Ask HN: Would you watch a P2P YouTube replacement?
&gt; Say it actually took off and had as much content as Youtube.<p>This is a <i>huge</i> assumption. There are two moats around YouTube right now:<p>1. Discovery processes and sharing. You claim an assumption that these exist, and specifically don&#x27;t want to talk their details, so I&#x27;ll skip details on this as well.<p>2. Ad revenue share. For good, bad, and sometimes very ugly, a lot of content just doesn&#x27;t <i>exist</i> without YouTube&#x27;s monetization. You assume &quot;no ads&quot; and don&#x27;t mention a business model, how do you expect to pay for content?<p>Restricting to just the consumer standpoint, the answer is easy: if an app had the content I wanted but a better ad experience than YouTube I&#x27;d be very easy to convince to use it. I don&#x27;t even need &quot;no ads&quot;, I don&#x27;t mind advertising paying for or subsidizing content I watch. (I grew up with broadcast TV.) I do wish there was less tracking involved (and find targeted advertising creepy&#x2F;terrible) and I do wish for some sort of curation of advertising again. (A broadcast TV station would never interrupt the middle of a 5 minute music video to play an hour long infomercial. A broadcast TV station would also have a lot to answer from, including the FCC, if they allowed nazis and other hate groups to buy hour long infomercials.)<p>All the other stuff mostly doesn&#x27;t matter to me as a consumer. I don&#x27;t care about traffic anonymization via onion routing or if it is peer-to-peer or centralized. I don&#x27;t care about cryptographically verified channels or censorship resistance. I care about filters obviously, but I only care if they are crowdsourced in so much as I distrust a lot of the biases of ML-based recommendation algorithms and would maybe prefer something with more paid humans (labor) involved.<p>All I care about as a consumer is does it have the content I want to watch. So indirectly I care a lot about the business model of whatever it is. If it is monetized well and attracts the creators that I care about, then I use it, it&#x27;s as simple as that. The tech doesn&#x27;t matter. You just need to be very careful in assuming you can beat today&#x27;s YouTube on attracting creators given their moats.