Irrespective of how you feel about this, its very strange to throw China under the bus here. If Chinese surveillance is so dystopian, don't you think China uses the same exact rhetoric for protecting their police state? After all China went from a bunch of farms to the second largest economy in 30 years.
Either you think mass surveillance is wrong or not.
This is a historically ignorant take, especially when you consider the country being talked about is Iran. As an American it's very easy to assume that a "government revolution" is something that can executed by the will of the people.
Iran had a democratic government. That democratic government voted to do something against Britian's economic interests. In response America dissolved it's government.
If I lived in a nation where any government instability would be used by wealth foreign powers who didn't care if I lived or died, I would also be hesitant in brewing any anti-government fervor.
You can't hold them wholly responsible when they don't even have the power of true self determination.
We all have history. It's not long ago that a lot of us Europeans did some pretty messed up stuff. We got over it and now we're all holding hands and such. Except for the damn Russians of course, because we can't just be friends and have nice things, someone has to ruin it for everyone.
I don't care what your history is. I care what you're doing now, and if what you're doing now is killing people over 80 year old beef (or anything else really) then I have absolutely no respect for you nor your history. Get over it, move forward. War should be a thing of the past at this point, we all share one planet.
I'm not sure how Iranian's are supposed to "get over" the fact that America wants middle-east hegemony. My point is exactly that:
You wish the blame the Iranians for the problems with their government, but the underlying problems with their government is because _Americans_ can't stop electing war hawks. The only sin Iranians have comitted in the eyes of the west is being born on top of an oil field. The "beef" might be 80 years old, but the oil is there today and America wants it's cut. Iran didn't want sell their oil to the British while their own people starved and for that they've been a quagmire for 80 years. You are asking them to live as slaves in the name of peace.
Would you tell Ukrainians that they are at fault for the war?
Could you try to substantiate these claims about the US extorting Iran for oil?
The only part of your claims that I've found information about is the CIA/MI6 orchestrating a coup in 1953, over 70 years ago. Iran was an ally for a long time after that, the Iranian revolution happened two decades later.
So unless you can point to something more recent I really don't think your blaming the US makes a lot of sense. Iran was an ally of the west and Israel for a long time, then religious extremists took over and pissed all over those alliances. Here's an AI-generated summary:
> Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran experienced significant economic growth and secular, Western-oriented modernization under the Shah, with expanded education and some cultural freedoms. After the revolution, however, the economy stagnated, inflation and unemployment rose, and per capita income declined significantly
The revolution was not the fault of the west. Iran was doing well, then the revolution happened and it went to shit. I'm sure the west would be happy to support Iran again if it got its shit together. I honestly don't believe these claims that the US is pressuring Iran for oil. Maybe they were 70 years ago, but that's really not very relevant any more.
>(which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework)
The ban wasn't executed on digital privacy concerns. The intent of the original ban was on digital privacy concerns, and that was shot down.
>The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
The TikTok ban passed under Biden, and the ball was kicked to Trump so he would deal with the political fallout. But the reason the ban passed the second time around was because China would not censor content about the Gaza genocide. The ban had no legs until October 7th and TikTok frustrated the US/Israel message that Hamas was homicidal terrorist group that spawned from no where.
What seems obvious is that, yes, the new TikTok, will fall in line with other US owned social media companies when it comes to spreading US propoganda.
So while Chinese social networks have "What happened in tiananmen square?", US social networks will have "Is Israel committing a genocide?".
1. All these devices would sell out, because these are all of Apple's best sellers. I'm willing to bet a replacable battery iPhone will sell as much as the iPhone 6e. Replacable batteries aren't a strong feature.
2. "Current Apple Product" + "My own personal tweak" isn't a product strategy. "A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen?" wouldn't move the needle sales wise, and would just be a headache for developers. If, for some strange reason, you need a 19inch touch screen, the iPad pro already exists and has better developer support.
Most Apple products are locally maximized. The last great new Apple product was the AirPods in 2016. Neither the Apple Watch or Apple Vision Pro seems like they will define a new product space.
I doubt there will ever be an alternative to YouTube. "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.
Before you get into cdns, bandwidth, advertisers, and social features, you need to have content - and a steady flow of content. What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
Any new competitor eventually runs into the fact that
* Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)
* In order to actually pay creators you need to have the capital, legal, and advertising side completely figured out.
So on top of building a giant cdn, you need gobs of money to pay people to stay on your platform, and another gob of money because you will be sued to death (especially because once you start paying people, people will cheat, and pirate content).
All this means is YouTube has an incredible moat. If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
I love YouTube, so many things to learn. But their recent push to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages with their auto-translated bullshit and no way to turn it off makes me use YouTube way less.
It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.
"to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages"
I'm terribly annoyed by this, and even more so with their latest push to translate the titles, so now you have to click and listen in on the video in order to know which the original language is.
I speak 3 languages, and I want the title and voice to be in the original language. And I won't bother nor would settle with watching an AI translated video even if it is translated from a language which I do not understand. Then I simply do not want to see that video.
Me too. I hate the auto-translation feature. Both on YouTube and other websites that force it on you, such as the new Reddit (I'll just stop using Reddit when they turn off Old Reddit).
Likewise. Reddit just took the preference for old UI away on mobile for my account (seems to be some sort of testing they are doing maybe?). The new UI is jarring an not useful to me. And "old*" always seems to have a broken failure mode, that some links within reddit default to new.
I strongly advise any 3rd party app (I use Relay for Reddit) and it costs me $3/mo for decently heavy usage. About half of that goes to API fees and half to the developer. I consider that fair given the excellent features and lack of ads
And if paying for reddit is unacceptable, it's easy to get it for free.
Either use one of the still-supported third party apps with an accessibility exemption (RedReader for Android or Dystopia for iOS), or use any of the classic 3rd party apps with your own API keys - which you can get for free, if you mod your own subreddit. Takes 5 minutes to set up.
It isn't a feature, at least not for users. I strongly suspect youtube's autotranslate has more to do with regulatory compliance and content moderation. Rather than having people who speak X/Y/Z languages, they want each every video to be translated into English by default so they can be feed more easily into the the system that vets content. Having translated and non-translated copies floating around is probably seen as a needless complication.
Once a monopoly has been established, the next step is to actively make the product worse in order to either reduce costs or push users towards premium features.
I speak at least 3 languages at a native level.
Google's autotranslate 80% of the time selects a language I'm not just unfamiliar with, but can't even read due to the writing system difference (i.e. sudden arabic appears).
Considering I'm using it with an account that is about 20 years old now, that gave Google all of the permissions in the world and has all the possible data one might need to make the conclusions on which language I prefer, it is absolutely absurd that it cannot make a solid guess.
As another multilingual person, I keep getting reminded how bad software "features" can be for us. First, from early computers up to at least the Windows XP era, things sucked due to code pages and all that, but that was understandable, technical limitations after all. Now things suck due to what's supposed to be convenient UX.
Google Chrome broke Ctrl-F functionality for my native language ages ago and it's still broken because the breakage is apparently by design.
The Amazon website for my country appears to mostly auto-translate the English product pages into the local language. Product titles sometimes mean totally ridiculous things because of course the translation is poor.
Nobody cares about the Accept-Language header. Way too many websites like to use GeoIP and switch to the local language. Sometimes the geolocation is wrong, sometimes their location-language mappings are, and even when everything is working "correctly" it's a pain if I'm traveling. I have my browser set up with a correct Accept-Language list, but during travel I definitely see websites switch to a language I can't read.
Then of course there's the huge problem, related to autodetection, that you cannot deduce a user's language from their residence. Countries don't have a surjective mapping onto languages.
Because it ignores diacritics. Searching for ā will find a, searching for š will highlight s. This may make sense for some languages where diacritics are used sparingly to indicate an aspect of pronunciation, but in my language and many others diacritics are used for entirely different letters. The letter ā is not a. Treating them as equivalent makes as little sense as treating e and o as equivalent would in English.
If I'm trying to find kāzas (wedding) in a page, I will get hits for kazas (goats). If I'm looking for šauš, a letter sequence that words about shooting begin with, I will also get hits in šausmas (horror) or sauss (dry). It's nonsense. Windows 3.1 notepad.exe could find the actual word I entered in a text file (though the input required setup), the dominant browser in 2025 cannot do that and finds entirely unrelated words because an English speaker has decided they're visually similar.
Go into your Google account settings, under General, then add any languages that you watch YouTube videos in. I did this for Spanish and all my Spanish videos stopped getting dubs and translated titles.
They still track you? Is there much of a difference? Get an account you only use for YT, I can't imagine the difference in data leaking will be that much greater if they track you just by IP/other fingerprinting vs a session?
Thanks, I went there and added spanish since google and youtube were auto translating some stuff for me lately out of nowhere and I saw that there was a language already added for me by google, Uzbek. WTF?
It's especially annoying when you're searching for things that are done very differently in different parts of the world. No, I don't want to learn how to build walls or wire up electricity from e.g. Americans.
Watching any dubbed video is a big no for me. You lose ALL original expression, this was already the case with TV dubbing and it's far worse with anything auto generated. People with accents get translated poorly at best, resulting in garbadge.
The excuse is "most people want it so we force it", hooray for the dictatorship of the masses (by assumption, I've seen no research papers on the matter published by any platform).
It unfortunately could be true. I mean I hear people in my own family listen to the always same sounding auto generated narrator voices on YouTube and it has me thinking: "Oh my god why do you even listen to this crap???" and the portrayed ideology that comes along with such content is very questionable as well. Usually some low effort (a)social drama shit. It has zero worth. No, it is net negative! But apparently people watch or listen to that crap.
And so we see it playing out over and over again. Dumb masses creating market incentives for bullshit products and product decisions, ruining everything. If you want it with a pinch of capitalism critique: Oh right capitalism makes it so that we get the best products!!! lol
I was so confused by this when it first happened to me....
Watching quite some youtube content, and more than willing to pay any content provider for a worthy dose of content... I refuse to hand youtube any money and will happily play the adblocker cat and mouse and use clunky scripts to remove shorts. Starting to archive the most interesting channels myself. Thanks yt-dlp.
so many websites do this. ebay is another offender, where if you buy international items and speak english, it just gets in the way and introduces mistakes, which is especially bad if you're about to pay money for something. And of course, no way to turn it off.
If I click I’m not interested on every short presented to me and I’ve never watched a short, why can’t YouTube get the point? At least give us the option to remove them. I don’t deal with the translation issue but not giving you the option is what is beyond frustrating for me.
If you're using ublock, you can remove elements on webpages, including the area where shorts are on the YT pages. It's what I did on my mobile to stop watching them.
if your on firefox or one of its clones, firefox can auto run javascript scripts to remove shorts with the extension Greasemonkey, scripts can be found at 'the greasy fork'. there is also a decent youtube abdroid app called litube which can be found on f-droid which has a built in option to remove shorts (among other great options)
It took a little while but YouTube has stopped recommending shorts after doing exactly this. They still appear in my subscription feed but it’s less bothersome because they’re from channels I actually watch.
No, you don't understand! Being interested in anything works only in one direction, and that is the direction of getting you to engage with content that brings ad money!
This feature is so annoying. YouTube is always trying new stupid features that I wonder who they make sense to. The hype thing now, the games, I wonder for who are these things useful and if it's relevant in any sort of metric. I use unkook on desktop and Newpipe or my phone for a more minimal watching experience now
What's even more bullshit is that this is easily fixable on their side without impacting the goal of the feature. They just need to take into account all the languages of the user, not just the first one.
A similar case: for those who haven't seen it, Jimmy Kimmel's "Unnecessary Censorship" videos are regular videos with added bleeps to make it sound as if the person is talking about something censorship-worthy.
YouTube auto-translates these videos, with the end result being a random toss between the original uncensored speech, the modified speech with some sex term added in there (and unbleeped!), and random nonsense - all of it read in a robotic monotone voice.
The end result is completely unwatchable, except perhaps as a dadaist experiment. I can't understand how someone hasn't noticed it yet.
I currently dislike and comment every video that has out dubbing enabled.
I hate this approach but it is the only way to somehow make this awful feature more visible.
Yeah this is infuriating. I read 4 languages and now I'm left trying to reverse-engineer/guess what the title I'm reading was supposed to mean.
Add on top of that googles persistent (14 years and counting) inability to decide which of the three countries I've lived in they attribute my account to (sometimes it still opens maps centered on Stockholm 12 years after I left) and I understand why I watch way less video these days...
> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. Further, some big-ticket content creators hedge their bets, uploading to backup platforms, trying to shift to Patreon, etc.
The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc.
But TikTok shows that you can disrupt that simply by offering a video format that is different in some way and thus not gated by the same muscle memory.
Almost every reply has pointed to TikTok as some sort of counterfactual.
1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist.
2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library - how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube.
3. TikTok addressed point (2) of my post - ByteDance launched in the US with the acquisition of Musically, and even then still had to pay for content. The creator fund, and now also the TikTok shop is a huge part of TikTok's content strategy.
>The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place.
This is a social quirk, not something that a newcomer can replicate. The problem is, for a new platform, your best content creators will quickly defect to other more monetizable platforms once they get the eyeballs. This is what happened to Vine. If you want to have a sustainable platform you have to keep your creators. YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform. TikTok paid AlixEarle millions to ensure they didn't lose her.
>1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist.
Or the article might have just wrongly failed to take into consideration TikTok as a viable alternative. Imagine that?
>2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library -
>how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube.*
HN is a niche platdorm mostly for older farts. Doesn't say anything about the viability of TikTok as YouTube replacement in general.
And an argument can be made about TikTok's viability to replace YouTube in its own thing, not that it already has done that. Unlike other platforms, TikTok has brand recognition, viewers, younger demographics, advertising and payments sorted out, and lots of initial content. If it can make a good proposition for longer YouTube style content, it has everything else sorted to be a viable alternative.
>YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform.
WTF YouTube wont have it? If another platform starts to be seen as a cooler alternative, creators can jump ship on a heartbeat...
"TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube."
Maybe this is true but it is also easy to get the impression because of algorithmic differences.
I think YouTube quite aggressively tries to find a global optimum for your viewing preferences and for that constantly throws a certain fraction of random content at you to test if you like it. At the same time there is high inertia for active engagement to influence your feed.
TikTok is completely different. Once you are locked into your niche it tries to keep you engaged there as much as possible but never strays into
other niches by itself. If you actively search for content outside your niche it is quick to adapt.
So, if you are just a lurker on TikTok it is very easy to get the impression that content diversity is low there.
Fwiw, the only content on youtube I see as both interesting and irreplaceable are music videos. News clips, recipes, sharing of opinions, etc are all on tiktok and don't waste my time. Virtually all long-form content is better presented in prose. Documentaries with critical clips can be purchased without having to watch ads or found on archive.org. Interviews and monologuing work just fine with podcasts and without having to be subjected to the most obnoxious ads known to man. The incentive to make videos long makes 95% of the clips shared with me unbearably boring, and I can't exactly search or scan the video for the interesting parts like I can text. Plus, did I mention how the ads make me want to rip my eyes and ears out?
Maybe if I had children, it would seem more attractive, but I just don't get the appeal outside of that.
TikTok is a fluke, created by the condition of how it was originally born as Douyin in China. It is also the only app that translated well from the domestic China market to international markets.
Being backed by lots of VC cash and Bytedance's revenues in China is a key factor in getting TikTok established overseas.
TikTok is the most prominent one, for a number of reasons, but other platforms that pioneered or copied the format also reached considerable prominence. Instagram Reels, Snapchat Stories, etc. And tellingly, when YouTube wanted to compete, they needed to build an experience quite separate from the rest of the site. There is a qualitative difference in how people perceive and consume this type of content. It's not just "vertical YouTube".
Of course each one of these platforms was backed by VC or stock market money, but that's the nature of the industry. Over the years, VCs ended up throwing a lot of money at Google and YouTube killers and that didn't get them anywhere, so that in itself isn't the winning formula.
Vine had more active users than Musically, and look what happened to Vine. It would have never had the investment internationally if not for the blow-out success it had inside Mainland China.
Combination of factors, but mostly the success Douyin had in Mainland China leading to the investment in TikTok internationally, given that no other Chinese social app had reach this level of penetration.
> The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc.
They go to Spotify and Apple Music to listen to music, they turn on cable TV or go to a website to get their news, they get the Netflix algorithm to suggest them related videos. Etc.
I wonder though, are all those YouTubers blissfully unaware of the problems created by making YouTube a monopoly for videos? Why not simply upload your videos on another platform as well? Or is YouTube engaging in this anti competitive stuff like "if you monetize here you are not allowed to upload elsewhere"?
But niches within YouTube can be disrupted. We've seen it with short form (TikTok etc), music (Spotify etc). We see it with specific niches of content creators (nebula etc). It's happened with livestreams.
I'm bad at predicting future, but could imagine niches like "publicly funded content" from e.g. EU public broadcasters moving away (e.g. NPOstart in NL) because of privacy issues or because they legally can't monetize their content anyway. Maybe university lectures? Or sports video? Game reviews by a specialized platform by steam? Video between 4 and 10 minutes? Podcast videos?
So YouTube as a whole will stay, but it can be chipped away at. Some chips may prove in themselves a small, but still good business model.
I agree with this. For example some tech creators are using peertube or similar.
University Lectures now posting in other websites as backup and people that do courses also have them in their website. What I think what will happen it's that YouTube will still be used for discovery to drive the traffic to these other sites until people finally migrate to the smaller ones.
I disagree, the internet is full of websites who were on the top of the world until they weren't. Its easy for content creators to post their content on multiple sites. The main moat is the critical mass of users.
/. Used to be the goto tech forum, but now we are all at hn. Digg was the place to be, now its reddit. Audiences can shift surprisingly suddenly.
YouTube has recently have had massive, competitive attacks on their business and have had to quite drastically amend their offerings.
TikTok, SnapChat and instagram has all had huge success in their short form formats.
It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together.
While the battle is far from over, had YouTube not reacted, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these mobile first competitors would have started experimenting with long form content by now.
There are also lot of experts (obviously its the internet so anyone could be anyone) who post educational content on their field of expertise in the 20min - 1 hour length video format. I don't see that type of content anywhere else.
It truly is amazing the sort of learning resources on the internet you can find if you are really truly interested in a topic.
>
There are also lot of experts (obviously its the internet so anyone could be anyone) who post educational content on their field of expertise in the 20min - 1 hour length video format. I don't see that type of content anywhere else.
Exactly. This is the kind of content that I love to watch (in particular also lecture recordings from top experts).
In my observation, this kind of content is hard to monetize by showing ads: I notice that the ads shown at such videos (for me and friends - which may be a biased sample) simply neither fits my interests nor the subject area of such videos.
Imagine watching a dev talk and get a very loud/bright/cheesy ads about some construction tool. That's the kind of stuff that makes me download those videos instead.
While it's a different niche, the worry for YouTube is that younger viewers generally consume a lot of short form video. They might eventually shift to watching more long form content as they get older, but if they're accustomed to one provider it's going to be easier for that provider to expand into long form content than for YouTube to persuade them to switch or use a second provider. So YouTube feels it has to move into short form in order to ensure long term maintenance and growth of its user base.
YouTube used to be mostly short videos. 2-3 minutes was typical. They've moved to longer videos by changing their algorithms to encourage creators to waffle on.
Every three days I have to close the "shorts" bar in YouTube, which has been returning ever more quickly when I remove it. I yearn for the days before even the "Okay, we'll remove it for two weeks" or whatever. It was obvious that things wouldn't stay that way.
TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram had the capital and the advertising parts completely figured out. They sidestepped a lot of legal troubles by limiting the length and by insisting on the vertical video format, unsuitable for pirated movies, shows, and most musical clips.
Those are very hard but also very solvable problems with a lot of capital. It's the same basic idea as creating a new media company, albeit a lot more costly to build. This is way too expensive to do in a seed round, but one of the other FAANG giants could try if they wanted to.
The even harder problem is just answering the basic question of why the viewer side should care, and why they should change their deeply-ingraned habit of going to YouTube to find something to watch. "YouTube isn't fair and transparent to creators" is not going to be compelling to very many people, if the experience of the likes of Tidal competing with Spotify is any indication. YouTube is valuable to creators because it aggregates a huge audience of viewers, those viewers stick around because it's addictive and there is a content flywheel already.
But if you actually had a truly good answer for why the average person should switch their YouTube habit to watching some other site instead, the resulting payoff is huge enough (and there's enough crazy risk-hungry investors in the world) that the capital and the moat problems could theoretically be overcome.
What was unique about Youtube is that it got to claim the first search result for "Lazy Sunday", a popular SNL skit at the time. That is how everyone came to learn of it. The "homemade" videos that followed were also necessary for its longevity, but initial discovery was critical.
Disrupting YouTube is difficult because the rampant piracy isn't as easy to pull off anymore.
I remember reading a history of YouTube once, and early on they were about to go under from the sheer weight of music industry copyright lawsuits and the cost of bandwidth. Google had the technology, heft and resources to do infringement detection at scale to really save them, not to mention their global bandwidth.
> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
The main reason youtube has no competitors is because people want free (no ads, no subscription) content. And people will gleefully ad-block your service.
Look up the story of Vid.me
It exploded in popularity around 2015-17. Many youtube creators moved to it.
Then they went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay a subscription, and no one wanted to view ads.
Internet users desperately need to look in the mirror to figure out why so many services have strangleholds and why so many services plain suck for users - the users aren't paying for anything in any form, and they celebrate that fact.
There is no paying by users - which is replaced by ads. But in my experience the number of ads on YouTube sky-rocketed. I had no problem watching 15 seconds of an ad, skipping and then watching the rest of the video. But I used to watch long-form videos - and now I have skip ads every 7-8 minutes.
I almost stopped watching YT. In the few instances I watch I will for a8 minutes or so and at the first ad I am leaving. I am wondering if behavior like this explains the drop in views, but the fact that revenue stayed the same....
On Youtube you also have a choice between watching ads or subscription, I don't see the difference. Yes you can use an ad-blocker, but they're making it harder and harder.
Youtube has no competition because it's a winner-takes-all market, and they won.
Creators go where viewers are. Viewers go where creators are. Rinse and repeat, and sooner or later you end up with a monopoly.
> Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)
I don't think that's as big as a problem as you do, as long as you don't care about exclusivity.
Think of the streaming music market: Youtube Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, ect, generally have mostly the same content and little exclusivity.
For example, you could have a feature where all uploaded videos are automatically uploaded to YouTube and all of your competitors.
A lot of creators that started with a YouTube channel nowadays have moved a lot of content to social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram reels. To me YouTube risk to be replaced (or it has already been replaced) by short videos, because a lot of people is no longer interested in watching a 20 minutes long video nowadays, especially new generations tend to spend a lot of time on just TikTok.
Or, as the algorithm seemed to be rewarding 10min+ videos at one point and a bunch of creators put out filler content, people no longer enjoy forced long form content.
This has been a huge thing in car YouTube, a drag race that’s over in 11 seconds stretched out to a 19 minute video. Realistically 5-7 minutes would’ve been heaps of time.
Currently many YouTube creators request additional money on patreon-style platforms. It either means that YouTube's paycheck sucks OR they are greedy. In both cases this reverts your arguments on paying to creators, because if some platform would be better in some meaningful property, it could steal the user base.
For example - background playing, less commercials, less distractions etc.
For a company, it's impossible. For any country except for the US, it's very easy: you use any of the million different protectionist measures available. Such as tarriffs, as the US itself has taken a liking to - in this case it would be their digital equivalent, namely digital service taxes.
The US government is extremely active in going after governments which attempt to impose digital service taxes. It was proposed in the UK, and quickly vanished without a trace.
Indeed they are, IMO this is the real number 1 reason behind the US tariffs, as well as behind his anger against Brazil, even more so than the prosecution of his fash club buddy.
What you do is get together with a bunch of other countries and announce it as a block. The US can only keep shooting itself in the foot so much. The thing they should've done is, very soon after the US tariffs were announced, say "We think this is a fantastic idea by Mr. Trump. Aligned with his views, we are instituting accompanying digital tariffs to fix the digital trade deficit. We're sure he'll agree that the trade balance should be corrected in both the physical as well as digital worlds".
The UK is effectively a colony of the US so them backing out is entirely expected. Luckily, other countries aren't. I think Brazil, Vietnam (?), Thailand (?) are ones that have already set a date for when it's being instated, and I haven't heard of them backing out. There's probably more. The EU has also confirmed today that they won't be cancelling the Google fine, though we'll have to wait and see what happens to their DST proposals. Given their serious lack of spine as well as how far the EU has gone to the right, I do expect them to cancel it, but who knows.
And again, there's a hundred other protectionist barriers that can be put up. This is the smartest way, salami slicing, as China has figured out decades ago. You begin very small and just ramp it up. You begin with something like banning Twitch because of moral concerns. Maybe even just from 8 to 8, when kids are up. Then you say national security concerns mean data centers of critical infrastructure all have to be hosted in the country. Then you expand that. Then you make Whatsapp (or whatever is the most popular messaging app) do a JV with a local player because it's a national security risk. And so on.
But Western governments don't have the wit to execute this, in which case a cruder measure such as a digital tariff is what's left.
That's the nice thing - they don't need to create one. They just need to put up some barriers, and there will be plenty local entrepeneurs who will be happy to create a competitor unencumbered by those same barriers.
This is not some wild theory, this is how it has generally played out in real life in the countries that did put up such meaningful barriers.
So if you succeed, how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what?
The only way i can think of it is some super-efficient neural codec with extreme video compression ratio that runs on mobile devices. Othewise Youtube wins by sheer scale google invested in it.
Majors CDN already exists. They can build on top of cloudfare or Amazon services.
If you think about it Amazon it's on a good position to build an alternative,they already have experience with ads and hosting video content
> how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what?
How does it work in the Internet itself? By decentralization, i.e., different servers serve their own small part. The same can work with the videos: see PeerTube.
This is why YouTube should be treated, like all large social media, as a utility. There isn’t a real path to competition here. Things like censorship or Google having exclusive rights to train their AI on YouTube data have a lot of negative impact on the world.
If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
Meta, Bytedance, Snap, and even X could fill the void relatively easily. a few new views focussing specifically on video, and video focussed apps that don't require a login for all the platforms.
YouTube is incredible, YouTube is poorly run. If I were making the laws, I'd do something similar to mandatory licensing of songs for radio: mandate that YouTube, as a sort de-facto content monopilist, provide third-party access to its database (upload, discovery, view counts, recommendations, etc). Devil is in the details, but well-done it would strictly improve the world.
Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.
Absolutely. TikTok and Instagram are usurping the social video space with 3,590M MAUs between them (compared to YouTube's 2,530M MAUs). Although YouTube continues to do fine, it's far from a monopoly, and I personally don't think it can be assumed that it will retain its flagship position.
There are aspects of YT that I simply cannot see TikTok or Instagram disrupting. Music is one of them. I just searched for one of my favourite musicians Lisa O'Neill on TikTok. There are literally 6 videos in the results, mostly just short clips of her singing live. On YouTube she has her own channel with 16k subscribers, all her official music videos, and several live performances, plus countless other channels like BBCMusic or TradTG4 with videos of her doing live performances. There's no comparison.
You don't have to be an exact copy of another company to disrupt them. YouTube had supported short form videos being uploaded long before TikTok came along.
The other platforms added shorts because they realized they were being disrupted and were losing users to TikTok.
Not being similar helped tiktok disrupt youtube. Framing losing users to competitors as "finding your sweet spot" is cope. There's a reason youtube built shorts instead of conceding to tiktok.
I do not see that as inherently correct. There have been and are several alternatives to YouTube and every single one has been actively sabotaged for primarily political/ideological reasons that have nothing to do with any of what you are talking about.
There is quite literally a conspiracy to suppress alternatives to YouTube because they do not align with the ideological parameters of the pernicious system. If you let that boot up from humanity’s neck, there would be many competitors to YouTube that would immediately atrophy YouTube. You seem to simply not be aware of what is going on outside of the authorized narrative. You will never be able to see the reality of things if you limit yourself to only the confines of the illusion matrix created for you by the system.
But yes, YouTube has a moat and like all moats it is built and maintained by the tyrannical monarch who believes himself to be chosen by God, but must hide away behind it from reality.
The replacement may be AI generated content or something.
Let me go into wild eyed futurist speculative mode here,
1- AI/LLMs are basically a response to the enshittification of Google. The reason this tech is so good and useful is because for years Google rewarded SEO optimized content a.k.a. long winded articles that repeat the same words over and over again and take ten years to make a point, which after training on all that gunk, your LLM can now do in one paragraph. The Google search monopoly gave rise to this lengthy word salad web content and blanketed the earth with it. The AI summarizer arose as a natural response. The web as we know it may now die.
2- The software industry seems to gravitate toward a layer cake of monopolies. E.g. we have Microsoft monopolize the OS and app platform, it becomes so awful the government even tries to put the brakes on it, partially succeeds, then we get the Web application platform. Sitting in a browser on top of Windows and others. Which Google goes on to monopolize. One may suppose that another platform will be built on top of this, which will be unmonopolized for a few years, and then someone will monopolize and enshittify that too, paving the way for the next cycle. It's turtles all the way down.
3- How this pertains to YouTube, well in the near future I suppose someone could ingest all of YouTube, and create AI versions of it, exactly like what was done with the web. And they might even get away with it once we set a bunch of legal precedents that this is not a thing you can get sued for. Presumably the AI platform would need to be different or better in some way, so perhaps we'll see a video platform where all the content is generated on the fly by AI, and you can get exactly what you want because it was trained on the videos that humans made. E.g. you can simply tell the AI you want to watch a comedy show called Three and a Half Horses where all the characters are reverse centaurs, and it will spin up as many episodes as you want until you get bored. And YouTube will continue to be an aging monopoly for decades, like Windows, but no one will really care because we'll be watching horses deliver Seinfeld quality jokes [1]
[1] It's not horses and it's not as good as Seinfeld, but someone's already doing this. So all that remains for my prognostication to come true is for a financial crisis to happen, at which point the government can use it as an excuse to print a random $500B and give it to a politically connected billionaire intermediary who will invest a fraction of it into the engineering, and history will continue to march forward as it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
If the US government was a function body, it would force Youtube to separate the hosting business and the website itself. The hosting would be a low margin low risk business which doesn't care about traffic either way. It's just selling infrastructure the way telecom companies do. It would be paid by websites to offer a frontend to users.
This way there is real competition on what matters, the user experience and still a economy of scale on what costs a lot which is actually storing and delivering videos.
Some frontend would be free with ads, some with a paywall but without ads. Some low quality, some high quality, some both. The user would have a choice. Each creator would be free to choose its licensing model. The hosting company would then only provide the video to frontends following the creator's wish.
The creator would pay by the bytes stored and the frontend by the bytes transferred. No incentive for the hosting provider to favor either of them.
Not perfect as the hosting company is still a monopoly, but it could be regulated to be neutral and behave like a utility.
The frontend has to cater to users and nobody else. They have competition and disappear if they enshittify.
Creators are free from the tyranny of google. They become the clients of the hosting company which makes steady money whatever the content.
Everybody wins, except google, which is fine by me.
This is incredibly funny considering AI generated content is currently endemic thrash on YouTube. AI generated fake trailers, universally hated zombodubbing, weird "touches" on shorts…
Which to be clear isn't a contradiction to your comment at all. It'll take work and time though, at minimum.
In a theoretical future The Algorithm would include content generation so that the platform can generate content for you instead of just suggesting it. Could apply to TikTok, Spotify, etc. if the generated content is good enough.
I think the angle of the story is compelling for being different: look at this athlete investing in startups.
What I'm more interested in is how is he getting dealflow:
>The high-growth startups in his portfolio include Anthropic (currently valued at $183 billion), Anduril ($30.5 billion), Ramp ($22.5 billion), Cognition ($9.8 billion), Neuralink ($9 billion), Strike (~$1 billion), and Polymarket (~$1 billion). He’s also a limited partner in funds including Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, Silver Point Capital, and Multicoin Capital.
If he has sizable investments in these companies at an early-ish stage then one has to ask: is this guy nostradamus? Or is he doing the classic early stage playbook and investing everywhere? Is there someone else making the bets?
It's really easy to look in hindsight at this guy and said he did a good job with his money, but I'd argue for any angel that wasn't already tapped into the network, this would be an impressive portfolio. It's not like Anthropic was hurting for investors. And if it is the case that Anthropic said "why not, I'd love to have a check from 2024 superbowl champion Saquan Barkley", then it's not really repeatable.
I have plenty of friends who made quite a bit of money from previous exits and have also read Zero to One, and their angel portfolio isn't as lucrative.
They did exactly that, they just outsourced it to cloudflare. The problem became bad enough that a lot of other people did the same thing.
If your argument is "companies shouldn't be allowed to outsource components to other companies, or cloudflare specifically", then sure, but good luck ever enforcing that.
This is the wrong way to look at it. The people in the US that you would want working in semiconductors aren't NEETs. They are at Facebook/Google/Jane Street/Citadel/McKinsey.
If I am a capable person working on delivering node improvements dealing with smaller and smaller challenges as the physics issues become quantum - I will eventually start to ask myself: why am I working on the hardest physics problems in the private sector for 150k/yr, when I can transition to Facebook or Jane Street, work equally (if not less) as hard and make 500k/yr?
The US has plenty of smart people. I'd argue more that the wealth inequality gap makes it _incredibly_ difficult to justify working for less, even in a field you love, when you can make top 1-4% of income doing something else.
The cost of assets (especially housing, schooling, and health care) is a huge problem, and your example is a poignant one. More funding could sway a few people in that pipeline to go towards semi-conductors, but the majority of workers aren't Jane Street quality, they are technicians and engineers doing lots of highly skilled "grunt" work.
Personally I think the other half of the problem, Big Tech paying so much might be solving itself right now, excepting really only the very very top.
When Silicon Valley was cheap enough to live in that people could casually start a company in their garage... Then people didn't have to relentlessly optimize for short term comp.
Today you have to work at FANG to afford a garage in the Bay area.
Look at the insane salaries/equity going to AI researchers. Those at the cutting edge of semi manufacturing/design are likely completely capable of reproducing the skills sets of those people- how do they not cut and run?
If the government has to provide the funds, so be it, make those jobs valuable enough and the skills will be there.
Is that true? I thought a lot of semi-conductor work is borderline blue-collar factory work and physical labor.
What you’re describing is in the R&D area and also not physically dependent on being colocated in a fab. So we should have an easier time finding that talent, although we’re probably underpaying them now, as you point out.
The most salient issue with Intel in the past 10 year was their constant delay of the 10nm node process. While TMSC was constantly pushing down the Node size, Intel struggled and ceded a lot of ground to AMD & Apple. At the same time Intel struggled to develop a competitive 5G radio, and GPU.
These are all downstream of R&D. If your fab cannot shrink it's node size, then you won't get the most profitable orders.
I’m not sure it would have made a difference if they hit 10nm faster. Apple has always wanted to make its own chips. Some marginal efficiencies wouldn’t dissuade them from investing in themselves. And it’s not like Intel was going to start a consumer PC business…
Yep, Apple buying PA Semi was an indicator of their intention all those years back. I suspect intel was just hoping they would fail at their ambitions.
I’ve always found that the default hacker advice is was a bit too complex for my taste. If I’m someone who hardly cares about archiving things - I’m not suddenly going to care about setting up a NAS/Ceph/Backblaze/S3.
The lowest friction tool for me for nearly a decade now has just been iCloud. It helps that I use Apple products everywhere (and I even have iCloud installed on my windows machine), but I just default to storing things in iCloud.
Searching is not the best but I’m confident the files are there
You can just plug in a USB3 SSD. The key is to have something easily transferred between machines as they are replaced. Then you just need discipline to keep everything important on that storage.
Either you think mass surveillance is wrong or not.
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