how would someone go about building a better YouTube?

[Tadpole]

Watching Matpat's going away video, and dan and Phil gaming's reviews of their older content got my gears turning a lot about the old YouTube that I grew up with. The shitty cat videos, the emo kids, the first unboxing a, the screen cast o matic animal jam and Minecraft videos. It all feels largely forgotten when we start talking about YouTube 'alternatives'.
I use freetube on my laptop and libretube on my phone so it's not like I'm blind to the conversation, I find it really cool that we can still watch the videos on this silly little app without the corporate overlords of Google profiting off of us and our information, and without feeding the machine to an extent.
But I feel like those miss what I want when I want a YouTube alternative.

I dream of a small video platform that is as personal feeling as old YouTube was, while avoiding the pitfalls it has fallen into. I don't want to watch 'content creators'. I want to watch people! People not appealing to an algorithm just to make money to be able to reliably pay their editors and writers. I don't need a lot of highly produced videos.

People always complain about smaller video platforms saying they'll never have what YouTube has because of the lack of drive for creators to move off of it. Why is this an issue? Why do we need to keep to the same shit forever to appease the beast?
One thing that I worry about is, in a universe where YouTube currently exists, not many people would want to be a part of a smaller platform because so many people post on YouTube in the hopes of eventually getting paid for it, but this didn't used to the way back then. It wasnt even a thought that you might be able to monetize your videos :(

And always I worry about the inevitability that, if something like this becomes successful, and it grows to a point it couldn't easily sustain itself, it will fall into the same problem of needing advertisers money to survive, and in order to do that they would need to put them on videos, and in order to do that they would pay creators, so on and so on. Till history repeats itself.

So I pose the question to those more knowledgeable on the matter, more knowledgeable about security, websites, and how money fits in to hosting so many videos, how would you redo YouTube in the current day. This question can be answered in any amount of detail you want, I want to know and learn as much about it as I can.

Tldr: YouTube and corporatism sucks and I want to think of how a real YouTube alternative with the goals of old YouTube would be able to exist

[DiffydaDude]

People always complain about smaller video platforms saying they'll never have what YouTube has because of the lack of drive for creators to move off of it. Why is this an issue? Why do we need to keep to the same shit forever to appease the beast?

That's exactly what i'm saying! Literally everybody ive talked about this too says this, and honestly im super fucking tired of that. Its like everything on Youtube is never actually making shit. I'd honestly rather have more youtubers leave the platform if it means that people actually make fun videos again. I honestly am having trouble describing this, can you help me

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

Hi.
I believe the issue is not a lack of technical options - there is a bunch of yt alternatives. The problem is that there are too few people who use these platforms to let a stay there look worthwhile.
Personally I use(d) dalek.zone for some uploads, but honestly: The fact that you have nearly no viewers, and many of the other videos on the platform are problematic reduces the fun a lot. Didn't bother to upload my last trailer there, maybe I will do it in the days to come. I have, unfortunately, no solution for this. Maybe a heavily moderated PT-Instance could do the trick?

[ralfwause]

Well, i think peertube can be a viable alternative. Sure, you don't get the opportunity to have 20 quadrillion viewers and there is no (build in) monetization option, but it is in a way what early youtube was: Cat videos, cringy nerd content, unboxing, ranting, local content... The "problematic" videos, i think, are just what we have to live with, if we don't want a corporate controlled walled garden, there are shitty people out there who will post shitty stuff... its in some way human nature.

[SquidDied]

id say if you want an alternative to youtube that has the same mainstream presence then we really need existing youtubers to either switch platforms or use both, but theres no incentive for them if they dont feel they have an audince there. i dont see this cycle ending soon unless something really revolutionary happens BUT if we just remove this mainstream presence problem from the picture that could be great direction for a new platform.

i really do miss the personal nature of how yt used to be, people just had fun making whatever they want for their own enjoyment. even very large creators that managed to monetise their stuff got that way just from goofing around and that feeling was more inspiring to me than anything. go back to like 2007 on the wayback machine and it seems like a totally different site, even the layout has such a humble feel to it.

although i think any new video sharing site nowadays will encounter a problem where they recieve an influx of extremist types making accounts because theyve been booted off more mainstream outlets, and kind of making it their home. thats a thing iv seen in plenty of fledgling sites and without some real good moderation theyll meet the same fate. of course youtube had this problem back in the day and still does, but back then the internet was nowhere near as interconnected, people didnt have pre-existing massive followings and if they did, were relegated to niche communities that didnt spread all over social media.

i think if we were to envision a small, albiet open, video sharing community akin to 00's - 10's youtube wed need a very clearly defined site ethos and robust moderation team from the start

[Memory]

Vidlii was unregulated, and that site went down the drain since a month or so. Will it come back?
Bitview still exists. The first new "breed" of influencers and Let's Players is around there, trying to be king of the subscribe rankings (around 500 subs would catapult you into the Top 5 right now). The site looks humble and safe so far. The angry Vidlii mob seems to have passed on somewhere else and didn't got a foothold on Bitview. Bitview is regulated somewhat like Youtube.
To be honest, the decentralised sites like the Peertubes failed to impress me. Videos are too large to share them over this Peer-to-Peer structure, if you expect to watch them immediately. It was too inconsistent and slow for me, website too bloated as well and didn't work in Palemoon properly.

My money is on Bitview.

Links to other Melonland threads regarding that topic:
https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=1889.0
https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=2239.0

[lime360]

Links to other Melonland threads regarding that topic:
https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=1889.0
https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=2239.0

oh hey! my topic got featured!

also, i would like to mention an underrated youtube alternative called vanillo, it's basically what if modern youtube was better, the only flaw is the ads (in the frontpage, not in videos so that's probably fine)

i also remember that vanillo made an april fools joke about google's aqusition and a fake ai model called "vanillogpt", intended to replace video writers

[Kallistero]

After reading some of the replies here, it has me thinking that old YouTube is in the mind. By that, I mean that if you really truly want old YouTube back, then a technical solution requires understanding of not just a technical puzzle, but a cultural one. The idea of the platform itself incentivizing views & influence for your videos almost has to go out the window if you want people to just post whatever silly home videos come to mind. No matter how small the site is, then as long as people go there with the idea that they should build some sort of following and be one of the main characters of the platform & the platform rewards that behavior, the platform will continue to channel the YouTube influencer mindsets around video virality, follower-count building, and eventual monetization priority.

To make videos & post them online, you fundamentally don't need a channel intro or a video intro or an end card or thumbnail art or skillful editing or a high-quality camera or dedicated sound hardware or self-promotion or a search-optimized title or so many other things that are conditioned to be a mainstay of independent videography almost exclusively because of YouTube. You can just point your phone camera at a cat doing something silly, hit upload, and there you have it: an old YouTube video! 

The puzzle is making this a systematic occurrence on the site without also losing videos that ARE high-effort. Albeit, there are theoretically still people with that type of passion about the actual craft of making videos, even without the popularity & financial incentives. It's a dimension of the problem that can go unseen if "YouTubing" is the only thing you & the people around you have ever really known about online videography.

It's like how a lot of people will lament that the independent Web has disappeared, but it's right here, unseen by many and characterized by a mindset that's alien to much of the surface Web. Well, independent online videography seems to be in the exact same situation. If a Web Revival requires a disconnect from some assumptions about the Web, then perhaps the same can be said about a similar revival for online video culture. 

[DiffydaDude]

@lime360 another youtube alternative to add to the thread on yt alts, i have plenty of them in there now so if y'all are in the market to go hop over to another site for videos then pick one of these over here, theyre all pretty alright and are considerably better than youtube i'd say. should i make one for youtube frontends? i know some like invidious, materialious, viewtube, pipepipe and newpipe, etc

[lime360]

should i make one for youtube frontends? i know some like invidious, materialious, viewtube, pipepipe and newpipe, etc

sure why not