It would be wrong to call it a replacement, but this is a good place to plug [email protected] - there's more quality content on there than many might suspect, especially if you are into FOSS and people tinkering with stuff they are passionate about.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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They already did something similar back in the day. I remember watching a music video some ~10 years ago where they placed an ad like five seconds before the end of the song, right at the musical climax, ruining the mood with surgical precision. I was absolutely infuriated and went off to Google wondering if there's a way to block ads. And the rest is history.
I've met some people who ask why I care so much about not having to see ads. They don't care if there's youtube ads every now and then. At this point they have to care.
I am used to listening to streams while walking, but I've been noticing the most annoying ads pop-up when I'm interested in something they are saying. This isn't going to make me pay attention to those ads, it's going to drive me to the plethora of other services I can use. The worst thing about it is that it doesn't even pause and cache the stream, meaning that if I was listening to something interesting, the ad just causes me to miss it. Google just keeps eating its own tail.
Why use Gemini and AI when they already have a feature in youtube where they show the "most watched moments"..?
because immidiately after sponsor segments are frequently watched more than once, as are walls of text.
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Advertisers are invasive like zebra mussels.
They mean - maximize irritation? Put ads in the most obnoxious way?
There's a good global task for FOSS alternatives of YouTube and other places where life happens.
A decentralized scraper. Something similar to SETI@home, or that hentai analog for storage. So that based on some metric YT content would be divided between users willing to contribute their machines and accounts to scraping YT (a bit similar to searching DHT, and probably some kind of DHT would be useful), and then they'd download that and re-publish in some p2p alternative.
TBH probably also good for that little of the web that is still possible to represent as static pages and browse via links.
The issue is that alternatives lack content, and the closed nature of proprietary services gives them an advantage - there is content there which doesn't exist outside of them.
And people just reuploading by hand what they themselves consider interesting are a little fraction of the majority that doesn't bother.
The core problem is that hosting and streaming videos costs money, and that money must come from somewhere. Unless there is someone with really deep pockets just paying for everything, such a platform must use subscriptions or ads to make some money. Netflix & others use subscriptions, YouTube uses ads, and both even offer combo models.
How would a free variant of YouTube work on the long run? Setting up a small model on a server in your home office, maybe with donations to cover initial hardware costs is not the issue at first, but once you need a computer center and employees you'll need some serious, regular money coming in.
How would a free variant of YouTube work on the long run?
Some options:
- charge channels for hosting costs - most channels make more from sponsorships, patreon, and merch than ads; could even be free for smaller channels
- charge customers for premium features - like Discord Nitro; they already have this in the form of super chats or whatever
We've had bittorrent for many years.
The issue is creating a global index and dedicating some storage to the less popular (at the moment) data.
One can have paid storage provided over such a network, available only to subscribers. So you want to fetch a video from the global index, there are no peers having it online for free or their upload speed it atrocious, but there are some offering it not for free. You choose them and download, or maybe you have something like trade and auctions automation in MMORPGs - setting for auto-purchase and auto-sale with caps for what you would pay.
That requires a payment system, though, that one can seamlessly connect to identities in such a network.
But even running an indexer on a YT-like scale would need serious money, even if you spread the hosting and streaming load around. And for most users, this would not be attractive, as you probably would have to torrent the data first and view it later.
Then there is the issue with responsibility. If someone throws e.g. CSAM into the system, who could be held responsible? Who would have to deal with DMCA notices? Who would deal with issues like "Dictator X demands all videos showing him in a bad light to be removed immediately!"
And: Opening a payment system is a serious can of worms, especially if you need it to work internationally.
Honestly, I'm not against a YT alternative, but I don't want it to die after three weeks because the person behind is was too optimistic to consider to potential problems.
All this also doesn't take into account how creators gets paid.
It's a big system, with enough moving parts that I understand the ad/pay model existing. I just wish they weren't such prices about how they choose to operate it sometimes.
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alternatives lack content
Maybe I'm old or smthing, but for the past years content on yt mostly sucks.
Few interesting and original channels and then galaxy of reacts to, recaps and AI garbage slop reading Reddit.
Yes, there's a lot of crap, but there's also a lot of great content. That's what happens when you're basically the only game in town, you get basically all the content.
I agree, but it's still the place to look first.
Our YouTube experiences are vastly different. Their algorithm frustrates me because it consistently serves up interesting videos I want to watch when I open the app to seek out something specific. My Watch Later playlist has become huge.
I am a YUGE fan of FreeTube, a cross-platform YT client for the desktop. You can subscribe to channels, create, save, import, and export playlists...and no. Ads. Tis the bees knees.
And just a friendly reminder to donate to your favorite FOSS projects.
THIS IS AWESOME, THANK YOU!
(Apologies for my capslock, but I really am stoked.)
Could probably spin up a new edging community
Ublock Origin in a Firefox fork and PipePipe with Sponsorblock on mobile. I'm perfectly ready to just export/delete my Youtube account and move on if it stops working.
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