When I look at the trending videos on YouTube, it makes me want to become a hermit and have no contact with society, the videos are so bad. I think the money side of YouTube has totally corrupted it.
As a PeerTube creator, I make videos as a way to teach/inform/entertain, not to make money. One way to make PeerTube work is to find a way to fund the hosts/instances that transcode and store the video files.
It would be interesting to create a crypto coin and have PeerTube users, both creators and viewers, to buy a small amount of the coin (a few dollars worth) when they register, then each video that they watch costs a small fraction of a coin paid to the instance hosting the video, and the viewer could add a tip to the creator if they liked the video. The amount paid to the instance might be an approximation of the cost to host the video. Accumulating the coin might be a game not an income source for the creators, but there might be enough money to fund the instances with this scheme.
There certainly is value in quality video that people are willing to pay for. It would be nice to find an alternative to advertising based video.
Another side of video that YouTube is not doing a good job at is creating community. The comment section is hard to follow, impossible to search, and it is transient, as new videos are created, comments on old videos disappear. I don’t know how to do it, but creating a forum or a lemmy group for each creator or each video interest group with multiple creators involved would be extremely powerful.
Yeah. Maybe call it microtransactions. Or maybe make it a game where you get “stickers” you can post on videos you like. “Stickers” being the equivalent of a like with your avatar posted somewhere on the video page.