I don't think I ever will, but the world needs an alternative that has a good encoding/optimization (like switching to lower bitrates on slower connections), a unified interface (familiar no matter what site it's being used on) and that doesn't tempt users to write custom skins for the video player.
Honestly I was thinking that some sort of integration where content creators could be directly contacted by advertisers - who would pay for in-video advertising by the content creator (this is more for personalities than for corporations) - and have a vetted way to be payed for their time / platform / ads would work (with companies paying to be part of that system). This would result in higher quality ads that are more beneficial to the content creator than the video distributor (a goal I view as equally good). And to benefit the companies advertising, you could create a tool where shorter clips of the advertisement could be sent back and forth, previewed, and approved as needed (if integrated with a payment system, this protects both parties from a bad deal).
I also think some, but not all, content creators would view paying for a small hosting company to store and stream their videos in the same way they view buying a new webcam or microphone.
While this might occur also with self hosted, YouTube is their main target and what they mostly care about.
So far so good, everyone is entitled to be paid for their work.
However they are quite aggressive collecting those royalties, to the point that there are royalty free song books for the children on primary schools, for them to avoid paying GEMA.
Since we are approaching Christmas, several typical Christmas markets did had another set of songs going around, a couple of years ago as protest.
So coming back to YouTube, if there is something on a video that might trigger GEMA to act upon, Google just triggers "Sorry this video isn't available in your country".
It was much worse a couple of years ago, when Google refused to pay any kind of royalty to GEMA and just blocked everything, they have kind of settled now, but it still comes up occasionally.
I've found the opposite, despite advertisements. For one thing, Youtube provides very good auto-generated captions and makes it easy to watch a sped-up version of the video. This saves way more time than would be taken up by looking at ads.
Of course people should still host their own videos but I see this as more like a backup, in case YouTube goes rouge somehow.
(How they came up with this name, given the existence of porn site Red Tube, I'll never know.)
Some genres are very popular on YouTube but not elsewhere (relatively), New Retro Wave been an example that comes to mind, good programming music.
People often assume that youtube-dl only works with YouTube because of the name, but it actually works with a really huge amount of sites, including Vimeo and Twitch.
You can see the full list of extractors that they have in the source here:
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_d...