I was reading the post “Ask HN Share your personal website” on HackerNews yesterday. Thanks so much to all of you for being creative by sharing and creating lists that showcase personal blogs to keep the open web alive.
While browsing the comments and looking at the lists people have created, I found an interesting article from Ariadna’s Blog about YouTube’s prevalence in today’s media for learning. The idea is: What would happen if YouTube no longer existed because people stopped using it or something better came along? The knowledge and learning people spread via their channels would be a massive loss to many of us who depend on that information to get by in society. The critical part of this article for me was how YouTube’s current direction makes maintaining a channel and ultimately a way of living unsustainable because the model is too focused on the quantity of uploaded videos and the amount of work to stay relevant with an algorithm that encourages reactions instead of thinking.
I have heard YouTubers’ comments on this. One channel I watch semi-frequently is Veritasium. Recently, he did a video on the future of his channel. One of the things he mentioned was that he had a conversation with YouTube about his channel, and they encouraged him to stay relevant by uploading more content. I won’t spoil that video by giving away the outcome, but it does make me think: if this kind of thing keeps up, will it cause others to stop making YouTube videos, and who will be left? The people who have the most money to keep going. And I don’t know about you, but the people who spend the most money aren’t always the best YouTubers to watch.
Anyway, I don’t host content on YouTube. Still, recently I have been thinking about how I would circulate a video essay I am working on about the Andor TV series without YouTube because of its content polices and the concerns I described above. It isn’t in our best interests to have a for-profit corporation in control of such a large amount of educational material that we all depend on.
So I started looking at alternatives. I looked at PeerTube. I don’t like the concept of decentralization. Centralization still happens at the instance, and with ActivityPub, content can and does get censored.
And no, instance owners don’t have the right to censor content on behalf of the people who use the instance/platform. That’s another form of censorship that any misguided government would try to use against its people to minimize discourse, but it’s more subtle because you don’t even know it’s happening.
I decided to publish a web page comic strip in parallel with the video. I’ll post a link to a torrent of the video from the web page to keep these two pieces of content together. This will allow visitors to either watch the video or read the visual page, or both. I’ll reach out to people directly who would be interested in this type of content and get a newsletter going. I’d like to hear your input on a better way to deliver a video to an audience without using a for-profit or decentralized video-sharing platform. IMHO, we need to develop distributed video solutions, like BitTorrent. I wish that BitTorrent could work seamlessly on a web page that could host content from a seed without requiring the visitor to have a client.