Gab

General
Gab.com is a social media platform launched in response to censorship on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and other social media platforms. It is primarily used by free speech advocates. Gab was created by Andrew Torba, and was launched on May 8, 2017.

Also, read this article here on Gab if you like freedom of speech.

Functionality
Gab™ shares a heavy amount of features with Twitter due to it being created for direct competition with the website. Free users can post "Gabs" which are limited to 300 characters while users who have a Pro Subscription can use 3,000 characters, both users are also able to embed photos, Giphy gifs, and emojis. Individual posts can reference other users with the "@" symbol and use hashtags in an identical matter to Twitter. Gab™ also features the up/down vote system from Reddit on individual posts. This system has changed many times however due to the website's owners responding to actions by users.

Free users can upload videos with up to 40 MB.

Controversy
Gab.com has been the subject of criticism from liberals, conservatives, hard free-speech advocates and suspicious users. The site, despite claiming to be a bastion of free-speech, has slowly began implementing new rules against hate-speech; namely against holocaust denialism as well as overtly white nationalist and white supremacist content. Many believe the site will do this more until it becomes the very safe-space is was deigned to compete with. On the other side of things, it has also garnered criticism from the left for being a hive of alt-right and right wing individuals harboring bigoted, racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, etc., opinions. This caused Google to remove the app from the Google Play Store causing a lawsuit to be filed, but eventually dropped. It has also removed the down vote, due to accusations that down votes were being used to remove women from the platform. More recently, it has come under fire for a ban on sexual content for moralistic reasons, claiming it is not free speech.

Viability
For better or worse, Gab.com is not a suitable competitor, replacement or alternative to YouTube. It seems unlikely it will be able to compete with Twitter in the long run either. It has garnered far too much controversy, political or otherwise, applied censorship that compromises its primary appeal, offers no way to monetize posts and has too small of a userbase. Gab.com is too small and too slow, so no one wants to use it, and since no one wants to use it, it doesn't make money for upgrades and it becomes too small and too slow.