this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Frankly, I'd rather see one of the following two things happen:
YouTube letting any content up that is legal in a given jurisdiction, and provide end users filtering ability. If they need to spin some content out to a separate website for brand management reasons, fine. It's not just firearms or whatever is the controversy of the day. YouTube is such a widely-used platform that having content restricted creates issues for other users. If there are restrictions, it's just on a "useless noise" grounds, like someone uploading enormous amounts of video that nobody is viewing.
Content that doesn't fit within YouTube's content restrictions move to other platforms that are available to content creators and consumers. The problem here is the financial side of things. Yes, the Fediverse has PeerTube, but that doesn't have anything like the capacity to provide YouTube-scale service, and I don't see where the money to do so would come from. Google has figured out how to provide make a return on YouTube via mining user data and showing ads and some premium subscriptions. I don't think that given the bandwidth costs associated with video, YouTube can be nearly as readily-replaced as Reddit. Maybe it's possible to get commercial service from a provider; that's the route that Usenet mostly wound up taking.
Additionally, a number of YouTube content creators do so because Google pays them for views of their content; for them, this isn't just a volunteer project. To make an alternative that also permits for professional content creators practical, it has to have a way to also compensate professional content creators, which means that it has to generate revenue one way or another to pay professional content creators.
Yes, PeerTube doesn't have monetization, but Hickock45 in particular is in trouble because of all the sponsorship they've gotten from other sources. They aren't being shut down because they're a gun channel, but because they get sponsorship from gun businesses, which they promote in their videos.
I don't know what Hickock45's revenue stream looks like. But they say themselves, at issue is YouTube saying that mentioned sponsors can't be gun-related. What's really shitty about Hickock45 is the decade of content that has always been acceptable to YouTube, and which now is retroactively at risk because of the sponsorship rule changes.
My feeling is that if H45's external sponsors are so valuable, they could make a go on PeerTube. Or, if YouTube's revenue is so good, they can drop mentioning the external sponsors. I'd rather they just move everything to PeerTube, old content and all, and give YT the finger. But I suspect that's too costly for them. And there's no way they can go back and re-edit a decade's worth of material to remove all sponsor mentions; that's patently absurd.