Firefox users are reporting an ‘artificial’ load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”

  • Chozo@kbin.social
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    2 years ago

    There will never be a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else is willing to run at a net loss for a decade before seeing their first profitable quarter, like Google did with YouTube.

    Turns out, free video hosting is expensive as fuck.

    • Obinice@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      There will never be a real competitor to YouTube

      That sounds reasonable but you’re thinking way too small. Lets not forget that Tiktok is already more popular than YouTube with a very, very large chunk of younger people, for example.

      But besides that, let’s not forget that absolute giants in the business have been toppled. Look at Yahoo! as one example. Hell, even entire countries can fall within a few decades, whole empires.

      So, assuming that there will never be a decent YouTube competitor is a very limited way of looking at it. Who’s to say Google will still exist in any meaningful market leading way in 20 years?

      Sure they’re big now, but what if the entire face of the internet and how we use it and what we want fundamentally changes (say with the addition of highly advanced AI that brings changes we can’t even predict right now).

      There will absolutely one day be a service that can rival YouTube and eventually replace them, it’s the same with every product from every business, it’s the circle of life I suppose. But whether that will happen within the next 5 years, or 15, or 30, only time can tell :-D

      Never say never, though!

    • reddig33@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Im surprised Amazon hasn’t stepped into the space to advertise their own products. They already own a huge storage cloud backend.

      • ours@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        They already make a killing with their cloud with much less business risk in the form of AWS.

    • livus@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      Maybe. But give decentralised federated hosting a few years. It might never be a rival but it’s possible it will become a viable alternative.

      • Chozo@kbin.social
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        2 years ago

        If PeerTube can fix their major discoverability issues, it can potentially pose a real threat to YouTube. But that’s the biggest thing keeping it back right now, is that it’s impossible to just find anything you want to watch.

        Unless you want to watch hour-long seminars on Linux. In which case, PeerTube’s got you covered.

        • livus@kbin.social
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          2 years ago

          I think discoverability is in its infancy for the fediverse in general.

          But I’m old enough to remember when vast tracts of the internet were hard to find and everyone used directories. When that changed, everyone jumped online.