this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Crappy Design
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Noticed that theres no equivalent to r/crappydesign here yet so i made one
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I use Firefox and have uBlock Origin installed. I block ALL cookies from YouTube and Google and other Google sites. I am not signed into any Google properties and I have not seen an ad for over 10+years. I never use an app or mobile and use only a desktop on Linux.
Google will not win over products like uBlock Origin because, it's NOT an ad blocker, it's an element blocker. It allows the user to remove annoyances, and that sometimes includes ads.
The only way Google will get to force ads on people is if they REQUIRE you to sign in to it's services and force cookies on you. It will have to be a walled garden. Meta, Xitter, bluesky, reddit, will all eventually go to the walled garden because they are greedy. Users will leave and the Fediverse will grow.
People are fed up with ads and all the "improvements" that sites like YouTube make. Ambient mode, auto play, end cards, notations, all unnecessary. And we block it with element blockers.
I don't think the Fediverse can really provide an alternative to YouTube. The infrastructure required for the amount of data constantly being served and processed is prohibitly expensive.
Maybe not today, and never at the scale that YouTube is right now (that's not a bad thing), but never say never.
5 years ago no one saw a psychopath buying and actively destroying Xitter.
Technology changes quickly. It won't be long until 10TB HDDs are standard fare, 8G is everywhere, electric cars are 40% of the market etc.
Anything is a possibility and humans get smarter and more innovative. I know this because humans can carry a small computer in their pockets.
All it takes is 1 developer to add video support to lemmy, and make videos defederalized, then we could have different videos in different communities, we could have video-only communities, and those would be youtube-like.
I don't think code is the main problem here, it is the money to invest in the server space and bandwidth for it.
And that is all neglecting the platform effect. People are on YouTube because the stuff they want to watch is there and the stuff is there because there is an audience. Because there is audience, people are willing to dump their marketing budget there. Because there is a revenue split of these marketing budgets, people are there publishing stuff. And so on and so on.
You can have the greatest platform from a technical point of view. If nobody is publishing good stuff, nobody will care.
Not to forget the moderation problem. You would effectively need to verify each video for bad stuff, copyright infringement, or risk getting sued for noncompliance.