Why none of my video links go to YouTube
You might have noticed that none of the video links on this website go to YouTube, and are wondering why this is.
I am passionate about freedom of speech and privacy online, so I link to the most freedom and privacy-respecting platform possible for the video. Below is a list of preferred platforms in descending order, with summaries of their pros and cons:
- Peertube
- Pros:
- Completely decentralised.
- Hosted on a variety of independent websites that anyone is free to create.
- Connected to other Peertube instances (The same account can be used across multiple instances, and you can search across all of them)
- Integrated with the wider fediverse (decentralised equivalents to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud/Spotify etc).
- Cons:
- Setting up a personal Peertube instance is more complicated than just clicking a few buttons.
- If you want to put your videos on a personal Peertube instance You will need to pay for a server and domain to host it on
- Pros:
- Odysee
- Pros:
- Videos hosted on the Odysee website are decentralised using the Lbry platform.
- It allows people to earn cryptocurrency (LBC) for doing various things on the website, or to tip/donate to creators.
- You can trade LBC for fiat currency (dollars, pounds, euros, etc), allowing you to earn money without relying on advertisements or partnerships.
- LBC fluctuates in value against fiat currencies, allowing further profit by timing exchanges wisely.
- Whilst much smaller than YouTube, it has a lot of users, particularly in the technology, politics and cryptocurrency areas.
- Cons:
- The website/app itself is a centralised place. That means staff can remove videos from the website, ban accounts, etc.
- No fediverse integration.
- Pros:
- BitChute
- Pros:
- Respects freedom of speech much more than YouTube (for now?)
- Doesn't suffer from YouTube's search algorithms.
- Cons:
- Less decentralised and secure than hosts listed above.
- No cryptocurrency.
- No fediverse integration.
- Hosted in the UK so subject to its censorship laws.
- Pros:
- Invidious
- Pros:
- An alternative front-end for YouTube which is stripped of its invasive scripts.
- Anyone can host their own front-end.
- It benefits from YouTube's large userbase and video selection.
- Cons:
- It will still suffer from the problems of YouTube admin and policy (e.g taking down or demonetising undeserving videos and channels).
- Sometimes can't handle traffic to their website, so the website or video might not load properly. If this is the case when visiting any Invidious link on my website, try looking for the video on another Invidious instance instead.
- Missing "copy at current time" functionality YouTube has.
- No cryptocurrency, fediverse or any other feature that YouTube doesn't have.
- Pros:
Why I dislike YouTube in particular
A lot of the videos on my website may be available on YouTube also, but I avoid YouTube in particular because:
It's owned by Google
I advise against using all Google products. Google is growing into a dangerous monopoly with no qualms about abusing their power for their own selfish ends. Anyone curious to learn more should check out The Creepy Line documentary and webpages by Richard Stallman and by Wikileaks.
It has unfair and restrictive algorithms
These algorithms bias towards certain kinds of videos, and give big businesses an unfair advantage. For example criteria to appear on the top of search results include how often the channel uploads videos, and how new a video is. This makes it so that those who spend a long time to make high-quality videos will probably not get noticed, and so people who don't have the resources to make high-quality videos on a regular basis will have to resort to low-quality, click-baiting videos in order to keep up. In my opinion we already have traditional television and closed streaming packages like Netflix and Disney+ for big-budget entertainment, so the role of open video sharing platforms like YouTube should be to give smaller, independent creators a place to thrive.
It bans and demonetises content inconsistently and unfairly
Not only are the staff often inconsistent but also the punishments are often enforced automatically by a bot which doesn't understand context the way a human would (e.g a historical videos about WWII might be misunderstood by a bot as promoting nazism or a film/music critic might be detected as violating copyright). You can appeal to have the video put back up or re-monetized, but as the search algorithm means that only new videos get noticed, it's usually too late for the creators to receive money by the time the video has been re-monetized.
It's a centralised website
This means that even if Google was the nicest company in the world it still has the potential to be corrupted and abuse their power later down the line. With decentralised alternatives a particular host might get corrupted but you can just move to another host and continue business as usual if so.
All this being said though, this does not mean that any website that is trustworthy just because it's not YouTube. I do not endorse any video sharing website apart from the ones listed above.