For $900 a year you get 7 TB of video and unlimited live streaming. Yes, YouTube is cheaper (free) and brings a large audience. So you have to balance paying for something that's certain or being at the whim of the market maker.

I believe it's because YouTube is as much a content-discovery platform as a content-delivery platform. If you only use Vimeo, very few people will discover your videos.

I don't know why more people don't upload to both, though.

> whim of the market maker

As I understand it, Vimeo are also far from perfect in this regard.

An interesting anecdote: the recent Michael Moore film, Planet of the Humans, was made freely available on YouTube, but was taken down after a copyright complaint. They moved the video to Vimeo, where it remains. (I can't comment on the legitimacy of the copyright complaint, and this is not an endorsement of the film.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Release

Clips are a neat feature but they're a sharing feature, not a "help me watch" feature.

We have an large

Should be:

We have a large

There are great ways to host video for free on the internet these days so if you want to preserve some video or link it in somewhere (I've seen vimeo used as a hosting platform for tutorial videos on sites) then you have much better option than YouTube - but if your business is the videos then you either need to survive on YT or else get big enough to splinter. Given how Dlive (pwediepie) and Nebula (technical vlog folks) haven't taken off that well I'm guessing you'll need a lot more behind you to go indy - those subscriptions (hit the bell icon!) and the feed are the feature YT sells.

For professional videos, until there is a law that specifies that a monopoly (currently Google YouTube does seem like the only place where money making is possible) has to follow certain rules, they can throw you out for virtually any reason and it's not a secure way of making a living. So maybe it should be, but it currently isn't, and we can't currently force them to be.

Other platforms may not significantly help one to pay bills, I'm just wondering if that might not be okay given the sheer number of people who seem to have fun doing this. If not, we should make new laws.

Sure! We can definitely have charity content. Most of the content out there is.

Somebody's paying for most of the content most people want to watch, though.

A reasonable-quality single-camera A/V rig that a video producer would actually want to work with is comfortably in the middle four digits. Three cameras, low five. That money must come from somewhere, as must the rationalization for the time in a world as productized and generally fucked as ours, and "that's OK, art and media can just be done by wildly wealthy dilettantes in their spare time" is a shitty world.

I think it was prompted by seeing the name "Hodler" once and thinking it sounded like the cryptocurrency equivalent of Wainwright or Cooper.

Still, we need people to start contributing to alternative platforms. The YouTube monopoly only benefits Google.

So, bigger than that.

YouTube, like it or not, is the engine that drives many people's content business (the creators), and if the engine is denied to them, there really isn't a realistic alternative.

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're Google."

https://vimeo.com/355556831

It's like the alternative really is "depend on his largesse and submit to his whims beacuse you can't overthrow the king because he is too powerful".

Like it or not YouTube is in an extremely solid position that is unlikely to be shifted by anyone at this point.

Twitch somehow seems to do a pretty good job of competing with YouTube.

If you move and only get a handful of views, do you really have a channel? If you can't take your viewers somewhere else, do you actually have viewers or are you simply one of the interchangeable nobodies that YouTube uses to keep YouTube viewers engaged?

I'm reminded of the "influencer" who couldn't sell 10 t-shirts to her "thousands" of viewers.

I often hear the “host your own content” but I don’t feel like there is an equally vocal “make it discoverable, too” crowd. That is until I discovered the indieweb.

The indieweb’s usage of microformats and features like “webmentions” that can be crawled ad hoc, enabling decentralized, federated discovery (example: http://indieweb.xyz) is the web that-IMO-we should have gotten. Not one dominated by corporatized, professionalized platforms

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/moving-from-youtube-to-peertu...

I don't know what you guys expect to happen if you just keep using YouTube... Do you expect some benevolent spirit to fly down on a fairy chariot and "break up YouTube"?

Y'all just want to complain but do nothing else.

lbry.tv - Shows 6 videos on the front page above the fold. 3 are appear to be strongly political, and 1 is pushing a far right conspiracy. NEXT.

bitchute.com - Front page appears to be entirely far right propaganda and conspiracy theories. Lots of race baiting. NEXT

diive.tv - Front page appears to indicate this is a streaming site ala twitch.tv. Mostly game videos on front page, along with 3 race riot videos. Due to titles about "no-go zones", I assume they are all going to be far right propaganda.

bittube.tv - Half of the videos on the front page are not in English. Not a bad thing, but surprising to me. The rest of the videos seem to be focusing on bitcoin scams, bill gates vaccines, and videos calling the corona-virus a left wing conspiracy.

Based on what I have seen, I now assume most of these sites are for people banned from Youtube for spouting far-right propaganda. Would not recommend any of them, and will likely not be back.

It would be cool if these sites were able to mirror all of the youtube content as well, so you get all of youtube plus the content that people are posting to the decentralized or anti-censorship platform. Probably illegal but that's kind of the point.

Of the people who get kicked off of those platforms, a significant number will be socially obnoxious. They of course have "freedom of speech but not freedom of reach", and our legal structure has decided that the big platforms get to enjoy being both a platform and a publisher, simultaneously.

So when a competitor comes along, the natural way to differentiate is to say "we won't ban you unless you break the law". So the socially obnoxious flood to the new plaform, and pretty quickly, you've got a core user base of people who like that, and a few people who are merely willing to tolerate it on principle.

I don't think this was originally strategic, more a matter of not wanting socially obnoxious voices on the platform, because advertisers don't care for that sort of thing. But it so obviously contributes to the continued dominance of the big platforms that there's no chance they haven't noticed.

We are "Social Media X but with no moderation" is a braindead business strategy. I'm failing to find a source, but moot (this founder of the anything goes social website), once said of all the 4chan clones, the ones that never lasted were the ones that were started by people who decided to make their own 4chan clone after being banned from the site. Naturally people discovered those clones were filled with insufferable asshats and died off.

Naturally when you look at these video sites, very few of them actually offer the number one thing I would expect from a YouTube clone - revenue sharing. So not only are they not competitive with YouTube, but for a large group of people kicked off of YouTube, they aren't even substitutes.