Around 2000 or so, I used to work in tech support for a software company who had like 5000 Windows-based customers and 5 running Solaris. My boss chose me to learn Solaris when the previous “expert” left. I bought this book and started hacking. Good times!
Can’t answer most of your questions, rhetorical or not, but don’t have much to add or argue with either. One caveat I want to make is:
Don’t think that for a second. There are more now than there ever have been. The problem isn’t simply that YouTube choked out all the others, it’s that YouTube moved the goalposts so we wouldn’t even consider the others. E.g. back in the day if you wanted videos about a very specific topic—say, you need a new phone and you want to find out if the PinePhone is right for you—you would have to go to all the video sharing sites and, if you were lucky, you would find a video or two somewhere. Nowadays you just check youtube. Youtube shifted the goalposts from “hosts videos” to “hosts videos about everything,” and now people won’t consider adopting alternatives unless their community just spontaneously exists, and is big enough to have everything, and also it doesn’t show them people they hate, and also it has this ambiguous list of features that youtube mostly has, and also…
And who can blame them? Who wants to check 8 different websites with 8 different interfaces and 4 different apps and 2 without apps and 2 that don’t work on mobile at all and partially overlapping communities and offerings and STILL risk not finding anything when checking one unified platform will guarantee you the video?
It depends on what you mean by “replacement,” as I mention above. As far as I know, there are no exact replicas of “[website], but only the good parts.”
Every Social Media alternative is either too small to be attractive to the people who expect a very full social experience (e.g. Lemmy instead of Reddit), or it’s just recreating the same flaws again, but more subtle and insidious (e.g. Threads instead of Xitter). The problem there is that the will of the herd doesn’t make smart choices, so you’re either left with site that’s just like the last one and doomed to recreate its downfall in a few years (because the average person likes what they already know and liked) or a site that is too forward thinking and will never have more than a few hundred thousand followers in your lifetime (assuming it can last)—a number that might seem large in a stadium or a BBS forum, but seems small on a site like facebook.
That being said, I like where the fediverse is going with services like Matrix, Mastodon and Lemmy. Maybe one day we’ll see a more fb-like experience
As you said, DuckDuckGo is a fairly good search engine. Better than Google currently, sadly. I remember when it was definitely a harder choice and really required strong values. 'Nuff said.
For Amazon, I like using Ebay, Etsy and specialized online stores. Brick-and-mortar is only necessary if it’s groceries or not a large chain (which all have websites anyway). The trade-off is the guarantees: some baseline of quality, and a definite refund when you get scammed. Hasn’t been an issue for me yet, but I make it a point to not buy online if I can try in-store.
Yahoo and Youtube: not really. As aforementioned I don’t use one, and I too am suckered into the pretty multicolored void of the other.
TV and streaming: cough [email protected] cough (follow the checklists in the megathread first)
I would consider going to https://www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-show when Jon Stewart returns (that man has such grace and class, nobody since comes close), if they offer full-episode videos within a week of airing whereas YouTube does not. My point here is that there needs to be a REASON to go somewhere. YouTube combined both the “video hosting” and also “content aggregation” components, so even if we replace the former - and yes, some of us really WOULD choose to go to 8 different websites, for 8 different pieces of content that are worthwhile - it would get that much harder for someone to even know that the videos on the other places exist.
On top of that, when you just happen to be on YouTube, it suggests something that you might want to watch - a related video, e.g. George Carlin perhaps - and you can enjoy watching that. Whereas 8 different websites are going to have at most 1/8th of the content, and probably several orders of magnitude less than that realistically. So as long as the ads are not TOO burdensome - let’s say limited to 5s each and at most 2 of them - they will “win”.
Also, I really do want Jon Stewart to get credit for my having watched one of his videos, yet watching the identical video from like Vanced or Piped or something deprives him of those tracking metrics, which are worth a lot more than mere money (which at this point he’d likely just donate to charity or some such).
YouTube wormed their way into our hearts, like an abusive spouse, and now just dares us to divorce them - they push the edge as far as they possibly can, knowing that we hate them now yet not caring one bit, unless enough of us will ACTUALLY go. At which point they’ll lawyer or buy out the other place that we would go to, in an effort to drag us back in, kicking and screaming. It’s a horribly abusive model for a “relationship”, where our consent really doesn’t matter at all, only what they can get away with, by any means necessary. And the sad fact is that many of us have greatly reduced the amount that we watch such videos entirely, but that makes next to no impact on them at all. So long as they can sell US as the product to advertising companies by being “THE” place to put their ads, they will continue their parasitic chokehold on our society.
I like Lemmy too - it is not even trying to replicate other social media sites (well, it is but it cannot succeed, so we accept that about it), and while it has enormous technical hurdles, e.g. every single time I visit my instance in via a browser, whether desktop or mobile, I have to re-login again, and sometimes (rarely) even while browsing internally. That’s… not ideal, though it’s still a million times better than the toxic filth crowd that is Reddit (having more to do with culture than technology ofc, and yet the two are not entirely unconnected). Whereas other places, such as Mastodon, just seem doomed internally b/c by their very nature “everyone else” has to go there too or it just won’t work. Otherwise, you still need like a Xitter account to follow them, and a Facebook account to follow them, and so on (I actually do not have either, but I understand that some people will feel the need to).
Buying in brick-and-morter is facilitated by having a car, even in a city, otherwise it gets really rough trying to go without that, especially for even the smallest furniture items like a chair that you’d basically have to pay for delivery. It can be done, but does get difficult.
Back to YouTube though, yeah you go where you can find the goods. I haven’t used torrents for almost a decade, ever since getting a letter from my ISP about usage of those tracked ports. Fortunately streaming - yes I literally have a Netflix account, plus the occasional whatever - covers so very much ground, if not all, and for the tiniest fraction of the amount of effort involved in keeping up with things e.g. setting up and paying for a proxy. It’s literally as easy as searching for 1-2-3!:-P