There are also no ads. No tracking. Traffic is anonymous by default with onion routing. Has a good working GUI instead of a buggy slow JS page. And no censorship. And you can subscribe to crowdsourced filters for each type of content you don't want to see (such as spam, misinformation, low quality, etc). And there are desktop and phone versions that integrate fluidly.
Say it actually took off and had as much content as Youtube.
Would you actually use it? As a consumer, not a creator.
To make this fun, let's ignore technicalities like, "well all programs are crap now, you can't make one better", or "well the filter won't work for this reason". Just imagine it works. This is a thought experiment.
The question is simply one question: Would you use it? As a consumer, not a creator. Why or why not? Would you view the cryptographically verifiable news outlets? Would you use it to download or watch music and movies? Would you use it to watch tutorials? Would you use it to get angry about political happenings? Would you use it to work out? Would you use it to watch pro game streams?
It would be helpful if I could find that content.
Some content I want to consume like pirate movies and steamy romance audiobooks cannot find hosting on conventional services, but must content can still be hosted on YouTube. Any free speech oriented service is inundated with fake news propagators and people with really shitty opinions and a much as I would defend their right to speech I am not interested in thier content. Therefore I tend not to use existing free speech platforms because all the content is uninteresting. There is no need to host a regular tech tutorial on peer tube so that content I want isn't going to be there. If the platform mostly hosted stuff I liked, even if that stuff was lewd romance books and hooky hbo shows then sure. But it won't be.
People hate algorithms but live discovering the stuff they want easily. Any high privacy platform will have much lower doscoverability.
As a result, the things people find on here are going to be stuff the creator has built a marketing funnel for. People only do that if it is thing to make them money in a way they can't do on censored platforms. Therefore it would be full of crypto scammers and evil gurus.
A lot of existing alternative platforms have actually been high censorship just on a different political basis. If this imagined platform was genuinely high free speech then it would be full of illegal content like i2p and I'd avoid it for that reason too.
This is a huge assumption. There are two moats around YouTube right now:
1. Discovery processes and sharing. You claim an assumption that these exist, and specifically don't want to talk their details, so I'll skip details on this as well.
2. Ad revenue share. For good, bad, and sometimes very ugly, a lot of content just doesn't exist without YouTube's monetization. You assume "no ads" and don't mention a business model, how do you expect to pay for content?
Restricting to just the consumer standpoint, the answer is easy: if an app had the content I wanted but a better ad experience than YouTube I'd be very easy to convince to use it. I don't even need "no ads", I don't mind advertising paying for or subsidizing content I watch. (I grew up with broadcast TV.) I do wish there was less tracking involved (and find targeted advertising creepy/terrible) and I do wish for some sort of curation of advertising again. (A broadcast TV station would never interrupt the middle of a 5 minute music video to play an hour long infomercial. A broadcast TV station would also have a lot to answer from, including the FCC, if they allowed nazis and other hate groups to buy hour long infomercials.)
All the other stuff mostly doesn't matter to me as a consumer. I don't care about traffic anonymization via onion routing or if it is peer-to-peer or centralized. I don't care about cryptographically verified channels or censorship resistance. I care about filters obviously, but I only care if they are crowdsourced in so much as I distrust a lot of the biases of ML-based recommendation algorithms and would maybe prefer something with more paid humans (labor) involved.
All I care about as a consumer is does it have the content I want to watch. So indirectly I care a lot about the business model of whatever it is. If it is monetized well and attracts the creators that I care about, then I use it, it's as simple as that. The tech doesn't matter. You just need to be very careful in assuming you can beat today's YouTube on attracting creators given their moats.
YouTube offers the discovery of new videos I didn't know I wanted to see. My watch history is likely 80/20 videos suggested vs videos I used search to find. YT's algorithm provides me a list of new content from creators I like, related content to subjects I like, and new content that is relevant to my interests.
The primary focus of an alternative that I'd be willing to use is one that focuses on showing me relevant videos over focusing on mere hosting.
1. An uncensored onion-based video sharing network would very quickly become filled with the kind of content that gets the FBI knocking on your door
2. Much smaller issue, but I actually really like Youtube's recommendation algorithm. It's how I find a lot of the content I watch. A platform without that wouldn't be as enjoyable to me.
I can easily imagine that, there is already similar things out there.
>Would you actually use it? As a consumer, not a creator.
Yes as a consumer absolutely. As a creator too, why not asking as a creator? You mentioned in the first sentence :
>where you host a stream or upload a video
I would happily do both consume the content and upload my own content.
>Why or why not?
Well in my case, "why", simply because :
1. Youtube eventually runs out of daily content.
2. P2P in my experience offers a lot more 'niche' content. The big outlets for any media (video music or text) usually offer mostly popular and america-centric content. When you are looking for uncommon content that isn't in english you have to look for underground channels to get it.
3. geolocalized P2P would offer local creator more visibility in within their communities. It could greatly help for local culture.
4. Youtube or any other centralized sharing services (meta, twitter, ...) simply have too much power nowadays. P2P allows to share content freely and makes censorship very difficult.
So, yes. On paper, if the content was readily available, I would use it. In practice, everything is too entrenched and I'm not about to start searching multiple websites for video when I'm already successful with just one.
The no ads is also huge, I understand that YT needs to make money, but the fact that the ads are so abundant and sometimes the content barely loads while the ad loads in HD quality immediately is maddening and seems like YT is just a platform to push ads.
So yeah, I'd use that site in a heartbeat.
Here is the thing that people don't understand about the big tech - people actually like and use their stuff. Nobody really cares that much about ads - maybe we have become desensitized to it, or it was never too big of an actual problem. And as for tracking, people actively want it even if they don't know it - take aways peoples front page of youtube without specific recommended videos and they are going to be bored as hell on the website.
To compete with that, you are never going to build an alternative that does things effectively worse.
The scale of copyright infringement needed to compete with youtube to spark a new fire is a non-starter because it is so intractable now compared to 15 years ago.
A site to watch videos to intentionally make people angry sounds like some brilliant marketing. Could open up the algorithm and have settings for more anger, more pointlessness, more stupidity.
One reason I stopped using Nebula is because it became hard to separate the signal from the noise.
Any barrier or gate-keeping to creating and uploading is a non-starter.