YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users
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Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
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There will never be a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else is willing to run at a net loss for a decade before seeing their first profitable quarter, like Google did with YouTube.
Turns out, free video hosting is expensive as fuck.
That sounds reasonable but you're thinking way too small. Lets not forget that Tiktok is already more popular than YouTube with a very, very large chunk of younger people, for example.
But besides that, let's not forget that absolute giants in the business have been toppled. Look at Yahoo! as one example. Hell, even entire countries can fall within a few decades, whole empires.
So, assuming that there will never be a decent YouTube competitor is a very limited way of looking at it. Who's to say Google will still exist in any meaningful market leading way in 20 years?
Sure they're big now, but what if the entire face of the internet and how we use it and what we want fundamentally changes (say with the addition of highly advanced AI that brings changes we can't even predict right now).
There will absolutely one day be a service that can rival YouTube and eventually replace them, it's the same with every product from every business, it's the circle of life I suppose. But whether that will happen within the next 5 years, or 15, or 30, only time can tell :-D
Never say never, though!
TikTok isn't YouTube. It's two different method to consume videos. TikTok doesn't replace YouTube per se. Some people split the available attention time between them and in favor of TikTok.
It will be hard to compete on the YouTube field. But, there is multiple places for a different way to consume video with a different user experience.
On the YouTube field, it will be hard. I don't see creator moving with their community. The same issue has with let say Reddit, Twitter, etc.
That’s the commenter’s point: YouTube might not be replaced, but that doesn’t mean it cannot disappear.
Im surprised Amazon hasn’t stepped into the space to advertise their own products. They already own a huge storage cloud backend.
...i'm surprised pornhub hasn't rolled out an all-ages video site...
They already make a killing with their cloud with much less business risk in the form of AWS.
Maybe. But give decentralised federated hosting a few years. It might never be a rival but it's possible it will become a viable alternative.
If PeerTube can fix their major discoverability issues, it can potentially pose a real threat to YouTube. But that's the biggest thing keeping it back right now, is that it's impossible to just find anything you want to watch.
Unless you want to watch hour-long seminars on Linux. In which case, PeerTube's got you covered.
I think discoverability is in its infancy for the fediverse in general.
But I'm old enough to remember when vast tracts of the internet were hard to find and everyone used directories. When that changed, everyone jumped online.
Yet there is a gazillion of porn sites out there. The thing is, once YouTube become shitty enough its users are itching to find an alternative, porn operators like MindGeek might launch a competitor site because they're already have a scalable video delivery service. I wouldn't be surprised if they're already working on it.
It's not really a technical problem anymore. Which isn't to say it's easy to run such a site, but rather to stress that YouTube is like a social media site. The value is in the users (and the content that they create and consume). You could make a perfect YouTube clone, but good luck getting people to use it when their favourite creators don't. And good luck getting creators to care when the users aren't there.
And Lemmy is misleading. Most people don't use Firefox. Heck, most people don't seem to even use ad blockers.