• rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you’ll get depends on who you’re getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they’re downloading it from may not all have the entire file’s worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there’s no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there’s no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.

    Yep, that would be a great system. /s

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Exactly.

      I’m feeling like this whole “distrubuted youtube!” argument is nothing but a variant of the blockchain fantasy. Seeing a lot of the same style of arguments and ignorance.

      • Balder@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        It’s a common trap for certain types of people to assume technology can fix problems that are inventive or socially driven.

        • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Its also a common trap for idiots to grasp hold of a fraction of a fragment of an idea and think it gives them complete and total understanding, and then go around proselytizing their absolute incompetence as if its techno-gospel.

          Which I think is why this distributed youtube bull follows the same general argument trend as the mythical and holy blockchain. That does nothing, but somehow can magically solve all problems.

        • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          We solved this problem BEFORE youtube was even a thing. Youtube only exists out of convenience for normies. Youtube can die tomorrow, we will still have unlimited video. In fact, think youtube slowed down innovation on this front. Torrent trackers are unchanged in their form from 2003. I wouldn’t mind federated content, browser integration of torrent systems and locally running content recommendation system as well as social crowdsourced review systems (aka the like button and comments)

    • kalleboo@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      To be fair, a LOT of people swear by Popcorn Time, which is exactly that. I was surprised it worked as well as it does, too.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      If the file is that poorly seeded, and therefore extremely sparsely watched, then the laptop with a broken screen in my closet can serve it to anyone who wants it.

      The only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand / broad appeal media and in that case, what you describe WON’T happen.

      For low demand media, https off my mom’s coffemaker will do just fine.

      That means anyone posting 100-200 video to youtube today, can easily handle all these situation with less expense than the price of whatever camera they filmed the content with to begin with.

      Youtube only exists, because us, old internet fucks, got lazy and relied on google for mail and video.

      We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.

      • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It’s fundamentally unreliable.

        only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand

        Scalability isn’t just about distribution. It’s about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.

        We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.

        This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That’s the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have…nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.

        • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          We are in the age of the toy internet, it is all about to crumple like a house of card bought on cheap credit and unviable business models. Youtube is not long for this world and nobody will miss it. The only question is how much of it Archive Team can save before if goes up in flames. Well, the good parts of it, that’s easy but can we save the garbage too, I’m not sure. Take any channel on youtube and its creator can easily serve it’s entire catalog out of a obsolete chromebox with two usb sticks on the side. Even as small as a terabyte would still be mostly empty space. Youtube was built defective by design using 1970s ideology, it is immensely wasteful.

          • Schmeckinger@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            I want to see how you can serve thousands or millions of people with a Chromebook in your closet. And if you say p2p, that doesn’t deal with spikes in demand and a lot of old content will just vanish even easier than on YouTube. Also it would rely on people being willing to seed.

        • Emerald@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Blockbuster is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.

          • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.

            • Emerald@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.

              I think YouTube will eventually end up destroying itself. It’s not a profitable business model to just run some ads. The amount of storage, bandwidth, and processing power a video host requires is massive.