you with content.

I understand they probably care more about the politics and philosophy but if they want to be an alternative to Youtube they need to do what Youtube does and present themselves as content first. The layout for the instances themselves do that, but the homepage needs to pull a bit more weight in that regard, since it's standing between the user and all that stuff. In my humble and unqualified opinion.

Exactly, I think the first impression should immediately show the value of the platform.

In this case it would probably be well rated videos on the default / least niche / most popular instance and not an instance with conspiracy videos or other "censored" content that can't live on the other platforms.

Being in a pretty similar situation I think the https://joinmastodon.org landing page is done in a more user friendly way. They have a "Join now" link which brings you to an instance list that has the most popular ones shown right away and even gives you a way to find out which instance is the best for your language or interests.

" since everyone else is happy with Youtube and other centralized services."

I also respectfully disagree, because YouTube consistently: - recommends pop-culture content that can be found elsewhere, most specifically on cable - recommends content I've already watched even though I'm logged in and they should know I've already watched it - buries the content most relative to my interests - gives me no means of adding or removing tags to help me filter my content - has search functionality that constantly breaks when one applies filters (so you do a search, get a million results, sort by upload data and it returns 'no results found' W.T.F.

Hell I'd even settle for someone to just abstract the AI/tracking/algorithm and link to content on all of these sites so I don't see content on any ONE of them and can search across all of them. Why hasn't anyone done this? If someone has, please promote it more.

Check out https://github.com/omarroth/invidious: no js needed, audio-only mode.. It has some rough edges (channel pages and a couple videos seem to break), but it's very decent.

That's why I use many accounts for YouTube, one for music, another one tech-related, ... using the multi containers extension of Firefox, this way, the recommendations become somewhat more relevant.

> activists and hackers ("non-normal" people) are really the main audience

Respectfully disagree with you. There's quite a lot of content which is getting throttled on Youtube if not outright censored.

I follow Styx on YouTube who's a libertarian and even his channel and videos are constantly censored, throttled. Dave Rubin is another one.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Styxhexenhammer666/videos

Why the downvotes? HN is getting more and more hostile.

I think it has to do with the youtube channel you shared. Best guess is that the content is alt-right or trails on conspiracy.

What's alt-right or conspiracy about it? I don't even know what the definition of "alt-right" is now a days. I am a brown immigrant myself (I hate mentioning that but it seems relevant in this context) and I find majority of the time people using "alt-right" don't know what they are talking about.

Ironically it’s the corporate shills and free market profiteers who end up caring about things like “what does the user want”. So many of these projects are all about ego stroking ideals and not actually providing value to anyone. There’s some food for thought in there about the parts of capitalism that work.

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