Author here. I woke up to a surprising amount of traffic! Some notes based on the discussion.

This wasn't coordinated between Jeff Geerling and myself. However, I did mention the post in the Bluesky thread that Jeff was included in. [0]

I concluded the piece with “[t]his space is ripe for disruption”. That was a really poor choice of words. I've since updated the piece to better match what I was trying to say. Diffs are available. [1]

On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium.

This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet. I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the video from RedLetterMedia that I mentioned in the post. They have a huge following and were blaming something that might be related? Or might not? It's really hard to tell! I'm not a YouTube creator, but I assume having metrics that determine your livelihood shift out from under you as a creator must feel awful.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/gavin.anderegg.ca/post/3lyeayuckv22...

[1] https://github.com/gavinanderegg/gavinanderegg.github.io/com...

> On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium

Why? Because the tools that allow them to take almost 50% of the revenue (they say you earn) have low friction?

I would say the opposite. There is no customer service. There are endless legal pit traps that allow larger channels and companies to predate on smaller ones alongside the AI channels, which lead to the same end. The entire point of the platform is to push as much advertising as possible, while mutating a user's search habits. Ironically, this leads to videos becoming borderline useless for many use cases, without taking them off youtube. This is not a good platform.

I'm sure I feel this way because I don't have a bunch of content I'm afraid of being yanked from the platform. Another "benefit" of having a big youtube presence, is I would be forever worried about implied retaliation.

Linus Tech Tips has also noticed some really odd view to like ratio stuff happening recently as well. They discuss it in last weeks WAN show.

Something is going on.

I host videos on my own server and there's Vimeo and Mux. I guess you're saying it's the free-as-in-beer service that has a social network and recommendation network attached to uploaded videos.

> This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet.

I realized this back in 2009 and tried really hard to start using other platforms, but wound up just not watching YouTube as often instead. I hope this changes. The only true competitors are places like TikTok and Instagram, but they don't feel like a true replacement to the rest of us who don't want to be tied to "social media" but YouTube shorts are evidence that it does compete with YouTube directly.

I think YouTube even tried to have "IG Stories" at one point iirc.

Hmm,

One of the things that is notable about Youtube is there was once competition (Vimeo and Daily Motion) but they effectively outdistanced it. A bit like Amazon and Ebay. There are related things semi-competing like Twitch.TV etc, also, of course.

I suspect that the situation with the earlier video providers is that they were "bleeding cash" for many years until the process finally reversed - if they were the winner (again like Amazon).

I think this long capital investment process is what means that no one wants to or expects to step into the ring with a large, successful player. It took that player a long time to learn to be successful, that player will fight you to keep their relative monopoly and you will have to risk a lot of money.

Youtube content creators are effectively Youtube's suppliers. Youtube is squeezing and its "normal" - squeezing suppliers is part of the monopolist's playbook. Its unfortunately convenient for Youtube that people have been willing to make good quality video for nearly nothing since the tools to do so became cheaply available.

Why there is "no competition" for Nvidia, Amazon, Youtube, etc. Not that I like the situation but it's not an "unnatural" situation.

Structurally there's only a few ways disruption can happen to a platform that has existing centralized hosting of metadata and centralized hosting of data. Either the disruptor also centralizes both, decentralizes just the data or decentralizes both.

The second isn't viable in most real world cases until something changes the huge expense of decentralized CDN fetching. My gut says that the third would be on the losing side of almost every network effect.

> This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet.

Well, technically there's lots of user submitted videos posted to p*rn sites... Apparently even started posting educational videos there, like math and neural networks and stuff.