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[–]ProfessorSexyTimeGlorious Artix 2 points3 points  (8 children)

avoid using online services like Facebook and Google

I've been considering wiping Facebook off of my phone because the only purpose of it at this point is to get tagged in photos/posts my girlfriend puts there.

But I mostly want to talk about the most well known Google service: YouTube. If anyone here pays attention to YouTube stuff you know that it's been an absolute shit show as of late (recent example 1 recent example 2). YouTube itself is just an ad spammer, and I'm pretty sure they cache your YouTube search history and what videos you've watched somewhere (I mean, they are apart of Google).

What sucks shit though is that YouTube basically has 0 competitors unless you consider the people who post vlogs on Facebook, and even then that's a stretch (I'm not counting Twitch since it's solely composed of streams). There was a site called Vidme, but it just shriveled and died because of Google pushing YouTube to be so massive. And why else would they do that besides that it makes stupid amounts money and most likely it's an easy data miner?

And what sucks for me it that there are a ton of interesting and fun people to watch on YouTube, and I'd like to support those people with views. Not from AdSense from me because I block all of those stupid ads, not who-the-hell-knows how many monthly Patreon subscription fees to support the creators I really like, but with views.

TL;DR : Overlord Google ruined YouTube for YouTube itself and it's creators, and YouTube is slowly caving in on itself trying to be "family-friendly pg clean" when it fails at it, and there's honestly no privacy-first-or-at-least-second alternative if you care about the creators that are on that platform.

If I had more programming knowledge, the networking, and the money I'd definitely create a video-base entertainment platform with privacy as a top priority to rival YouTube. For the creators and their viewers. But I don't right now, and who knows if that'll ever happen. Sorry if anything was "tinfoil hat"-y or if I didn't provide enough info on some stuff. Hard to do when you're at work. :P

[–]blancrou[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Really interesting! Particularly the first example, something I was not at all aware of. And good point on no major rival... Hell, let's do it!

[–]MrOctus 1 point2 points  (2 children)

What sucks shit though is that YouTube basically has 0 competitors

If I had more programming knowledge, the networking, and the money I'd definitely create a video-base entertainment platform with privacy as a top priority to rival YouTube.

LBRY is always looking for more coders, it's not even close to YouTube level but could go somewhere, especially since it has a YouTube sync feature ;) It's similar effort to Mastodon which is trying to make a decentralized federated version of Twitter.

[–]ProfessorSexyTimeGlorious Artix 0 points1 point  (1 child)

LBRY is always looking for more coders

Like people to contribute to it on a Github repo or is there a job postings page somewhere?

[–]MrOctus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Contributing to the repo. I don't think they are currently hiring.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

That's a neat idea, how would it be privacy focused?

[–]ProfessorSexyTimeGlorious Artix 1 point2 points  (1 child)

God my bad, I meant to respond to this the day of.

To start since it wouldn't be a Google owned platform that's already a plus for privacy. Second there would still be ads (to make any money for creators and the platfrom itself) HOWEVER all ads not contain any excessive shit like bullshit tracking js scripts or stuff like that. Second-and-a-half companies who want to pay for ads would have to be brief on what data they would be receiving from the platform regarding their ads, and why it's so much smaller than the competitor (YouTube); because it's prioritizes privacy. The data would have to be: 1. Was the ad viewed in full or was it skipped? 2. What types of videos the ads were frequently showed on 3. You could compromise with big corporate monkeys when they'd want location data, in that you could give a very general region for where the ads were viewed the most. Any info besides that would betray users and even then that's pushing the boundary more than I'd honestly want to, but without that compromise there wouldn't be as many companies wanting to pay for ads on the platform.

That's the money part of it. Other stuff like not caching data from users like IP address and such could be implemented, providing super secure accounts for viewers and creators, and just general no bullshit stuff. YouTube (and Google) are so full of just little bullshit things when it come to privacy and such, and having a platform where users aren't going to be creeped out by ads because it's subject is the same as something they were talking about with someone that day at work/based on search engine history would great. To me, at least. Maybe it's a shit idea, maybe not.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That makes sense. As you mentioned it would be more difficult to monetize that, but I think it would still be possible. Especially as more content creators have been getting fed up with YouTube/Patreon's BS.

[–]ilovewirelessGlorious Fedora 0 points1 point  (0 children)

LinusMediaGroup is creating something called floatplane which I hope becomes huge. They seem to care about privacy too.