They do evil, or at least won’t not do evil.

And they require us to trust them?

Don’t put all the financial costs on one single company. Spread the financial costs out among lots of people and run small peertube servers. If a creator becomes popular, then the people watching their videos at the same time will be sharing the video with anybody else who loads it afterwards and take load off the server so it does not crash.

The big problem with Google is that they are in, or a part of, almost everything on the internet, and it all funnels users back to them one way or another.

Their search favors their own things, so if you search for anything, YouTube will come up most of the time. This by itself is enough to kill competition. Their search also recommends their browser heavily if you’re not using it, which is how they became the most-used browser, which defaults to their search, which by default recommends YouTube in most searches.

Even if you don’t use Chrome, don’t worry because they will pay absolutely nuts money to be the default search on their competitors browsers, which is again more people to YouTube. And if that isn’t enough, most browsers are built on Chromium, which Google maintains, meaning they can sway the course of their competitors browsers over the long term, which they are doing by selectively killing and bringing in certain technologies over years.

Android, which is also Google, I believe has YouTube installed by default, or at least all of my phones have had it. Trying to compete with defaults is almost unachievable. It’s easy to think that people will change settings, but most people don’t.

I agree that the technology and infrastructure needed to run YouTube is huge, and it’s amazing, but that’s only part of the story. Google has so much control of so many things that even if you could build the same thing, that’s only the beginning.

But it’s not only YouTube, it’s the same for Gmail. Gmail has so much market share that they can kill competitors by making another email service seem unreliable. And all of their services point back to Gmail.

It’s not just that they have a monopoly on video, they have a monopoly on the whole internet.

do you think that the content creators that you enjoy would be able to exist as profitable businesses

I’m probably showing my age, but there was a time in human history, where people created things not because it was or could be a profitable business, but because they were inspired to share their vision, or humor, or art with the world. In the years before 2008, and in this mythical time on the internet, we did and were and created simply “for the lulz”. If anything, I think that focusing on the idea that your job on the internet is to “generate content” is a toxic leak from neoliberalism/ VC culture. Its the commoditization of the self.

No one joined SA’s or Farks photoshop contests because it made them money. We did it because it allowed us to be funny, to one another, for one another. We pitched in together to cover the server costs and that was that. In fact, that’s how Reddit stayed alive. We pitched in together to cover server costs so that we could do things for ourselves (memes, nudes, music, whatever…). I learned to code making crappy flash games for new grounds not because it was profitable, but because it was fun, and cool to be a part of a community who loved to make thing and then give them away.

The enshitification of all things is a symptom of a broader issue, which is the commoditization of the process of self actualization, which happens through lived experience. The human desire to build, to create, to make art, to talk, chat and communicate; its part of a process where we find out who we are.

There are plenty of things in life that are worth doing that aren’t profitable. The ideal that we should allow a neo-liberal doctrine to determine how we find out about ourselves via our creative expression, for me, is worth resisting.

Removing content that didn’t violate the DMCA is not how it should work and older content should obviously still be removed but you don’t have to get a strike for that

Uploading content to other websites is just not worth it. You won’t get views anywhere else.

I mean that I can’t really use other video platforms because the content I want is on YouTube. If you upload videos you also kind of have to use YouTube because otherwise almost no one is going to see your videos and you also can’t really make money with it.