And that means you can't just say "If you don't like it, leave, it's a free service", because it's not that simple, as leaving in reality means "give up on your business", and most of people just can't afford that. Youtube has them cornered and thus needs to be careful, since it's not a game, it affects people's lives. For many accidental blocking of channel can mean they'll be living in their cars until the Gods of Google show mercy and fix the error.... and if they do it, since sometimes you don't even get a meaningful reply on what happened, just a template message.

The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Think of it in terms of paying users: how much would you have to pay someone to switch from Youtube to your site? Multiply the average by the number of users, and that's the advantage Youtube has over competitors.

The reason I ask is because, despite all its flaws, YouTube is one of the treasures of the internet. And I wonder if we'd lose it by breaking up Alphabet.

I am not pro-Alphabet and 100% believe Alphabet needs more regulation, and quite frankly does need some trust busting, but I'd be really sad to lose YouTube. Yeah, there's vimeo but it's clearly not a direct competitor. I also fondly remember stage6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage6).

However as I understand it the product itself isn't tied to the Google infrastructure. YouTube's main value is the user base, both of viewers and of publishers. It would be a technical marvel to move it off of Google's infrastructure however I don't think that there is any feature that they wouldn't be able to provide anymore. It would certainly be more expensive, but at YouTube's size you could probably work out similar deals with other providers (or with GCP) so I'm not sure that the prices would rise that much. (IDK, maybe 15% increase in cost between provider cut and raw cost increase?)

> The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch.

Only if we're assuming that users and uploaders will only ever use exactly one service at any given time. No reason why that needs to be the case; nothing stopping people from uploading to YouTube and Vimeo and Twitch and DailyMotion and PornHub and LBRY and PeerTube and whatever other platforms, and nothing stopping people from viewing from those platforms, either.

The cost to enter the video sharing market is extremely low, especially in this day and age where you can rent computing and storage capacity on the cheap around the world.

The problem here is in the network effect, not in scarcity.

Suppose YouTube disappeared tomorrow. Where would everyone go? Probably odysee. So why don't they go there now? That's why Youtube is a natural monopoly.

I named multiple said competitors. And they seem to get plenty of traffic themselves.

> So why don't they go there now?

Do people know about odysee? First I've heard of it (to my recollection at least).

I mean , YouTube is huge, but we had moderation-at-scale before ML was a popular phrase to bandy around.

'ML' and 'Algorithms' are just convenient non-human bogeyman that any corporation can pin all their woes on without batting an eye right now -- a convenient explanation tool for when things go wrong.

I am going to take a bold stance with this next statement:

An algorithm cannot be at fault -- it is always the fault of those that implement such algorithms.

YouTube and their community is huge -- YouTube has revenue fifteen times greater than Yahoo. 'Too big to X' should not be a tolerable excuse from any industry -- especially so since YouTube/Google has been pushing the idea for years that being a YTer is an actual profession.

Imagine for a moment coming into work and being told that you're fired because an internal corporate policy checker decided that something you did in your past work history was worth of termination; and then 24 hours later being told to continue coming into work because a mistake had been made, but with no further explanation.

This kind of 'workplace' would be intolerable in any real 'work environment'. Just more evidence that YTers are not really treated like any other partner or employee anywhere else in the world -- and that they should probably curtail that language if they want expectations to match the reality that their 'employees' experience.

>People forget that they get these free services for free,

YouTube is not a free service. This fallacy needs to go.

To anyone still not convinced, YouTube takes 45% of all ad revenue generated on videos that YouTube had no part in creating.

Your work comparison just isn't valid because there is no employer with a number of employees within several orders of magnitude of the number of videos on YouTube.

I feel like it's the exact opposite: we're hearing about them because these are the ones that slipped into public awareness. The inadequacy of automated moderation without any real semblance of human oversight has been rampant and frequent for about as long as the concept has existed.

This would be true if youtube/google created the content as well. Youtube essentially gets the content "for free"... and then decides what to do with.

Also, I'd be really interested to know how much the Youtube team payed to build this classifier and how that compares to paying human moderators.

At this point, I view YouTube like I viewed bars that allowed smoking--it was sufficiently popular that nobody could compete against it even though it was harmful. So, we needed legislation to move us to a different local minimum.

And, I find this very painful because I firmly believe that smoking bans have killed live music. But I also understand that nobody was ever going to do the right thing while doing the bad one was so profitable.

What's the connection?

It’s an extreme claim with very little rigor.

By almost all measures, it is. Number of artists, average age of artists, revenue, number of customers, etc.

> as opposed to recorded music becoming way more accessible through technology.

Except that by most measures the general public consumes VASTLY less music than they used to, so it isn't accessibility driving it.

Now, you could suggest that it's because of a bunch of changes: video games, social media, etc. That would at least be plausible.

Compared to when? 1800? 1970? 2010?

You can have a small venue (<100) and it will trundle along. You can have a big venue (>1000) because it probably reached self-supporting.

However, we lost a LOT of 100-1000 size venues from about 1990 to about 2005. And those are the ones that working musicians can make a living off of. But those need the stupidly profitable contingent that goes along with smoking and drinking. The single craft beer drinker isn't going to generate enough money to support such a place.

You could see this even before the smoking bans in areas which had sophisticated dancing (swing, ballroom, etc.) groups. If your venue somehow attracted the young dancing contingent, the venue was going to vaporize within 6 months. Everybody loved them--they tended to be polite, didn't harass the waitstaff, looked good, prevented highly skewed M/F ratios, etc. -- except that they spent next to no money compared to the general public so the owners HATED them. This was in stark contrast to the elder dancing contingent who smoked and drank like fish and could keep clubs alive long beyond their expiration date.

Of course, all venues make sure to have outside areas for smoking, because that's the sensible thing to do.

Although, if you say Nashville or New York, you're not helping--those are mega anomalies and all the musicians are already there which makes the situation untenable.

Side Note: WTF, people? Why downvote this person?

However, I am concerned that a lot of these smaller venues and promoters will struggle to survive the pandemic lockdowns, unless our governments pull themselves together and support cultural venues, instead of focusing so hard on sports. Culture isn't just something you play with a ball :-)

As for the downvotes, probably general disagreement or spillover from other discussions where someone has taken offense to what I wrote.

Same in pubs. The smoking-and-drinking crowd got edged out by parents who for some reason want to bring their kids to the pub. They will have brought their own drinks and snacks for the kids too. The mother will have a small glass of wine and the father will drink half a pint of "craft beer", stretched out over a couple of hours while their kids run around screaming and annoying the few remaining paying drinkers.

I loved pubs in the old days but even before COVID they were dying out because they just don't want their loyal paying customers any more.