Interesting idea, but unfortunately (and as expected) full of antisemitic and „new world order“ conspiracy stuff by people that claim YouTube is censoring them.
Regardless of your opinions on the subject it's a bad thing for the platform. If 90% of the content is highly divisive then it's going to "taint" STEEM by association, people will assume that if you're posting there it's because you adhere to that point of view. Good luck becoming a Youtube-like general purpose video host in these conditions.
See 8chan for instance: I really like the blend of reddit's flexibility (where anybody can create their own board) coupled with 4chan-style anonymity and lack of karma/upvotes etc...
Unfortunately 8chan became the destination for the generally super far-right 4channers who were too extreme even by 4chan standards. It's like 4chan's 4chan if you will. With such a reputation good luck convincing people to join your knitting-themed board on 8chan.
Similarly, Dailymotion is reputed for porn/NSFW/copyrighted content not available on Youtube and Voat is like 8chan but for redditors.
The fact that all these sites exist (4chan, 8chan, Voat, Gab, etc) suggests that there is demand. You may find their content objectionable, and I may agree with you, but that doesn't mean there's not a viable business there.
> Regardless of your opinions on the subject it's a bad thing for the platform [DTube]
I don't agree. If DTube becomes associated with the far right, which by the way is totally jumping to conclusions at this early stage, and if that then becomes a profitable niche for them, then I'd argue they have a legitimate business.
Compare it all to something like MSNBC vs Fox News. Both are quite successful, running political content for people at different points on the ideological spectrum. While it's true that the viewers of one probably find the other's viewers disgusting and deplorable, I fail to see how that's a problem from a business standpoint.
I agree with you. I should've been more specific: it's a bad thing for DTube if they want to be the new Youtube. If they're fine staying small and catering to a specific niche then sure, that's not necessarily a problem.
That being said I browsed a bit through d.tube since my earlier comment and unlike the parent I don't see that much "controversial" content. However I don't see a lot of quality videos I'd be interested in either... Mostly vlogs and cryptocurrency-related videos.
I looked around d.tube. It's mostly crypto related content. There's also a difference between racist content and conspiracy content. Conspiracy content, which has been growing in popularity and around since the Kennedy assassination, has only recently started getting thrown off of youtube and has started to draw a lot of people to new platforms.
It's likely to forever remain a niche for that kind of content only. What reasonable person would say: "I know, I'll host my video on that website which opens with a list of conspiracy videos and has antisemitism promoted in the sidebar next to my content/face." (And even more - which popular company would do that?)
If there are enough benefits to the platform and semi-popular (likeable) Youtubers switch to it, the problem should resolve itself after a few days. Luckily antisemites etc. are a minority of the population and can be easily outnumbered.
I think the question is if the risk of very loose association with that content is higher than the risk of loosing out on revenue by arbitrary decisions from Youtube.
Given what happend over the last year with the Adpocalypse, most of them realized that being at the whim of Youtube is a real risk, and are now looking to diverisfy their income streams (see growth of Patreon).
Conspiracy videos are important. Think "Collateral damage" videos showing US war crimes....good luck hosting that on YouTube.
Now, if you're talking conspiracy theories, that's totally different, and still not a problem, for many who believe in free expression, regardless if they're interested or not.
> What reasonable person would say: "I know, I'll host my video on that website which opens with a list of conspiracy videos and has antisemitism promoted in the sidebar next to my content/face."
Well people still advertise on Reddit next to T_D and other nutjob subreddits. Unfortunately.
Note that reddit devs are trying hard to hide these controversial subreddits. You won't see them if you go to https://www.reddit.com/ for instance. That's partly why they introduced the "popular" meta-subreddit a while ago. Reddit is pretty advertiser friendly, hence famous people making AMAs to promote something, official or semi-official subreddits for some video games etc... If you want to see the controversial content you have to look for it, for the most part. I consider it very hypocritical of reddit admins to handle things that way but it seems to work decently for them so far.
Contrast that with something like https://voat.co/ for instance. At the moment I can see only one (1) post in the entire front page that's not alt-right politics. Special mention to the highly upvoted "If women have the right to terminate unwanted life because it's in their body, do we have the right to terminate unwanted illegals because they're inside our country?". I don't expect most advertisers will want to touch that with a one parsec pole.
Reddit could ban that entire crack den of T_D and friends.
Let them go to voat, it was specifically founded for the alt-right, same as gab.ai as a Nazi twitter clone. They're all alone out there and don't have any influence anymore... the problem with T_D specifically is that their users lesk out to other, normal subreddit and spew their stuff there. Ban the subreddit, ban all the top commenters/submissions, their admins and forward the dirty stuff to law enforcement.
>Let them go to voat, it was specifically founded for the alt-right [...]
Except it wasn't. It simply experienced more and more waves of users from banned subreddits (which were mainly alt-right related ones) coming in and eventually making an hard right turn on the main website culture, driving out most existing center/left users. It did serve me as a lesson on what external influences can do to existing communities tho.
Looks like it's already going the way vid.me was right before it closed down (as in super meta videos talking about how great the site is). I think people underestimate just how hard it is to run a video sharing service like youtube and have a healthy community all while making money.
That's just a natural consequence of building a censorship-free platform; many of your early adopters are going to be people who find freedom from censorship to be particularly valuable to them.
Tor, Monero, etc all suffer from basically the same problem. Ultimately, if you value freedom from censorship, you shouldn't let the association with others who share that value (though perhaps for different, less noble reasons than you) bother you. Otherwise no platform that has that property will ever take off.
YouTube in its first years was mostly illegal content like music videos, ripped series and random internet videos reposted from other funny video sites. That and the original YouTubers of course.
By avoiding a service, because it's used by people you don't agree with, you act exactly like those people. You're not one bit better than them.
By the way, you'll find that kind on Youtube and Facebook, too. I hope you avoid both of them. Best avoid Google all together, because they own Youtube and are guilty by association.
Don't you think some of that could be perpetrated by Google, to sabotage competition? Same thing plagued Vidme, but the thing is - you can find the same stuff on YouTube - it's just more diluted by other content.
No. They don't need to do that and it would be a waste of time for them. If they made any mistake, the negative news would wipe more of their share price (however minimal that reaction would be) than they're ever likely to lose to d.tube.
