I'd bet that most of such recordings are not even shared or perhaps even looked at by the author (personally, I'm guilty of this). It's just some sort of compulsion to record it.
I'm sure the rise of smartphones had as much to do with that as anything.
At its peak, WoW had 12M players; Pokemon Go had 4x that many daily actives at its peak.
Yes, because YouTube is changing their stance between when a large part of the data was uploaded and now. If they chose to compete fairly from the beginning instead of using their search ad revenue to kill off all the competitors we might have had something resembling a remotely free market instead of the unthinking, unfeeling monolith we have right now.
> Yes, because YouTube is changing their stance between when a large part of the data was uploaded and now.
This is untrue. As there was significantly less users on Youtube early on, it's highly likely that most of their total content consists of recently uploaded videos. This becomes more and more true as time goes on.
> A huge amount of videos on YouTube are created for their own sake, with no expectation of going viral or making money off them.
It's estimated that there are 1 billion YouTube videos, compared to 600k videos hosted by PeerTube. Thats a 4 order of magnitude difference. Saying that PeerTube can "fill this role" is an outrageous assumption about scaling.
Sure, I should have said "P2P based video sharing like PeerTube". The point is that for videos with no expectation of making money, P2P is a better model than YouTube, as it is both free and ad-free.
I am not saying that PeerTube is better and that people should be using it. I am saying that it is worse, because of the way YouTube developed and made competition impossible.
Before this was mostly done through in person communicate, now this is primarily done through smart phones.