Is YouTube Fundamental or Trivial?:
A Better Way Forward
Perhaps the best way to emphasize the positives of online video while diminishing its negatives is to deploy a hybrid indie web approach.
Imagine an online world in which people hosted their innovative video on large, big-infrastructure platforms like YouTube or Vimeo, but then embedded the players on their own independent web sites. This would allow users to find interesting new video content by leveraging the same style of decentralized trust hierarchies that structure the blogosphere, instead of relying on artificial statistical algorithms tuned to optimize attention extraction.
Because YouTube came along at exactly the moment when broadband penetration made online video practical, we never had a period of indie experimentation before the market consolidated into platform monopolies. I think it's worth exploring what we missed.
(Via Blog - Cal Newport)
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