YouTube

Video sharing is dominated by YouTube (which is owned by Google, which is owned by Alphabet). It is a completely unprofitable mess, yet it is still held up by sticks and duct tape thanks to the company that owns it. I think that video sharing should be given back to the people. The majority of people already engage in the actual sharing (also known as piracy) of videos anyways. Why can't user-generated media be shared the same way?

To understand my idea for this application, I think a brief overview of how torrenting works is needed. The BitTorrent protocol invented in 2001 is what drives most of torrenting today. It is a method for internet-connected computers to share files directly with one another. Computers that upload files are called "seeders," while computers that download those files are called "leechers." A leecher can become a seeder once it has completed downloading the file and begins to upload it to other leechers. It is common to hear sayings like "don't hit and run" in torrenting communities to encourage people to become seeders.

People share torrents by creating a single "torrent" file with the necessary information and uploading to an index site, where others can download those files. There are also links called "magnets" that allow for the sharing of this information without having to download a file at all. Magnet links are usually handled automatically by the user's torrent client, such as qBitTorrrent or Deluge. When a particular file gains a large amount of seeders and leechers, it is called a "swarm." Websites and BitTorrent clients often feature statistics showing how popular a file is, along with the number of seeders and leechers.

YouTube never involved you at all. Your videos are stored on Google's massive cloud infrastructure, and you can't do anything about it if that infrastructure goes away or becomes restricted. With the power of BitTorrent, videos can exist for as long as they are popular.

Videos on Youtube are ranked by metrics like views, likes, and dislikes, but these metrics can be easily inflated by bot accounts. On the other hand, it is naturally easy to gauge the popularity of a video/file with torrents since the number of seeders and leechers are tracked. A hypothetical video sharing website could display the most popular user-generated media simply based on how many seeders it has.

I don't think there really is a way to dethrone YouTube without finding an alternative method like this. Being able to host the incomprehensible amount of videos that YouTube does is unfeasible to even large, established companies that wish to build a platform as popular as YouTube. The best way, then, is to decentralize the whole process. With a peer-to-peer video sharing website like I've described above, the videos are stored by the creator and each viewer. There is no central authority that stores each video; thus, there is no worry as to how to feasibly store them. In fact, these websites exist already.

However, what I'm trying to describe is something that I'm not really sure exists yet. Torrenting is still a sort of mystified process, like how Dungeons and Dragons was once viewed as a game played by satanists. Torrenting is actually really easy, but people are (justifiably) afraid of getting caught by their ISPs. An application that abstracts the process of torrenting (perhaps even by having a baked-in VPN) would make video sharing much more accessible, in my opinion.

Imagine an application or torrenting client that has a similar interface to YouTube:

• Users can browse videos that have thumbnails, timestamps, etc., but they're all rated by the amount of seeders, leechers, and overall popularity/availability.
• When a user clicks on a video, they can choose to download it to their system.
• The video gets added to the application's "cache" where the user can watch for as long as it exists within the cache.
• The user manages the cache's behavior, such as the ratio at which a video should be seeded before it gets deleted, or how many videos are allowed to be stored on the system before it starts to delete previously downloaded ones.
• There could even be a setting to archive downloaded videos by moving them to a designated location if the user decides that they have enough space on their system.

I think this would make a truly P2P video sharing application a lot more feasible and accessible to the average person.

Further, there would be no moderation required, because the moderation would be performed by the community. Videos that people want to watch will be downloaded by those who wish to watch them, and videos that no one wants to watch will be ignored. No central authority is at fault for what the users download, since all of the media is purely distributed by individuals. This has implications for the certain kinds of media that could be shared by people, but such is the way of the internet.

An application like this is the only way, I think, to make something that could actually rival YouTube. There would be no giant company hoarding anyone's data, nor would their be predatory advertisers trying to squeeze money out of every second of each video. Creators wouldn't be able to make money off of their videos, but there's a reason why services like Patreon are popular now, right? Also, most creators accept third-party sponsorships, anyways.

I think that in this day and age, YouTube, along with Google's advertisement antics, is really starting to show its cracks. It's not even that old of a website, but the framework it's built on is not sustainable. It's only by the grace of Alphabet's infinitely deep pockets that YouTube still exists. The future is peer-to-peer, a future where companies don't own the data any more. At least, that's how I hope it will be.