Ask HN: Video recommendation platform as a way to compete with YouTube?
<i>&gt;Why don&#x27;t we just make a platform that crawls the internet for videos and build a recommendation algorithm. Therefore no matter where you host your videos you&#x27;ll be easily discover?</i><p>Because there are fundamental tradeoffs of _information_ and _meta_information_ that a system has that factors into recommendations.<p>People upload about ~500 hours of videos to Youtube every minute.[1]<p>Yes, that means that centralization to that degree has negatives such as the guitar channel being deleted but it also has positives such as better (not foolproof -- but relatively better) detection of spam and mistitled content.  Because Youtube servers actually have the <i>real bytes of actual videos</i>, they can scrub the content with machine learning algorithms augmented with some human oversight.<p>If you only have a platform that crawls for video urls and doesn&#x27;t actually ingest the petabytes of video like Youtube, the &quot;recommendations-only&quot; service will be susceptible to gaming such as people putting <i>&quot;Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson nudes&quot;</i> as the titles but the actual video is an ad for somebody trying to sell a used car.  Or the first few days of a video url has <i>&quot;Tips to deal with COVID&quot;</i> which is real but the video hoster later switches it out to be a video for that same url to be something else.<p>Also, a centralized service like Youtube can measure actual <i>user behavior</i> such as &quot;watch time&quot; (because Youtube&#x27;s servers know they are sending bytes to the client) to see if the video is actually engaging viewers and this factors into future recommendations.  If web surfers are closing out a 10 minute video after 20 seconds, the videos are appropriately penalized because users are &quot;voting&quot; that the content is bad.  I.e. the viewers &quot;voted&quot; without even having to press the &quot;thumbs down&quot; button.<p>A new platform to recommend videos pointing to decentralized video hosting has advantages but also has <i>unavoidable disadvantages</i> that lower the quality of the recommendations.<p>EDIT to add my previous comments about the <i>financial</i> incentives (ads) that <i>help</i> video content creators which many techies overlook:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21506992" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21506992</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=upload+about+~500+hours+of+videos+to+Youtube+every+minute" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=upload+about+~500+hours+of+v...</a>