Odysee, a decentralised YouTube alternative focused on free speech, is officially ending the serving of ads on the platform, starting today. The post:
"Dear friends of Odysee, Starting today, we’re removing all ads. We don’t need ads to make money as a platform and we are confident in the development of our own new monetisation programs that will help creators earn a living and at the same time keep Odysee alive. Ultimately, sacrificing the overall user experience to make a few bucks isn’t worth it to us and nor is it even sustainable for a platform that wishes to make something truly open and creatively free.
As we take this decision, one thing is certain to us, media platforms (even ones that market themselves as ‘free-speech’) typically devolve into advertising companies and end up becoming beholden to their paymasters. It’s been that way for centuries and is never going to change.
As we see YouTube become more aggressive with their ad deployment and ‘Free Speech’ platforms try to build their own ad businesses it’s apparent to us that we’re building a model for Odysee that will keep it sustainable not only financially, but in its ability to provide an incorruptible user experience.
Our approach may be considered niche or unconventional, that’s fine by us. Odysee will be used by the world on terms that are agreeable to its users, and we know our users don’t like ads.
Best, Founder & Creator, Chief Executive Officer. Julian Chandra"
Is this not a neo-Nazi/far right platform? I only ever see them linking antivax and evropa content on Odysee. That’s where I’ve heard of it.
It isn’t exclusively a Neo-Nazi platform, but it is a free-speech absolutist platform, so they have absolutely no problem platforming Nazis.
It’s basically the 4chan of tube sites. All are welcome, but if you aren’t a fascist you probably won’t fit in.
If one Nazi is allowed into a bar, it’s a Nazi bar. I’ll continue to steer clear.
To be honest, I’ve been using the website and I notice nothing of this. I can click a few links and get to said content, yes, but my feed and some of the categories I check are on par with YouTube. The only big difference I experience is that there’s much more content of smaller content creators.
I ain’t a fascist, Neo-Nazi, far-rightist, or any of the things Odysee is falsely marked by people as being, and I fit in just fine with my fellow Odysee users. Stop attacking one of the only companies who are truly trying to be the change they want to see in the world.
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I agree with most of your points, but “anti physically and mentally disabled”? Really? Your source describes how they reuploaded unsubtitled lectures for the sake of preservation. This is hardly a villanous move and has nothing to do with “not caring about deaf people”. Let’s keep the arguments honest, you have plenty else to stick them with that’s actually substantial.
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something something if there’s a nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 nazis
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I don’t really think that’s true, so long as you stay off the tankie instance. I have it blocked.
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Far right content is more common than on YouTube because of the guidelines, but in my experience the largest parts are crypto, privacy and similar, also a decent amount is gaming (at least that’s what I upload)
I’ve noticed that the Linux and open-source community is pretty big there, too; with a lot of them being part of the privacy community. I’m a part of this community on Odysee.
In my experience the Linux people are considerably more on peertube compared to its site, but this may just specific to the channels I watch
I don’t use PeerTube much, but I plan to. This is probably why I didn’t know it was bigger with Linux users. Though it makes sense since I tend to see PeerTube mentioned and linked to far more often on the internet than Odysee.
Pretty much, unfortunately. And the people who run Odysee have repeatedly, time and time again, defended Nazis, white supremacists, far-right conspiracies, videos calling for genocide, etc.
Although in fairness, to my knowledge they haven’t done what Musk has done for example and said “free speech [Unless you disagree with dear leader, then it’s an account ban]!” Left-wing content is left alone (not that there’s much of it on Odysee)
You sometimes see that stuff on Odysee because they don’t censor it, unless it promotes violence or hatred to individuals. They do have community guidelines after all, since they can’t legally host… illegal content. In that sense there is censorship because they can’t not censor things to some extent; but the free speech and large lack of censorship is their goal regardless. As an Odysee user for over 2 years, this is the minority of content on the platform. Where you do see that content that breaks the rules… that’s what the report button is for.
My understanding was that Odysee served the purpose to upload videos that could no longer be uploaded on YouTube due to YouTube’s community guidelines. The time I checked out that website the front page was full of manosphere types and the Evropa documentary and anti vax crap
That was never the purpose of the platform, otherwise it would have been marketed that way. The platform allows more content than YouTube does, so it’s not far-fetched to assume that people would use the platform for that, and tell others they should use the platform because of that. What random people on the internet promoted the platform being good for is not the same thing as the platform owners themselves creating the platform for that very purpose. If you really care about the “purpose” of the platform, just watch some of LBRY’s oldest videos on the platform from before the Odysee frontend even existed yet for LBRY; where they were first revealing their visions for the platform and the progress they had made.
Also note that plenty of people upload stuff to Odysee for their preservation efforts. Just because some documentary that talks about medical misinformation or promotes a conspiracy theory (for example), exists on the platform; it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s there to promote the idea; it’s simply there so that people who want to see the video can see it. I’ll watch content that was censored from YouTube and other big-tech social media platforms because I just want to see what was said. People have the right to that level of freedom; Odysee provides it because they should.
I mirror my stuff from youtube over there and I do not fall into these categories. To be fair, I have the tiniest of audiences anyway, so… doesn’t really matter either way.
Haven’t checked in on Odyssee for a while though. Not sure if the auto mirror thing still works.
Same.
And I’ve noticed that there seems to be a very small user base there.
My videos and most in my niche only get 10s of views on Odysee.
When I go browsing around outside of my niche, I tend to find quite a bit of right wing conspiracy stuff. Not really who I want to be associated with, but it’s not nearly as bad as some of the other (now failed) "free speech " video platforms that came before it.
Cool. What’s your channel? I have a gaming channel for no-commentary playthrough’s. It’s not synced from YouTube, though.
I found your channel, and yeah, your latest YouTube uploads are still being synced to Odysee.
There may be content generators on there you can label that way, but that doesn’t make the platform neo-nazi.
You take all of the stuff excluded from a big platform and put it on a small platform, and it’ll swamp every other topic out. If as a platform runner you feel that you should not censor others, then this can happen.
On the flip side, there’s nothing stopping other with less controversial opinions to post there as well. Nobody is going to be told their channel about supercars isnt racist enough, or their politics channel is too-left communist.
Strongly disagree with you. If you have a bar that tolerates Nazis, you’ll find that bar becomes a Nazi bar over time. To commingle with Nazis is to accept them and their ideology.
I’d have a very hard time sending people to my videos if they sit next to a white replacement theory video.
I think Odysee has created far fewer Nazis than sites with addiction exploiting algorithms that say they remove such topics.
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Most of those videos are also found on YouTube. I would expect that you don’t see those videos suggested to you because the algorithm has learned what you like to watch.
If you open up YouTube with a VPN and in a private tab you’ll likely get search results that include a mix from both the right and the left.
I’d rather not link to them, but from the ones you circled, these are the videos that I found on YouTube while doing a quick search:
Now please excuse me as I purge my history…
Well I never happened to see anything related to these topics on Odysee. I mostly used to follow tech stuff as my other hobbies like cars and basketball aren’t really present on the platform.
If you have some favourite YouTube channels from the cars and basketball world, you should try contacting them personally and asking them to sync their channel with Odysee. Even if they choose not to; at least they’ve heard of it now, know at least some of their audience may want them to, and may consider it in the future 🙂.
It might not work asking in YouTube comments though, but it’s worth a try. The reason I say this is I’ve personally tried it multiple times over the past year, and strangely I’ve been noticing that YouTube appear to be switching between banning the word “Odysee” spelled specifically that way, and not banning it. I would comment something with the word Odysee, and no matter what happens, it would immediately disappear the moment I refresh the page – commenting anything else would work fine. A few months later, I tried it again and it worked. Some time after that, it stopped working again, and it was like that for quite a while. Fast forward a month or two, and I again checked it a few days ago, and it seems to be currently working again; and all my previous comments from the past about Odysee have reappeared in my comment history, when they previously would not appear in my comment history. So now could be a good time to comment. It wasn’t a glitch with my account, because I tried it with two separate ones.
I can see my favorite channel now “I have zero interest in learning a new platform to have to figure out, I have a hard enough time with the mainstream sources” lmao
we went over this with Twitter, “I am not learning another social platform, when Twitter dies I will just not have any SM Presense except discord”
What are you quoting? I didn’t say any of that.