Yes, but the founder of WeMe specifically holds to that philosophy. In case anyone else considers getting an account there, you have been warned. I suggest you look elsewhere.
I remember thinking about how people were fighting some kind of war about whether to stream on twitch or youtube, content policies, advertising revenue etc. My following thought being, âIf people are so concerned why not run your own site and just host your own videos.â Obviously I get that the draw is that people are already on youtube/twitch/etc so if youâre not already big you have to work several orders of magnitude harder to get noticed, but I still feel like there is something to that. Use a specific TLD or something and provide a common package of plugins people can use to integrate in with each other that emulates a single site experience without any common authority that has to police content, provide hosting, collect revenue, etc. Obviously the heavily negative side of that is with no company running it at its core thereâs nobody responsible for also policing out the bad stuff⌠then again this just arrives at what he internet already is I guess. Meh.
You either want some authority that polices bad stuff, or you want complete autonomy and no oversight. there isnât some middle ground I can see. If you want to have the power to deplatform people with shitty views, you need to have platforms. And then hold those platforms accountable to not become themselves shitty platforms.
And then it just becomes a war of âwhere are the lines drawn between shitty and not?â That we have today.
The MeWe thing Scott is taking about will probably fall if nothing else than because that name is terrible. Its like a horse named âmehâ, no oneâs going to bet on that horse.
You underestimate how much it costs to build reliable infrastructure for mass comsumption of video content.
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Part of the problem is the infrastructure needed to pull this off, especially if youâre streaming to a large number of people. Iâm also assuming you donât want to use any cloud hosting providers and instead want to host on-premises.
Most home internet connections donât allow for hosting servers, so youâll need to pay more to get a business connection (even if there is no physical difference in connection bandwidth, tech, etc.). Even this may not be enough once the number of simultaneous viewers surpasses a certain amount.
Then youâll need a server capable of handling the load of hosting whatever youâre streaming. If itâs just for a couple of buddies, you can probably just host it on whatever your current machine is as a background task or on an old, but not too old, computer in a closet or something. Once you get past a certain amount of viewers, however, youâre going to need serious dedicated hardware.
Then youâll need to spend the time to administer the server yourself or pay someone to do so for you.
Oh, and then youâll need to spend your own time to hunt down advertisers or advertising networks who are willing to work with a teeny streaming site like yours.
Youtube, Twitch, et al already have all that infrastructure set up â you just need to upload and go or connect and go. The trade-off is that you need to play by their rules to do so.
Itâs the modern equivalent of publishing works on paper back in the 1800s or whatever. You can deal with the expense of buying your own printing press, paper, supplies, etc., and figuring out how to pay for distribution of your works, or you can perhaps pay someone who already owns a press to do it for you, or you can somehow convince a publishing company to handle everything for you. In the latter two cases, you need to play by the rules of the people you contract with to distribute your work.
If the service only deals with text and images, someone like me can afford to provide that for free to many users just with their disposable income. Obviously too many users and it becomes untenable, but thousands is not unreasonable.
Once you throw video into the mix, or even audio, suddenly the technological requirements go through the roof. You need a fuckton of CPU to transcode the videos. You need a fuckton of storage to store all those different video renditions. You need a fuckton of bandwidth to deliver those videos. And if you want to live stream? OH SHIT now you have to do all that in real time.
You can use existing video infrastructure provided by companies like Amazon Web Services or Brightcove, but that costs a fortune.
People do not appreciate what they are getting for free when YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Twitch allow them to upload and/or stream video for free. If people had to pay a metered market rate for that service, it would cost many dollars just to upload one video.
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Right? I remember when video appeared on the Internet at all, and it seemed like a miracle. Itâs still a miracle, but a monetary one.
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Honestly my guess for who will try to compete with YouTube is PornHub for exactly that reason.
The thing is, I really feel like itâs a monetization problem, not a technology problem.
True. Trying to make money in a way that isnât terrible with video content is really complicated.
You either end up with ads, Netflix (Monthly subscription) or some combination of the two (Youtube Red and CrunchyRoll). I think Youtube Red was actually a really good idea, the problem is that very few Youtube users understand how it works as far as how that money goes to creators.
I donât need to know, and I donât care that much either. I just want to pay to make ads go away. In that sense, it is perfect.
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Yup. The tech exists and works. The problem is that itâs freakinâ expensive.
Ads are a dead end. They poison every platform that relies on them eventually.
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Well, FNPL is fucked then.
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Also every GeekNights video. Itâs discriminatory against New Yorkers I say!
How hard is it not to swear? Isnât that just normal adult conversation?
Iâm not conscious of swears. They are no different than any other word.
Pick some set of very common words. Words that are less common than âtheâ, but still words that you use in any conversation that arenât topic specific. Maybe something about as common as the word ânever.â Now talk for an hour straight without using any of those words.
So yes, it is extremely difficult.
Give me a break.
I can literally go days without swearing. In polite conversation, swearing isnât necessary. At work, not only is swearing frowned upon, it could probably even get you into trouble with HR.
I hardly ever swear. My friends hardly ever swear. If you canât control the words coming out of your mouth, I donât know what to tell you.
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This.
I mean, I can curse like a sailor in certain situations, but I can also turn my swearing on or off pretty much as needed.
If Iâm in an informal situation with friends who also swear a lot, then yeah, Iâll swear with them.
If Iâm in a formal or professional situation, then yeah, I completely turn off my ability to swear without any issue.
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