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Jan. 14th, 2026 05:02 amTo begin with, YouTube has had a reputation lately for what is known as enshittification, which Google AI cites to result from such things as pressure from shareholder demands who are not interested in user experience, more staff getting hired and paid, or better treatment of existing staff, and a lack of meaningful competition that could easily tank the platform just by providing better service.
Despite its overall stranglehold, there are still people left and right closing their accounts for one reason or another. Case in point, one redditor posted the other day to ask people for the best way to get banned instead of simply closing their account; the next thing you know, another posts to recount all the bullshit they had to deal with for years on end, and I can see why anyone would want to spite the platform and go out on a bang.
Surely, there must've been meaningful alternatives, no matter how niche, when you consider how niche all companies start out.
-
Three days ago, I created my own post detailing three different problems in total I have had to date and the lack of meaningful help I ever got:
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1qa0tde/why_i_have_just_left_youtube_in_favor_of_odysee/
At one point, someone already protesting YouTube, f10945yt, commented to share that with me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1ooffwh/we_need_to_start_a_protest_against_youtube/
Decided to read some of his responses to people's comments there, and one of the latter was "Let's go to a site that openly allows open hate speech, misinformation, and extremism. It's not a better site, its actually far worse." He argued that you can at least shun such content, but I have read numerous times before that allowing people to present bigotry in the first place is how you get police who kill unarmed black men, laws designed unwrittenly to send black people, including black children at school, to prison, and Alligatraz.
I researched that the following morning, and while Odysee does have a written policy against bigotry, Google AI cites The Guardian to have confirmed its stance to the contrary back in 2021:
[Sentence opening cut] Julian Chandra, the vice-president for growth at LBRY, which owns both Odysee and created the blockchain-based video-sharing protocol that underpins it, wrote: “Eric Striker is a white supremacist, but that has nothing to do with him being on Odysee. What matters is if he breaks rules.”
Chandra added: “Have a look at the title of the video: If it appears to be inciting hatred toward an ethnic group or whatever; the title should be scrubbed. But that doesn’t mean the video should be removed unless it does break community guidelines.”
Chandra continued: “Also just being a white nationalist or nazi isn’t grounds for removal. Are you nazi that makes videos about the superiority of the white race? That is NOT grounds for removal.
“If you’re on the other hand, dehumanizing a race or doing things against our guidelines, that is grounds for removal,” he concluded.
On the idea that white supremacist beliefs can be articulated without dehumanizing other groups, [Michael Edison] Hayden, the [Southern Poverty Law Center] spokesperson, said: “White supremacy is inherently dehumanizing.” [Boldface mine.]
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/14/odysee-video-platform-nazi-content-not-grounds-for-removal
That being the second platform already implied to be run by white supremacists, and only the second, I came back that afternoon to look into some other platforms, and seemingly found a winner in Vidlii, for also being said to maintain my content even after I drop out of a membership plan (read later still to be one lifetime payment to begin with).
Uploaded my two Earthbound clips yesterday morning, and while I read later that 1080p is reserved for paying members, it failed something basic and misloaded the colors of my video, something I noticed while comparing screenshots with YouTube after noticing a duller image first. I complained to an email address written to be for violation reports (no dedicated outlet for bug reports), and later on this Twitter clone called bluesky where the site's blog is hosted. (One person there has Liked it, but there's been no actual response so far.)
From there, I wound up down a rabbit hole all day, with other platforms and their own problems. Bitchute caps resolution at 480p for all users and seems dubiously ethical. Bitview has a broken verification email generator (you have to ask at a site called Bittoco to get verified), and doesn't allow custom thumbnails until you have over 75 subscribers (and the one for my brownie video was one of its main attractions; on just the first problem, I would not wish to suggest something that the less serious potential users could end up forgetting all about after registering.
-
So to summarize, out of all the options I could find, the few platforms that fulfill both my first two criteria (not counting content diversity, as opposed to specialized platforms such as Vidyard for business), throw me a curveball and fail in a different way each.
I gather that YouTube itself once had a proliferation of fascism and pedophilia, but did crack down on that in 2019.
From there, I decide instead to google why YouTube has all the functionalities I spent all day looking for, besides so much as acknowledging reports that I submit, and why half these different sites do so little to enforce rules against terrorism and dehumanization.
During a following discussion, Mom did specify that a lot of these sites, besides considering hate speech to be free speech (despite written policies that would rule that out), might simply not have the resources yet to deal with it properly, with their current priorities elsewhere.
She also stated that I need to be in charge of my own priorities, while also encouraging me to stick to YouTube for continuity.
For a purpose like posterity, she did suggest that I back all my videos up somewhere, citing someone who used to interview famous people and record all his interviews starting on VHS.
Regarding my first Getter Love!! video, she did suggest uploading a new one, and that was exactly my intent behind commissioning a restoration. The question is, how many times is something like that going to happen, that I'm gonna have to keep re-uploading my old content and linking forward from each previous upload? I would expect a reliable website to back up every byte of its data for circumstances beyond anyone's control, such as if multiple people's videos, comments, Likes, subscriptions, and so on got erased, lest they lose trust and seek out competitors like I've just been doing, and I really hope that what I lost simply slipped through the cracks during the original recovery and can still be retrieved by the engineering team.
Despite its overall stranglehold, there are still people left and right closing their accounts for one reason or another. Case in point, one redditor posted the other day to ask people for the best way to get banned instead of simply closing their account; the next thing you know, another posts to recount all the bullshit they had to deal with for years on end, and I can see why anyone would want to spite the platform and go out on a bang.
Surely, there must've been meaningful alternatives, no matter how niche, when you consider how niche all companies start out.
-
Three days ago, I created my own post detailing three different problems in total I have had to date and the lack of meaningful help I ever got:
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1qa0tde/why_i_have_just_left_youtube_in_favor_of_odysee/
At one point, someone already protesting YouTube, f10945yt, commented to share that with me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1ooffwh/we_need_to_start_a_protest_against_youtube/
Decided to read some of his responses to people's comments there, and one of the latter was "Let's go to a site that openly allows open hate speech, misinformation, and extremism. It's not a better site, its actually far worse." He argued that you can at least shun such content, but I have read numerous times before that allowing people to present bigotry in the first place is how you get police who kill unarmed black men, laws designed unwrittenly to send black people, including black children at school, to prison, and Alligatraz.
I researched that the following morning, and while Odysee does have a written policy against bigotry, Google AI cites The Guardian to have confirmed its stance to the contrary back in 2021:
[Sentence opening cut] Julian Chandra, the vice-president for growth at LBRY, which owns both Odysee and created the blockchain-based video-sharing protocol that underpins it, wrote: “Eric Striker is a white supremacist, but that has nothing to do with him being on Odysee. What matters is if he breaks rules.”
Chandra added: “Have a look at the title of the video: If it appears to be inciting hatred toward an ethnic group or whatever; the title should be scrubbed. But that doesn’t mean the video should be removed unless it does break community guidelines.”
Chandra continued: “Also just being a white nationalist or nazi isn’t grounds for removal. Are you nazi that makes videos about the superiority of the white race? That is NOT grounds for removal.
“If you’re on the other hand, dehumanizing a race or doing things against our guidelines, that is grounds for removal,” he concluded.
On the idea that white supremacist beliefs can be articulated without dehumanizing other groups, [Michael Edison] Hayden, the [Southern Poverty Law Center] spokesperson, said: “White supremacy is inherently dehumanizing.” [Boldface mine.]
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/14/odysee-video-platform-nazi-content-not-grounds-for-removal
That being the second platform already implied to be run by white supremacists, and only the second, I came back that afternoon to look into some other platforms, and seemingly found a winner in Vidlii, for also being said to maintain my content even after I drop out of a membership plan (read later still to be one lifetime payment to begin with).
Uploaded my two Earthbound clips yesterday morning, and while I read later that 1080p is reserved for paying members, it failed something basic and misloaded the colors of my video, something I noticed while comparing screenshots with YouTube after noticing a duller image first. I complained to an email address written to be for violation reports (no dedicated outlet for bug reports), and later on this Twitter clone called bluesky where the site's blog is hosted. (One person there has Liked it, but there's been no actual response so far.)
From there, I wound up down a rabbit hole all day, with other platforms and their own problems. Bitchute caps resolution at 480p for all users and seems dubiously ethical. Bitview has a broken verification email generator (you have to ask at a site called Bittoco to get verified), and doesn't allow custom thumbnails until you have over 75 subscribers (and the one for my brownie video was one of its main attractions; on just the first problem, I would not wish to suggest something that the less serious potential users could end up forgetting all about after registering.
-
So to summarize, out of all the options I could find, the few platforms that fulfill both my first two criteria (not counting content diversity, as opposed to specialized platforms such as Vidyard for business), throw me a curveball and fail in a different way each.
I gather that YouTube itself once had a proliferation of fascism and pedophilia, but did crack down on that in 2019.
From there, I decide instead to google why YouTube has all the functionalities I spent all day looking for, besides so much as acknowledging reports that I submit, and why half these different sites do so little to enforce rules against terrorism and dehumanization.
During a following discussion, Mom did specify that a lot of these sites, besides considering hate speech to be free speech (despite written policies that would rule that out), might simply not have the resources yet to deal with it properly, with their current priorities elsewhere.
She also stated that I need to be in charge of my own priorities, while also encouraging me to stick to YouTube for continuity.
For a purpose like posterity, she did suggest that I back all my videos up somewhere, citing someone who used to interview famous people and record all his interviews starting on VHS.
Regarding my first Getter Love!! video, she did suggest uploading a new one, and that was exactly my intent behind commissioning a restoration. The question is, how many times is something like that going to happen, that I'm gonna have to keep re-uploading my old content and linking forward from each previous upload? I would expect a reliable website to back up every byte of its data for circumstances beyond anyone's control, such as if multiple people's videos, comments, Likes, subscriptions, and so on got erased, lest they lose trust and seek out competitors like I've just been doing, and I really hope that what I lost simply slipped through the cracks during the original recovery and can still be retrieved by the engineering team.