I haven't had internet all day, so I apologize for how this post will miss a few of the points touched on. I appreciate the responses though and I will want to do it later.
>>7>But in the long term, it could lock them into the same sites available
Are you saying that the aggregate site would lock people into the same handful of sites it browses? That's a fair criticism.
I wanted to provide an open API standard to help prevent that, but that still relies on people being willing to coordinate on an API, which isn't always the most easiest task to succeed with out there.
>It's already a lot of work to make one
I like making websites and I'm a workaholic. Making 3 websites sounds like a fun time, provided I can actually FINISH them.
>obsessed with being famous
Hrmm... So, I kind of understand where you're going at with this, though my basis of Youtube used to be FAR worse(having a whole leaderboard system for you to compare yourself towards,) and yet there were less people interested in being famous.
Also, these statistics do serve an important service outside of fame, giving you general indications on what is good and what isn't.
So, let's say that I keep them private to the creator. Well... what exactly does that solve? The creator still knows how many millions of views they've gotten, and how many hundreds of thousands of subscribers they've got. They can make rough guestimates on what other people have, and... still lord over it. They can also just take their statistics public themselves anyways, defeating the purpose.
In theory, the only way to solve that behavior entirely is to just not give the creators these statistics, or provide alternate statistics that provide relativism to their own output.
Neither solution is particularly optimal, as important information is lost either way-and this also prevents the watchers from acquiring certain important information for consideration before watching. A video with a high rating:viewer ratio is probably not entirely honest with its own statistics and may be viewbotted, for example.
I suspect that the much larger motivator for fame chasing isn't actually public statistics. Though the statistics definitely play into it a bit, most videosharing sites make it easy to make money off of your videos-to the point that you can generally start off your career with the intent of making money. (This is even the case of
X, Reddit, and Facebook.) When your goal is money, your end point is fame. Couple that with algorithms that tend to promote addicting content to try to keep people on the site for as long as possible, creating unnatural trends, and I think you can see why I think this might play more into it than the raw statistics.
