this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Yes, but the problem is the convenience.
Google has made their services convenient, which is why everyone I like to watch content of posts their stuff on YouTube. Both alternive websites and the content on them is often of inferior quality and difficult to find.
Then use alternative youtube clients, like piped or freetube.
Or even better: spend money (if you can afford it) to host a peertube instance that automatically rips the videos off of youtube.
That's an even stronger message that you'd rather spend money than use their crappy free services.
Oh that’s amazing. I’m gonna see about doing that for channels I actively watch. Gives me an excuse to unfuck my NAS storage too since then it’ll be full faster.
Do you know of any software that does that already (I assume PeerTube itself doesn’t)?
Peertube does indeed have that functionality
Nice!
Piped doesn't work most of the time. In fact, I can't remember a single Piped link actually loading the video. And I don't have money to spend.
that sounds EXPENSIVE, ima stick with piped
it's not cheap, but it's not prohibitively expensive either, unless you watch a prohibitive amount of youtube (i.e. you watch youtube 24/7)
You can get a 10TB hard drive for slightly under 200 dollars today, then just throw it in an old computer (even if the parts are 10+ years old, it's fine), install a linux distro and install peertube.
I'm not sure this is exactly true - like, first off, I am not a YouTuber and I only watch a very specific kind of content there (breadtube), so idk if my opinion is valid, but
From what I've heard creators say, it's not that YouTube is great, in fact it kind of sucks in a lot of ways, it's just that the alternatives don't do it better, and obviously don't have the size & reach. All the things that YouTube does badly or not at all, the competition doesn't do well either, so why bother.
You're 100% right tho that Google's success at this point hinges almost entirely on their convenience. Google drive/docs/sheets/etc are kinda garbage, but they'te fast, simple to use, and the integration is incredibly smooth. If there was any alternative that was as simple to transition into from email or whatever, I'd jump ship in a second.
Offering a free convenient service is the first step of enshittification.
[Side eye at Bluesky]
Under the same logic we can say that Lemmy is in its first stage of enshittification, lol. You need to refine the criteria.
Ok, a for-profit entity offering a free product.
You must be fun at parties.
You described a straight up better product. That's not convenience. You said it yourself: alternatives have worse quality.
Actually, the main problem isn't that they've made their services convenient. Most of them are inconvenient in multiple ways.
The really big problem, the absolutely INSIDIOUS shit is how extremely inconvenient they've made using alternatives.
Example: Google the search engine straight up sucks from an end user perspective now. Yet because it's where over 90% of all search engine searches happen, it's MORE inconvenient to use any other one, no matter how much better the algorithms and what have you.
Same with YouTube: the user experience becomes worse and worse, but since it has a de facto near-monopoly of certain types of content from certain creators, best you can do is a custom frontend. Which they're of course trying to make impossible ever since they removed the "Don't" from their original informal slogan.
A good plug to use Invidious for sure, intentional or not.
Unintentional but very much welcomed 😁