Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?

Re:Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete... by anderspitman on Thursday September 24, 2020 @03:24PM (#24582501)

We definitely need to decouple discovery from hosting.

I'm not even sure you would need to do any crawling. Maybe you could just let people submit links to videos hosted elsewhere. Kind of like you can submit any URL to the Internet Archive. But in this case you would use the frequency of duplicate submissions (along with in-house upvotes) to build out a recommendation platform.

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Re:Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete... by corobo on Thursday September 24, 2020 @05:11PM (#24583701)

I like the idea of Peertube for this, and a search engine popped up the other day too

Search: https://sepiasearch.org/

Hosting: https://joinpeertube.org/

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Re:Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete... by anderspitman on Thursday September 24, 2020 @05:38PM (#24583990)

Does it include videos from platforms other than PeerTube, though? If it doesn't support at least YouTube that's going to be a huge uphill battle to adoption.

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Re:Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete... by uniqueid on Thursday September 24, 2020 @10:26PM (#24585981)

We definitely need to decouple hosting from Google. It's lunacy to have a giant actor of debatable integrity (ie: Alphaboogle) hosting video for the entire internet — the entire internet!!!

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Re:Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete... by Lopalis on Thursday September 24, 2020 @05:47PM (#24584072)

Discovery is probably the only reason why I still use YouTube. If somebody could make something that provides a non-Google recommendation system with tools to categorize/organize the videos I've watched/want to watch, that'd be great. Assuming the UI is at least on par with Google's, I'd switch in a heartbeat. Not that their UI is particularly good, but the alternatives I've seen (like PeerTube) are frustrating to use on a basic moment-to-moment level.

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Re:Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete... by anderspitman on Thursday September 24, 2020 @05:58PM (#24584161)

The tricky part is getting enough adoption for network effects to make it generally useful. So you need it to be useful to individual users before it has lots of users. Sort of like how Goodreads is useful for keeping track of books you've read/want to read, even if you never read the reviews or look at the lists that are a result of network effects.

The question is what features of a video aggregator would be useful to the individual? Watched list? Playlist management? URL shortening for sharing videos? Better UI? Export list to youtube-dl?

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