this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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BitTorrent may have been big as in number of files, but as far as users and having content on demand it never got there. I remember waiting for days to get a single movie, not because my Internet was slow, but because the peers were slow.
When it comes to a YouTube replacement I don't think you are going to get big relying on users to be the servers. Nevermind the fact that the nature of how BitTorrent works means no company will allow their content on it legally.
And nothing's changed in all those years. Yeah? P2P technology couldn't get any better than 2004. The fact it was slow sometimes means we're boned forever.
Corporations already have streaming. I don't care if they come along. Their content might be there whether they like it or not.
Consider where we're having this conversation: is big even desirable? Has the dominance of one video platform been good for the internet? I'd say plainly fucking not, if killing ad blockers is even a feasible outcome. When YouTube was its own company there were a dozen competitors of similar size and quality. Google pouring money into one, so it could swallow everything and censor everyone and shove people toward right-wing propaganda, is not exactly ideal.
Has P2P changed much? I don't think it has really. I use private sites for that stuff now and it's great there, but the public stuff still seems pretty bad IMO.
Well if they don't want their content there, then you have the whole problem if it being illegal. Now you have to convince people to break the law, and go as far as to install a VPN or whatever so your ISP doesn't send you warnings. This isn't a great start for something to replace YouTube.
I think Big is required for a P2P YouTube style thing to work. You need lots of peers to stream content in decent quality. You need people to knowingly break laws and use VPNs. You need people to run their own media servers, you are asking a lot from people, all YouTube is asking you to do is watch some ads or buy premium.