Comment by _fs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _fs | Hacker News Reader

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So, of those sites, I had only heard of dailymotion. The others I had never visited before, so they will have no history on me, and will get clean recommendations. Upon going to each one, here's what I got:

lbry.tv - Shows 6 videos on the front page above the fold. 3 are appear to be strongly political, and 1 is pushing a far right conspiracy. NEXT.

bitchute.com - Front page appears to be entirely far right propaganda and conspiracy theories. Lots of race baiting. NEXT

diive.tv - Front page appears to indicate this is a streaming site ala twitch.tv. Mostly game videos on front page, along with 3 race riot videos. Due to titles about "no-go zones", I assume they are all going to be far right propaganda.

bittube.tv - Half of the videos on the front page are not in English. Not a bad thing, but surprising to me. The rest of the videos seem to be focusing on bitcoin scams, bill gates vaccines, and videos calling the corona-virus a left wing conspiracy.

Based on what I have seen, I now assume most of these sites are for people banned from Youtube for spouting far-right propaganda. Would not recommend any of them, and will likely not be back.

I think the problem is that of the people removed from YouTube, the vast majority are going to be removed for unsavory or misleading content, so any alternative anti-censorship sites are dominated by those people. You have the same problem with Reddit vs something like Voat.

It would be cool if these sites were able to mirror all of the youtube content as well, so you get all of youtube plus the content that people are posting to the decentralized or anti-censorship platform. Probably illegal but that's kind of the point.

As far as I can remember, Voat has always courted the alt-right segment. The fact that they became a haven for extremist content wasn't an accident.

Yeah, this is part of YouTube's moat. Twitter as well.

Of the people who get kicked off of those platforms, a significant number will be socially obnoxious. They of course have "freedom of speech but not freedom of reach", and our legal structure has decided that the big platforms get to enjoy being both a platform and a publisher, simultaneously.

So when a competitor comes along, the natural way to differentiate is to say "we won't ban you unless you break the law". So the socially obnoxious flood to the new plaform, and pretty quickly, you've got a core user base of people who like that, and a few people who are merely willing to tolerate it on principle.

I don't think this was originally strategic, more a matter of not wanting socially obnoxious voices on the platform, because advertisers don't care for that sort of thing. But it so obviously contributes to the continued dominance of the big platforms that there's no chance they haven't noticed.

>So when a competitor comes along, the natural way to differentiate is to say "we won't ban you unless you break the law".

We are "Social Media X but with no moderation" is a braindead business strategy. I'm failing to find a source, but moot (this founder of the anything goes social website), once said of all the 4chan clones, the ones that never lasted were the ones that were started by people who decided to make their own 4chan clone after being banned from the site. Naturally people discovered those clones were filled with insufferable asshats and died off.

Naturally when you look at these video sites, very few of them actually offer the number one thing I would expect from a YouTube clone - revenue sharing. So not only are they not competitive with YouTube, but for a large group of people kicked off of YouTube, they aren't even substitutes.

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