Lily's Corner

Discovering Odysee

Truth be told, it was a coincidence that led me into that platform: noticing that videos of some youtubers I watched sporadically had a link to Odysee, among other alternatives.
And it wast among the last I checked, because at the time the requisites in my mind were:

1. free for users
2. free for creators
3. easy to use
4. not completely flooded by politics
5. good content filtering

The last two criteria is exactly where other two alternatives fail miserably:

4. Rumble is a political pamphlet that happens to have a video platform inside
5. Every time I checked DLive had huge ads on the home-page - once with explicit porn

And by exclusion only Odysee and Peertube remained. The later looking too complicated to normies in my opinion, for a simple reason: needing to either find an instance open to registration to submit videos or self-host your own. So Odysee remained as the last option, the most similar to the convenience of Youtube.

From the beginning

Reanimated Corpse

Yes, as much as this title might anger some people this is a technically accurate description of Odysee as a platform.

Why? Years ago, the "LaNd Of ThE fReE" used one of their countless regulatory busy-bodies to deal a lethal blow in what was Odysee's backbone: the cryptocurrency LBRY, used for almost everything in the platform. How lovely is the "free market", isn't it?
The damage was even deadlier than bankrupting the company, it destroyed almost all paths to legally acquire the coin used for everything - to the point Odysee almost went dark, until it was ... bought by another crypto company.

Goddam crypto!?

I know, most people despise crypto currency with good reasons: the countless SCAMs over this technology, how the tech was used as excuse by greedy hardware manufacturers to skyrocket PC component prices, the exhaustive over-hyping age of the NFTs, among others.

And that is the back-bone of Odysee, a natural repellent to most people that fundamentally limits the adoption of the platform. To make things worse, a little before I joined they removed the only option to use paper-money on the platform that was provided by Stripe - so in the eyes of common people, no real-money was allowed anymore. The allegations to drop Stripe were reasonable - invasive Know Your Costumer requirements and censorship demands -, but for months they had no alternative outside of the defunct crypto LBRY.

Social Poison

If you think what I described until now is already too bad, try to interact in comments with some parts of the Odysee community and you will see why moderation eventually is necessary.
Even being a person with a big tolerance to reading/hearing heinous stuff, I saw stuff nasty enough to make me question what goddam hell-hole did I jump into. A very toxic repellent for normies - sometimes that being the exact intention of some individuals, that try to gatekeep the "Youtube refugees".

While the platform proudly brags about being a free-speech sanctuary, which seems true on the surface given it allows almost everything from bread-tubers to extreme political discourse (including ideologies directly tied to genocides), the Terms of Service paint a very different picture - that most users clearly never bothered to read.
So much content violating the ToS points to the real cause, their - honestly - pathetic moderation. It is dependent on user reports for manual review of a ridiculously small team, that - if it still exists - is probably overwhelmed by the sheer amount of scammers trying to flood comment sections.

The only automation for moderation is writing down a black-list of words you don't want people to use for comments on your channel. Outside that, you get to individually block every bad actor or disable comments.

Bad functionalities

If being a repellent for regular people were not enough, things get even worse when you look at the bad side of functionalities.

While the ability to post any kind of content is very nice, there are two big catches: their editor only support the core Markdown functionalities (which is limiting) and is code-oriented - with preview separated from editing. In other words: unless you are a programmer, their text editor for articles is ... trash.

On videos, the main point of an Youtube alternative, there are no subtitles functionality. Not only that, loading can be very slow compared to the site Odysee claims to compete with. Back at my days, competitors at least tried to be technically better than the incumbent.

Getting worse

"How things can get even worse?" you might ask. The previous problems where things I - naively - tought that Odysee might overcome if they took their business more seriously, if they focused on improvements. And this is the root cause of what I'll describe bellow: not only they didn't improve, they activelly signal they won't.

Broken today?

Little after I joined the platform they started to ramp-up their terribly slow migration from the defunct LBRY ecosystem to the new cryptocurrecy of their new parent company: Arweave. Normally you'd think a slow migration would mean few problems, but that couldn't be further from reality.

My first problems, that still happens to this day, is sometimes the website simply not loading content - specially on the home page. Yep, they managed to mess up a core functionality.
Atop of that, after one of their updates the videos always start muted on my web browser - where no other video platform has the same behavior. Not to mention the mess with the text editor for comments, that sometimes allows Markdown and other times doesn't.

But remember I talked about them removing Stripe as a monetization path and staying months locked on a dead crypto? Their solution to this was pushing users to the token of the parent company, Arweave, over the cryptocurrency wallet "Wander Wallet" - which in turn has options to use "real money" to buy the tokens. But some problems were systemically ignored and still are:

• The Arweave implementation on Odysse is less than half-assed, most of the platform still working on the dead LBRY
• Wander Wallet works by a browser extension on Chromium Browsers or by importing your wallet onto Odysee
  • The first method is more privacy-invasive and a huge potential for security-threat, since malware on extensions are booming this days
  • The second method is simply dysfunctional - with the wallet being disconnected at almost every restart of the browser
• Having a crypto exchange between users and monetization adds extra friction and imposes a system most people despise

No answers

This is the point that burnt my remaining hope, down to a cinder. The current parent company of the so called "free-speech platform" Odysee, Arweave, is based on the United Kingdom - the mother of most internet censorship on the western hemisphere, including among many other anti-citizen atrocities the bullshit of "age-verification".

Since Odysee automatically subscribe you into their channel when you create an account on the platform, where they post articles describing updates from time to time, it is only natural I'd ask them about it there, isn't?

The result was depressing: while the community up-voted my questions to the top of the comments, there was no answer either from the Odysee official profile or their staff/associates - that were replying to other comments.
And this did not happen once of twice, but three separate times with months between each other. At this point their silence is the answer!

Their relation with UK's rampant censorship and tyranny, their instance about age-verification, their usage of Google Analytics (on a platform that pretends to compete with a Google product), their claims against AI-slop only to push contributors to Github with guidelines to vibe-coded contributions, their pretense attitude against big tech while pushing Discord + Github (Microsoft) + Google Analytics, ..., all of that went forever unanswered. And my trust was gone.

Parasitic relationship

One of the main selling points of Odysee as an alternative to Youtube for creator is their Sync feature: automatically reposting their videos from Youtube on Odysee. And from the start this creates several issues:

• Most content on Odysee are videos synced from Youtube
  You can easily notice this by an Youtube link at the end of the description
• In practice Odysse works mostly as a backup for Youtube videos
• Most creators have no incentive to interact with Odysee's community, given it's smaller size, lack of moderation, broken monetization and lack of differential
  • To the point even most creators that promote Odysee ignore comments there
• Synced videos are first uploaded in the highest quality (often 1080p), making the slow loading even worse

That already makes Odysee, in practice, more of a parasite to Youtube than an alternative. But don't worry, management has an even more imbecile way of making the "competitor" even more dependent on Youtube: integrating it on Odysee!

YES! LETS COMPETE WITH THEM BY OFFICIALLY MAKING OUR PLATFORM A SHOWCASE FOR THEIR CONTENT!

Worse than making the platform a Youtube client with extra content on the side, those new "features" of integrating videos (and maybe even comments) are a solid ground for an Apocalyptic lawsuit - on a platform that almost died a decade ago because of another lawsuit, YAY! And also begging to make their website even more broken!

If you ever looked at my resume, you might have noticed that I've got some time as a web developer. My 2015 job experience, as a then Jr Developer, was in a website of music lyrics - where Youtube integration was a very important part of the business. And since then, eleven years ago, Youtube was already know to break integrations with third-party and intentionally limit functionality. Now just imagine said third-party being officially a "competitor".

Conclusion: definition of insanity

Well, at this point Odysee is an obvious lost cause to me. But thinking about this lead to a deeper thought: trying to replace a Big Tech service, Youtube, with something that works too similarly and has the same (if not even worse) incentives is a ticking time-bomb.
If the service is too similar (centralized, monetization focused, detached from the community) it's a matter of time before the service becomes bad and - on best case - the cycle just repeats. It's the definition of insanity, doing the same things again while expecting different outcomes.

This is why in my opinion the real alternative to Youtube is Peertube. Because it's structure and incentives are fundamentally different - so their development will inevitably go for a different direction.
The integration with ActivityPub/Fediverse is also a great point, allowing users the freedom of using the service they prefer (Peertube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, etc) to follow profiles/creators instead of being locked in a closed ecosystem.

My reaction is already done: my articles posted in Odysee are available here, where new articles will be posted exclusevily. All of them allow for comments using the Fediverse on a post/too on my Mastodon profile - to let people to follow me from whathever ActivityPub platform they prefer.

This will be my only article ranting about Odysee, so see you on the next one - with a better subject!