In the recent past (say up to the mid 2010s) it was a really good product and there was a reason nobody gave a shit about Vimeo et al, YouTube as a site, app, platform was so far ahead of the competition.
But now? Youtube is full of slop, search barely works, and Google is on an endless campaign to make ad-blocking and free downloading impossible. Even most of the "good" channels resort to clickbait titles, thumbnails designed for children, and embarrassing shilling.
Meanwhile hosting and streaming HD video is a mundanely easy feature to implement with off-the-shelf/FOSS software, hundreds of no-name, fly-by-night websites have HD video hosting. Maybe it's time for someone to make a mastodon equivalent for youtube.
People are lazy, you don't need to steal Mark's users, you just have to build an alternative for anyone looking to escape or new users. That is the only way these ad companies get disrupted, slowly.
All they need to do is fix the abomination that their search has turned into. 3 relevant, shorts carousel, 9 irrelevant "people also watched", then back to relevant. It's truly awful.
Browser add-ons and/or userscripts may alleviate this problem if those are an option in your use case. I use Unhook (https://unhook.app/) to hide all algorithm recommendations and shorts.
To solve that problem: when you're logged in, go through the suggested-videos margin and right-click on the suggested videos that appear irrelevant or awful to you, and you can click either "Do not recommend channel" or, more mildly, "Not interested." Do that a few times and you'll see the suggested videos get far more relevant to what you want to see. Yes, they definitely have an agenda in terms of the channels they push, whether it's political news clips, late-night talk show interviews, celebrity gossip, or zany pranks and challenges, but you can block them all. They love CNN, Joe Rogan, the Kardashians, and New York City real-estate mogul Donald Trump, but you don't need to see them if you don't want to. I've also done this with my Instagram "Explore" page and now it's always nearly all posts I'm definitely interested in, like about technology, science, astronomy, history, archaeology, coins, all sorts of stuff I like, it's great.
There are many genres of content where other video platforms--all of them entirely entirely or mostly premium--are bigger than YouTube, for instance, for:
- movies (Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Turner, Criterion)
- old as well as current TV shows (Netlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime)
- cartoons (Netflix, Hulu, Disney, Tubi)
- pro sports (ESPN and league-specific platforms)
- video game videos (Twitch)
And for short advice videos (I call it "advice-ology," and there are tons of people doing it, whether about relationships life, nutrition, health, or fitness), comedy shorts, and prank videos, a video app called TikTok has been the biggest app in the U.S. and the world for the past 6 years, and Instgram, with its video "Reels," is also bigger for such videos.
So, my question to you is: What are 2 of more types of videos you'd like to get YouTube get disrupted in? Music videos? Podcasts? Movie trailers? Here's the current "Trending" list:
To keep BigTechs in check you need a strong state with a proper legislation. To achieve it, you need a political power to create such legislation and force your decision-makers to adopt it.
Fantasy that some FOSS project or bunch of brave entrepreneurs backed by YC will actually make a difference is just it - a fantasy.
In the recent past (say up to the mid 2010s) it was a really good product and there was a reason nobody gave a shit about Vimeo et al, YouTube as a site, app, platform was so far ahead of the competition.
But now? Youtube is full of slop, search barely works, and Google is on an endless campaign to make ad-blocking and free downloading impossible. Even most of the "good" channels resort to clickbait titles, thumbnails designed for children, and embarrassing shilling.
Meanwhile hosting and streaming HD video is a mundanely easy feature to implement with off-the-shelf/FOSS software, hundreds of no-name, fly-by-night websites have HD video hosting. Maybe it's time for someone to make a mastodon equivalent for youtube.