And youtube. Creators constantly want to move away from youtube with it's content-id with incredibly slow appeals process that makes most types of fair use nearly impossible, it's demonetization that intransparently makes your videos unprofitable because you said the wrong word or made the wrong sound, the blatant favoritism when it comes to the "trending" page, etc.
But the viewers are on youtube, and network effects keep the viewers from switching. So there's just a graveyard of failed youtube alternatives.
The part that you are missing is that all of alternatives to YouTube pay creators little or no ad money and have far worse search engine/discoverability. If a creator is getting demonetized on youtube, moving to a platform with no monetization would not solve their problem.
And sooner or later, any platform that becomes popular would have to implement a content ID system and and have to deal with ban/demonetization waves every time Twitter/journalists discover a new type of offensive content on the platform.
There have been plenty of (mostly short-lived) competitors that paid out more per view than YouTube. But that's obviously meaningless if there are barely any viewers on the platform.
I agree that content ID is a necessary system in principle. Not legally necessary, but it's a system that solves real problems YouTube had before its existence. The problems with it are largely around YouTube heavily favoring recent content, while simultaneously having a support that takes weeks to even look at your case if you can't raise a twitter storm. They are trying to completely automate a problem that's full of subtlety and rife with abuse, and then don't give you any way to resolve it when it goes wrong. Other platforms don't have to choose the same path
I think streaming video is a different beast, because the market is littered with loss leaders. It's hard for content creators to switch to another platform when the only profitable ones are subscription based (and not competitive).
Even Youtube, for all its users and being part of an existing advertising company, struggles to break even (reportedly).
Video is so mind blowingly huge compared to everything else. A single youtube video can be multiple gb if you view the 4k60fps version. While making an alternative reddit or twitter is relatively trivial server cost wise.
That's true, until the viewer profile change or disappear, which happens very, very slowly, but it happens anyway. It happened several times in history. Nothing lasts forever.
As a viewer, I would prefer watching content on other platforms. Problem is: there's none. Someone will mention PeerTube, but no... It doesn't work as well, not easy to navigate. The whole federation thing makes it harder to find content on a platform that already doesn't have most of the well known creators.
By network effects it's meant that all the buyers will go to OnlyFans because all the sellers are there, and all the sellers will stay there because that's where all the buyers are.
I don't see how trust is directly related to that, it's a competing concern.
