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tobyhinloopen

I hate what YouTube has become, but the creators are still there by choice so the viewers are as well.

FloatPlane is too expensive (I don’t want to pay per channel). Vessel was great but it’s gone.

I’m fine with paying for videos, but there’s just no platform like Netflix for random creators

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> by choice

If you have two choices, namely no money and some money and you must have money to eat then you don't have two choices. There is no choice, because the other platforms are far too small to compete. What should arguably happen more is uploading to more than one location, but searching for youtube alternatives is almost impossible (at least if you want one that actually has some potential. There is a ton of trash).

If the issue is money, there are many ways to make money besides relying on YouTube.

You need to reach your audience somehow. Even creators who earn a lot from Patreon and other websites had to build their following, often on Youtube.

People can complain as much as they want (and sometimes rightly so) but it's a simple technical truth that nobody else can provide a Youtube-quality service for free. The operating costs are just insane.

I read the parent as saying YouTube is probably a pretty lousy bet if you have no other income stream to eat. Yes, some people do pretty well. So do some actors. And some authors. That doesn't make those occupations good full-time financial choices if you're broke.

Most people posting on YouTube have day jobs or other means of support. I'm actually tempted to think that patronage and ad supported models lure a lot of people into thinking they can monetize their hobby in a significant way that they would never think they could if they were playing a musical instrument for tips.

You read correctly. :)

This is just conservative Prager-U corporate toadying.

Essentially, if you don't like your job, stop complaining and quit!

People invested significantly in YouTube because they were promised that it was a platform for everyone.

Now they are gentrifying the platform and driving everyone off who isn't a major celebrity, via gaslighting.

If you are a celebrity like Logan Paul, the rules simply do not apply to you. YouTube will fully monetize anything you put up, up to and including violating the terms of service or even committing actual crimes in real life.

YouTube is perfectly capable of treating people better, they just choose not to.

People can see it is wrong when Uber does stuff like this to contractors who are far less invested in the platform, but YouTube gets a free pass to abuse its contributors.

There are plenty of platforms for everyone out there. They're just not a path to riches, or indeed even to material "side hustle" income, for the vast majority of people. Anyone who ever thought otherwise is... let's just say optimistic.

What's your experience of using them to establish and grow a viewer base and monetise the kind of content created by a typical Youtube channel?

Maybe Vimeo or Dailymotion will pick up some users this way, like Signal and Telegram picked lately some Whatsapp traffic...

You can cross upload your content, right? Just upload it to all platforms. Sure noone will watch from there but if enough people start doing it, viewers will follow. At some point it must be worth it to set an example for your colleague creators.

It just needs a start

This is impractical due to YouTube's algorithm. If y people watch your content on alternative sites that would otherwise have watched on YouTube, this reduces the algorithm's score and could result in x : (x > y) less views on YouTube due to reduced placement. It's probably not a problem at small numbers of views, but if you actually started getting significant views on alt sites, you would be heavily incentivized to pull your content back to YouTube exclusively. The network effects are just too strong. Even if a few very devoted creators stick to using alt sites at personal cost, 99% of creators will remain exclusively on YouTube and the alt sites will not be able to compete on content.

TLDR: A few people may do it, but it won't scale.

I've been using Nebula more frequently. Only one monthly payment for the whole platform, zero ads. A lot of my favorite YouTube content creators have been uploading their videos there too. And not just uploading the same videos, but higher-quality ones. For example, they're more free to use copyrighted material fairly when doing content criticism, knowing that they're not going to get automatically flagged/demonetized even when they're within their rights.

(If someone from Nebula reads this: My only complaint is a lack of a Roku app, which is where I consume most of my content in the living room any more. Please make this happen!)

It's not available for any video creator though, only a few selected by Nebula.

I'm on the opposite side, I love what Youtube has become, and Youtube Premium is givinge lots of value.

Sure, I'm not happy about authors optimizing for some alforithms, like increasing playtime, allowing thumbnails that have nothing to do with content, and heavy moderation of important words (like COVID), but I live with it.

I have the same feelings about YouTube. There's great content on there and is absolutely worth paying for Premium. That helps support the creators you watch too because a Premium view is worth more than an ad-supported view.

Of course it really is the content that is making it worth my money here. There is no platform loyalty. If another platform amassed a significant number of quality creators, I would certainly switch over.

For me actually the platform is amazing as well, the iPad app for Netflix is still flaky when internet is not that good, and offline viewing is buggy as well. I'm travelling a lot, and I haven't found anything close to YouTube in a stable source of legal content.

Those are the times when I switch to YouTube app, which always works for me, and downloads are working as well. The only thing that I'm missing from it is support for downloading in background, when I'm not running the YouTube app.

I worked with a large media company a few years ago on a product like this; long story short YouTube pays the big content creators to stay on YT. Getting a critical mass of content that’s not also available on YouTube is a problem, because you need content to draw an audience and creators don’t want to do a bunch of extra work for no exposure — YouTube is only one revenue stream for the top stars, but it gets them the publicity to monetize their image in other ways on other platforms. So there’s an opportunity cost to using another platform.

I get the problem, I just wish there was a solution

I think floatplane by itself never wants to compete with Youtube, they know they can't scale that much and just want to provide creators with a second option for supporters. If LTT were to disappear from Youtube I bet they'd still find some way to provide a free way to access their videos, even if on another provider.

What about PeerTube? Random creators often include their own advertisements into the videos anyway.

> but the creators are still there by choice so the viewers are as well.

Not really. Network effects keep them all there whether they like it or not. The creators need their work viewed, and that happens where there are both creators and viewers, which is Youtube.

Is there a reason that Vimeo wouldn't work? Aside from the lack of regular users, which could be fixed over time.

Monetization on Vimeo basically requires you to already have a following of some sort to sell subscriptions or pay per view videos. So I've seen some people use Youtube as a funnel to get viewership and send them into other services like Patreon/Vimeo/etc.

> Is there a reason that Vimeo wouldn't work?

Do they have apps for all smartphones and TV's?

I just search the iOS App Store, and the 2 Vimeo apps that are at the top seem to be for creators, not consumers.

I watch most Youtube on the TV, if there's no Vimeo app, I wouldn't be able to consume the content.

This is a good question. I have a suspicion that the big difference is actually many tiny UX differences: Vimeo isn't nearly as aggressive with getting you to watch more videos (i.e. automatically playing a video next) with an aggressive recommendation algo; it also doesn't seem to encourage engagement as much. Vimeo's brand (at least afaict) is more on the business/commercial end, a 'prestige' brand (at least to some extent?) with fairly different demographics.

Interesting that we live in a world where these are problems. I mean, I understand why it is, but when you say it that way, it actually sounds like a much better and friendlier experience.

It is, but it does serve different purposes. You don't go on Vimeo to find cute cat videos. You don't go on Vimeo to reply to strangers' comments about a music video or board game review etc etc etc.

Discovery and search. Looking through my YouTube subscription, well over half of the people there are people I discovered via YouTube, either by searching for a video about a thing or by having it recommended to me. YouTube has the best tools for building an audience, and that is what a competitor has to replicate, not the video hosting functionality.

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