Does google's revenue cover for youtube's losses? Having the monopoly over anything is a pretty huge draw and something worth paying for regardless of a cia paycheck

@rher @Hoss At the very least, they would have pulled this ad injection stuff a lot sooner. Instead they lost billions per year in order to keep it as appealing as possible to everyone. I assume if the primary motive was profit they would do like X where they've largely shut it off to public consumption and just made it a paypig club.

I'm thinkin' the reason Google is shitting up YouTube has something to do with the fact that they ruined every other Google product that was actually profitable over the past ~5 years.

@Hoss @RustyCrab @rher the problem with social media is it's unprofitable, but it was like why Jeff Bezos bought a newspaper. It's a great mouthpiece and locus of control.

When you understand that, Elon Musk buying Twitter makes sense. In a way it was also like SomethingAwful where a moderator and heavy user of the site bought the site for the forums. No really. If you go there now it redirects to the forum and the old articles are a click away and unupdated after a trolls remorse post got nuked by LowT/someone else.

@Hoss @RustyCrab @rher The other question is, how do you monetize YouTube? It is the costliest kind of social media site to run overall, compared to every single other social media site on earth because video eats megabytes and they haven't moved to a more efficient codec yet. There's also the fact that aside from adblockers, the site payouts are poor (this is why every fucking YouTuber takes sketchy sponsorships from shit like Betterhelp, which is so tainted that merely accepting their sponsorship will cause the comments to be shitting on them, and moved to the Patreon model).

As much as the mere mention of WebP starts a shitshow, WebP was designed in part to solve this issue with images and WebP images are really fucking tiny. If it wasn't for the "one implementation" issue and a company everyone hates being tied to it, people wouldn't mind it as much.

Also, the streaming site competition was even worse for YouTube because the idiots at Google didn't know what people pay money for. It was bad enough for the Netflix wannabes of the world making slop TV shows nobody wants, but it was a million times worse with YouTube thinking people will pay money to watch MrBeast's reality show level competitions.

Twitter is mostly text posts/images, and aside from paid users short form video.

@Hoss @RustyCrab @rher The other elephant in the room is every competitor to YouTube either ends up branded alt-tech and attracting fringe weirdos (BitChute), dies off due to no money (Vid.me and numerous forgotten names in the halls of internet history like Metacafe), or both (Odysee after the LBRY fiasco).

One of the guys I followed back in the day shitting on the early signs YT was unsustainable had a good point about YouTube. YouTube started with a trick that nobody else can recreate: the site had heavy uploads of copyrighted material and clips from TV shows that lured people in. Then the copyright lawsuits/takedowns hit and Google swept in to buy it. This would start the transition from a creator driven site to a "top dog" driven site, of which people like RWJ, PewDiePie, Shane Dawson, iJustine, and more would dominate the site, with Cosmic Panda and feature removal turning the site away from it's community origins.

Before the Alt-Tech grifters found one way to keep people on your site as a containment site (which came after his videos), Veoh was infamously shut down for this very reason and had a high profile lawsuit.

It is literally easier to start up a competitor to literally any other social media site for this reason.

@PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss
>It is literally easier to start up a competitor to literally any other social media site for this reason.

It seems exactly the same with other social media sites.

* All the Twitter competitors are just the same as the Youtube competitors: either echo-chambers for political dissidents (e.g Gab or Parler) or decentralized protocols that only techies would use, despite it being functionally no different than email.
* When it comes to Reddit-like sites, there were both Immzy and Voat which are both now defunct and suffered from the same problems as Gab and Bitchute. Otherwise, you have the Lemmy instances which turned out to be an even bigger shitshow than Mastodon.
* As for Facebook, nobody would ever use a Facebook alternative, because those sites require your IRL friends and family to join. You are better off sticking to email or setting up an SMS group chat for your friends and family.
* Tumblr seems to have a few alternatives like Pillowfort, but I don't know much about them.

https://namelessrumia.heliohost.org/w/doku.php?id=tumblr_alternatives

@xianc78 @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss The difference with those sites is it's not a money sink to the same degree, and Reddit's purges led to far more containment sites for specific communities, and unlike imageboards they tend to be far more active.

Take rdrama.net as a prime example. It might as well be "like KF (during the 2010s) but Reddit" but that has a huge community. The same goes with ip2 refugees moving to communities.win.
https://communities.win/c/IP2Always/

They're not trying to be a normie website like certain alt-tech sites tried to project themselves as, they know their audience, and they are enjoying it.

@PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss Social news sites are nothing new. Reddit is unique in that it allows you to create your own communities within the site. Sites like rDrama are no different than sites like HackerNews, SlashDot, Fark.com, or MachoSucko.

@xianc78 @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss A lot of people didn't use Reddit as a social news site but as a forum. This is a very important distinction that summarizes why Reddit is nothing like the older websites.

That's what made the creating a community part so important as the site aged. It was no longer about sharing content and news, but also for say asking for help.

@xianc78 @Hoss @RustyCrab @rher Even this mindset spread to sites like rdrama, and /r/drama was like this as well. Here's a random ass rdrama post, where OP reads just like a post on a forum and the replies do too.
https://rdrama.net/post/276696/word-of-caution-for-aspiring-cs

Treating Reddit like a news aggregator is foolish when the userbase of it, and the former userbase of it did not use it like a news aggregator for the most part. There were even many users there making memes and shitposts, like on a forum. Reddit literally replaced forum culture, only to become the worst of it with automods and [REMOVED] [DELETED].

@PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss I lurked Reddit a few times back in the early 2010s just to see what it's about. I rarely saw any actual discussion, and for the time, I found much better discussion on actual forums.

Also, I think Reddit is losing relevance as a hub for discussion thanks to Discord (I honestly see people hosting their communities on there these days).