Creator of it here, here's some of my thoughts and things we're working on...

It has proven a number of concepts as far as the relationships between publishing and monetizing content. Activity is obviously not where we'd like it to be yet, but it stays active despite us being a head down technical team that's more focused on building up than reaching out.

Network effects are a product we can't offer. We knew this when developing the POC, and so the landing page was just an upload flow. It didn't make sense to try competing with YouTube / Twitch etc on this front. So, when you visited the site back then, it was confusing to a lot of people who expected to see a discovery view by default (including the prospective investors we needed to continue work on it)... and so we got kind of distracted implementing what appears to be a discovery platform which was really never our intention nor part of the value prop.

For content to do well on LV, you have to promote it as your own digital product. It's way better than shilling T-Shirts or doing some of the other silly things creators are forced to do to sustain their channels... but it's not intuitive. The next iteration of the site will cater better to this and make more clear the use-cases for our tools.

Repeat engagement (increasing overall engagement) requires repeat visitors, but the current state of the site is lacking on "community" features that promote this.

Another friction is the usage patterns for video sites are well established, trying to build around decentralized technologies requires some re-training which is even harder to do when there's no real network effect to incentivize it. We're currently back to the drawing board with authentication, for like the 5th time, as we keep finding users having trouble with decentralized account UX.

Creators looking for new platforms are overwhelming more aware of "building a mansion in someone else's backyard", and so we do have tooling that lets you put your videos on your own site. Many of the most active videos use this feature and don't show on the discovery platform at all. This tells us we also have to focus more on white-labeling. It also means the discovery view leads you to think the LV infrastructure is less active than it is.

There's also a lot of hard tech to make the service reliable that's not appreciated yet: Ingesting of huge files, transcoding, generating teasers, paywall player that actually works on iOS... This is the boring stuff with background momentum and is more about retaining users than acquiring them (our repeat uploader numbers are great).

Ultimately, our goal is to have this be the standard for video sharing and monetization on the web, as protocol infrastructure and not a specific namespace. We have several Nostr projects in flight that will move further toward this, and unlock paths for solving most of the deficiencies mentioned above.

Our other project shockwallet will integrate as well and level up UX even further.

It's very much a marathon and not a sprint.

As always, feedback helps!

Flawed strategy and low quality content

Maybe the quality of videos?

I think @DarthCoin was a fan of lightning.video