All: please let's try to avoid repeating the generic discussion about how being on someone else's platform leaves you vulnerable to someone else. It's not wrong, of course, but it's been repeated for many years and won't lead to fresh conversation.<p>The goal on HN is curious conversation. Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.<p>The easiest way to do this is to respond to the specific new information in an article. As a nudge in that direction, I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases).<p>You don't <i>only</i> have to react to the specific new information in an article. Whimsical tangents and reactions are also ok. Just ask yourself if it's expected or unexpected [4], and prefer the unexpected.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p>[1] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=diffs%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...</a>
I follow CGP Grey’s stuff and it’s been interesting and instructive to see how he diversified.<p>* His Youtube channel is his main platform<p>* However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there<p>* He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex<p>* The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts<p>* He had a second podcast, hello internet, currently on hiatus. If ever something went catastrophically wrong with youtube this could be reactivated via the feed<p>* He has a large email list which he uses to reach people directly and drive traffic to videos if people request these updates<p>* He is also prominent on twitter etc and maintains secondary youtube channels, useful if main one taken down<p>* He runs a large subreddit for his following<p>So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)<p>Still faces a youtube risk but it would take a an earthquake across platforms to truly wreck his income streams.<p>As someone who runs an online business and follows him it’s been impressive to watch how diversified he has made his comms channels.
> Linus Sebastian<p>Something to understand, for those who might have just seen some youtube videos of him being goofy, is that he's an <i>actor</i>. The guy on camera doing stupid stuff is a stage persona. It's an intentionally cultivated image and media persona to get as many video views as possible.<p>I sort of see him as one possible aspect of the low/medium budget TV production stuff which is common in his home city, Vancouver BC. People who've met and worked with him in person report that he's a much more normal, calm, rational individual off screen.<p>I won't judge him for being goofy on camera because it's <i>hard</i> to make a living as a working actor. For every person who gets a job in a vancouver-produced TV drama that might last 2 or 3 seasons, there's dozens more people who are working as restaurant servers while trying to get their big break.
This article is a little on the surface level, but it's true.<p>People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air.<p>Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole thing. There either needs to be some neutrality, competition or youtubers need to organize somehow... unionize even. Trying to have a relationship with audiences that doesn't run through youtube won't work for most channels... even ones with millions of views.<p>I always expected a porn company to come in and compete with youtube at some point. They have the infrastructure. I've also been surprised at how restricted youtube manage to be, and still succeed... just the skin censorship if nothing else.
a good story about floatplane: i signed up pretty much as soon as it was announced, then i forgot about it and also forgot my password.<p>i was billed -very little- for a while then i opened a support ticket to have my account restored, since i had been billed for a while i at least wanted to watch some content.<p>but apparently something in the backend had changed and they plainly refunded me from the time i had my last login (iirc) and then they allowed me to re-signup.<p>it's been nice because i had then been able to re-signup and also recover some money that were pretty much lost, and i wasn't expecting that nor asking for it.<p>i really hope to see floatplane grow!
I think that's a great decision. Many people like to complain about Youtube and its policies and its algorithms but it's simply very hard to compete with it. Its offering is really unparalleled.<p>Hopefully these creators will manage to carve enough of a niche to create healthy competition, especially with a business model that doesn't rely entirely on ad revenue. It's going to be very hard though, making money from video hosting is a very difficult thing to do.
The ideal platform for something like youtube would be to separate discovery from content.<p>You host the content, and you can pick from UIs/algorithms for the discovery.
Peertube would work nicely for high traffic videos, since the data transfer can be shared among viewers <a href="https://joinpeertube.org/" rel="nofollow">https://joinpeertube.org/</a>
I spent some time a while back trying to build the “Shopify for Video streams” where creators could have a custom hosted channel that enables them to monetize however they’d like! Ultimately I didn’t do a great job of marketing it, but if anyone’s interested in giving it a spin for their channel feel free to fill out the beta interest form here: <a href="https://yourchannel.rreichel.dev" rel="nofollow">https://yourchannel.rreichel.dev</a>
Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier. The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large and seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon.<p>What is sad is that you see youtubers talking in code on videos, not saying words, self censoring because youtube's detection is so good, videos get demonetised instantly. This is also why most people have seen an Ad in a video for PIA or surfshark or worse, raid shadow legends.
I can’t help but wonder why services like Vimeo don’t come up more often when getting off of YouTube? It seems like Vimeo offers similar functionality already. Is there something about it that I’m missing / is it just not cool for content creators?
I did not even know that Linus had his own site. Fantastic. I won’t be watching his videos on Youtube anymore! Hopefully, everyone I watch will have their own websites, so that I don’t have to visit Youtube.
Ally Law needed to do this. He regularly trespasses to the top of sky scrapers and other unique buildings. YouTube tried to bring him down so he started his own site. He still posts on YouTube but it was a long process to get back. If you want to see a guy living, check out Ally Law. It’s a madness.
Maybe not totally on subject here. But Cleetus McFarland is one of the people I think is starting to make his move away from YouTube, or at least, diversifying dramatically.<p>Merch is huge for YouTubers in a lot of ways. He's been doing solid merch for a long time.<p>He also has been doing his Cleetus & Cars events for a few years now and those bring in big numbers.<p>Last year he announced purchasing an abandoned race track. Which he opened officially this year. This past weekend he had an event and the place was packed (COVID not withstanding... it feels like in Florida, where this is all located, COVID isn't a thing). He seems to have successfully saved an abandoned race track.<p>In an extremely creative maneuver they had to tear up part of the race track for repairs. To help fund the repairs he sold chunks of the track in a bottle with a t-shirt and a few other merch goodies. He literally sold chunks of the track.<p>He's now doing Pay-per-view events, which he started last year.<p>I'm sure a good chunk of his income still comes from YouTube, but in a lot of ways he's seemingly finding creative ways to make his business bigger. Eventually, I anticipate that YouTube and him part ways and he starts his own platform where he can make it more of what he wants it to be.
Because they are finally learning that all it takes to destroy their business is an algorithm glitch, or having 'wrong' political views, or just falling on the wrong side of an overzealous moderator.<p>When you use someone else's platform you are completely dependent on the owner of the platform, and being dependent on something you don't control is a huge business risk.
Personally, I think the way to end centralization is to introduce enough viable options that are willing to cohabitate and even cooperate. These viable alternatives can't be interested in total dominance and probably need to have agreements that allow transfer of content and data. Personally hosted sites backed by centrally maintained software is a logical choice if you can optimize for the lack of bandwidth sharing economy. If my hypothesis is true, then this is the tide turning in video sharing, though the tide may be a long tide.
Youtube is fantastic top of funnel. 2nd or 3rd biggest search engine online. Google also loves promoting it on search results.<p>But YouTube isn’t where you should keep the rest of your business.
We are still a very long way from distributed discovery.<p>Back in the day at Demon Internet (well known 90s UK ISP)
every customer got a free 10MB of webspace - barely any of them used it.<p>But it <i>should</i> have been how we all hosted our blogs and our videos. And it would solve a multitude of social media issues.<p>If Facebook and youtube did not host its hard to see how they could compile trustable usage stats (#) and so hard to see how we could all find out we must watch Gangnam Style. Similar problems seem to hover over crypto-currencies.<p>Edit: some random thoughts<p>- DNS: In a world of individual producers, curated aggregation still has value as it provides a quality / interest gate. A TV channel implies curation, a review guide the same. Perhaps it is no coincidence Marvel has found its footing in a world where choice is infinite and curation zero. Every TV show hopes to land a few million dedicated fans.<p>- Social media companies basically have zero curation (this is weirdly tending towards including Amazon who are dumbing down curation in marketplace)<p>- Our natural curation signals are usually based around proximity (geography, recommendation, similarity). These fall apart where the same DNS hosts nazis and nannies. Especially where recommendations are controlled by (one?) algorithm.<p>- If enough viewing moves off YouTube (not merely the bits over pipes, it off the influence of the algorithm) then these other effects might start to show through.<p>- But even if we could gather reliable distributed usage stats (book publishers managed it for decades), distributed discovery becomes a strange animal. A dumb algorithm that recommends what is the most watched video in the world, followed by the second, would have some strange chaotic behaviour but would at least have twin virtues of <i>simple</i> and <i>transparent</i>. Start adding in anything else (here is my past history, make a recommendation, or here is my aspirational set of people (my twitter follow list is watching) or just show me what Barry Norman recommends, all of these can be made transparent - and open to a cottage industry of discovery algorithms.<p>- This cottage industry fascinates me - it's like the other industries I expected to exist but don't (decent job search, dis-intermediated real estate). Duck Duck Go seems the model here - there is likely to be a (regulated?) split in discovery - much like railways or phone lines - where the underlying monopoly bit (we scraping) gets hived off and everyone can access it at common fees - and the add on bits, the start of distributed discovery - appears as a more competitive market. And one hopes a less behaviour driven one (I am still wanting to know the revenue difference between Google storing my every move and returning what it thinks I want and Duck Duck Go just using the context of my query - and returning what I asked for.<p>- But hopefully after a Cambrian explosion of companies offering discovery - not just search or for videos and entertainment but even shopping (as Amazon hits the same split the Google inevitably will), after all that, we are still a long way from where I hope we can get.<p>- Everything online should treat me as a citizen, as even a patient - where do no harm is the first principle. If we live in an internet where my individual best interests are the legal and cultural norm, as professions are supposed to be, then we enter a totally different equation. We are all exploited online now, and the discussions are about harm reduction. But that's not the real end goal. Making sure quacks don't charge too much for the snake oil is not what made medicine work.<p>(#) ignoring facebook lying to advertisers etc etc
Why wouldn't you? It's becoming increasingly clear that you cannot trust your web presence (and by extension, your business) to one or two social media companies ... though that should have been obvious in hindsight.<p>And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email.
It seems really weird that BBC would do a story on these alternates to youtube, mention them, and then not link to them.<p>I watch Linus Tech Tips so I've heard of floatplane but I haven't heard of the others mentioned. Even one of the three links in the article just goes to another site called tubefilter which itself doesn't link to this nebula thing. It took me ten minutes to find the site because I had to read the articles trying to see if they linked to <a href="https://watchnebula.com/" rel="nofollow">https://watchnebula.com/</a> (admittedly, that link doesn't really do a great job of selling the product either)<p>What is the point of doing stories about other web sites without linking to them?
Because they are finally learning that existing on someone else's platform sucks. Much better to get your own domain which is actually property registered to your name and can't be taken away from you because you offended some advertiser.
> There is no algorithm, they're going to be served everything you make.<p>I am not sure how is this (lack of) feature mentioned as an advantage over youtube. Afaict there's certainly a video tab on the yt channel that displays videos sorted with time uploaded (and probably is modifiable). I understand that the point must be that people may want to not see the recommended videos, but don't most such visitors directly visit the yt channel. At least I use it like that.<p>(mandatory: googler, don't work on youtube)
Are there opensource product/apps/website that allow distributing media to multiple outlets at once? Like uploading to YouTube, peertube, daily motion, vimeo and others from one interface as well as managing and responding to the comments left on them?<p>I could develop something myself but it would be way better if someone already put the effort into it. Also because I suck at UI and would probably wrote a CLI for it, which probably doesn't mesh with content creators.
I think the question us hackers should think about is not about how do you beat youtube? But how do you make it irrelevant. Twitch was one answer. TikTok is another.
Because when you have business that brings money you do not let the somebody else control it to the point that they can kill it next day just because they can.<p>One of the reasons why my backends are based on self sufficient architecture that I can move to any arbitrary VM / dedicated server in no time. There is no cloudy dependent stuff in my stack at all.
Funnily I'm subscribed to Corridor Digital and Nebula. These were the first things I thought about when I saw the headline. And now I know where Luke from LTT went and why despite "not working at LTT anymore", Linus seemed to have a good relationship with Luke whenever he appeared.
>"We refuse to be an accidental vehicle for right-wing, neo-Nazi propaganda. And it's really easy for fringe platforms to turn into that if you leave the doors open," he says.<p>Kudos where it's due for fighting fascism and all that jazz, but it does raise a pretty large concern: where do people draw the line for this stuff? A private platform like that can ultimately decide which videos they want to accept and which they want to reject, which really defeats the purpose of making your own platform in the first place. It doesn't matter if there's no content aggregation algos, since everyone consumes a homogeneous slurry of videos. Instead of preventing gatekeeping in the first place, they just changed who can open the gate.<p>I don't think I'll ever be very interested in a platform like Nebula, and I'm really only tangentially interested in Floatplane. YouTube will always be a dominant market because it's free and offers a functional user experience. Even if half of the people watching YouTube videos got a Nebula subscription, they're still going to be using YouTube alongside it. As long as that YouTube audience exists, people will continue to capitalize it. As long as the two platforms compete, they'll be in a constant struggle for power over their viewers. It's the definition of a lose-lose situation.
Even with their own frontend, creators' content is still hosted and served via YouTube just with an embedded video player, no?<p>Are there any viable alternatives out there? Vimeo?<p>I'm not particularly knowledgeable on video streaming, is cost the main barrier?
it wasn’t that long ago that it would be unusual for somebody to publish all of their videos on YouTube rather than their own site, And when he did it was to save money/performance, not for the network effects of the platform.
I wonder if there's a businessmodel for selling self-hosted video streaming solutions for this kind of content creators. Would be a fun product to build if nothing else.<p>Putting the "you" in YouTube
If they don't want to end up on islands that nobody ever visits then they better start thinking about getting together and starting cooperatives or non-profits to host and list themselves.
I wonder if there could be a good business in building “deplatforming” type content websites for people with large audiences who want to decouple from centralized platforms.
Seeing how many channels are randomly getting nuked by false copyright strikes, shadowbans, account termations, it makes sense that they want to move off YouTube. However as a consumer, there's just so many services/websites competing for my limited attention that if they're completely off YouTube, I doubt I'd ever watch them again -- especially if there's a paywall -- I'd just watch someone else the YT algorithm recommends.
so now what? Instead of millions of channels competing on one very good and easily accessible site, designed to show videos, they will compete on a much larger scale, with far bulkier channels on a site that displays other things as well. The punchline is that both sites are controlled by the same company. I can predict that exactly nothing will be gained by this, except the flooding of internet by many more videos.