I have an extension that can individually disable all the most useless/addicting components of the Youtube site, such as shorts and whatnot. On the search page, I have turned on:
hide Shorts
hide For You
hide Trending
hide 'People Also Searched For'
hide Search Categories
hide Promoted Videos
hide Promoted Websites
hide Suggested Products
Do you know what Youtube has started doing? They are now inserting engagement slop DIRECTLY into the search results, as seen in the image above. It's literally a short, yet it's inserted like a video so you're forced to see it. The only possible way to remove it is by using a privacy frontend, as even on incognito mode, Youtube will look at the three videos you've watched and start inserting shit based off that.
Louis Rossman is right, they all have rapist mentalities... "just let me stick it in"
Their incompetence opens room for other platforms
Oh, we've been through this though. Which other platform will ever have the cash to be a real contender here?
DouYin, you know, the Chinese YouTube
That's sarcasm though, as I expect them to be as malicious as YouTube
Things like freetube seems to be basically a simple yt front-end.
I don't know what happens if a significant amount of yt users used freetube. but that probably won't happen.
I find it a lot more pleasant to use than yt.
I use freetube as well, but I have a feeling that it's just a matter of time before google brings the axe down on it too, especially if it increases in popularity.
Well FreeTube never claimed to be a platform, it's a fantastic front-end for browsing YouTube videos without having to deal with Google's crap, but you're still using YouTube.
Look at what happened with Nitter (alternative Twitter frontend). They'll start changing around things so often that alternative frontends break every few days.
Twitch could. Still wild they don’t allow editing vods or uploading videos.
Dan Clancy has already said that Twitch isn't profitable as it is. Right now, they basically only still exist because of existing contracts, otherwise Amazon would've likely pulled the plug a while ago. They can't handle their current user base; they wouldn't be able to handle YouTube refugees en masse.
They currently allow unlimited vods that are hours long that provides zero revenue. They could disable that and instead allow 30 minutes of edited vods or video uploads and have ads on them to make money
Yeah that's true, and I'm honestly surprised that they've had features like that available for free for as long as they have.
I kind of wonder why they haven't attempted such a pivot already, though, as it seems like they could easily take over the gaming video space that YouTube currently dominates. Much of that audience uses Twitch already and would easily transition over to a more curated platform, so it feels like it should've been a pretty obvious move by now.
Video hosting is a money sink, I wouldn't hold my breath that somebody else comes along.
Vimeo charges users money to upload videos
PeerTube isn't too bad if you're willing to host your own videos as a big creator, and smaller creators can pool resources for smaller instances.
My main issue with Peertube is that for some reason, after just a bit of its use the internet connection on my laptop just shuts down until a reboot. It was present on both old and new laptop, and while the same thing happens when I torrent sometimes - only Peertube does it consistently. Would really like if there is a fix for this.
But yea, I agree in that the answer is not a platform, but a selfhostable solution.