Fuck AI

Users can't leave because the videos they want to watch are on youtube, and creators can't leave because their audience is on youtube.

I think it's because there was a time where the Internet wasn't completely usurped by corpos yet. YouTube was phenomenal in its prime. YouTube alternatives that try to take root today can never have the same popularity or success as YouTube because they are trying to begin thrive in a completely different ecosystem. It's certainly admirable to try and salvage the wasteland it's become with pushes towards alternatives but it's just not realistic.

That and user base is important for a content creator and their options are to suck up the shitty parts of media sites or shoot themselves in the foot trying to reach an audience.

Edit: I understand the irony of posting this on lemmy: a federated reddit alternative, but I'm here mostly because I'm a spiteful hermit who doesn't want the general population's company.

You're not wrong, though if I didn't like the people running the local library, where else do I go for book lending?

Ideally, video creators would just host on their own website (remember those) and maybe let viewers pipe the video through a frontend of their choosing. That's a big leap to ask of your audience though, and even bigger for a non technical creator.

I've seen some of them using Patreon to share videos with paying fans, sometimes exclusively, but with YouTube having the larger slice of the audience pie, they continue to upload to the platform.

When I think about why people might meet you with vitriol for proposing they stop using YouTube, it may be that they interpret that suggestion as you telling them not to watch the creators they enjoy. Bit of a logical fallacy there, but an appreciable one given YouTube's monopoly on small scale video content.