Media publishers, broadcasters, or netcasters (as with YouTube) serve a number of critical roles. Among these are both audience and advertiser aggregation.

Audient aggregation matters because once on site, recommendations and discovery systems increase the likelihood of some other site content being viewed or accessed.

Advertiser appeal matters if advertising provides a significant portion of site revenues (and it virtually always does, for large-scale properties). Advertisers themselves seek audiences, with particular interest in both size and composition. As with audiences, there are cognitive and organisational costs to maintaining multiple relationships, so that advertising platforms tend to grow and monopolise over time. Small niche platforms are of very limited interest.

Both factors intersect with other elements, including site infrastructure development and maintenance, such that large sites have vastly superior economies of scale. This includes a lot of activities and benefits with low public visibility including moderation, abuse, legal, and general business overhead effects.

The overall result is a pronounced tendency to create large and durable media monopolies. New technologies may disrupt earlier established entities for a time. But the old structures have an exceedingly high likelihood of re-emerging. More pointedly, technologies of greater efficiency only amplify the tendency to form, and the size of, such monopolies.

YouTube provides content curation in addition to mere video hosting. In the current state, I can open up my YouTube subscriptions page and see a list of all new videos from people I'm interested in. If every video creator hosts their work on a different platform, I no longer have a one stop shop for video consumption. I subscribe to lots of people on YouTube, but there are probably only two or three that I care enough about to go check a different site for new content.

The situation you just described does not match YouTube's value being in that it "provides content curation". The situation you described involves you doing the curation, and YouTube acting as a glorified RSS reader.

If you can subscribe to channels on YouTube and be satisfied with that content (and not from e.g. YouTube's recommendations for stuff you don't subscribe to), then you can do those same things whether the videos are hosted on YouTube or not, just like millions of people do with their podcast subscriptions that are never actually hosted "on" iTunes.

Is that something an average teen with an iPhone can do, or wants to do? And apart from the subscription feed, there's recommendations based on the videos you already watched. If creators were distributed across different platforms, this wouldn't work.

> Is that something an average teen with an iPhone can do, or wants to do?

Use an app that can listen to podcasts? Uh... yeah.

> apart from the subscription feed, there's recommendations based on the videos you already watched

So you're just going to ignore the context and pretend that you're saying something insightful? The comment you're responding to specifically pointed out that the original commenter doesn't cite YouTube's recommendation engine as the source of value for him/her.

Could do? Yes, it's as easy as adding a contact to your phone. Wants to do? I'm sure some do and some don't, but I'd argue that there's conditioning involved there by these services so that is irrelevant.

I can think of a simple engineering solution to the problem of recommendations, an open API standard to fetch them should a user want that functionality. So it could work, but the hosts don't want it to work.

But that aside, just because a service makes recommendations doesn't mean the recommendation engine is more useful than randomly finding things or getting sent things by friends. I'd argue that YouTube recommendations, at least in their current iteration, are less useful to users than their friend sending them a video they were subscribed to, following random twitter accounts that share content they enjoy, or even a chronological list of uploads sorted with content tags. You're placing a lot of value on something that frankly is a raging dumpster fire of hot garbage.

I think curation might be one of the drivers of the problems we have nowadays, I'd prefer a host that does no curation.

> If every video creator hosts their work on a different platform, I no longer have a one stop shop for video consumption.

Yes you can, use an RSS reader and subscribe via RSS. This problem was solved before tube sites were even widespread, and then the UX for subscriptions devolved, primarily because these sites want to lock you in and make you feel how you do. But you can still curate your own feed and have all your video content in one feed, I do it, you just have to use RSS.

I used to use RSS a decade or more ago. It always felt clumsy and half-supported at best. Perhaps you could share what RSS reader you use?

Sure. On desktop I use Thunderbird, on mobile I use something called Feeder, it is a FOSS RSS/Atom feed reader with built in Webview so you can watch the video in app if you like.

YouTube and Bitchute both support RSS, also Peertube has RSS built in if you watch anything self hosted using that software, as far as all the other tube sites out there I'm not sure because I don't subscribe to anyone on those sites, but I would expect that they do more than likely as RSS is still a web standard.

All but Peertube I've found sort of hide syndication in some way to encourage their account based subscription because they'd rather you use that. It might take a minute when you want to subscribe on a new site you don't usually use to figure out their feed URL format.

It can be a little clunky to add subscriptions I guess, but how often are you doing that? What matters more is integrating all your subscriptions into one feed, you're watching every day multiple times a day, you're not subscribing every day.

> It can be a little clunky to add subscriptions I guess, but how often are you doing that?

And you're saying that as a techie. How do you think the average subscriber of Markiplier, Pewdiepie or Logan Paul would feel about that? Things like peertube will always be a super small niche because there are two dozen alternatives to YouTube and they all suck if you depend on YouTube for income. As long as those oopsies don't happen to the big YouTubers on a regular basis, the status quo will remain.

Plus, as much as people complain about YouTube recommendations, I found a couple small but interesting channels already. Imagine everything were distributed across ten different platforms.

> How do you think the average subscriber of Markiplier, Pewdiepie or Logan Paul would feel about that?

I don't care about them. People can do what they want. I'm not trying to revolutionize the world. I'm just trying to live life the way I want to and help people who are interested in doing things that I do.

It doesn't require you to be a techie to copy paste a URL. It's as easy as adding a contact on your phone.

I watched an interview with Jaron Lanier yesterday actually talk about YouTube recommendations, he talks about an experiment, click the top recommendation and let it play 10 times and see what you get. You have to keep in mind just because they've been helpful a few times doesn't mean they're more helpful than no curation at all. Confirmation bias exists. Remember YouTube before Google owned it? Most of the content was not as good as it is now but it was still much easier to find new interesting things. That algorithm is superior to anything that's been implemented since, and honestly every iteration makes it worse. The fundamental difference with it was that it recommended based on what other people watched, not based on some hand waving about getting to know you and your preferences.

If everything were distributed across ten platforms then viral spread of content could only occur organically. That would be amazing.