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YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.

This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.

This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.

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[–] 64 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Google only has power as we the people give it to them but using their services. Same with Reddit’s power and such. Not the people here as we have unfortunately unplugged, but admittedly, all the decentralized services have significantly less content and variety of content. We need more people to join us, but they seem happy to support the centralized services they hate.

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  • [–] 37 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    The problem with youtube in particular is there is no way to build an alternative that's as good as YouTube (ignoring all the bad bits they've added). PeerTube is nice to have around, but it's not as fast and doesn't have all the content as youtube. There's also Nebula, which is alright. It's not free and doesn't have as much content, but it's usually a higher quality.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    You're obviously right. But it's funny to me; I find it easy to imagine a world where staying independent and hosting your own stuff was seen as cooler. Instead of YouTube and Google Buzz, we ran RSS clients akin to Outlook and Thunderbird. They torrent and seed media we're subscribed to while we're at work or class. It's saved on a home server. We walk in and simply toss it up on our desktop or TV. (Or maybe a mobile client streams from your home server over the Internet or over your home Wi-Fi if you're at home )

    And if you visited the website instead of YouTube's recommendations, The creator just adds a few RSS feeds on the backend to pull thumbnails from, of other creators' sites they enjoy.

    Crazy how easy it is to daydream though, when I'm not the one putting the work in.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    There was a world before YouTube. It grew from humble beginnings. Granted it didn't have an incumbent to fight off, but it had all the server issues, bandwidth issues and similar.

    The only thing that stops someone else doing it is the user base.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The problem with youtube in particular is there is no way to build an alternative that’s as good as YouTube

    as good

    I mean, assuming that's exactly what people wan, "exactly youtube but cheaper", then yeah it's an impossible and thankless task to even try something of that scale. Instead it's better to think of building youtube alternatives that are focused on one or two parameters that allow organizational optimizations. For example, much of the issue that people complain about is the storage, but a YT-alt that dedicates to eg.: archivism of old TV shows, that scan at best at 480p or 360p, wouldn't need to spend that much in storage compared to a service that is trying to serve 4K UHD 120fps Subwoofer Surround; that combined with the topical focus suddenly makes it much more scaleable and approachable.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I'm always a bit shocked the worlds governments don't start offering free email/hosting to their citizens. It'd give them a cheap way to surveil that was "opt-in" (but would probably catch a lot of dumb people) and everyone would have a "verified" email for official stuff too. It seems like a good investment to me.

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  • [+] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I'm also curious why people pretend it doesn't exist when they say "there is no other video uploading platform like youtube"

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Vimeo is expensive, I don't know how it works today, but when I tried it, I had to pay to upload some videos.

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  • [+] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    The problem is the network effect. It's hard to switch from YT if all your favorite channels and creators are there, but it's also hard for them to switch if all the users are using YT. And because it's many different people we cannot coordinate a simultaneous transition either.

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