How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?
Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation.
When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by.
The content shared was mostly text and a small amount of images. Video and audio were largely non-existant.
> I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
You're describing hobby content creators which didn't have the volume and quality of individual content creators nowadays.
agreed
> and quality
filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...
There was also always a way to accommodate a large amount of users through mirrors and other channels, which people shared frequently.
With "the web" they meant their business idea for their specific platform isn't viable without advertisers exploiting user data to the largest degree possible. That is something entirely different. On if they just paywalled the content, people would probably again use alternatives.
Of course I didn't mean to say that infrastructure costs are negligible. On the contrary, it is the largest expense for certain platforms and services. But if a platform has advertising as a business model, it is not on my browser to accommodate that. Then they need to let someone else fill the space they cannot serve without manipulating my user agent.
I do even approve of platforms enabling some creators to make a living with online content creation. But I am still not interested to accommodate advertisers. It is a toxic industry that strives on exploiting users and their privacy. There is no sensible means of cooperation possible and I want my browser have realistic perspective here.
This silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.
I'd argue advertising silences many more.
Any niche topic is already so SEO'd to death with keyword rich but contentless content that those with something truly relevant to say are unlikely to ever be heard.*
* Unless commenting in a niche subreddit, a web-ring indexed by small web engines, or the like, where the audience are like minds who've previously found the niche.
Disadvantaged groups will already have less free time to share content, less exposure to the technical skills needed to do so, less attention, respect, and opportunity from doing so, etc. Advertising places a fig leaf over unequal access, but really makes the inequality worse by centralizing wealth and control in the hands of a few rent-seeking operations.
predatory lawyers and greedy creators is the reason I don't.
And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.
> Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
The Pirate Bay existed… huh, still exists, OK… without requiring any single person to have all the pirated content on any single system — the combined size of all videos on YouTube may be 10 to 15 exabytes or whatever, but no single video, no single creator, is close to that. Even LTT is about 3.6 petabytes for their entire working-archive backup system last I heard, and if they wanted to stream those as a torrent, well, the files are right there.
It may not suit the current way YouTube content is consumed, where you share a link to a specific timestamp and whoever follows that link can see that moment almost immediately, but that doesn't detract from "can people share videos, perhaps even ones they made themselves, using this system?"
