To me it’s a feature and not a problem to have less people. I had more online human interaction in lemmy than I had anywhere else (except maybe facebook in early times). Look at Reddit now, good luck interacting with real genuine people. Everyone is shilling something and nobody is honest, plus the low quality posts count growing.
I saw some studies a few years ago on how people are less interested in traditional social media and more interested in instant messaging 1to1 and small group chats. Also something about how group chats become dead after they exceed a couple hundred members.
Just to say, I am more happy with the way things are in lemmy. I appreciate all aspects of Lemmy really.
Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Ehhh, I feel it’s not just that.
Yeah, people don’t think centralized media is an issue, and thus don’t join Fediverse, causing it to be a little dead and discourages others from using it as an alternative.
However, YT is a job for the thousands that create content on there, and reasonably so, they need money to make said content and pay bills. Which means ads, cause be real, most people (including me) don’t wanna join a Patreon to see their content. I just can’t think of many creators who I love enough to drop consistent money on them, never mind several at once.
Lemmy doesn’t need to be monetized to entice people, because Reddit wasn’t built on that (karmawhoring gets you no money). Even pixelfed could make it as an alternative, because creators aren’t paid by ads or Insta themselves, they get money from sponsorships and promoting their shops.
But YT? It’s built to make money from putting in ads. So unless creators lived off of sponsors alone and the few who subscribe to Patreon, they’re shit outta luck if they join Peertube.
swelter_spark@reddthat.com 11 hours ago
YT became popular before monatization existed. It was a hobby and a form of socialization for many people. I’d rather see Peertube be that than what YT has become. Monatization is what ruined it, imo.
Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
I get what you mean about the monetization ruining the hobby, but also realize that there would be a significant lack of creators (and therefore content) if they couldn’t make money from their channels. People were doing it for fun back then and they could afford to since they didn’t have to worry about high quality, well produced videos. Even today, plenty of people join YT to make content without the idea of trying to make it rich or make a job out of it.
I watch mostly gaming content online, and I feel that a lot of these YouTubers wouldn’t make content if they weren’t getting paid, especially for those who are livestreamers and VTubers who’s whole life depends on subs and spending money on them.
I think it’s justified that these creators want to be paid for their work, as these quality videos take teams of people and hours of editing and love put into them. You can still love your hobby and also want to get paid for the mass amount of effort it takes to do so.
So the shitposts, fan clips, video essays, art memes, gossip channels, etc. would still exist, yes, but some of the longer content that needs higher production would just tank. Stuff like gameplays, cooking videos, makeup tutorials, etc., at least in my mind.
I want Peertube to succeed without needing ads, but I just find that extremely hard and unrealistic to do. Maybe if online culture shifted entirely from ads to sponsorships instead, creators would go to Peertube, but that would require us to actually use these codes and pay money to said sponsors for them to make money. Plus, sponsorships are the new ads, which is why I use sponsorblock, defeating the purpose.
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
That is a very good point and is something that needs to be sorted out. There is or at least was a video platform that paid crypto that I think had the right ideas, but was not well executed and frankly even if it was great, most crypto projects were scams.
I do suspect that as we make our way more into the AI and robotics era, that how we measure value will shift and suddenly decentralized platforms will generate some form of income of it will even be called that. Until then, you are right, there is little incentive for creators to move to a platform that makes them no money and people are ok with their privacy and data being shared so the status quo it is.