this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Youtube is still the biggest video website on the world and there just isnt a viable competitor to it and nor is there financial incentive for anyone to jump into something like it given the overhead and cost. Hell even early on when youtube was lower resolution and ran worse on hardware it still beat out competitors like vimeo, dailymotion, and the various early internet content creator sites that spun off of youtubes early copyright purge.
At the end of the day they serve a tiny amount of ads which honestly is more of a minor inconvenience(especially when you remember what TV was like) and the algorithm is pretty hit and miss(personally on my feed it's not bad). Even worst case scenario if the adblockers stop working youtube will probably still not die.
It would take an antitrust hearing or something to really push youtube off of it's top spot and it would be interesting to see what that would look like for the site(though I suspect a google dismembering would leave youtube intact and just remove it form other alphabet brands which wouldnt entirely fix the issue).
Hell look at what happened on reddit. That was a very visible very big protest and there was a huge amount of outrage and reddit skews nerdy enough that the userbase actually pays attention and cares about whats going on. Weeks later and not a lot has changed. Lemmy and some other alternatives became viable but even then it And thats essentially just a big message board which links to content on other sites, in terms of design it should be easier to replicate compared to an open video site that anyone can upload to.
I wouldn't say that nothing has changed. Maybe you have to be a former daily user to notice, but most of the subs have gone downhill. Quality of posts is at a 10-year low, likely due to the mass exodus of power users and mods. I'm not saying that every valuable user has left, and I'm not saying that reddit is dead. But the quality-to-shit ratio went from 60/40 to 40/60, and it is noticeable.
Yeah I've been back there a few times to check, and the reddit I knew is most certainly dead. Its corpse will stumble around for a while animated by venture capital necromancy, but it's not really a threat any more and will stop moving soon enough. Youtube still has much enshittification to go before it gets to that point.
I think what's likely to happen isn't that we'll see one replacement for YouTube, but a large number of niche and possibly subscription based or peer to peer sites that collectively end up offering everything of value that YouTube does/used to.