Left unchanged, the market can have new entrants that undercut the major player. In this case, any new video playform that has fewer ads could steal market share from youtube. Rumble has entered the market to do just that.
Network effects do make this challenging, but that is for the market to decide. The more creators that dual upload and then see number shifts over to a YouTube competitor, the better,as it will force YouTube back into competition.
The market will solve this.
Just look at Twitter, it completely spit in everyone's faces and even still people cannot get out of its grips on them.
The only platforms that have even remotely survived are platforms that also own an ad network, or some other secondary source of income (like Kick and their Crypto gambling site or Twitch with their ad stock) as a way to shovel users into that fire. The market cannot solve this and has no incentive to do so. Again, it's a complete fantasy that has not once proven true.
People can get out of them. People refuse to get out of them. Likely this is because YouTube and Twitter are still the most efficient platforms regardless of their regressions.
I used to have FB. Now I don't. I used to have Twitter. Now I don't. I used to have Android. Now I have Grapheneos. I used to use gmail. Now I use Fastmail, Mailcow, and shared hosting. I used to have Instagram. Now I don't.
You can decide to not be a user of a service. You can build your own! Or more easily, you can migrate to a competitor.
All of this clamoring for more regulation is nonsense. We have a market that can solve these problems. But markets work by votes. The path is harder if you take the road less traveled.
It's not fantasy. This is how markets work; how economies work.
Let's look at something like FB. At one point they were absolutely the social company. But other competitors have entered the market. In some instances, new markets were created, like Tiktok. Those new products took users away from FB. In some instances, the users will never return. This has happened precisely because someone somewhere decided to make something and challenge the existing market.
> I didn't even mention regulation
My bad. I was getting this thread confused with the one about AI regulation.
People refuse to get out of them is the market. That is the point of their growth and dominance model.
People refuse to get out of them because they are still the most efficient providers. Regardless of the user experience degradation, YouTube still offers the best product. For example, Rumble doesnt let me start looking for ve events from the beginning. YouTube does. Better experience.
My hypothesis: if YouTube only worked on Web Integrity browsers and forced a four hour ad before content was played, people woulf move elsewhere. They havent yet because YT is still the best.
AND this is tech. The place that "network effects" was coined.
Private capitalists controlling the economy is practically the definition of capitalism. And it's bad for society indeed.
That is not the definition of capitalism. The definition of capitalism is a system in which owners of capital control their capital in accord with their interests, which translates into competition because everyone else is also controlling their own capital and labor for their own interests. The natural outcome of this system is monopoly, which does closely resemble all the harms and dead weight loss of communism but, unlike under communism, the government is supposed to be there to stop total control, bust up the monopolies, and restore competition. It did a passable job of this until the Rehnquist supreme court in the 70s and it's time to start back in that pre-rehnquist direction. It's never time for communism.
This doesn't mean there's no place for VC funding, there's lots of legitimate uses for it (i.e. handling mismatched cost/revenue flows from expansion where there are a lot of upfront costs and cash flows come over the following years). Just that it's usually more profitable to be a monopolist/oligopolist and so that has been where the money has been flowing, at great detriment to society.