Anatoly Karlin has a long thoughtful post on the latest Youtube crackdown:
It’s worth pointing out that demonetization is nearly as bad as an outright ban, as it demoralizes creators, and in some cases, cuts off their main source of income. Relying on Patreon or Subscribestars (a recent and less PC Russian alternative) is a bandaid – while we greatly appreciate the exceptions, anonymous readers are rarely very generous, and you need to be really big to make even a decent living off public donations. And they can always shut you down as well. Patreon is more than happy to kick controversial people off by itself, while Subscribestars had to cease operations for a period of time after PayPal cut them off…
I have a blog post ready to go about how the vlogosphere has superseded the old blogosphere over the past few years. Obviously, it will now have to be substantially rewritten.
But the main point to take from here is that YouTube is not going to become the center of anti-Establishment dissidence that we thought it might be, just as similar delusions about the power of Twitter and other social media were dispelled from around 2017*.
YouTube will become a repository for cat and unpacking videos.
…Yes, alternatives exist, but by and large, people are not going to bother going to Bitchute or RuTube. Three reasons why.
First, they are much smaller than YouTube, which is a de facto monopolist in this sphere, and so derives vast benefits from network effects.
Second, YouTube operates on an annual loss of a billion dollars. It is something that Alphabet subsidizes for presumably political reasons. No other site can afford to be a YouTube. Videos take up a lot of storage space, and HDD’s don’t come free!
Third, let’s be honest, many of the people driven off are not so much dissidents as assorted freaks and weirdos. Their presence will deter “normies” from migrating over. We already have a perfect example of that with Gab (Twitter alternative) and Voat (Reddit alternative)…
As reiner Tor points out, this was also probably a sign from God not to engage in vlogging. Since it now seems there is no way to be famous, edgy, and uncensored on YouTube, I am probably going to deprioritize these plans going forwards. I suppose it is good that it happened now, before I invested any significant time or energy into this enterprise (apart from ordering a mini-tripod for my smartphone). As for using Russian alternatives, apart from the aforementioned problem of all the significant Russians being on YouTube as well, I am certainly not going to be talking about Dagestani IQs on Russian platforms (i.e. for the same reason that German nationalists use VK over Facebook).
Comments section:
* No matter how big it seems to us, politics is minuscule part of youtube content. Of top YT videos, none is political.
* Bitchute uses p2p which scales pretty well without requiring youtube-like infrastructure. I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.
For example, when Soph’s “Be not afraid” video was zapped by YT, the Bitchute version picked up 150k views (and counting). That is a decent chunk (maybe 20%) of what it would have got on YT.
And if a whole bunch of people like Crowder and Sargon etc get booted from YT, bitchute would see a major uptick, and a network effect would kick in.
* What are YouTube’s network effects?
Recommendations. You get vast numbers of new people getting funneled onto your channel e.g. you watch Molyneux –> JF Gariepy.
Viewership is systemically higher than for similar profile blogs by up to an order of magnitude. For instance, the typical video by the psychometrist Edward Dutton – probably the most high profile HBD vlogger – gets around 10,000-20,000 views. I am reasonably sure that this is well above what the typical article by James Thompson here gets. My most popular “HBD” article ever – The Idiocy of the Average – got something like 40,000 views if I remember correctly. The Golden One, a Swedish alt right pagan bodybuilder, has 100,000 subscribers, and most of his videos – rather low effort productions with minimal editing or effects – get at least 20,000 views.
The Alt Right child prodigy “soph” – recently profiled by Mr. Bernstein – is currently just shy of a million subscribers on YouTube. She has had 17 million views since she started her (rather irregular) vlogging career in August 2015. That’s approximately what the Unz Review currently generates in half a year, and we have far, far more visitors now than even just a couple of years ago.
* With the rise of women in the workforce and especially in secondary and university education, there has been a concomitant war on the manly virtues of valor and gallantry.
Use to be, poets immortalized their civilization’s heroes by singing tales of their gallantry and sacrifice. Men fighting to the end when death was all but certain were commemorated and thus granted immortality–as much anyway as can be achieved by mere mortal men.
Today, with the tearing down of statues and the feminine war on martial virtue, all that is lost. Bravery is no longer considered worthy. Instead, women teachers–and internet censors–promote a sedated, docile keypuncher as the ideal male.
This goes against the grain of the Universe and won’t end well.
