I think their real edge is a practically free and practically infinite bandwidth/capacity global CDN setup. There's no real technical reason for this still to be the case, but bandwidth costs are significant for people relying on other services to provide such. Or they're cheap and slow/capped.
This is the main reason I think alternative sites have a hard time competing. Play anything on YouTube from anywhere and if it's buffering/slow then it's probably your internet connection that's the problem. By contrast do the same on competing streaming sites and it's, more or less, expected especially if you aren't in certain geographic areas.
Monetization on YouTube is mostly just a carrot on a stick. The overwhelming majority of content creators will never make anything more than pocket change off of it. That carrot might still work as an incentivization system, but I don't think it's necessarily the driving force.
I'm not really disagreeing with you but I have a 700/700 fiber connection that generally works perfectly for anything I do, and youtube craps out pretty frequently. It'll just fail to load videos and I have to refresh up to multiple times before it starts working properly.
Also the frontend is generally very wonky, I'm wondering if its severely over engineered or something. It seems very simple, but it's failing at all kinds of stuff all the time. Shorts fail to load when scrolling, the scrolling just stops working, some times it keeps playing the previous video's audio while the current video is frozen.
Some times if I write a comment and try to highlight and delete some of it, when I hit backspace it deletes the part that wasn't highlighted. A normal <input type="text" /> does not do that. Have they implemented their own text inputs in JS or something?
All you need for that component is a form with a textfield and a submit button. As far as I know that won't behave this way so I'm not sure what they're doing but it doesn't seem great.
I went and checked, it's a div. No idea why they would do that for that simple comment form.
This is the main reason I think alternative sites have a hard time competing. Play anything on YouTube from anywhere and if it's buffering/slow then it's probably your internet connection that's the problem. By contrast do the same on competing streaming sites and it's, more or less, expected especially if you aren't in certain geographic areas.
Monetization on YouTube is mostly just a carrot on a stick. The overwhelming majority of content creators will never make anything more than pocket change off of it. That carrot might still work as an incentivization system, but I don't think it's necessarily the driving force.