The elephant in the room is the size distribution of "other people's kingdoms". Having oversized kingdoms and overbearing kings is not a god-given parameter, its down to regulation, political and economic choices. Its not for nothing that the current digital world has been called neo-feudal.
The real solution is to force these kingdoms to build permanently open gates and roadways that connect the land, increase all around traffic and opportunity.
Only when people turn from digital vassals to digital citizens will we emerge from the middle ages we are currently in. In this sense the most important development in the online world is still ahead if us.
I live somewhere that has a lot of castles - there are 3 (possibly 4) within 2km of where I am sitting writing this.
I don't think any of these castles were built directly by kings - although I suspect their construction was either approved by a king or by someone who had delegated authority from a king. NB I can also see a large castle about ~11 km away that was a royal castle (and still has a military garrison).
I suspect that most castles are probably in other people's kingdoms.
If you are in France or some other central European old Kingdom, the people living in those castles were the ones who either put the king in the throne or had the power to remove him if he started some funny business, so it was their kingdom in a sense. The problem with modern platforms is, as always, how much leverage the users have against the administrators.
Yes, in the case of Scotland there is a famous document (Declaration of Arbroath) that was written to the Pope asking him to, amongst other things, acknowledge that Scotland had been pretty much always been independent of England. This was "signed" by the Scottish nobles and has a section saying that if the current king (Robert the Bruce) wasn't good enough at fighting the English he'd be removed and they'd find someone more capable.
Removal of a bad king was a possibility, but actually attempting to do it was ... tricky. It could definitely backfire and end up with the rebels on a scaffold, or, worse, with a decade-long civil war that harmed everyone and opened the door of the kingdom to potential raiders from the outside.
In practice, unhappy nobles would often rather deny their necessary cooperation (at war or administering the land in peace) and thus force the king to make some amends and tradeoffs.
Well, there is the practical purpose of legitimacy. It may seem too soft for modern power theoreticians, but the legitimate king has something that cannot be acquired by raw power, and that puts somewhat of a damper on potential rebels. Not on each and every one of them, of course, but it has a wide effect. Killing or deposing the legitimate monarch was a serious spiritual crime for which one could pay not just by his earthly life, but in the afterlife as well.
Even usurpers like William the Conqueror tried to obtain some legitimacy by concocting stories why they and nobody else should be kings.
We still see some reverbations of that principle today. Many authoritarians love to "roleplay elections", even though they likely could do it like Eritrea and just not hold any. It gives them a veneer of legitimacy.
Would-be rebels don't necessarily need to kill or even depose the monarch, if the monarch's power is so limited in the first place. They can just go about their business and ignore the king's objections to the contrary.
Then, of course, legitimacy itself is culturally defined, and in some places being able to depose the monarch would be ipso facto proof of said monarch's retroactive illegitimacy. The notion of "divine right of kings" is far from universal.
3. You are strong enough to provide a serious and credible threat to the king if he implements a policy that threatens you.
Example: Valve in the early 2000s before or as they were building Steam to challenge the video game publisher model. 20 years on and Valve is still printing money, while Sierra Online doesn't exist.
Also Valve has always been a private company tightly controlled by insiders, whereas Sierra had already been a public company since 1989, subsequently acquired by CUC in 1996 for $1.5bn, and embarked on a non-stop acquisition spree in pursuit of short-term growth, which usually ends badly (think Gateway, AOL, Time-Warner, etc). Esp. pre-Sarbanes-Oxley.
Moreover, Gabe Newell always had a controlling stake in Valve ever since 1996, so that prevents any shenanigans. There are comparatively few shareholders (than a public company) and they were all long-term, since Valve will likely never go public, certainly no year soon, or even be privately acquired; while Newell controls it.
In this instance your complaint is about corporate governance rather than tech; (how far back did tech people stop being in control at Sierra?)
Castle building was in fact a function of the downfall of the carolingian empire that until then kept it under control and only granted the right at strategic locations. Most castles simply made a local lord unfireable by his king since besieging a castle was way too expensive for a regular dispute. The castle building shifted the power to the local realm, starting the feudal period for good.
Castles are thus more like domains where once you take hold of it, even the big powers have a hard time taking it away from you again
> Building a castle is a very good idea if you seek to entrench yourself in the power structure of the kingdom. To do this, you must be able credibly mount a defence of the castle to discourage forcible eviction without major mutual destruction (cough too big to fail).
> Don't build a wooden cottage and expect it function like a castle with a garrison under your command. Even if you slowly expand it to a stone mansion, if you don't maintain a garrison, it won't work as a castle.
Sadly, building an game on someone else's platform is more like setting up a cottage on the land. You might be able to get some farming done and survive, but if the lord fancies the grain, you're out of luck. But also good luck finding land to farm without a lord. Peasant.
My understanding in many places (France in the Versailles era and the contemporaneous Tokugawa Japan) important families were expected to have some members at court where they could be observed, held accountable (hostage?) etc. That would be a reason to be your own domicile close to the court.
When it comes to the "internet" - you are 30 years late to apply such forces. Everything is now DRMed, closed garden proprietary bs - there is no legal framework, nor will to reverse that and we are going to pay.
It looks like you got down-voted but I'm not sure why, because you're technically correct.
Rewind 20 years and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, TikTok, Discord and what we think of as the "contemporary Internet" didn't really exist. Google existed, and even back then SEO was a thing and people were talking about not putting all of your eggs into Google's basket when it comes to your business model (which I remember vividly because I started a business in 2003 running a for-profit website that would continue to exist until 2022).
Fast forward to the present and yeah users are opting in to "platforms" that require accounts that keep content within the walled garden. And Google search has declined in quality so much that I and many others don't use it anymore.
But the world wide web, as a technology that is accessible to everyone, that existed 20 years ago still exists.
You can still build a website
You can still create opt-in email newsletters
And there are a lot more people online today than there were 20 years ago, which in many regards makes it easier to reach an audience today than it did back then... even if how you would choose to go about it might differ because of user behaviour.
It's fashionable to be pessimistic towards the tech industry.. and I myself get pessimistic about it all the time.
But when I look back at the fact that I was able to, beginning in 2003, create an online business that allowed me to work from home and feed my family for 15 years at a time before YouTube existed and when the dominant social media platform was still MySpace ... and now I see content creators getting millions of views and some of them are just talking heads in a bedroom ... yeah the world changed but in many ways it's easier to reach people today than it was before this modern era of walled gardens and a google search that sucks.
But we are starting to have the first generation that grew up with Google thinking Google, etc was the internet, where as it's not. The culture of creating more than consuming gave way to consuming content and scrolling becoming the default behaviour that was conditioned into users.
Using a platform is one thing, reducing your platform risk by finding the people who will be your supporters is the real purpose of other platforms in other cases... coming to your platform.
As people start to see themselves as a platform, I suspect this will change.
Anecdotal: My hobby tech blog went from 4k hits/ day (all cold Google search traffic) w/ top Google searches in 2019 to about 60 a day today. I still publish at the same tempo and I believe I improved the quality of the blog, but I suspect these days the search engine traffic pushes eyeballs to the walled garden "social media" apps.
You are no "authoritative" voice. What do you think was all the rage against misinformation about? To give legacy media and advertising customers an edge. All platforms with user voices and ratings were destroyed too. User opinions are bad for marketing.
If any search term is in any way part of any news cycle, you will get the crappiest search results you could imagine and any real content like a blog fitting the topic will be far down the line.
Absolutely. But it is disconcerting to realize the inertia of current collective intelligence even when what is at stake is great gains in productivity and welfare and even when formally we "celebrate" the benefits of well governed, market based democracies.
It goes to show that every generation has to internalize the painful way key facts about what is good and what is bad for society, even if history provides more than enough learnings for free.
Even worse is the overemphasis on when (in terms of exactness).
Knowing the rough order of events (as per the flow of a story) is important, as is the relative timespan, but a lot of history schooling puts too much emphasis on knowing the exact dates of certain events, which I think really subtracts the experience for many.
The most interesting history we got taught at school was by one of our music teachers who was a kilt wearing Scottish independence supporter who used to tell us bloodthirsty stories about Bruce, Wallace and others...
NB This was ~45 years ago - I doubt such things would be tolerated these days. :-)
Scottish history would be far too dangerous to teach today. Undermines the narrative that all white people have a detestable history of colonisation and exploitation.
The history curriculum I was taught in school was terribly boring and politicised. Other than the mandatory WW2 coverage, the _only_ other topics we studied were the horribleness of European colonisation, like Gandhi and Apartheid, ect… I was rather surprised to grow up and find out how interesting the topic actually was.
Conceptually the fediverse points towards the "right" direction, but imho it still falls way short from being a fully developed and sustainable new proposal. Both on the technical side and (maybe more importantly) on the economic side.
Don't get me wrong, it is admirable what a handful of highly motivated people have achieved with activitypub, atproto etc. (to mention just some currently trending designs). But what needs to be done to deprecate the pattern of digital feudalism is a much bigger challenge.
The main way to move forward will be to incentivize (through legislation) many more actors (not just social media reformers) to invest and experiment in this direction, away from the feudal hypersurface that is crushing our horizon. Its the only way to explore the vast number of technical possibilities and economic patterns without being hampered by biases and blind spots.
We don't know what a digital democratic economy and society exactly looks like. Its not been done before. Maybe more than one patterns are equally viable and it becomes a matter of choice and/or random historical accidents.
But we do know that we are far from anything remotely compatible with our purported norms and values.
The fediverse is probably the best answer you're gonna find to digital feudalism that is compatible~ish with the real world. Which is to say; it theoretically divides the risk that any single castle and king could hijack the entire process up into many smaller castles, meaning that if a king turns hostile, you can go somewhere else with relatively little friction.
The reality is that if you truly want to get rid of digital castles and kings, you're essentially going to have to operate a distributed digital firehose (cynically: digital sewage pipe) that anyone can submit to with no preconditions whatsoever. For many reasons (first one that jumps to mind: spam, second reason: illegal shit, third reason: trolls) most people don't want to operate something like that, and that's before the law gets involved.
Pet projects exist of course, but pretty much zero of them are made to scale up against the idea of truly nuking kingdoms; the closest to a realization of this sort of network is something similar to TORs peer2peer, and you can consider pretty much all legal risks of running a TOR exit node for a service like this.
No. Network effects + turbo-capitalism being able to lose 100s of millions a month to build market share, mean excessive concentration which we cannot get rid of simply by providing alternatives, even if they are "better".
The real elephant in the room is unless you are an actual king, your castle is always on someone's land
I get the original point of the article, but the reality is you're always building something on someone else's infrastructure. It depends on how much the infrastructure you want to build yourself and own versus how much you get to use of theirs and for how much
We already have digital citizenship and already are digital citizens.
We are digital citizens of commercially owned and run countries called Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more.
A digital citizenship is in private corporations with out many rights in exchange hold our digital identities as they see fit.
It’s why we are offered digital citizenship to a digital identity in exchange for convenience of a single sign on to click.
This can setup a relationship
Of being locked out of your digital identity and whatever it is tied to.
A way to keep a balance is to only use email as login, and own your identity with your own domain for email that at least can be moved between providers if you don’t want to manage your own.
You're always building a castle in someone else's kingdom.
If you're publishing on your own website instead of a social media platform, your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself, your hosting provider, Let's Encrypt, all the email providers you need to be able to deliver to (notably Microsoft and Google), and probably also your payments provider.
Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized, and it's no longer possible to build a site that isn't in anybody else's kingdom.
This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.
When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there: identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and ensure there's a plan B.
Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift that's earthshattering for ~everyone.
On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it actually does happen to people and businesses all the time. Even the most law-abiding business should not build their castle in a social media platform.
This is not a safe assumption. You're just one crazy person willing to harass the family of whoever runs the registrar away from being 'too difficult to work with' and getting your account nuked. They don't charge enough to stick their neck out for you.
We're also one button press away from thermonuclear apocalypse.
Knowing what's more likely and what's less likely is still useful information: social media turning bad is a daily occurence, while dns registrars' family members have been safe for a pretty long time now.
I was once involved in my friend's SaaS startup and he got locked out of Facebook ads for having an inactive account and then spending too much money in the first day. "Too much" in this case was a few hundred dollars. Turns out you're meant to slowly increase your spend over a week while doomscrolling shitty clickbait, otherwise Facebook thinks your account has been compromised.
> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.
This is simply false. We were locked out of Meta Ads Manager for no apparent reason. When we contacted Meta customer support—setting aside the casual racism I faced for not being a native speaker—all they could offer was, "Oops, that shouldn't have happened; we'll refresh your account." As a result, we lost approximately $5k in business because we couldn't reach our audience at its peak.
My wife got randomly banned from Facebook Marketplace for a year. Appeal after appeal was ignored, then randomly they restored access more than a year later.
> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.
That's not correct, just on HN you can frequently see articles about people getting locked out of Google, Paypal, Facebook, etc. with no explanation given. I've been banned for suspicious activity on a social media site on an account I hadn't used in years, probably because someone was trying to steal the username.
> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.
Complete ignorance of the people who arbitrarily get flagged by algorithms to no fault of their own or get on the bad side of someone at these companies who have a grudge.
You mean like the Texas home schooling Facebook group that keeps getting dinged because Facebook keeps asserting that the word "Texan" implies they are selling drugs?
It's not an either-or. Organizations are required for a well-functioning community, but they're also threats to liberty insofar as they represent easily capturable concentrations of power.
>But wait! Your mailing list is hosted by Mailchimp which is another company, and your website is hosted by GoDaddy or Squarespace? Aren’t they evil kingdoms too?
>Not really. They are just hosting platforms that are invisible to your followers.
>The general public doesn’t have to go to Mailchimp.com to read your newsletter or squarespace to view your blog. Your readers go to your domain.
Just because you are using someone else’s services doesn’t mean you’re in their kingdom.
Self hosting (which I think you should be) is more like being Luxembourg. Sure, you still have to appease the neighbours, and occasionally you might be invaded, but overall you still get to see your own taxes and keep the culture somewhat independent.
> This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.
I doubt it is true, and I'd assume people have set up a site. If the media industry failed to exterminate torrenting with enormous economic incentives to do so why would the crusade against child abuse achieve more success? It isn't technically possible to stop people communicating with each other over the internet.
Well, for all the "safety" of the kingdoms there, it didn't stop it.
So the kingdoms have not prevented it, and many probably have facilitated it, and maybe not always unintentional (as in, someone from inside the company was "in on it").
You still need an IP address. You can build your own network on top of point-to-point layer-2 connections, which have no central authority, but it won't be reachable from the Internet.
BTW: anyone interested in this should join DN42, which is an alternative central authority, and does more-or-less this. Although 99.9% of DN42 links are internet VPNs because that's cheaper, physical links are also accepted because they're cooler.
(This reply was delayed by an hour by HN's rate limit)
You can get an IPv6 range from your ISP, or directly from the central authority in your region. (IPv4s are too scarce to get a range, so you'll only want to have one and that will have to be part of your ISP's range because you can't advertise just one.)
Purchasing wholesale internet bandwidth is another way of saying purchasing internet service (a lot of it). The company that sells you that is your ISP.
This logic extend to governments as well. It's a spectrum which in many ways the mega platforms are directly comparable in their economic impacts to governments. This requires a more nuanced analysis than a reductive "it's a private company".
At this point you only have your own kingdom if you have a standing army with nuclear weapons, you are sovereign, everyone else rents, this is just physics, the details are social contracts.
A certain medieval gentlemen from Alamut would beg to differ. One does not need a standing army and nuclear weapons so much as the ability to inflict your politics on others credibly and unavoidably. There are many ways to do that, not all of which necessarily involve violence.
Put another way: There are many minority populations throughout history and up to this very day that have managed to carve out a niche in their host population without necessarily employing mass violence to do it.
If you think that all politics is violence then you're always going to be woefully ineffective at it. Never bring a shotgun to a negotiation when a well-placed fact (or fiction) will do.
It does make Clausewitz's saying about war being "politics by other means" back in context when you put it that way.
But really politics is just about "one person causes another to act". This can be through persuasion. It doesn't have to be force (or fraud for that matter).
Consider the persuasion of making a sale. That's not force. People can sell political ideas in the same way, they can spread virally.
EDIT: Also I consider economics, politics and marketing as basically "mass psychology". Hence all the problems with replication in those fields.
EDIT 2: And with these things being psychology, there's a big "default biological drives" component. A lot of the motivations for political etc actions are internal to each person.
The replication issues in those fields are partly attributable to the fields inability to explain behavior in terms of the biological imperative.
There is the theoretical rational actor which while very misunderstood is also subject to the stochastic and entropic reality. The 'internal motivation'
Persuasion can be divided into carrot and stick. The stick the implication of force against the individual and the carrot the promise of the ability to use force against other actors. This can be further expanded to negative force inherent from a relatively worse off position for not taking the carrot.
With some creativity all behavior can be formulated from a few simple primitives.
Interpersonal actions can be "win-win", "win-lose" (of which zero-sum is a subset) and "lose-lose". No force is needed to enter into a win-win arrangement.
Having your own nuclear weapons is probably like having firearms in your home in that you’re actually more likely to be the victim of that class of weapons.
You can make a html website in a torrent. Works surprisingly well.
One time I had a copy of someones website that got deleted and experimented a bit.
The index was paginated linked page titles 50 per page. I combined the paginated pages so that each had 2000 entries (I think it was, maybe 5000) Then I wrote a bit of js that takes a search query from the url?q= looks if it exists on the page, if nothing is found load the next html document and append the query to the url. To my surprise it paged though the pages remarkably fast.
If you want to you could, in stead of display the content, display a search box on each page with the query in it, have a row of dots for the page number (on page 4 display 4 dots)
Displaying 50 or 500 blank pages one after the other goes pretty damn fast if you load them from the file system. They can also be pretty damn big. If you put the content in comments the rendering engine wont touch it at all.
When you update the website you can make a new torrent that has the same folder name and the same files inside. Run a check and the client will discover you had nearly everything already. The only restriction is that it may not change existing html documents.
For that you can just attempt to load non existing scripts in the folder. Have script1.js attempt to load script2.js and 2 look for 3 etc
Easier said than done… if you are a YouTube creator, are you supposed to set up your own video hosting to compete? And how many of your viewers will move over to watch your stuff there? This advice probably works for blogs and mailing lists but isn’t really actionable for other content.
If you are a "YouTube creator", you have already firmly planted your castle on Google's land. The positioning of onself as bound to a particular website run by someone else is needless loss of independence.
Position yourself as a video creator and post your videos also to Instagram (when possible) and to Vimeo. Seed free / back catalog episodes via a torrent. Run a mailing list announcing and discussing your videos, with some premium content for paying subscribers only. Maybe have an X / SkyBlue / mastodon feed with more compact announces, comments, and high-virality short clips from your longer videos.
Cross-link and cross-reference all the channels of your presence. Make your brand recognizable across the publishing methods. Gently prod people to touch more than one channel of your video distribution, just to get the most avid viewers acquainted with several.
Yes, this is significantly more work. It also may bring significantly more results if your videos are good. This gives you a much stronger assurance that your brand and your following will not be lost, should you lose access to YouTube / Instagram / Vimeo / X / whatever other platform. Commoditize your complement, as they say.
Vimeo only gives you 2 TB bandwidth/month without negotiating an Enterprise plan. If your video goes viral, you're going to be out thousands to host it for everyone. How are you going to pay for that? You could put it on credit and then show these numbers when manually negotiating the payout from your next sponsor and pay it back with the proceeds from the next video, but there's no guarantee your next video will be also a hit.
That's what PeerTube is supposed to be for. You can set up a PeerTube host yourself.
Or there are some public PeerTube hosts that accept uploads.
When people are watching your videos, the ones with good bandwidth are also hosting them for other users. The hosting site is just handling the original copy and coordinating the peers. (This isn't like Bittorrent; hosting is centralized but playout is distributed. When no one is watching, the only copy is on the original server.)
PeerTube really should be popular like WordPress, for self-hosted content. But it's not.
Neither Google nor Bing indexes PeerTube sites, so there's no discovery. Few PeerTube videos have more than a handful of viewers. I use PeerTube for technical videos, to keep them ad-free, and it works fine for that low-volume application.
Here's the Blender 4.2 showcase reel on PeerTube.[1] It's a good demo. Will it overload if watched by many HN users? Please try.
PeerTube is just a self-hosted video platform. Video bandwidth is legitimately expensive. You'll still be out a bunch of money if your video goes viral.
No, that's the whole point of PeerTube.
PeerTube scales up by spreading the playout load amongst everyone who is watching at the moment.
If a thousand people are watching your video, most of them are getting the content from the cache of others who are also watching at the moment. Not from the hosting server.
This works well only if many of the watchers have significant upload bandwidth and aren't behind firewalls that prevent them from outputting blocks of video.
This is different from torrent-type systems or Usenet, which distribute persistent copies.
With Peertube, only the original server permanently hosts the video. Everybody else is just caching.
So the disk usage of watchers isn't that big.
Now your castle is in someone else's kingdom. And in Cloudflare's kingdom, always be ready to get an email: "pay us $150,000 in 24 hours or we cancel your service"
Can you suggest a few video creators who are having success with this model? I watch quite a few video creators, and don’t know any trying to use this model.
Personally I have seen a few over the years come and go. Podcasts (Adio and Video) for example often tried to use youtube as an additional channel, but still maintain their websites and RSS feeds.
It seems these days, most Youtube creators are at least somewhat aware of the problem and have websites, discord channels, patreons etc.
While I still think many would struggle if they lost their youtube access suddenly, they do have additional channels to reach out to at least part of their audience.
The people there are both video creators and their own hosts, or so I read. Got together and built themselves a host because YT was not what they needed.
Most videographers are actively trying to be seen, are they not? How else would they transition into an agency/studio job with real customers and projects? I've never heard of a videographer that would accept obscurity in exchange for tech/platform sovereignty.
I have seen a few do the conversion. They usually start by cross posting on any video site they can. X, Rumble, locals, self hosting, discord, with usually some sort of patreon model of funding with maybe ad reads. Then what is left on YT is highlights of their other longer form content on other sites. The kicker is they do not need as many people following them as YT is not taking the majority of the ad revenue cut.
But if you want to see people trying to make the conversion just scroll the front page of Rumble. Many of them are trying to get out form under youtube and many have YT channels too. But Rumble is just another YT waiting to happen and they know it.
LinusTechTips literally built their own video hosting site - Floatplane - exactly for this reason, to have a backup in case YouTube nukes their channel.
This is all good advice but realistically you can probably skip the random social media sites and just do email and YouTube. Email is much, much better than pretty much any social network.
Email? Outside of the older crowd, I don't know anyone that actively uses email for anything. So many people in my life are surprised when my wife and I use email for anything. Tech/business/academic might hit some ok % with email, but outside of that I'd doubt you'd get to 1% of your potential audience.
Sure, but in my experience it's better to have 1000 solid email subscribers than have your tweet seen by 100k people. Even moreso for something like TikTok, where you can get millions of views but capitalize on virtually none of them.
Dave Jones from the EEVBlog does this - he cross posts to his own site and to many smaller video hosting sites. But if I remember correctly he has said in the past that almost all his viewership comes from YouTube. Unfortunately for long-form videos in English YouTube seems to be the only game in town in terms of discoverability.
While you're tiny, you need discoverability a lot. But even if YouTube bans you and deletes all your videos, you lose relatively little.
The bigger you are, the more well-known, the larger is your following, and the more the whole enterprise is the source of your livelihood, the more you may need to hedge your bets.
It always makes sense to have a backup, but the issue is that video creators are always naturally losing viewers and need to replace them by new viewers who discover their channel(s). It seems like the new viewer discovery is all happening on a very short list of giant platforms which is a bit worrying. Personally I like the way podcasts have managed to be more decentralized but I also fear podcasting is slowly becoming YouTube centric.
Nice summary. There are tools out there that can help with chunks of this, but understanding the pieces as you’re laid out is critical.
Since a lot of creators today were consumers first of content, they miss the side when there was little social or video to consume online, and in turn creating was the default.
I think one method here is to incorporate your own site into the content as much as possible. For example, if you are a creator, get people to sign up to a newsletter to get the source files. Get people onto your platform/forum/whatever as well as watching through YouTube. Easier said than done, but better than not doing anything.
From there, you also ensure that you have a backup of all your videos. I've talked to people that only had their stuff on YouTube/Facebook/whatever. It is super risky. If you have a backup, and YouTube bans you, you can rehost elsewhere, it won't be as big, but you might still have a business afterwards.
Also something that needs to be noted, you don't need the same original numbers of people in your kingdom to make equivalent money.
When you're making commerce in someone's fief, they will demand tribute as well. In the confines of your own kingdom, all the ad dollars are yours.
Which also means you don't need to chase the same amounts of people to make similar coin, especially if the deals you make with advertisers are between you and the advertiser (not you, the advertiser, and the king of some other fief).
Exactly. You can be huge on Youtube or tiktok and if you convert some of that to direct engagement you are much better able to survive a changing landscape.
Yeah, every YT creator that is serious about their job should have their own website with a copy of the videos, and I find it really curious that this doesn't seem to be much of a thing? At best I'm seeing merchandise webshops. But you'd think these people would be multi-channel and have a website, youtube, all the social medias, etc, and the bigger ones a company to manage them all.
But I suspect that as they get bigger, they enter in exclusivity / no-compete contracts with Youtube, and if they detect the same video hosted elsewhere, they get taken down or something.
This sounds like an opportunity for a product. Apart from eyeballs and familiarity, Youtube does a lot of handholding so that non-technical people van run their own channels. I don't think 90% of youtubers would have any idea how to spin up a website. But I'm sure they'd be happy to pay someone to do it for them (as long as the price was a small fractuon of their ad revenue).
Your YouTube example is exactly what gave rise to Nebula.tv—creators banded together to create an alternative that would backstop them against YouTube's dominance.
All the 1000 of your mailing list subscribers? Or maybe 10k.
You start needing alternatives when you're already established and have a following. With this comes large enoug influence and thus the ability / risk to step on some big toes, including Google's.
I think the difference between development for a “real” OS is that windows is still mainly owned by its customers. Similar to how MacOS is. On MacOS people can still install your applications even if you don’t pay the Apple tax to avoid their pop-up warnings. (I’m not sure if avoiding the windows warnings is also something you pay Microsoft for.)
I think a better comparison would be iOS or Chrome, where you’ll realistically have to submit yourself to their stores if you want to reach most users. Which is sort of even more locked down than YouTube as some content creators on YouTube have managed to move their audience to other platforms, though sometimes by still posting teasers or at least some content on YouTube.
For instance, https://vimeo.com/ott is an effective (albeit expensive) option, powering Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor) and other brands and allowing them to focus on content. Dropout, in particular, has found an effective model of releasing short clips from their improv-heavy shows on social video platforms, gaining virality there while subtly reminding new and old fans that they can find full episodes, and support on-screen and off-screen talent, by subscribing to the brand directly. Their growth would be impacted by the loss of a marketing channel, but not their underlying subscription fundamentals.
Another option is to consider that "YouTube creator" should not be treated as anything more than a hobby; it should certainly not be your identity/job title. Unless you have some sort of contract with Alphabet, your videos are hosted at their pleasure and you are owed nothing. Your time is likely better spent not bolstering someone else's library of content.
With videos you can start by retaining control of your channel configurations and making it independent from any particular video hosting provider. See this for inspiration (not promoting it, just the gist of the idea): https://grayjay.app/
It really doesn't. To understand why, you have only to comprehend the following: Whether someone is searching under a particular keyword, or just browsing whatever pops up on the home page, the average browser has a finite amount they're willing to scroll before abandoning their search... and chances are your video is NOT going to be placed highly in those results unless you're directing a firehose at it from offsite via Twitter, forum posts, news aggregators, or paying Youtube to promote your video flat out (which is such an obvious moneygrab on their part its disgusting). In other words: If you rely on their algorithm to promote your work you're literally playing the lottery and, much like the lottery, statistically you're going to lose. It makes far more sense to find bandwidth and hosting, negotiate with an ad network, and direct a firehose at the resulting site... but that's more work than some are willing to do. shrug Oh well.
This is an amateurish take on marketing yourself on YouTube. The algorithm is /not/ like the lottery. My wife is a content creator on YT and hasn’t spent a dime on advertising. The free advertising isn’t in the form of search result placement (mostly) but rather the algorithm showing your videos next to more popular related videos. That’s why the absolute most important thing for video promotion isn’t the material itself, but rather the title/thumbnail combination. People are generally bad at understanding this and/or bad at marketing themselves so they attribute their lack of success as random chance
And unless your audience is very tech oriented, they’re not going to switch off whatever platform the ads are on to watch videos hosted elsewhere. You’d need to ask a LOT of people (= a large amount of $$$) and hope a few of them make it over a bit at a time
> My wife is a content creator on YT and hasn’t spent a dime on advertising.
Is your wife a representative sample of all Youtubers? If not, your datum is irrelevant.
> unless your audience is very tech oriented, they’re not going to switch off whatever platform the ads are on to watch videos hosted elsewhere.
Having now witnessed multiple creators hop from one platform to another and drag their audiences with them because they're JUST THAT ENTERTAINING... no, you're wrong. People will gladly follow artists to a better platform if it means they're able to make a living and/or not be censored.
Podcasting is actually worse. YouTube is a kingdom where people come to you. In podcasting there are a few large kingdoms and you have to be in all of them because of the "wherever you get your podcasts" thing.
With YouTube people can just click the "make money" button. YouTube handles the ad sales and payments. Both are your job if you're podcasting or publishing on PeerTube.
Hosting video content is not an unsolvable problem. YouTube's moat is economies of scale and user base. YouTube's draw is the "make money" button.
The "make money" button, however, is an illusion for 99% of publishers. The one case where it does seem to make out is with livestreams, and then only because unlike topical short-form videos, streaming is not a winner-take-all environment where one or two people run away with all the eyeballs, but instead people will tend to decommoditize topical streaming based on the personality of the broadcaster and your ability to form a parasocial relationship with them... hence even a relatively unknown person, if they're persistent, can manage to grab a few hundred regular viewers who'll toss a few bucks each stream... not enough to make a living, but enough for beer money. The prime advantage of youtube in this scenario is not having to deal with setting up hosting/DDoS filtering and negotiating with a payment processor ... just push the button and upload. So for streamers I think it can still be worth it, but for people posting short form content I think they might be better off rolling their own because they can't rely on Youtube's algorithm to give them enough eyeballs to be profitable.
A high school friend of mine contacted me out of the blue on facebook after probably 20 years. He had gotten on early with an MLM that made it big and one of them had such success on the platform that he had made multiple appearances at their national convention to give a testimonial to how it changed his family's lives. Mind you, this is a guy who was 2 years from being able to retire with a pension from the chemical refinery he worked at.
I laughed, told him I wasn't interested, and warned him that he didn't own his network: that the MLM could take it from him at any time, and it's why most of the experienced salesmen I knew lived well below their paychecks. He grew very upset, told me I didn't know what I was talking about, and basically behaved as if I had insulted his religion.
Well, half a year later I was laid off and found a new job with a marketing automation firm. On my second day, we had an all hands meeting where they were announcing that the MLM he worked for would be immediately breaking contract and leaving our platform because they reached a settlement with the DOJ over their methodology. Effective immediately, they were going to a distributor model and ceasing all payouts for network related sales.
I knew his world was going to collapse before he did. In the end, he had to sell his house and most of his possessions, his wife divorced him, and he tried to break back into the MLM world but could never get anything started. Nobody wanted to hire him for a traditional sales role because they regard MLMers as lazy and dumb. He's back at another chemical refinery, hoping to work there for another 20+ years to earn another pension.
> 2 years from being able to retire with a pension
> [..]
> hoping to work there for another 20+ years to earn another pension
I don't understand that... If he was two years from retiring, then he only needed two more years of salaried employment somewhere lese - didn't he ? What country did he live in ?
In the US, pension is short for “defined benefit pension”, most often a provided by a single employer stipulating that you work at that employer for a minimum number of years, and the longer you work at one employer, the greater the benefit.
They only exist at taxpayer funded employers or legacy businesses like oil and gas, but most everyone else has switched to defined contribution pensions, but those are referred to as “401k” or “401b” or some other letter for the appropriate section of the law that specifies the tax benefit of saving for retirement.
The latter are better ever since low cost index funds came about, as you get to skip paying the DB pension administrators and remove agency risk.
Virtually all people who have worked and retired at oil and gas companies over the past 40 years had both a company pension AND a 401K. My dad has a paid off house and no bills other than utilities and taxes. He's pulling in over 80K a year in retirement, and he re-invests most of what he's being forced to pull out.
But now people working for profitable businesses can do mega backdoor roth contributions and still invest in the same VOO equities that the pension fund manager would invest in, but cut out all of the agency risk and not be tied to their employer.
The optimal strategy would probably be to start on YouTube and then migrate to your own platform once you can afford it and have an audience willing to come with you.
Then probably dual stream for a while on your site with blended chat support before cutting the YouTube cord loudly and with warning.
Rule #7: Use a social media platform that lets you own your identity and social graph.
Social media has certain benefits that your own website doesn't. Public key cryptography, self-hosted servers, and an open protocol make it possible for your followers to actually follow you, regardless of what app they use to access the protocol. This is what we're building on nostr (in contrast to bluesky and farcaster, which are nearly as closed as the legacy solutions). It's not always pretty, but it works better for sovereign social media than anything else.
Interesting article but it only talks about 1 half of the coin. For the sort of stuff they are talking about you can't get near the visibility and ease of use building it yourself.
You will see a fraction of the traffic that somebody doing the same thing on those platforms will see.
They try to hand wave it with build a tower and bring them back to your site but that rarely works well.
I need to create an account to use your site has a significantly higher bar than I hit subscribe to see your next video in my feed.
I have friends dealing with this very problem. They strongly believe in and agree that they should build in their own kingdom. They hate the platforms and all the ways in which they are bad.
But they are small business owners. They make their living entirely based on digital visibility. They need to get their message out to where the eyeballs are. They may try to get people to subscribed directly to their e-mail newsletter, but that's not enough. Most people find them on Instagram, Twitter, etc. If they delete those accounts, as they would like to, their business will be in deep trouble almost immediately.
Web discoverability has had the same dilemma since its inception. People only remember and actively engage with a few things. A search engine, some media platforms, some communities they are involved in, etc. If a link appears in one of those places it's extremely visible. If a web page does not show up in one of those places, discovering it is next to impossible. What are they going to do, guess the URL?
How can someone get some amount of visibility on the web without putting anything in anyone else's kingdom? Even someone following the POSSE model (post on own site, syndicate elsewhere) is extremely dependent on the elsewhere if they want to be visibility. Without the elsewheres to syndicate to, they will build an empty and isolated kingdom.
Well, there's always good old fashioned off-line visibility, if your small business friends want to experience real worthless crap.
If you do your work, it's not hard to get good visibility on Google and other search engines. The key is this: If you're selling product X or service Y, you need to make your website the very best resource imaginable for information about it and with an as easy purchase process as possible – with good terms to boot.
But most small business owners are completely uninterested in that, and instead spend their days spamming social media and paying for ads to bring visitors to their website that turns potential customers away instantly.
Build your castle in your own kingdom but have "vassels" in all those other kingdoms to get the benefits they provide and use them to promote your own kingdom. You might still rely on those 3rd party "kingdoms" for the vast majority of your income but you at least have options if one kicks you out and your fans know where to find you.
[edit: akin to a developer having the official git repo self hosted but mirroring it into github for the community]
This advice goes back to previous generations of web entrepreneurs, way back to 2015 or earlier: https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634
" It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. "
GOG isn't exactly DRM-free these days. The platform doesn't add its own DRM, but it does distribute games with DRM elements. Their stance seems to be that, so long as the game is playable offline in single-player mode, it is acceptable.
And yet Steam is incredibly popular despite the DRM because it's unobtrusive. You don't get punished for replacing your computer every couple years and needing to reinstall your games.
I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone having a technical problem with Steam's DRM, I've only heard moral/ethical/worried-about-what-happens-when-Steam-disappears problems.
It's true, even assuming you do everything yourself, you're still building within the laws of a country, which is building within someone else's kingdom, as it were. I suppose the real rule of thumb should be "Don't build your castle in an autocracy."
I'm about to launch an small indie Web site, and yesterday I started going through a list of 11 social media sites on which to grab the brand name.
But initially the Web site has only an email list signup form.
I figure, if I have an array of icons for social media sites where everyone is owned, then random people interested in the site will just pick one of those.
I guess I'll soon see whether I get many connections that way, whether people actually read their email, whether they forget they signed up and flag it as spam (scrodding me with GMail), etc.
(Later, I plan to have an active Fediverse presence, for people who want some social thing like that. But I don't expect many people to be on Fediverse, so first I'll have to sell it to people. It's an easier sell if that's the only "app" on which I'm putting out stuff, rather than hypocritically supporting all the social media ranching companies by replicating content to them.)
The leaked MrBeast PDF is enlightening in this regard; he knew he was building his castle in youtube and did so intentionally and explicitly because he thought it would get huge. He wasn't exactly wrong, either. His prediction-gamble earned him a life-changing amount of money.
Whether he could or should have built his castle in his own kingdom is irrelevant. His stated goal was to build a bigger youtube castle than anyone and everyone else.
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
> Youtube is the future and I believe with every fiber of my body it’s going to keep growing year over year and in 5 years Youtube will be bigger than anyone will have ever imagined and I want this channel to be at the top.
They can replace him by altering search results, so he stays around while others build up make up for the revenue. There is a reason the YouTube search engine is no longer useful for finding things.
I always start by searching HN. I'm no techbro so I take a good amount of what I read with a grain of salt. With such an open query (Digital marketing), you should limit to past year and there will be good content
I've had this attitude before and missed out on some major opportunities. For example, even though I was an early smartphone adopter, I refused to develop apps for the iPhone when the AppStore was launched in 2008 because of the closed nature of Apple's ecosystem. There are a variety of billion dollar companies which can attest that building their castle in Apple's kingdom worked out fine for them.
The big question today is: Do you try to make an AI business using OpenAI's APIs, or do you host everything yourself? One could make the argument either way.
You use their APIs in a way that commoditizes them. Ideally your customers don't care if you switch to Anthropic, because the LLM provider is not the reason customers are picking you. Likewise, there is some structural reason that OpenAI will never release a feature that rugpulls you, eg, no 'chat to your PDF'.
An extreme form is self-hosted on edge-only devices where folks are buying some other hw. Ex: Nvidia selling GPUs and giving out free Triton inferencing OSS software. But most are in the middle, eg, some accounting app now with LLMs. Our case of investigations in louie.ai is right at that boundary: OpenAI likes to support data analysis, but folks using Splunk/databricks/etc all day expect a lot more out of software here, and that's too at-odds with OpenAI's org chart and customerbase.
Most business advice is really good at figuring out in hindsight why things went a certain way. But usually it's not that great at predicting what will work in the future.
While the article admits that it’s pretty much necessary to use “other people’s kingdoms” to get any interest in or visibility for your castle in the first place, I feel it still greatly underestimates the power of the few large kingdoms that are in actual place on the internet at this point in time.
If your goal is to monetize your castle, you generally need the masses. And while you should indeed spread your risk, be it throughout multiple kingdoms or having one of your own, it is naive or even ridiculous to assume you can get the bulk of your revenue-generating visitors to continuously add 'visiting your castle in your kingdom' to their routine. That is a conscious effort they have to make, not just a mental choice but an actual action, to go to your (e.g.) website.
Simply put: the majority of visitors to any castle do their visits in the FB/X/IG/YT/TT kingdoms. Only a negligible few of them will consistently make the effort to go to your kingdom. Spread your risk, but don’t delude yourself.
Good advice, but really think it is a lot harder to get eyeballs than this makes out. What the big platforms brings is the audience. Yes, you can make a site to archive off the content, and direct people to your own site. But that is a backup plan. If you get de-platformed, and you go it alone, your audience will stagnate and shrink. Each little guy just doesn't have the reach or infrastructure to drive eyeballs.
Hence, why the proliferation of sites that do this for you like substack, twitch, etc... Anything with content, by being a part of a bigger crowd you can gain more eyeballs.
You will never own every dependency. The raw IP Internet is also someone else's kingdom, more and more by the day. Best you can do is try to balance the utility of someone else's kingdom with its risks.
I started a newsletter on Revue. Then Elon shut it down quite drastically after my 17-ed edition. I'm using Convertkit now where frankly speaking I'm running the exact same risk...
It feels like a middle ground to me. If you can export your list, and use your own domain, and have an easy way to get the content out, it might be worth whatever distribution they can provide.
Just generally I’d always have an eye on the exit and watch for signs of things going down hill. Anything VC-backed warrants more care. Think about how they could alter the deal and plan accordingly.
Kind of tangential, but this article mentions Twitch Boost - I can't imagine small creators having any real issue with this. Building momentum on twitch is hard, and usually involves a ton of luck. If you have no viewers, you get few recommendations, until either the algorithm helps you out and you get lucky or you get a big raid/rehost that gives you the momentum to grow. It's either that or you happen to be one of the first streamers of some entirely new gaming category that doesn't have any big names attached to it, you get lucky there, and grow.
Offering a shortcut to skip all that and pay for growth seems like a common sense move for a lot of small creators. I struggle to think of the arguments against it - are they concerned big creators will flood money into it and drown out smaller ones? They already drown out smaller streamers, especially in streaming categories that are very "saturated." They also have no incentive to boost their stream, they're already top of the recommendations anyway.
Great revenue idea, and a change I as a small creator was welcome to see. Often I have viewers want to spend their channel points or bits or whatever they're called and I tell them to save it, I don't seek profit off of what I do (plus twitch takes it all anyway) I have a day job - but I do feel bad because they seem to want to spend it on something and I only have enough energy and bandwidth to add custom emojis or bot commands, which are dumb and people tire quickly of anyway.
Partner here - I don’t know the precise TOS here because it’s twisty and constantly changing but I have streamed now for almost 10 years as a partner with a micro following, my account balance to this day is like $46. They make every excuse possible not to give you money or put arbitrary restrictions on how much you should stream to access it, to the point I just stopped and put a paypal link on my profile and said dont give it to twitch. They steal a lot from smaller partners. However, it’s a good platform so I just take it. Kind of on the theme of this thread, lol. You choose to build a castle in someone else’s kingdom because there’s no other place.
The elephant in the room is the size distribution of "other people's kingdoms". Having oversized kingdoms and overbearing kings is not a god-given parameter, its down to regulation, political and economic choices. Its not for nothing that the current digital world has been called neo-feudal.
The real solution is to force these kingdoms to build permanently open gates and roadways that connect the land, increase all around traffic and opportunity.
Only when people turn from digital vassals to digital citizens will we emerge from the middle ages we are currently in. In this sense the most important development in the online world is still ahead if us.
I live somewhere that has a lot of castles - there are 3 (possibly 4) within 2km of where I am sitting writing this.
I don't think any of these castles were built directly by kings - although I suspect their construction was either approved by a king or by someone who had delegated authority from a king. NB I can also see a large castle about ~11 km away that was a royal castle (and still has a military garrison).
I suspect that most castles are probably in other people's kingdoms.
If you are in France or some other central European old Kingdom, the people living in those castles were the ones who either put the king in the throne or had the power to remove him if he started some funny business, so it was their kingdom in a sense. The problem with modern platforms is, as always, how much leverage the users have against the administrators.
Yes, in the case of Scotland there is a famous document (Declaration of Arbroath) that was written to the Pope asking him to, amongst other things, acknowledge that Scotland had been pretty much always been independent of England. This was "signed" by the Scottish nobles and has a section saying that if the current king (Robert the Bruce) wasn't good enough at fighting the English he'd be removed and they'd find someone more capable.
Removal of a bad king was a possibility, but actually attempting to do it was ... tricky. It could definitely backfire and end up with the rebels on a scaffold, or, worse, with a decade-long civil war that harmed everyone and opened the door of the kingdom to potential raiders from the outside.
In practice, unhappy nobles would often rather deny their necessary cooperation (at war or administering the land in peace) and thus force the king to make some amends and tradeoffs.
Passive aggressivity isn't a modern concept :)
So long as the king is not sufficiently powerful to take on a bunch of nobles who gang up, for all practical purposes, it is not the king's country.
"for all practical purposes"
Well, there is the practical purpose of legitimacy. It may seem too soft for modern power theoreticians, but the legitimate king has something that cannot be acquired by raw power, and that puts somewhat of a damper on potential rebels. Not on each and every one of them, of course, but it has a wide effect. Killing or deposing the legitimate monarch was a serious spiritual crime for which one could pay not just by his earthly life, but in the afterlife as well.
Even usurpers like William the Conqueror tried to obtain some legitimacy by concocting stories why they and nobody else should be kings.
We still see some reverbations of that principle today. Many authoritarians love to "roleplay elections", even though they likely could do it like Eritrea and just not hold any. It gives them a veneer of legitimacy.
Would-be rebels don't necessarily need to kill or even depose the monarch, if the monarch's power is so limited in the first place. They can just go about their business and ignore the king's objections to the contrary.
Then, of course, legitimacy itself is culturally defined, and in some places being able to depose the monarch would be ipso facto proof of said monarch's retroactive illegitimacy. The notion of "divine right of kings" is far from universal.
So, you should build your castle in someone else's kingdom iff that kingdom either
1. Has strong norms against castle seizure or abandonment of the king's duties in kingdom upkeep
2. Has a federation of non-king castle owners strong and unified enough to force the former point.
3. You are strong enough to provide a serious and credible threat to the king if he implements a policy that threatens you.
Example: Valve in the early 2000s before or as they were building Steam to challenge the video game publisher model. 20 years on and Valve is still printing money, while Sierra Online doesn't exist.
Also Valve has always been a private company tightly controlled by insiders, whereas Sierra had already been a public company since 1989, subsequently acquired by CUC in 1996 for $1.5bn, and embarked on a non-stop acquisition spree in pursuit of short-term growth, which usually ends badly (think Gateway, AOL, Time-Warner, etc). Esp. pre-Sarbanes-Oxley.
Moreover, Gabe Newell always had a controlling stake in Valve ever since 1996, so that prevents any shenanigans. There are comparatively few shareholders (than a public company) and they were all long-term, since Valve will likely never go public, certainly no year soon, or even be privately acquired; while Newell controls it.
In this instance your complaint is about corporate governance rather than tech; (how far back did tech people stop being in control at Sierra?)
Sierra Online was acquired through fraudulent accounting, and the company that acquired them went under shortly after as their fraud was revealed.
Unfortunately Sierra had to accept the offer.
Castle building was in fact a function of the downfall of the carolingian empire that until then kept it under control and only granted the right at strategic locations. Most castles simply made a local lord unfireable by his king since besieging a castle was way too expensive for a regular dispute. The castle building shifted the power to the local realm, starting the feudal period for good.
Castles are thus more like domains where once you take hold of it, even the big powers have a hard time taking it away from you again
Seems more like the rule is:
> Building a castle is a very good idea if you seek to entrench yourself in the power structure of the kingdom. To do this, you must be able credibly mount a defence of the castle to discourage forcible eviction without major mutual destruction (cough too big to fail).
> Don't build a wooden cottage and expect it function like a castle with a garrison under your command. Even if you slowly expand it to a stone mansion, if you don't maintain a garrison, it won't work as a castle.
Sadly, building an game on someone else's platform is more like setting up a cottage on the land. You might be able to get some farming done and survive, but if the lord fancies the grain, you're out of luck. But also good luck finding land to farm without a lord. Peasant.
I’m guessing you live in Wales if the castles are that densely populated. It has the highest density of castles in the world.
My understanding in many places (France in the Versailles era and the contemporaneous Tokugawa Japan) important families were expected to have some members at court where they could be observed, held accountable (hostage?) etc. That would be a reason to be your own domicile close to the court.
When it comes to the "internet" - you are 30 years late to apply such forces. Everything is now DRMed, closed garden proprietary bs - there is no legal framework, nor will to reverse that and we are going to pay.
And this is not cynic talking ...
The web is still open.
Wide open.
For anything to build.
More users online than ever, and able to get their attention too.
It looks like you got down-voted but I'm not sure why, because you're technically correct.
Rewind 20 years and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, TikTok, Discord and what we think of as the "contemporary Internet" didn't really exist. Google existed, and even back then SEO was a thing and people were talking about not putting all of your eggs into Google's basket when it comes to your business model (which I remember vividly because I started a business in 2003 running a for-profit website that would continue to exist until 2022).
Fast forward to the present and yeah users are opting in to "platforms" that require accounts that keep content within the walled garden. And Google search has declined in quality so much that I and many others don't use it anymore.
But the world wide web, as a technology that is accessible to everyone, that existed 20 years ago still exists.
You can still build a website
You can still create opt-in email newsletters
And there are a lot more people online today than there were 20 years ago, which in many regards makes it easier to reach an audience today than it did back then... even if how you would choose to go about it might differ because of user behaviour.
It's fashionable to be pessimistic towards the tech industry.. and I myself get pessimistic about it all the time.
But when I look back at the fact that I was able to, beginning in 2003, create an online business that allowed me to work from home and feed my family for 15 years at a time before YouTube existed and when the dominant social media platform was still MySpace ... and now I see content creators getting millions of views and some of them are just talking heads in a bedroom ... yeah the world changed but in many ways it's easier to reach people today than it was before this modern era of walled gardens and a google search that sucks.
100% true.
But we are starting to have the first generation that grew up with Google thinking Google, etc was the internet, where as it's not. The culture of creating more than consuming gave way to consuming content and scrolling becoming the default behaviour that was conditioned into users.
Using a platform is one thing, reducing your platform risk by finding the people who will be your supporters is the real purpose of other platforms in other cases... coming to your platform.
As people start to see themselves as a platform, I suspect this will change.
>But we are starting to have the first generation that grew up with Google thinking Google, etc was the internet, where as it's not.
What's weird is how deeply held this view is on HN, by people who should know better.
> More users online than ever, and able to get their attention too.
Not really. There are some people walking around with giant teddy bears[0], but that is entirely for show.
[0]https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
That was honestly a really good read on enshittification.
I think the theory that luring the producers by throwing them in my face, is a really good one. And one I haven't though of.
It's functionally shackled by the terms Google lays out for it.
Anecdotal: My hobby tech blog went from 4k hits/ day (all cold Google search traffic) w/ top Google searches in 2019 to about 60 a day today. I still publish at the same tempo and I believe I improved the quality of the blog, but I suspect these days the search engine traffic pushes eyeballs to the walled garden "social media" apps.
You are no "authoritative" voice. What do you think was all the rage against misinformation about? To give legacy media and advertising customers an edge. All platforms with user voices and ratings were destroyed too. User opinions are bad for marketing.
If any search term is in any way part of any news cycle, you will get the crappiest search results you could imagine and any real content like a blog fitting the topic will be far down the line.
I'm not sure why search engines would push there or where you are learning about seo, etc.
It seems search engines want to know it's real people behind content.
Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?
> Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?
It wouldn't do you any good. Social media sites will kill your post if it has a link in it. They don't want you leaving.
I post it to LinkedIn and X, but my logs show very little traffic from those sources.
If Google is relevant to it.
Google's relevance has been changing with alternate means to discovery (perplexity, chatgpt) than their search.
I see more 401s than ever before running a webcrawler I think because of A.I. paranoia.
It is the same process that turned literal kingdoms into representative democracies.
Absolutely. But it is disconcerting to realize the inertia of current collective intelligence even when what is at stake is great gains in productivity and welfare and even when formally we "celebrate" the benefits of well governed, market based democracies.
It goes to show that every generation has to internalize the painful way key facts about what is good and what is bad for society, even if history provides more than enough learnings for free.
History isn't exactly the most liked subject in school. Most people continue not liking in later in life.
History is just terribly taught and practiced. At the core history is just telling stories which are always interesting when told well.
History is terribly taught because it's often about the how and not the why.
Even worse is the overemphasis on when (in terms of exactness).
Knowing the rough order of events (as per the flow of a story) is important, as is the relative timespan, but a lot of history schooling puts too much emphasis on knowing the exact dates of certain events, which I think really subtracts the experience for many.
The most interesting history we got taught at school was by one of our music teachers who was a kilt wearing Scottish independence supporter who used to tell us bloodthirsty stories about Bruce, Wallace and others...
NB This was ~45 years ago - I doubt such things would be tolerated these days. :-)
I suppose he skipped the part in which the Scottish elite sold out their country (literally) to the English crown?
He probably didn't mention that because it wasn't particularly bloodthirsty and therefore of little interest to 12 year old boys.
Mind you, the fact that it was events on the Isthmus of Panama that were one of the main causes of the union is fairly interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
Scottish history would be far too dangerous to teach today. Undermines the narrative that all white people have a detestable history of colonisation and exploitation.
The history curriculum I was taught in school was terribly boring and politicised. Other than the mandatory WW2 coverage, the _only_ other topics we studied were the horribleness of European colonisation, like Gandhi and Apartheid, ect… I was rather surprised to grow up and find out how interesting the topic actually was.
American history id even more dangerous as it justifies the violent overthrow of the government
Do you think fediverse is a good direction as response to that?
Conceptually the fediverse points towards the "right" direction, but imho it still falls way short from being a fully developed and sustainable new proposal. Both on the technical side and (maybe more importantly) on the economic side.
Don't get me wrong, it is admirable what a handful of highly motivated people have achieved with activitypub, atproto etc. (to mention just some currently trending designs). But what needs to be done to deprecate the pattern of digital feudalism is a much bigger challenge.
The main way to move forward will be to incentivize (through legislation) many more actors (not just social media reformers) to invest and experiment in this direction, away from the feudal hypersurface that is crushing our horizon. Its the only way to explore the vast number of technical possibilities and economic patterns without being hampered by biases and blind spots.
We don't know what a digital democratic economy and society exactly looks like. Its not been done before. Maybe more than one patterns are equally viable and it becomes a matter of choice and/or random historical accidents.
But we do know that we are far from anything remotely compatible with our purported norms and values.
The fediverse is probably the best answer you're gonna find to digital feudalism that is compatible~ish with the real world. Which is to say; it theoretically divides the risk that any single castle and king could hijack the entire process up into many smaller castles, meaning that if a king turns hostile, you can go somewhere else with relatively little friction.
The reality is that if you truly want to get rid of digital castles and kings, you're essentially going to have to operate a distributed digital firehose (cynically: digital sewage pipe) that anyone can submit to with no preconditions whatsoever. For many reasons (first one that jumps to mind: spam, second reason: illegal shit, third reason: trolls) most people don't want to operate something like that, and that's before the law gets involved.
Pet projects exist of course, but pretty much zero of them are made to scale up against the idea of truly nuking kingdoms; the closest to a realization of this sort of network is something similar to TORs peer2peer, and you can consider pretty much all legal risks of running a TOR exit node for a service like this.
The fediverse just moves the problem to multiple servers. The solution is a content addressed network.
It’s one of the better options.
There’s a few other neat technologies that are toying with being social network protocols.
There’s some fascinating angles for combating AI fake content compared to human ones.
> There’s some fascinating angles for combating AI fake content compared to human ones.
Are there any common terms one could research?
No. Network effects + turbo-capitalism being able to lose 100s of millions a month to build market share, mean excessive concentration which we cannot get rid of simply by providing alternatives, even if they are "better".
Make all Algos for content recommendations open for scrutiny and watch the walls come down.
Disagree. That is still "playing nice"
The real elephant in the room is unless you are an actual king, your castle is always on someone's land
I get the original point of the article, but the reality is you're always building something on someone else's infrastructure. It depends on how much the infrastructure you want to build yourself and own versus how much you get to use of theirs and for how much
We already have digital citizenship and already are digital citizens.
We are digital citizens of commercially owned and run countries called Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more.
A digital citizenship is in private corporations with out many rights in exchange hold our digital identities as they see fit.
It’s why we are offered digital citizenship to a digital identity in exchange for convenience of a single sign on to click.
This can setup a relationship Of being locked out of your digital identity and whatever it is tied to.
A way to keep a balance is to only use email as login, and own your identity with your own domain for email that at least can be moved between providers if you don’t want to manage your own.
Do we go on massive platforms to find the small communities (like subreddits) that we like?
Or, maybe reside on large platforms partially or temporary.
There is an existing solution to not having to put in massive efforts to get massive private companies change their ways a tiny bit.
The open web.
We can build any web we want, at any time.
And build we should.
All large communities were small once.
Starting a community and being a part of a small community is the only way they will grow.
Maybe forums like HN and forums of the past have some of that right still.
And maybe we can give what we want our attention, instead of it being gamified away from us.
You're always building a castle in someone else's kingdom.
If you're publishing on your own website instead of a social media platform, your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself, your hosting provider, Let's Encrypt, all the email providers you need to be able to deliver to (notably Microsoft and Google), and probably also your payments provider.
Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized, and it's no longer possible to build a site that isn't in anybody else's kingdom.
This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.
When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there: identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and ensure there's a plan B.
Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift that's earthshattering for ~everyone.
On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it actually does happen to people and businesses all the time. Even the most law-abiding business should not build their castle in a social media platform.
This is not a safe assumption. You're just one crazy person willing to harass the family of whoever runs the registrar away from being 'too difficult to work with' and getting your account nuked. They don't charge enough to stick their neck out for you.
We're also one button press away from thermonuclear apocalypse.
Knowing what's more likely and what's less likely is still useful information: social media turning bad is a daily occurence, while dns registrars' family members have been safe for a pretty long time now.
Agreed. I don't know why the other thing is even an argument.
Nuclear security had many buttons and many people.
Harassing people is far more accessible and has a proven track record of success.
> has a proven track record of success.
Do you have examples of someone successfully harassing a registrar employee into breaking the registrar's ICANN accreditation terms?
Yes, and a cray person could blowup your house or your business premises,
> On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day.
If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.
Everyone has to worry about being downranked to oblivion, which is the new normal on most SM sites.
I was once involved in my friend's SaaS startup and he got locked out of Facebook ads for having an inactive account and then spending too much money in the first day. "Too much" in this case was a few hundred dollars. Turns out you're meant to slowly increase your spend over a week while doomscrolling shitty clickbait, otherwise Facebook thinks your account has been compromised.
> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.
This is simply false. We were locked out of Meta Ads Manager for no apparent reason. When we contacted Meta customer support—setting aside the casual racism I faced for not being a native speaker—all they could offer was, "Oops, that shouldn't have happened; we'll refresh your account." As a result, we lost approximately $5k in business because we couldn't reach our audience at its peak.
My wife got randomly banned from Facebook Marketplace for a year. Appeal after appeal was ignored, then randomly they restored access more than a year later.
A year is enough time to kill a business.
> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.
That's not correct, just on HN you can frequently see articles about people getting locked out of Google, Paypal, Facebook, etc. with no explanation given. I've been banned for suspicious activity on a social media site on an account I hadn't used in years, probably because someone was trying to steal the username.
> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.
Complete ignorance of the people who arbitrarily get flagged by algorithms to no fault of their own or get on the bad side of someone at these companies who have a grudge.
You mean like the Texas home schooling Facebook group that keeps getting dinged because Facebook keeps asserting that the word "Texan" implies they are selling drugs?
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> your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself
To whom have these bodies caused problems, to anywhere near the same extent as mass market social media networks?
OP is close to defending sovereign citizens.
Well-regulated, established organizations are not threats to liberty; on the contrary, they’re required for a well functioning community (of netizens)
Some kings thought that they were bound to gods so in the name of total freedom they announced themselves as “god-kings”
It's not an either-or. Organizations are required for a well-functioning community, but they're also threats to liberty insofar as they represent easily capturable concentrations of power.
Nobody said that this happened? The commenter is pointing out the faulty absolutist suggestion of the clickbait title.
>But wait! Your mailing list is hosted by Mailchimp which is another company, and your website is hosted by GoDaddy or Squarespace? Aren’t they evil kingdoms too?
>Not really. They are just hosting platforms that are invisible to your followers.
>The general public doesn’t have to go to Mailchimp.com to read your newsletter or squarespace to view your blog. Your readers go to your domain.
Just because you are using someone else’s services doesn’t mean you’re in their kingdom.
Self hosting (which I think you should be) is more like being Luxembourg. Sure, you still have to appease the neighbours, and occasionally you might be invaded, but overall you still get to see your own taxes and keep the culture somewhat independent.
> This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.
I doubt it is true, and I'd assume people have set up a site. If the media industry failed to exterminate torrenting with enormous economic incentives to do so why would the crusade against child abuse achieve more success? It isn't technically possible to stop people communicating with each other over the internet.
It's already happened. The Trump shooters brother was arrested for CSAM only because it was discovered during the investigation of his brother.
Well, for all the "safety" of the kingdoms there, it didn't stop it.
So the kingdoms have not prevented it, and many probably have facilitated it, and maybe not always unintentional (as in, someone from inside the company was "in on it").
The FBI also temporarily ran a CSAM site which raises ethical and legal questions.
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This is addressed in the article…
Yes, but you had to scroll to see it. Way too hard these days.
> Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized.
Do people say this? I’ve never heard anyone outside of web3 land say this.
IIRC it’s one of the big disappointments of the internet that is evolved in such a centralized way.
But also you can deploy a website which doesn’t rely on ICANN or a hosting provider, lets encrypt, email, or any of that.
Your only “king” would be an ISP (which you could also run yourself, if you were so inclined)
It wouldn’t be an easily accessible castle, but it’d be yours.
You still need an IP address. You can build your own network on top of point-to-point layer-2 connections, which have no central authority, but it won't be reachable from the Internet.
BTW: anyone interested in this should join DN42, which is an alternative central authority, and does more-or-less this. Although 99.9% of DN42 links are internet VPNs because that's cheaper, physical links are also accepted because they're cooler.
(This reply was delayed by an hour by HN's rate limit)
I’m not an expert (or all that knowledge, honestly) in ISP level stuff. I just know it can be done.
If you ran your own ISP and purchased wholesale bandwidth, would that not just include an ipv6, at least?
You can get an IPv6 range from your ISP, or directly from the central authority in your region. (IPv4s are too scarce to get a range, so you'll only want to have one and that will have to be part of your ISP's range because you can't advertise just one.)
Purchasing wholesale internet bandwidth is another way of saying purchasing internet service (a lot of it). The company that sells you that is your ISP.
This logic extend to governments as well. It's a spectrum which in many ways the mega platforms are directly comparable in their economic impacts to governments. This requires a more nuanced analysis than a reductive "it's a private company".
At this point you only have your own kingdom if you have a standing army with nuclear weapons, you are sovereign, everyone else rents, this is just physics, the details are social contracts.
A certain medieval gentlemen from Alamut would beg to differ. One does not need a standing army and nuclear weapons so much as the ability to inflict your politics on others credibly and unavoidably. There are many ways to do that, not all of which necessarily involve violence.
Put another way: There are many minority populations throughout history and up to this very day that have managed to carve out a niche in their host population without necessarily employing mass violence to do it.
All politics is violence by other means.
If you think that all politics is violence then you're always going to be woefully ineffective at it. Never bring a shotgun to a negotiation when a well-placed fact (or fiction) will do.
It does make Clausewitz's saying about war being "politics by other means" back in context when you put it that way.
But really politics is just about "one person causes another to act". This can be through persuasion. It doesn't have to be force (or fraud for that matter).
Persuasion is merely the implication of force. All actions can be explained through the language of force from the tenuous to the direct.
Consider the persuasion of making a sale. That's not force. People can sell political ideas in the same way, they can spread virally.
EDIT: Also I consider economics, politics and marketing as basically "mass psychology". Hence all the problems with replication in those fields.
EDIT 2: And with these things being psychology, there's a big "default biological drives" component. A lot of the motivations for political etc actions are internal to each person.
The replication issues in those fields are partly attributable to the fields inability to explain behavior in terms of the biological imperative.
There is the theoretical rational actor which while very misunderstood is also subject to the stochastic and entropic reality. The 'internal motivation'
Persuasion can be divided into carrot and stick. The stick the implication of force against the individual and the carrot the promise of the ability to use force against other actors. This can be further expanded to negative force inherent from a relatively worse off position for not taking the carrot.
With some creativity all behavior can be formulated from a few simple primitives.
Interpersonal actions can be "win-win", "win-lose" (of which zero-sum is a subset) and "lose-lose". No force is needed to enter into a win-win arrangement.
Persuasion is the art of supplying facts to enable mutual self-interest. Not everyone has an implacable class interest.
Having your own nuclear weapons is probably like having firearms in your home in that you’re actually more likely to be the victim of that class of weapons.
The alternative is you don't have them and you rent protection from someone who does.
Right, I’m hinting that it’s probably not worth maintaining your own nuclear weapon system in order to host your own website and email newsletter.
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"
> a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it
They could arrest the person and take down their servers, same as now.
Full independence is nearly impossible
You can make a html website in a torrent. Works surprisingly well.
One time I had a copy of someones website that got deleted and experimented a bit.
The index was paginated linked page titles 50 per page. I combined the paginated pages so that each had 2000 entries (I think it was, maybe 5000) Then I wrote a bit of js that takes a search query from the url?q= looks if it exists on the page, if nothing is found load the next html document and append the query to the url. To my surprise it paged though the pages remarkably fast.
If you want to you could, in stead of display the content, display a search box on each page with the query in it, have a row of dots for the page number (on page 4 display 4 dots)
Displaying 50 or 500 blank pages one after the other goes pretty damn fast if you load them from the file system. They can also be pretty damn big. If you put the content in comments the rendering engine wont touch it at all.
When you update the website you can make a new torrent that has the same folder name and the same files inside. Run a check and the client will discover you had nearly everything already. The only restriction is that it may not change existing html documents.
For that you can just attempt to load non existing scripts in the folder. Have script1.js attempt to load script2.js and 2 look for 3 etc
Can publish updates on a telegram channel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help
Easier said than done… if you are a YouTube creator, are you supposed to set up your own video hosting to compete? And how many of your viewers will move over to watch your stuff there? This advice probably works for blogs and mailing lists but isn’t really actionable for other content.
If you are a "YouTube creator", you have already firmly planted your castle on Google's land. The positioning of onself as bound to a particular website run by someone else is needless loss of independence.
Position yourself as a video creator and post your videos also to Instagram (when possible) and to Vimeo. Seed free / back catalog episodes via a torrent. Run a mailing list announcing and discussing your videos, with some premium content for paying subscribers only. Maybe have an X / SkyBlue / mastodon feed with more compact announces, comments, and high-virality short clips from your longer videos.
Cross-link and cross-reference all the channels of your presence. Make your brand recognizable across the publishing methods. Gently prod people to touch more than one channel of your video distribution, just to get the most avid viewers acquainted with several.
Yes, this is significantly more work. It also may bring significantly more results if your videos are good. This gives you a much stronger assurance that your brand and your following will not be lost, should you lose access to YouTube / Instagram / Vimeo / X / whatever other platform. Commoditize your complement, as they say.
Vimeo only gives you 2 TB bandwidth/month without negotiating an Enterprise plan. If your video goes viral, you're going to be out thousands to host it for everyone. How are you going to pay for that? You could put it on credit and then show these numbers when manually negotiating the payout from your next sponsor and pay it back with the proceeds from the next video, but there's no guarantee your next video will be also a hit.
> If your video goes viral
That's what PeerTube is supposed to be for. You can set up a PeerTube host yourself. Or there are some public PeerTube hosts that accept uploads. When people are watching your videos, the ones with good bandwidth are also hosting them for other users. The hosting site is just handling the original copy and coordinating the peers. (This isn't like Bittorrent; hosting is centralized but playout is distributed. When no one is watching, the only copy is on the original server.)
PeerTube really should be popular like WordPress, for self-hosted content. But it's not. Neither Google nor Bing indexes PeerTube sites, so there's no discovery. Few PeerTube videos have more than a handful of viewers. I use PeerTube for technical videos, to keep them ad-free, and it works fine for that low-volume application.
Here's the Blender 4.2 showcase reel on PeerTube.[1] It's a good demo. Will it overload if watched by many HN users? Please try.
[1] https://share.tube/w/uYK7X52m2Y7RyahL4wjKaM
> Neither Google nor Bing indexes PeerTube sites, so there's no discovery.
That's not search engines discriminating against it in this case.
https://share.tube/robots.txt
PeerTube is just a self-hosted video platform. Video bandwidth is legitimately expensive. You'll still be out a bunch of money if your video goes viral.
No, that's the whole point of PeerTube. PeerTube scales up by spreading the playout load amongst everyone who is watching at the moment. If a thousand people are watching your video, most of them are getting the content from the cache of others who are also watching at the moment. Not from the hosting server.
This works well only if many of the watchers have significant upload bandwidth and aren't behind firewalls that prevent them from outputting blocks of video.
This is different from torrent-type systems or Usenet, which distribute persistent copies. With Peertube, only the original server permanently hosts the video. Everybody else is just caching. So the disk usage of watchers isn't that big.
It's all done in the browser.
That's why it's built on WebTorrent, to share the load across users and instances.
Removed end of 2023: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/5465
I saw elsewhere that it's planned on being readded after the rearchitecting work that's mentioned in that issue.
There are cdns that can help..
The core issue is that someone has to pay a lot for a lot of bandwidth, or a lot of someone’s paying a bit each.
I've been connecting the dots in video/bandwidth delivery.
While I was digging up an additional link, it appears Cloudflare R2 allows no egress fees.
https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/r2/
10GB free to host, no egress fees.
Combined with a cloudflare worker, it seems reasonable that the object storage could be managed.
Now your castle is in someone else's kingdom. And in Cloudflare's kingdom, always be ready to get an email: "pay us $150,000 in 24 hours or we cancel your service"
My original comment was using a group of cdns. I think there’s a few.
In this case you’re already paying for storage so egress is free.
A 10 gig fibre connection is another way to start.
The internet always costs someone.
Host on a provider with "unlimited" data transfer (the legit ones are capped by rate eg. 100mbps etc.).
Can you suggest a few video creators who are having success with this model? I watch quite a few video creators, and don’t know any trying to use this model.
Personally I have seen a few over the years come and go. Podcasts (Adio and Video) for example often tried to use youtube as an additional channel, but still maintain their websites and RSS feeds.
It seems these days, most Youtube creators are at least somewhat aware of the problem and have websites, discord channels, patreons etc. While I still think many would struggle if they lost their youtube access suddenly, they do have additional channels to reach out to at least part of their audience.
There's nebula.tv.
The people there are both video creators and their own hosts, or so I read. Got together and built themselves a host because YT was not what they needed.
Is there anyone on Nebula who didn't build their audience through YouTube?
Most videographers are actively trying to be seen, are they not? How else would they transition into an agency/studio job with real customers and projects? I've never heard of a videographer that would accept obscurity in exchange for tech/platform sovereignty.
one possible example -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht9GwXQMgpo
i saw they post pretty well produced videos on youtube -- for folks like me
but also promote a more elaborate/detailed video series on the same/related topics on a separate subscription based platform
I have seen a few do the conversion. They usually start by cross posting on any video site they can. X, Rumble, locals, self hosting, discord, with usually some sort of patreon model of funding with maybe ad reads. Then what is left on YT is highlights of their other longer form content on other sites. The kicker is they do not need as many people following them as YT is not taking the majority of the ad revenue cut.
But if you want to see people trying to make the conversion just scroll the front page of Rumble. Many of them are trying to get out form under youtube and many have YT channels too. But Rumble is just another YT waiting to happen and they know it.
LinusTechTips literally built their own video hosting site - Floatplane - exactly for this reason, to have a backup in case YouTube nukes their channel.
Which is increasingly likely as they manually removed his video about adblock.
No, he can't, because there are none. It's a ludicrous model that exists only in the minds of HN commenters.
This is all good advice but realistically you can probably skip the random social media sites and just do email and YouTube. Email is much, much better than pretty much any social network.
Email? Outside of the older crowd, I don't know anyone that actively uses email for anything. So many people in my life are surprised when my wife and I use email for anything. Tech/business/academic might hit some ok % with email, but outside of that I'd doubt you'd get to 1% of your potential audience.
>Email? Outside of the older crowd, I don't know anyone that actively uses email for anything.
This, it's surprising and somewhat annoying, but people ~20ish and younger pretty much just don't use email.
Email is generally considered the best channel in the marketing industry. It’s absolutely not just something for old people.
That's because the "marketing industry" is filled with those using emails. It is absolutely just for old people at this point.
Somehow you will need to reach people, at least initially, though. They don't magically appear on your mailing list.
Mail lists go far, but retweets go wide. Different tools for different purposes.
Sure, but in my experience it's better to have 1000 solid email subscribers than have your tweet seen by 100k people. Even moreso for something like TikTok, where you can get millions of views but capitalize on virtually none of them.
Email has the problem though that Gmail suddenly in one fell swoop blackhole you for 80% of your readers.
Dave Jones from the EEVBlog does this - he cross posts to his own site and to many smaller video hosting sites. But if I remember correctly he has said in the past that almost all his viewership comes from YouTube. Unfortunately for long-form videos in English YouTube seems to be the only game in town in terms of discoverability.
While you're tiny, you need discoverability a lot. But even if YouTube bans you and deletes all your videos, you lose relatively little.
The bigger you are, the more well-known, the larger is your following, and the more the whole enterprise is the source of your livelihood, the more you may need to hedge your bets.
It always makes sense to have a backup, but the issue is that video creators are always naturally losing viewers and need to replace them by new viewers who discover their channel(s). It seems like the new viewer discovery is all happening on a very short list of giant platforms which is a bit worrying. Personally I like the way podcasts have managed to be more decentralized but I also fear podcasting is slowly becoming YouTube centric.
Nice summary. There are tools out there that can help with chunks of this, but understanding the pieces as you’re laid out is critical.
Since a lot of creators today were consumers first of content, they miss the side when there was little social or video to consume online, and in turn creating was the default.
I think one method here is to incorporate your own site into the content as much as possible. For example, if you are a creator, get people to sign up to a newsletter to get the source files. Get people onto your platform/forum/whatever as well as watching through YouTube. Easier said than done, but better than not doing anything.
From there, you also ensure that you have a backup of all your videos. I've talked to people that only had their stuff on YouTube/Facebook/whatever. It is super risky. If you have a backup, and YouTube bans you, you can rehost elsewhere, it won't be as big, but you might still have a business afterwards.
Also something that needs to be noted, you don't need the same original numbers of people in your kingdom to make equivalent money.
When you're making commerce in someone's fief, they will demand tribute as well. In the confines of your own kingdom, all the ad dollars are yours.
Which also means you don't need to chase the same amounts of people to make similar coin, especially if the deals you make with advertisers are between you and the advertiser (not you, the advertiser, and the king of some other fief).
Exactly. You can be huge on Youtube or tiktok and if you convert some of that to direct engagement you are much better able to survive a changing landscape.
Yeah, every YT creator that is serious about their job should have their own website with a copy of the videos, and I find it really curious that this doesn't seem to be much of a thing? At best I'm seeing merchandise webshops. But you'd think these people would be multi-channel and have a website, youtube, all the social medias, etc, and the bigger ones a company to manage them all.
But I suspect that as they get bigger, they enter in exclusivity / no-compete contracts with Youtube, and if they detect the same video hosted elsewhere, they get taken down or something.
This sounds like an opportunity for a product. Apart from eyeballs and familiarity, Youtube does a lot of handholding so that non-technical people van run their own channels. I don't think 90% of youtubers would have any idea how to spin up a website. But I'm sure they'd be happy to pay someone to do it for them (as long as the price was a small fractuon of their ad revenue).
Your YouTube example is exactly what gave rise to Nebula.tv—creators banded together to create an alternative that would backstop them against YouTube's dominance.
Another example is Floatplane which was bootstrapped by the Linus Tech Tips people after realized how dependent they were on YouTube.
And how many people are on nebula compared to YouTube?
All the 1000 of your mailing list subscribers? Or maybe 10k.
You start needing alternatives when you're already established and have a following. With this comes large enoug influence and thus the ability / risk to step on some big toes, including Google's.
You're omitting the choice of just not doing that in the first place.
If you want to be a Windows developer, then yes, you have to be a Windows developer in order to be a Windows developer.
But you don't have to want to be a Windows developer. You don't even have to want to be a developer.
I think the difference between development for a “real” OS is that windows is still mainly owned by its customers. Similar to how MacOS is. On MacOS people can still install your applications even if you don’t pay the Apple tax to avoid their pop-up warnings. (I’m not sure if avoiding the windows warnings is also something you pay Microsoft for.)
I think a better comparison would be iOS or Chrome, where you’ll realistically have to submit yourself to their stores if you want to reach most users. Which is sort of even more locked down than YouTube as some content creators on YouTube have managed to move their audience to other platforms, though sometimes by still posting teasers or at least some content on YouTube.
There's an entire OTT sub-industry for video hosting and out-of-the-box monetization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-top_media_service
For instance, https://vimeo.com/ott is an effective (albeit expensive) option, powering Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor) and other brands and allowing them to focus on content. Dropout, in particular, has found an effective model of releasing short clips from their improv-heavy shows on social video platforms, gaining virality there while subtly reminding new and old fans that they can find full episodes, and support on-screen and off-screen talent, by subscribing to the brand directly. Their growth would be impacted by the loss of a marketing channel, but not their underlying subscription fundamentals.
(The entire Dropout business story is quite inspiring and worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRK_gNfFdP0 )
That sounds incredibly interesting! Thanks for sharing that!
The YouTube link at the end is ironic ;-)
One way is to release videos 1-2 weeks early on your own site.
Another option is to consider that "YouTube creator" should not be treated as anything more than a hobby; it should certainly not be your identity/job title. Unless you have some sort of contract with Alphabet, your videos are hosted at their pleasure and you are owed nothing. Your time is likely better spent not bolstering someone else's library of content.
With videos you can start by retaining control of your channel configurations and making it independent from any particular video hosting provider. See this for inspiration (not promoting it, just the gist of the idea): https://grayjay.app/
Well there is podcasting and PeerTube.
YouTube offers millions of dollars in free advertising to content creators along with tens of dollars in free hosting.
Indeed, I was just trying to point out some decentralized alternatives.
It really doesn't. To understand why, you have only to comprehend the following: Whether someone is searching under a particular keyword, or just browsing whatever pops up on the home page, the average browser has a finite amount they're willing to scroll before abandoning their search... and chances are your video is NOT going to be placed highly in those results unless you're directing a firehose at it from offsite via Twitter, forum posts, news aggregators, or paying Youtube to promote your video flat out (which is such an obvious moneygrab on their part its disgusting). In other words: If you rely on their algorithm to promote your work you're literally playing the lottery and, much like the lottery, statistically you're going to lose. It makes far more sense to find bandwidth and hosting, negotiate with an ad network, and direct a firehose at the resulting site... but that's more work than some are willing to do. shrug Oh well.
This is an amateurish take on marketing yourself on YouTube. The algorithm is /not/ like the lottery. My wife is a content creator on YT and hasn’t spent a dime on advertising. The free advertising isn’t in the form of search result placement (mostly) but rather the algorithm showing your videos next to more popular related videos. That’s why the absolute most important thing for video promotion isn’t the material itself, but rather the title/thumbnail combination. People are generally bad at understanding this and/or bad at marketing themselves so they attribute their lack of success as random chance
And unless your audience is very tech oriented, they’re not going to switch off whatever platform the ads are on to watch videos hosted elsewhere. You’d need to ask a LOT of people (= a large amount of $$$) and hope a few of them make it over a bit at a time
> My wife is a content creator on YT and hasn’t spent a dime on advertising.
Is your wife a representative sample of all Youtubers? If not, your datum is irrelevant.
> unless your audience is very tech oriented, they’re not going to switch off whatever platform the ads are on to watch videos hosted elsewhere.
Having now witnessed multiple creators hop from one platform to another and drag their audiences with them because they're JUST THAT ENTERTAINING... no, you're wrong. People will gladly follow artists to a better platform if it means they're able to make a living and/or not be censored.
If you place it on a website you’ll also be subjected to their algorithm, google search.
The point of going to your own site, though, is not to rely on algorithms, but construct your own marketing funnel.
With podcasting you’ll almost certainly be reliant on being searchable on the major podcasting apps.
PeerTube is as close to nonexistent as a video platform can be.
Podcasting is actually worse. YouTube is a kingdom where people come to you. In podcasting there are a few large kingdoms and you have to be in all of them because of the "wherever you get your podcasts" thing.
There is a quasi-open podcasting index that many podcasting apps use.
It's here: https://podcastindex.org/
With YouTube people can just click the "make money" button. YouTube handles the ad sales and payments. Both are your job if you're podcasting or publishing on PeerTube.
Hosting video content is not an unsolvable problem. YouTube's moat is economies of scale and user base. YouTube's draw is the "make money" button.
The "make money" button, however, is an illusion for 99% of publishers. The one case where it does seem to make out is with livestreams, and then only because unlike topical short-form videos, streaming is not a winner-take-all environment where one or two people run away with all the eyeballs, but instead people will tend to decommoditize topical streaming based on the personality of the broadcaster and your ability to form a parasocial relationship with them... hence even a relatively unknown person, if they're persistent, can manage to grab a few hundred regular viewers who'll toss a few bucks each stream... not enough to make a living, but enough for beer money. The prime advantage of youtube in this scenario is not having to deal with setting up hosting/DDoS filtering and negotiating with a payment processor ... just push the button and upload. So for streamers I think it can still be worth it, but for people posting short form content I think they might be better off rolling their own because they can't rely on Youtube's algorithm to give them enough eyeballs to be profitable.
Some of them have, it's called Nebula.
A huge part of the world forwards videos primarily on WhatsApp. And links to YouTube.
Your question seems to connect discovery of videos and distribution.
Video hosting is getting easier. There’s platforms like avideo that are relatively easy to host.
Many companies use alternatives already like or Vimeo.
Hosting your video permanently first from your own setup isn’t too far fetched.
YouTube can be secondary.
Many people use social media to build their own email lists and communities.
YouTube can achieve the same. At the same time I think YouTube is more going to eat cable tv up or at least offset it more first.
A high school friend of mine contacted me out of the blue on facebook after probably 20 years. He had gotten on early with an MLM that made it big and one of them had such success on the platform that he had made multiple appearances at their national convention to give a testimonial to how it changed his family's lives. Mind you, this is a guy who was 2 years from being able to retire with a pension from the chemical refinery he worked at.
I laughed, told him I wasn't interested, and warned him that he didn't own his network: that the MLM could take it from him at any time, and it's why most of the experienced salesmen I knew lived well below their paychecks. He grew very upset, told me I didn't know what I was talking about, and basically behaved as if I had insulted his religion.
Well, half a year later I was laid off and found a new job with a marketing automation firm. On my second day, we had an all hands meeting where they were announcing that the MLM he worked for would be immediately breaking contract and leaving our platform because they reached a settlement with the DOJ over their methodology. Effective immediately, they were going to a distributor model and ceasing all payouts for network related sales.
I knew his world was going to collapse before he did. In the end, he had to sell his house and most of his possessions, his wife divorced him, and he tried to break back into the MLM world but could never get anything started. Nobody wanted to hire him for a traditional sales role because they regard MLMers as lazy and dumb. He's back at another chemical refinery, hoping to work there for another 20+ years to earn another pension.
> 2 years from being able to retire with a pension > [..] > hoping to work there for another 20+ years to earn another pension
I don't understand that... If he was two years from retiring, then he only needed two more years of salaried employment somewhere lese - didn't he ? What country did he live in ?
In the US, pension is short for “defined benefit pension”, most often a provided by a single employer stipulating that you work at that employer for a minimum number of years, and the longer you work at one employer, the greater the benefit.
They only exist at taxpayer funded employers or legacy businesses like oil and gas, but most everyone else has switched to defined contribution pensions, but those are referred to as “401k” or “401b” or some other letter for the appropriate section of the law that specifies the tax benefit of saving for retirement.
The latter are better ever since low cost index funds came about, as you get to skip paying the DB pension administrators and remove agency risk.
Virtually all people who have worked and retired at oil and gas companies over the past 40 years had both a company pension AND a 401K. My dad has a paid off house and no bills other than utilities and taxes. He's pulling in over 80K a year in retirement, and he re-invests most of what he's being forced to pull out.
But now people working for profitable businesses can do mega backdoor roth contributions and still invest in the same VOO equities that the pension fund manager would invest in, but cut out all of the agency risk and not be tied to their employer.
The US. Your pension, if you get one, is tied to your employer. Most people have 401Ks.
The optimal strategy would probably be to start on YouTube and then migrate to your own platform once you can afford it and have an audience willing to come with you.
Then probably dual stream for a while on your site with blended chat support before cutting the YouTube cord loudly and with warning.
> if you are a YouTube creator, are you supposed to set up your own video hosting to compete?
They could use their popularity to promote and donate to alternatives.
Rule #7: Use a social media platform that lets you own your identity and social graph.
Social media has certain benefits that your own website doesn't. Public key cryptography, self-hosted servers, and an open protocol make it possible for your followers to actually follow you, regardless of what app they use to access the protocol. This is what we're building on nostr (in contrast to bluesky and farcaster, which are nearly as closed as the legacy solutions). It's not always pretty, but it works better for sovereign social media than anything else.
The mailing list is king here. Always push people to your mailing list so you can do direct contact.
Lot of young people just don’t care about emails anymore
Interesting article but it only talks about 1 half of the coin. For the sort of stuff they are talking about you can't get near the visibility and ease of use building it yourself.
You will see a fraction of the traffic that somebody doing the same thing on those platforms will see.
They try to hand wave it with build a tower and bring them back to your site but that rarely works well.
I need to create an account to use your site has a significantly higher bar than I hit subscribe to see your next video in my feed.
I have friends dealing with this very problem. They strongly believe in and agree that they should build in their own kingdom. They hate the platforms and all the ways in which they are bad.
But they are small business owners. They make their living entirely based on digital visibility. They need to get their message out to where the eyeballs are. They may try to get people to subscribed directly to their e-mail newsletter, but that's not enough. Most people find them on Instagram, Twitter, etc. If they delete those accounts, as they would like to, their business will be in deep trouble almost immediately.
Web discoverability has had the same dilemma since its inception. People only remember and actively engage with a few things. A search engine, some media platforms, some communities they are involved in, etc. If a link appears in one of those places it's extremely visible. If a web page does not show up in one of those places, discovering it is next to impossible. What are they going to do, guess the URL?
How can someone get some amount of visibility on the web without putting anything in anyone else's kingdom? Even someone following the POSSE model (post on own site, syndicate elsewhere) is extremely dependent on the elsewhere if they want to be visibility. Without the elsewheres to syndicate to, they will build an empty and isolated kingdom.
Advertising on multiple platforms is a little less risky than building the entire business on, being able to publish to the App Store.
The article didn’t say you should delete all your social media accounts or never post content there…
Right, it specifically says to build bridges from other kingdoms to yours. So using Twitter, Youtube, etc. to bring people to your own site.
Well, there's always good old fashioned off-line visibility, if your small business friends want to experience real worthless crap.
If you do your work, it's not hard to get good visibility on Google and other search engines. The key is this: If you're selling product X or service Y, you need to make your website the very best resource imaginable for information about it and with an as easy purchase process as possible – with good terms to boot.
But most small business owners are completely uninterested in that, and instead spend their days spamming social media and paying for ads to bring visitors to their website that turns potential customers away instantly.
Build your castle in the kingdom that gives you the best game-theoretic outcome, but always keep in mind that it's not your kingdom.
Why not both?
Build your castle in your own kingdom but have "vassels" in all those other kingdoms to get the benefits they provide and use them to promote your own kingdom. You might still rely on those 3rd party "kingdoms" for the vast majority of your income but you at least have options if one kicks you out and your fans know where to find you.
[edit: akin to a developer having the official git repo self hosted but mirroring it into github for the community]
This advice goes back to previous generations of web entrepreneurs, way back to 2015 or earlier: https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634
" It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. "
Problem is that everywhere is already someone else's kingdom. This advice amounts to "Don't bother trying to build a castle."
Find the kingdom where you have most friends.
Desktop computers still exist and will happily run games.
Piracy and DRM killed most direct-to-customer distribution of software.
Valve Software got $8.6B in 2023.
Steam has DRM.
Not always. There are plenty games that work without the Steam libraries. Also GOG exists and very healthy with explicit no DRM policy.
GOG isn't exactly DRM-free these days. The platform doesn't add its own DRM, but it does distribute games with DRM elements. Their stance seems to be that, so long as the game is playable offline in single-player mode, it is acceptable.
But GOG censor their catalog for everyone after feedback from the CCP cough gamers.
And yet Steam is incredibly popular despite the DRM because it's unobtrusive. You don't get punished for replacing your computer every couple years and needing to reinstall your games.
I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone having a technical problem with Steam's DRM, I've only heard moral/ethical/worried-about-what-happens-when-Steam-disappears problems.
It's true, even assuming you do everything yourself, you're still building within the laws of a country, which is building within someone else's kingdom, as it were. I suppose the real rule of thumb should be "Don't build your castle in an autocracy."
More discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662 - Nov 2021 (122 comments)
We all built our castle in TSMC's and ASML's kingdom ...
While being guarded by a moat of snakes..
I'm about to launch an small indie Web site, and yesterday I started going through a list of 11 social media sites on which to grab the brand name.
But initially the Web site has only an email list signup form.
I figure, if I have an array of icons for social media sites where everyone is owned, then random people interested in the site will just pick one of those.
I guess I'll soon see whether I get many connections that way, whether people actually read their email, whether they forget they signed up and flag it as spam (scrodding me with GMail), etc.
(Later, I plan to have an active Fediverse presence, for people who want some social thing like that. But I don't expect many people to be on Fediverse, so first I'll have to sell it to people. It's an easier sell if that's the only "app" on which I'm putting out stuff, rather than hypocritically supporting all the social media ranching companies by replicating content to them.)
Yes, build a place where people can reach you at any time if the place where they met you becomes out of reach for any reason in the future.
The term is "sharecropping".
MrBeast built his castle inside of Youtube.
The leaked MrBeast PDF is enlightening in this regard; he knew he was building his castle in youtube and did so intentionally and explicitly because he thought it would get huge. He wasn't exactly wrong, either. His prediction-gamble earned him a life-changing amount of money.
Whether he could or should have built his castle in his own kingdom is irrelevant. His stated goal was to build a bigger youtube castle than anyone and everyone else.
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
> Youtube is the future and I believe with every fiber of my body it’s going to keep growing year over year and in 5 years Youtube will be bigger than anyone will have ever imagined and I want this channel to be at the top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649
The thing with being MrBeast is that now he makes YouTube a lot of money, so they have a good reason to keep him around.
They can replace him by altering search results, so he stays around while others build up make up for the revenue. There is a reason the YouTube search engine is no longer useful for finding things.
This actually piqued my interest, does anyone know of any good resources to learn digital marketing?
I always start by searching HN. I'm no techbro so I take a good amount of what I read with a grain of salt. With such an open query (Digital marketing), you should limit to past year and there will be good content
first one:
Ask HN: How do you learn digital marketing?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41107413
Nice. Convinced me to add a mailing list to my website. :D
I promise, 1 mail update per month. Exceptional cases, 1 mail a week.
I've had this attitude before and missed out on some major opportunities. For example, even though I was an early smartphone adopter, I refused to develop apps for the iPhone when the AppStore was launched in 2008 because of the closed nature of Apple's ecosystem. There are a variety of billion dollar companies which can attest that building their castle in Apple's kingdom worked out fine for them.
The big question today is: Do you try to make an AI business using OpenAI's APIs, or do you host everything yourself? One could make the argument either way.
You use their APIs in a way that commoditizes them. Ideally your customers don't care if you switch to Anthropic, because the LLM provider is not the reason customers are picking you. Likewise, there is some structural reason that OpenAI will never release a feature that rugpulls you, eg, no 'chat to your PDF'.
An extreme form is self-hosted on edge-only devices where folks are buying some other hw. Ex: Nvidia selling GPUs and giving out free Triton inferencing OSS software. But most are in the middle, eg, some accounting app now with LLMs. Our case of investigations in louie.ai is right at that boundary: OpenAI likes to support data analysis, but folks using Splunk/databricks/etc all day expect a lot more out of software here, and that's too at-odds with OpenAI's org chart and customerbase.
Most business advice is really good at figuring out in hindsight why things went a certain way. But usually it's not that great at predicting what will work in the future.
This is a good counterpoint. I fell for this too.
There is an argument for airbnb the lands with a castle on wheels.
While the article admits that it’s pretty much necessary to use “other people’s kingdoms” to get any interest in or visibility for your castle in the first place, I feel it still greatly underestimates the power of the few large kingdoms that are in actual place on the internet at this point in time.
If your goal is to monetize your castle, you generally need the masses. And while you should indeed spread your risk, be it throughout multiple kingdoms or having one of your own, it is naive or even ridiculous to assume you can get the bulk of your revenue-generating visitors to continuously add 'visiting your castle in your kingdom' to their routine. That is a conscious effort they have to make, not just a mental choice but an actual action, to go to your (e.g.) website.
Simply put: the majority of visitors to any castle do their visits in the FB/X/IG/YT/TT kingdoms. Only a negligible few of them will consistently make the effort to go to your kingdom. Spread your risk, but don’t delude yourself.
which by this point, is nowhere at all.
we cannot even go die and just drop dead in a ditch like the animals we are oh no.
now we need a certificate, and we need to essentially buy, a lot of land for our rotting remains to rot in, lest a single lot of land go unclaimed…
Good advice, but really think it is a lot harder to get eyeballs than this makes out. What the big platforms brings is the audience. Yes, you can make a site to archive off the content, and direct people to your own site. But that is a backup plan. If you get de-platformed, and you go it alone, your audience will stagnate and shrink. Each little guy just doesn't have the reach or infrastructure to drive eyeballs.
Hence, why the proliferation of sites that do this for you like substack, twitch, etc... Anything with content, by being a part of a bigger crowd you can gain more eyeballs.
yeah i came here wondering about substack which does give you everyone's email addresses...
You will never own every dependency. The raw IP Internet is also someone else's kingdom, more and more by the day. Best you can do is try to balance the utility of someone else's kingdom with its risks.
Building castles on the intern-net is fun.
Maybe the knowledge can be transferred to the doctor-net.
Also generally a good idea not to build any sand castles.
Meanwhile, Mr Beast.
I started a newsletter on Revue. Then Elon shut it down quite drastically after my 17-ed edition. I'm using Convertkit now where frankly speaking I'm running the exact same risk...
curious how ppl feel about substack in all this? its def not your kingdom but you do have everyone's email addresses
It feels like a middle ground to me. If you can export your list, and use your own domain, and have an easy way to get the content out, it might be worth whatever distribution they can provide.
Just generally I’d always have an eye on the exit and watch for signs of things going down hill. Anything VC-backed warrants more care. Think about how they could alter the deal and plan accordingly.
>know it sounds good to be anti ad but that means they have no clear way to monetize.
Nitro
....as everyone builds their core digital infrastructure in the cloud... :/
Is this a political post? :D
Kind of tangential, but this article mentions Twitch Boost - I can't imagine small creators having any real issue with this. Building momentum on twitch is hard, and usually involves a ton of luck. If you have no viewers, you get few recommendations, until either the algorithm helps you out and you get lucky or you get a big raid/rehost that gives you the momentum to grow. It's either that or you happen to be one of the first streamers of some entirely new gaming category that doesn't have any big names attached to it, you get lucky there, and grow.
Offering a shortcut to skip all that and pay for growth seems like a common sense move for a lot of small creators. I struggle to think of the arguments against it - are they concerned big creators will flood money into it and drown out smaller ones? They already drown out smaller streamers, especially in streaming categories that are very "saturated." They also have no incentive to boost their stream, they're already top of the recommendations anyway.
Great revenue idea, and a change I as a small creator was welcome to see. Often I have viewers want to spend their channel points or bits or whatever they're called and I tell them to save it, I don't seek profit off of what I do (plus twitch takes it all anyway) I have a day job - but I do feel bad because they seem to want to spend it on something and I only have enough energy and bandwidth to add custom emojis or bot commands, which are dumb and people tire quickly of anyway.
Channel points are free to the viewer and automatically accumulated by watching your stream.
Bits are purchased at roughly a 100:$1 ratio, and about half of that goes to the streamer (and half to twitch).
Partner here - I don’t know the precise TOS here because it’s twisty and constantly changing but I have streamed now for almost 10 years as a partner with a micro following, my account balance to this day is like $46. They make every excuse possible not to give you money or put arbitrary restrictions on how much you should stream to access it, to the point I just stopped and put a paypal link on my profile and said dont give it to twitch. They steal a lot from smaller partners. However, it’s a good platform so I just take it. Kind of on the theme of this thread, lol. You choose to build a castle in someone else’s kingdom because there’s no other place.
Yeah, build a business on an island.
in the "cloud"
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