With many voices being silenced by big tech companies that control the flow of information on the internet, it comes as no surprise that many alternatives to YouTube have popped up. The one that conservatives talk about the most is Rumble and when I saw a few messages about certain public figures being banned on YouTube I popped over to Rumble hoping for a viable alternative.
Unfortunately, Rumble is simply not a good platform unless you ONLY want to see conservative political content.
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If you want to subscribe to things like Infowars and Dan Bongino and basically anyone else who sounds and thinks exactly like these two outfits then I guess Rumble has a purpose.
Unfortunately, for people who have interests outside of politics Rumble is almost useless.
For example: I do a lot of gardening because I enjoy it and I like to be as off the grid as possible. I don't know everything about gardening though so I turn to tutorials on various gardening topics from people that do know how to do this. Here is a search result for "gardening" just in a general sense on Rumble
The only result that comes up is someone playing a gardening video game of sorts. If i search within channels related to gardening, a few more results appear that actually have something to do with plants and soil, but the choices are very limited and if you narrow your search even further to something like "planting jalapenos in dryer areas" - which I know is a very specific topic, the system can't come up with anything.
Another thing I quite enjoy is sports so I was at first kind of delighted to see that there was a lot of results for that only to be seriously let down when I delved in a bit further.
All of these results that have a letter rather than an actual image for their avatar or whatever it is called these days lead to dead links or 404 errors. There is no channel there and I have no idea why - possibly it was someone who took the trademarked name of another company and tried to form their own channel illegally.
I dabble in videogames so I typed in "gaming" as a general search because at this point I realized that trying to be specific about any topic on Rumble is a waste of time.
The top 3 results don't have anything to do with gaming at all and I didn't watch any of the videos but I can only assume that it refers to certain politicians "gaming the system."
I try to involve politics in my life as little as possible because I am one of the fortunate ones that lives in an area where almost the entire community is on the same page as far as that is concerned. I also feel as though politics and social media has lead to an overall decline in the mental health of a lot of people around the world. When I search for video games, I don't want a story about Hillary Clinton on Trump to hijack my search for something I was just trying to relax with.
Maybe it just takes some time because I realize that it took a long time for YouTube to become the powerhouse that it is today and Rumble has only been around for a little while. At least for now though, unless you are simply looking for a conservative echo chamber or places where other videos have been banned, Rumble isn't terribly useful at all.
As far as the political side of things is concerned, having a platform where only one side's position is represented is kind of the same thing that people are bitching about as far as YouTube is concerned. I suppose Rumble has a purpose, but since I don't need any additional politics in my life, I really don't see myself using it a great deal. I'd like it if there was some good, non-political informational videos on there, but they are just too damn difficult to find.