They are, but even YT won't last forever. TikTok and IG are eating their lunch badly, and as YT continues to chase after that market and keeps neglecting and pissing off people that bring value to the platform, something just might crop up as an alternative.
I mean, a month ago many thought Reddit is irreplaceable, and now look around.
I'm also hopeful for more creator-owned services like Nebula and Dropout. They tend to run off extremely cheap subscription models (about $5 a month for Dropout, less than $2 a month for Nebula) and all that money goes to the creators with very little business overhead in the way.
But reddit is fundamentally built different than other social media platforms. Reddit is more like a collection of forums than a social media platform. The only thing that keeps people on reddit is the content and that can be moved.
On Youtube its the Algorithm and the Content Creators that keep people to use the platform. PeerTube and LBRY simply don't have the creators Youtube has.
On reddit people choose what to see. On YouTube the algorithm simply is wayy more important than on reddit.
Premium just seems like too expensive a proposition for the casual viewer. I use an adblocker but if they made premium five bucks a month I’d probably just do it. And I think many people wouldn’t mind paying that to avoid ads.
It'll probably end up being like twitch. You can either watch 5 minutes of blank or 5 minutes of ads. Either way, hopefully it won't take yt-dlp long to be compatible. I mostly download my YouTube videos to a local server then search and watch them later just because my internet isn't reliable. I assume this will soon become the only way to watch YouTube if you want to resist that idiotic propagandist.
I looked up the article and it says they're limiting users with an adblocker to 3 videos pet day. They're testing it out on select users for now. Enshitification is killing all the sites I actually use(d) all at once