[HN Gopher] Why yewtu.be was down: Data loss after being shut do...
___________________________________________________________________
Why yewtu.be was down: Data loss after being shut down by Oracle
Cloud
Author : nouryqt
Score : 152 points
Date : 2023-07-03 08:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gist.github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gist.github.com)
| [deleted]
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Whoa, "Oracle Cloud", i have no experience with their services,
| but judging from their enterprise products that sounds like the
| grossest possible thing to run a personal project on...
| nisa wrote:
| It's very likely that they just used two free-tier instances
| for this and Oracle discovered that and it's against their ToS
| (creating multiple free-tier instances).
| [deleted]
| creatonez wrote:
| The reason they are gaining traction among hobbyists is their
| enormously generous free tier, where you get a 4x vCPU / 24 GiB
| ARM Ampere VPS and get to keep it as long as there is traffic
| and CPU usage.
| perceptronas wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. It does sound almost too good to be true.
| I'll check it out
| isp wrote:
| Setup details from a user of the Oracle Cloud "Always Free"
| tier: https://ryanharrison.co.uk/2023/01/28/oracle-cloud-
| free-serv...
|
| Disclaimer: I haven't tried this out myself. I found this
| blog post a few days ago when I first heard about the
| generous Oracle Cloud free tier.
| martinsnow wrote:
| Wow. Wonder how long it will last?
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I've been using it for about 3 years now (the large ARM
| instance a bit less than that, but since about when it
| was introduced). There have been two outages about a
| minute each (seems like a no-no-downtime host migration,
| but I am not sure). For the cost, I am not complaining.
| Evanito wrote:
| Have tried this out, and yes actually using it in any
| capacity risks an account ban with no recourse. Easy come,
| easy go. (I was running an IPFS node, which at the time was
| CPU and bandwidth expensive)
| ipaddr wrote:
| I use it. Google how to open ports because the firewall
| rules can be tricky
| [deleted]
| sirius87 wrote:
| Before you think of this as a favorable option, I do
| recommend you keep in mind that this is Oracle trying to gain
| traction.
|
| After moving to Oracle Cloud to use their Free Tier for my
| personal blog, I got this email from them back in April,
| basically requiring me to migrate to pay-as-you-go since my
| blog had near zero traffic. To be fair, I'm perfectly fine
| with this and happy to still be billed $0 per month. But it
| just set the perspective that Oracle wouldn't blink an eye to
| kill my site off if its PMs or lawyers thought they needed to
| revisit a subscription plan or usage terms - and I'm not
| saying that it's any surprise to me.
|
| > Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will be reclaiming idle
| Always Free compute resources from Always Free customers
| only. Reclaiming idle resources allows OCI to efficiently
| provide services to Always Free customers. Your account has
| been identified as having one or more compute instances that
| have been idle for the past 7 days. These idle instances will
| be stopped 7 days from now. If your idle Always Free compute
| instance is stopped, you can restart it as long as the
| associated compute shape is available in your region. You can
| keep idle compute instances from being stopped by converting
| your account to Pay As You Go (PAYG). With PAYG, you will not
| be charged as long as your usage for all OCI resources
| remains within the Always Free limits.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| while True: ...
| error503 wrote:
| Nice of them to e-mail you. They just nuked my instance.
| creatonez wrote:
| One alternative folks should consider for very basic
| hosting is the fly.io free tier. It's not a VPS, but a
| container platform. The reason it seems like a more stable
| option is that they interact with the community on their
| forums, including occasionally helping getting service
| restored to free users who have a legitimate use. But it
| goes without saying that they could change at any moment,
| like any free tier, and you certainly can't bet on forum-
| based support saving you. Definitely make daily backups and
| have somewhere else you can migrate to.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| O wow, that's pretty incredible! I didn't know that, thanks.
| metadat wrote:
| I had one for years, but it got shutdown probably because of
| under-utilization.
|
| More trouble than it's worth, imo. Was fun while it lasted.
| rozenmd wrote:
| Didn't they have an 18 hour hard outage the other day?
|
| Edit, sorry, 9 hours: https://ocistatus.oraclecloud.com/#/inc
| idents/ocid1.oraclecl...
| nyolfen wrote:
| i think they've cut this down to 8gb, but i got grandfathered
| in. i started paying a small amount monthly for one of their
| services to avoid being culled because it's still a very good
| deal
| creatonez wrote:
| The limit is 8 GiB of RAM / 0.125x vCPU only for the x86-64
| VPSes. The ARM VPSes are still overpowered. But you may
| have to wait a few weeks to get one, depending on the
| region. They get snatched up as soon as they become
| available.
| nyolfen wrote:
| i spun up an arm free tier instance for someone else a
| few months ago and it maxed it out at 8gb (and i think
| 2vcpu)
| creatonez wrote:
| Strange -- they still advertise the 24 / 4 free offer on
| this page: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ I know
| folks who have done it quite recently.
|
| IIRC it's possible for the slider to have a lower maximum
| if you're already using some of the resources on another
| VM, since they allow splitting. This has caused some
| confusion for some people, _possibly_ due to leftover
| block devices from deleted VMs acting as if they are
| taking up free RAM /CPU credits.
| mynonameaccount wrote:
| Plus they'll kill your account whenever they want
| re-thc wrote:
| Not to mention the inclusion of 10TB bandwidth. In AWS world
| that's a lot of $$$!
| re-thc wrote:
| > but judging from their enterprise products that sounds like
| the grossest possible thing to run a personal project on...
|
| Maybe not the best way to judge? i.e. based on impression of
| other products?
|
| People run personal projects on AWS etc.
|
| Oracle cloud is also a lot better priced than the big 3.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| AWS is by all means a legit cloud provider, one of the big
| three. You know what you are getting in to, and the
| skill/knowledge required is transferable to your dayjob.
|
| Now when I read "oracle cloud", my thoughts immediately go to
| their horrible, gross way of doing business in DB land. Pay
| outrageous amounts of money for poorly specced machinery, the
| "you are not allowed to benchmark us" snafu, poor docs, no
| open source mindshare to speak of/terrible community. And I
| personally hate their sql dialect but that's me.
|
| Then, you apply this feeling of grossness on the idea of them
| being your cloud provider. One that at the moment is not
| dominant, so learning how to navigate and use it is probably
| not that useful for your career right now. And one with, for
| me, a pretty shit-tier branding.
|
| All in all I'm not surprised to learn they have a very
| generous free tier to lure people in.
| pierat wrote:
| [flagged]
| xyst wrote:
| > It is known that this provider will randomly ban accounts
| without any reason.
|
| and yet this site was still using them prior to ban hammer
| because "it probably won't happen to me"
|
| I will always say this: fuck Oracle. Fuck Larry Ellison. Any
| person or company that uses their products despite knowing the
| shit the founder and company has done deserves any consequences
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Another lesson is that "multi-cloud" should mean "multi cloud-
| provider", if you're going to go that way.
|
| And that self-hosting as a fallback (if only to test backup and
| recovery procedures) is also highly underappreciated.
| adrr wrote:
| Multi region at least doubles your infra costs. Multi cloud
| will probably at least triple your costs since things like
| terraform don't transfer cleanly and you can't use even
| hosted services like RDS/CloudSQL, EKS/GKE because you won't
| be able to replicate it across cloud providers due to all
| vendor specific differences.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Note that the case here was of free-tier usage.
|
| Multi-provider setup may incur additional _effort_ , though
| the payoff is in liberating yourself from lock-in to any
| one vendor. Note that _those_ costs are being incurred here
| regardless, with both the costs of having to develop those
| on the fly and with downtime. Effectively, multi-provider
| set-up was a deferred cost for yewtu.be, now being
| realised.
|
| One trick for using hosted services to to avoid the
| service-specific tooling of the hosts in question. Yes,
| that decreases the value-add of such services, but again,
| the trade-off is reduced lock-in.
|
| There are also multi-platform solutions which stand as
| middleware between your own application and/or services and
| that of the host platform.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I do love the ideal of multi-cloud in theory but the
| practicalities aren't so simple. It's hard enough for
| businesses to pull it off, let alone someone who's providing
| a free service.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"
| daneel_w wrote:
| I don't want to come off as an apologist for Oracle or the OCI
| product, but I can't help to wonder if there's more to the story
| than just "this provider will randomly ban accounts without any
| reason".
|
| The only real "without any reason" I'm aware of is free tier
| infra running on an account that hasn't upgraded to paid tenancy.
| "Always-Free" resources belonging to an _unpaid tenancy_ can be
| deallocated without notice in order to provide resources for a
| _paid tenancy_.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Nitter frontends and Mastodon bridges have repeatedly been
| struck with DMCA takedowns and cease and desist letters because
| someone Googled themselves and found a strange website
| replicate their account.
|
| There are malicious people out there (on large, official
| platforms as well, because moderation is fiction) that will
| replicate someone's social feed and then adds controversial
| crap/crypto scams/weird stuff in the middle of it all. Taking
| action against imposters is sometimes necessary.
|
| If you're a normal Youtube channel and you find someone
| "ripping" your videos to Yewtube, I completely understand why
| someone would demand a takedown. Most people barely know how to
| operate a browser, let alone understand the concept of privacy
| preserving alternative frontends that work through local
| implementations of Youtube's client code.
|
| If you're some underpaid tech support person who gets a DMCA
| complaint about such a mirror, I wouldn't be surprised if they
| decide "take down first, ask questions later" would be a safe
| bet.
| srmarm wrote:
| I'm not really sure what the site does, looks like a cleanly
| designed proxy for youtube?
|
| If it's a service that's piggybacking on another site there's a
| good chance it'll get shut down at some point. I get the feeling
| the author of the post is a little naive that this comes as a
| surprise, that their two accounts with Oracle were linked and
| banned in unison came as a surprise and there wasn't a backup.
|
| However anyone who uses a site like this knows it's easy
| come/easy go. You get what you pay for and appreciate the time,
| effort and money the webmaster has put in and make your own
| arrangements to save anything of importance to your local
| machine.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| It's an invidious instance: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
| (actually https://github.com/yewtudotbe/invidious-custom since
| it has some custom patches)
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| These are Invidious instances[1], which proxy Youtube content
| for privacy reasons, though the project is having some legal
| troubles right now[2].
|
| [1] https://invidious.io
|
| [2] https://blog.thefrenchghosty.me/posts/im-not-invidious/
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| That second link, the blog post, is very weird.
|
| I understand the Spartacus-cum-Anonymous message that they're
| going for but the language is all over the place.
|
| Invidious can receive emails but isn't a person or business
| entity?
|
| I might just as well say that Knobble@McKnees.com isn't a
| person contactable via the Internet, it _just is_.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| I agree it's a weird way to defend a C&D; it was discussed
| on HN previously[1] with many commenters pointing out the
| same.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36262722
| hedora wrote:
| It's interesting that they had two different accounts
| specifically in case one got borked, and then Oracle
| simultaneously closed both without warning.
|
| As far as I can tell, the site is just a youtube frontend, so
| it's unclear if this was some sort of pseudo-DMCA thing, or if
| Oracle Cloud just sometimes intentionally scorched-earths paying
| customers.
| bsder wrote:
| It was almost certainly over-utilization of a low revenue tier
| that did it.
|
| Cloud companies all make certain claims around
| bandwidth/CPU/memory/etc. on low tiers, but if you _actually_
| fully utilize the tier, they 'll almost invariably make your
| life miserable.
|
| Normally they won't outright boot you (this seems surprising),
| but your instances will suddenly always be limited to what the
| Cloud Company considers to be "proper" for the low tier you are
| paying for--which magically is always _much_ smaller than what
| they advertise.
| [deleted]
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Projects like this usually run off of Oracle cloud to take
| advantage of the free tier. Reclamation of resources on the
| free tier is not unheard of, especially if abuse or high
| resource usage is detected, and other cloud providers like AWS
| will do it too.
| re-thc wrote:
| It's sort of the opposite. If you're on a free account with
| free tier and under utilize resources below a certain
| threshold it may get reclaimed after a while.
| ipaddr wrote:
| It's both. Create a server but never login it will be
| reclaimed. Try to use that 10T up and the account will be
| banned.
| [deleted]
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It was probably easy for Oracle to identify that both accounts
| were being used to serve this site of questionable legality.
| And having multiple accounts is probably against Oracle's ToS
| anyway.
| RajT88 wrote:
| AFAIK there is nothing illegal about YouTube frontend sites.
|
| While they may in some way violate Google TOS, that is not a
| legal matter.
| nisa wrote:
| What is the appeal from these YouTube frontends? I came to really
| dislike them because links are broken after a while because these
| sites don't live very long and the video data itself is still
| streamed by YouTube? I don't get it.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| The links don't really break, as the links are basically
| s/youtube.com/invidious_domain/
| bionade24 wrote:
| > the video data itself is still streamed by YouTube?
|
| It's up to the instance admin for Invidious and the behaviour
| of Piped to proxy googlevideo. Not sure if it's visible at
| Invidious if you use an instance that doesn't proxy the
| traffic, but you can be sure it's proxied when you use Piped.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The lighter ui is fairly significant. I go a step further and
| do most of my YouTube watching in mpv, but occasionally I'll
| find my browser unresponsive and find the problem fixed by
| exiting some YouTube tab.
| pndy wrote:
| Beside the things the other user listed: these sorta give you a
| way to experience Youtube before it become Google's plaything.
|
| In case of piped and freetube you can subscribe to channels
| without Google account (freetube does that even offline), it's
| also possible to import channel subscriptions from Youtube.
|
| There were instances that shortly existed, or which tried to
| redirect you to some suspicious sites but these were filtered
| out.
| lrvick wrote:
| The appeal is privacy, no ads, and avoiding the need for a
| Google account or supporting Google with any data to mine.
|
| Some of us feel supporting Google in any way is unethical, but
| still want to consume some of the content they have lured
| people to put on their servers.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Do you feel bad about the content creators missing out on the
| revenue you're denying them?
| dagw wrote:
| I don't know about this site in particular, but one very nice
| feature that some YouTube frontends have is a download button
| next to each video.
| Springtime wrote:
| The settings for volume, speed, quality, whether to show/hide
| recommendations, disable autoplay, etc can be controlled and
| without requiring any login. Also less cruft. On YT proper such
| things were only possible with userscripts/addons which ime by
| the time I found Invidious (2020) had already been broken by YT
| changes so it was an easy switch when used with a browser addon
| that auto redirects.
|
| Videos can also be optionally proxied in some instances but
| that wasn't a draw for me.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| I run a Piped instance on a VPS for myself. It's not linked to
| my Google account or my home IP (from Alphabet's perspective)
| in any way. I like giving Alphabet less info about my behavior.
| t0astbread wrote:
| Doesn't that still leave YouTube with one unique IP address
| that all your traffic is originating from? It would in any
| case close off some tracking vectors if you also use other
| Google products from your home IP address but I guess you
| would also need a proxy/VPN or share the instance to get any
| kind of anonymity.
| pantulis wrote:
| But then... aren't you missing recommendations and suggested
| videos? Honest question, I'd say Youtube is half as useful
| without that.
| toast0 wrote:
| Youtube without recommendations and suggested videos is a
| whole lot easier to get in and get out, without getting
| hooked into watching one more thing.
| TheBozzCL wrote:
| It does provide basic recommendations based on the video
| you're currently watching.
|
| If you only care about the channels you're subscribed to,
| it's a much better experience.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| YouTube will make recommendations based on your immediate
| session's viewing history, even without an account.
|
| A tremendous advantage to viewing _without_ authenticating
| is that you can quickly set a strong affinity based on your
| current interests, and don 't have to live with
| consequences of viewing low-quality content for hours,
| days, months, years, millennia, etc.
|
| If Invidious and Piped offer(ed) the option to permabam
| channels as well (to those subscribing directly to those
| services, or even within a single session), so much the
| better.
| smazga wrote:
| I hope you don't mind me asking for info, but how beefy is
| the vps? I can't find minimum specs for these frontends, and
| that would help me know if I have enough spare power at home.
| I imagine you want all the bandwidth you can get, but are
| there cpu limitations?
| d76d6776yudsy wrote:
| [dead]
| Tomte wrote:
| [flagged]
| anamexis wrote:
| It rhymes with youtube in English orthography, that's literally
| it
| chmod775 wrote:
| There's a real https://jewtube.com/ and it's definitely not
| racist.
| boondoggle16 wrote:
| There's also goyimtv but that one is definitely racist.
| [deleted]
| morkalork wrote:
| So what does the internet on a desktop look like in the next 3, 5
| and 10 years? Every site requires an account and logging in, if
| not an app install? Instead of phones becoming like computers,
| computers are becoming like phones.
| extasia wrote:
| Computers becoming like phones has to be avoided at all costs..
| That's not a world I wanna live in.
| 2h wrote:
| I tried signing up for Oracle Cloud and got the below message.
| After that I took the exact same card and signed up with 4 other
| providers. Fuck you Oracle.
|
| > Error processing transaction
|
| > We're unable to complete your sign up. Common sign up errors
| are due to: (a) Using prepaid cards. Oracle only accepts credit
| card and debit cards (b) Intentionally or unintentionally masking
| one's location or identity
| kytazo wrote:
| I'm almost certain its most likely a credential farming
| operation at this point
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For those not familiar with it, yewtu.be is an Invididous
| instance, where Invidious is an alternate front-end to YouTube,
| similar in spirit to Nitter (Twitter), Teddit (Reddit), the late
| Bibliogram (InstagramProxiTok, and more. Another YouTube front-
| end is Piped. It's possible to use public instances of many of
| these, or to self-host your own.
|
| There are browser extensions such as LibRedirect which will
| automatically, well, redirect requests to these alternatives,
| with extensive configurability by the user.
|
| <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/>
|
| YewTu.be went offline last week amidst news that Google were
| cracking down on YouTube viewers employing adblocking.
|
| As to benefits of Invidious and Piped front-ends:
|
| - No subscription required.
|
| - Less data exposure to YouTube /Google itself.
|
| - Lighter website / improved UI/UX.
|
| - One small way of registering dissatisfaction to YouTube for
| dark patterns / user-hostile site practices.
|
| Invidious: <https://invidious.io/>
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious>
|
| Piped: <https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped>
| gymbeaux wrote:
| It's cute that Google thinks we're all going to pay for YouTube
| Premium/TV instead of just not watching YouTube. That's where
| I'm at. I don't watch anything on YouTube anymore, and like
| when Reddit got "smart" and drove me away, I've noticed my
| mental health improve.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| YouTube isn't targeting the hacker news demographic. Users
| who can't or won't be served ads are an acceptable loss on
| the path to profitability.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The HN demographic is all the more likely to find, develop,
| and/or promote alternatives to YouTube.
|
| I didn't mention those in my comment above as the main
| issue was alternative _front ends_ to mainstream services,
| but another obvious option is _alternative services_.
|
| The key stumbling points for that seem to be
| discoverability and monetisation.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Kind of surprised nobody is making a strong effort at
| solving monetization through P2P (lowering costs).
|
| Historically the problem was you had to get people to
| install an app instead of visiting a website, but now
| everybody's trying to get people to do that on mobile
| anyway.
|
| In theory P2P isn't great on mobile devices because they
| run on battery and have limited cellular data, but
| devices also allow apps to tell if the device is
| connected to a charger and unmetered WiFi. And if you
| only upload from devices that are, that's probably still
| enough bandwidth to give you a significant cost
| advantage. Then add in anyone you can get to install the
| app desktops and TVs, many of which are always on and
| have fast unmetered connections.
|
| Then offer streaming on the website, but only if you
| subscribe. The paywall on the website links to the app
| installer, which is free (with ads).
| qwertox wrote:
| Lately I've been watching `MIT 8.04 Quantum Physics I, Spring
| 2016` [0], also at night before I fall asleep.
|
| And during the day I occasionally leave the live stream of a
| stork nest running. One of them learned to fly just two days
| ago, and it was fun watching them getting to learn how their
| wings work, while they don't have much space to train [1],
| which makes me ask how many such livestreams exist which
| normally would be volatile data. I'm not sure if these live
| streams do get stored, but it would be a huge amount of
| bandwidth for almost no added value.
|
| Then there are fun mathematics videos which show you how to
| solve mathematical problems [2], daring you to solve them.
|
| Basically there's so much of value, like `the native web`,
| `ServeTheHome`, `Jeff Gerling`, `No Boilerplate`, `Code to
| the Moon`, James Briggs`, gliding, mtb-riding, windsurfing,
| so much quality content which is hard for a TV station to
| deliver.
|
| I don't see it comparable to Reddit.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3
| N9d...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhvFd0i5nIo
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/@MathemaTrick/videos
| londons_explore wrote:
| They'd prefer you stop watching. Bandwidth costs them a _lot_
| , and they have pretty much the cheapest bandwidth of any
| tech player. If 1% of users are freeloading like you and I,
| and they can block us and save 1% on their infrastructure
| bill, that's still a huge amount of money saved, and could
| easily turn the whole effort from a loss to a profit.
| wpietri wrote:
| Do we know that bandwidth costs YouTube a lot?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Bandwidth costs all video sites a lot.
|
| Thats why cloudflare won't host sites with lots of video.
| It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Thats why there are
| no startups trying to make video hosting sites.
|
| If you hosted a youtube clone on AWS with their
| cloudfront CDN, you'd be paying $0.085 per GB out to the
| internet. A youtube ad view earns perhaps $0.004. HD
| video is ~6GB/hour, so a 3 minute video costs $0.0255 to
| host (before compute and storage costs, profit and
| engineer time).
|
| Earning $0.004 for something that costs you $0.025 is
| never going to work out...
| vetinari wrote:
| Not to distract from your point, but
|
| > It's why twitter doesn't do HD video.
|
| Twitter does HD video. I don't know whether it is
| generally available or not, but for example, Tucker
| Carlson's videos are 1080p.
| bsder wrote:
| > Thats why there are no startups trying to make video
| hosting sites.
|
| No, there are no startups in video for the same reason
| there were no startups in office apps or operating
| systems in the 2000s, a subsidized 500lb gorilla in the
| space.
|
| The problem with a video startup is that you have to
| charge for your content. And some jerk will download your
| video, post it to YouTube, and distribute it for free.
|
| If YouTube were forced to stand on its own instead of
| being subsidized by the Google advertising maw, we'd see
| innovation in the space.
|
| Until YouTube gets broken out from Google by anti-trust
| action, the video startup space will continue to remain
| dead.
| psnehanshu wrote:
| This looks to me like a sane comment. No idea why this
| was downvoted.
| wpietri wrote:
| Because it doesn't answer the question. I was asking
| about YouTube, which, being part of Google, occupies a
| radically different position. They aren't using AWS to
| host their video, so the numbers are irrelevant.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yes, I get that _I_ have to pay a lot for bandwidth. And
| that _you_ have to pay a lot for bandwidth.
|
| My question is specifically about YouTube.
| [deleted]
| no_wizard wrote:
| Though Cloudflare does have a separate product for
| streaming Video, it definitely doesn't fall under the
| generic CDN serving files model
| dijit wrote:
| I don't like this reasoning because I've seen the inside
| of google. Their bandwidth is _very_ cheap.
|
| What costs is having a CDN, a bunch of very fast servers
| that exist in every point-of-presence, given the load
| they endure CDN cache servers fail quickly when compared
| to others. -- along with the upkeep of their networking
| equipment, which is cheap but not free.
|
| But Google itself has invested wisely in how it connects
| to the internet, they are dark fibre all the way with
| many hundreds of gigabits between sites and pops. It's a
| huge upfront investment (the kind SV startups seem to
| hate) but the long tail makes bandwidth essentially free.
|
| The only cost they have is hardware and peering, and
| given their size I can't convince myself if they are or
| _are not_ being shafted financially by big ISPs for
| peering - even if they are though, it 's marginal
| compared to what GCP/AWS/etc; charge us, even Colo
| datacenters will charge significantly more than what it
| costs Google.
| ddorian43 wrote:
| What is google's cost for PB of bandwidth in EU/USA?
| dijit wrote:
| Google to Google? Next to EUR0.
|
| I should also note that Google will send data from their
| DCs over dark fibre to their PoPs near you, so they only
| transit onto the internet locally.
| jamespo wrote:
| Even despite that, they still have no interest in
| encouraging "freeloading"
| wpietri wrote:
| Thanks, this is exactly what I was wondering about. I
| would expect Google's marginal cost of bandwidth to be
| approximately zero. What are networks going to do, not
| connect to Google?
| michaelt wrote:
| _> What are networks going to do, not connect to Google?_
|
| Throttle the connection so its slow enough users get 480p
| video at peak viewing times. Ask google for $$$$ to stop
| doing that.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Google can just say 'if you're on this network, you only
| get poor quality video. Come to one of the networks that
| support YouTube properly!'.
|
| Remember that for a while they were just about the only
| site that could load Flash. YouTube is that important.
| MaKey wrote:
| German ISP Telekom is notorious for shenanigans like
| this, which is why I boycott them.
| kbutler wrote:
| Key words are "would cost _you_". The providers get much
| better cost per GB at scale, then sell to you at a
| profit.
|
| For example, transfer out from S3 gets down to $0.05 at
| just 150TB, including the AWS markup.
|
| (Note that CloudFront data out is not directly comparable
| to S3 data out!)
| dskrepps wrote:
| I think our best bet to make a difference is to cause
| network effects to drive other users to take the same steps
| we do. In the long run that will help shrink their
| monopoly, and/or bring a tipping point closer to reality.
|
| Similar to voting. Yeah, I could vote for a third party
| candidate, but the real power I have is in how many other
| people I can convince to vote for someone.
| rtpg wrote:
| I don't understand this. What is your principled stand?
| Don't charge me money and also don't put in ads?
|
| Youtube is one of the few platforms where people making
| content can actually survive off of it. It's not
| everything but it's more than ~anything else.
|
| It would be nice for there to be more platforms but
| personally I'm exhausted of platforms trying to race to
| the bottom and ultimiately squeezing people who are
| actually doing the "hard work".
|
| (My one big complaint is that youtube doesn't charge
| people for bandwidth, meaning that services like Vimeo
| are ... kind of DOA. I don't know how you do that and
| have viral stuff for normal people, but it does feel like
| something should be in place)
| wcarss wrote:
| YouTube could play ads and let me play videos while my
| phone screen is locked. They could play ads like they
| used to: a small popup. They could play ads like they did
| after that: one 5 second pre-roll. Or like after that, a
| pre-roll with a skip call to action.
|
| But at some point it got into the ballpark of two 10-15
| second ads every 5 minutes even on the channels of people
| who explicitly asked not to turn on monetization because
| they're making educational content, often for kids and
| schools. The mobile app nags me with a "try premium" /
| "skip trial" popup 5 times per week. There are
| consistently small bugs in the user experience of the
| app.
|
| Oh, and they're rich as God because they're also the
| people who own the operating system, browser, app store,
| and search engine I used to find all this stuff -- plus
| my email and my productivity software, all of which they
| will leverage to _squeeze_ every last bit the juice out
| of me as a user. They own all my data already. They own
| everything.
|
| So, what is the "principled stand"? Enough is a goddamned
| enough! If they were just going to show some ads, it
| would be fine, but like every single parasitic horror
| show out there, they promised they'd be good and they
| cannot stop getting worse.
|
| At the very least, I can choose not to pay them $12/month
| for the privilege.
| rtpg wrote:
| Yeah I agree that you can totally just be like "not for
| me". I just think the using of language of protesting and
| voting for "the video experience as a free user is not
| fun" adds a moral valence to something that honestly has
| a pretty good extant solution. Pay for the sub!
|
| Pay money, get no ads. It's not that complicated. It's
| totally reasonable to whine about the increased ads and
| not wanting to pay ofc. But at least we can pay to not
| have ads!
| lumb63 wrote:
| I see this ending with ads increasing ad infinitum. As
| more ads get added, the value of the free version will
| decrease and more users will be pushed to either stop
| using the site or pay for subscriptions. We should fast
| forward to that end game, where YouTube locks all the
| user-created content behind a paywall to monetize it for
| their own benefit like all internet platforms seem to be
| aiming to do.
|
| I understand that YouTube costs money to run, but the
| monetization situation does not reflect that, and is thus
| totally backwards. The current model is that users pay
| for a "service" (YouTube) which has an expense for
| "content" (video creators). The content is what the users
| actually want; the situation should be that users pay the
| content creators, who pay YouTube something akin to rent.
| It is not fair that YouTube profits off of the value that
| content creators bring rather than just their
| infrastructure. It is akin to paying the owner of a
| building for access to the store.
| andrepd wrote:
| I don't lump in YouTube with other types of social media.
| While _undoubtedly_ the vast majority of content on YouTube
| (either by count or by number of views) is _utter garbage_
| there is still more quality content than I will ever be able
| to watch in a lifetime. Documentaries, talks, lectures,
| concerts, content creators on all kinds of interesting
| things, from retro computers to history or science.
|
| I would buy YouTube premium but I don't really want to
| remunerate Google for their anticompetitive business
| practices or their mistreatment of content creators. So I
| just go for patreon of channels I like.
| [deleted]
| bosch_mind wrote:
| Same here! The UX is so bad on both I just can't use either.
| Not hard to quit when usability sucks and I find other things
| to do... like read or go outside.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| In the same boat here. But they couldn't care less, the
| masses is what they're after. I came to and been using
| invidio.us to listen to lectures without any video, a feture
| that works on Iphones with the screen turned off. Not sure
| whether apple or google are the ones who don't allow for
| that.
| cmgbhm wrote:
| Google. It's not a problem with the default video element.
| The engineer that into the app and mobile then that's the
| primary pitch for premium
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Screen off only works for premium subscriptions. I hate it,
| but someone has made a good point to me once that
| advertisers are probably not okay paying the same amount
| and not having video show for their ads. So Google would
| either have to build support for a separate category of
| audio-only ads, and those ads would pay out less. Instead,
| they just only offer the feature to ad-free subscribers.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I happily pay for YouTube Premium, and I get more value out
| of it than literally any other subscription service I'm
| paying for.
|
| YouTube is an endless goldmine of quality videos made by
| people who actually give a shit about the topic they're
| talking about, rather then people who are just trying to make
| "content" to monetize.
|
| I also appreciate that at least some of my monthly payment
| goes to the people making the videos I'm watching.
|
| I'm honestly surprised to hear such a cynical take on it.
| jjallen wrote:
| Damn. YouTube is my favorite consumer product in existence.
| It has massively changed my life for the better (like
| learning about health and wellness topics that have actually
| transformed my life). I watch about fifty hours a month in
| mostly pure bliss. And it costs $12 or almost nothing. I will
| never understand how people can be reluctant to part with a
| few bucks a month for an amazing product.
|
| If you come from a third world country I get it, but many of
| us here do not. $12 is less than half an hour of work for
| even middle class Americans and Europeans.
|
| I guess if you don't even watch YouTube I don't understand
| why you are even in this thread.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 12 bucks is enough to get you access to entire streaming
| catalogs full of exclusive content on other platforms.
| Merely not showing you ads on a site that's largely full of
| non exclusive user generated videos doesn't seem enticing.
| Wellness videos are everywhere, people will just watch them
| on TikTok instead of paying for a full premium
| subscription.
|
| It's a strange argument anyway, nobody buys something
| simply because it's only an hour of work. The internet
| offers me a hundred subscriptions every day, if I buy them
| all because they're just 10 bucks I'm broke. Whatsapp cost
| 1$ once and they even dropped that because although it's
| great value, what matters is that none of it is exclusive.
| manquer wrote:
| The pricing is lesser in other countries I have seen $2-3 a
| month, so it is not necessary to qualify
| Americans/Europeans it is priced similarly across the globe
| .
|
| ---
|
| It is not just $12/month for YouTube that is the problem
| most people have to budget for all their content
| consumption between streaming services, sports
| subscriptions , music subs, newspapers you can easily spend
| upwards of $300/month , that is not including other
| productivity tools Saas you could end paying for like o365
| , Dropbox and so on .
|
| YT would be the one easiest to cut because you won't loose
| access just have to put up with some ads unlike everything
| else .
|
| For many not seeing ads is not worth $12 a month , for some
| like you the value is enormous so you see it as worth
| paying .
|
| ---
|
| I personally stopped paying for YT premium because I get
| most of the content from Nebula what I used YT for, at
| 1/10th the cost.
|
| Also there is no way to disable Shorts and they won't
| improve the by design poorer implementation on Firefox;
| both these make my experience using the platform poor even
| if I pay for it so I don't bother.
| [deleted]
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I would love to buy it, if i liked it. I happily pay
| Spotify, Kagi, ChagGPT, etcetc - but while i do watch a
| fair amount of Youtube.. i'm not sure i get that much from
| it.
|
| More over, i'm constantly of the defensive with it. If i
| click on an impulse video -- aka one i watch guiltily but
| would rather not make a habit out of it -- Youtube
| disregards other videos i'd much rather watch and now gives
| me repeated videos of that one thing. I open a fair bit of
| stuff in Incognito just to avoid Youtube polluting my feed.
|
| I think i'd happily pay $3/m for what i get. But generally
| it's not close to $12/m for me, especially when i don't
| feel like it's working for me.
| collinvandyck76 wrote:
| Yes, my feelings are similar. It's one of the monthly costs
| I would not consider putting on the chopping block unless I
| were in dire circumstances.
| midasuni wrote:
| In the U.K. YouTube is PS16 a month -- that's $20 a month.
|
| I use YouTube far less than Netflix, Disney, Amazon, bbc,
| all of which are cheaper. Many YouTube videos come with
| burnt in adverts too.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Unfortunately paying does mean there is no way to escape
| tracking, that's even worse than the expenditure.
| mozman wrote:
| I'll never pay for YT because when it first started it was
| about people sharing information because they wanted to
| give to others. Now, people want money and fame. That's
| fine, but it's not my money they will get.
| silisili wrote:
| You watch 50 hours a month. I watch maybe 30 minutes. So it
| makes a lot more sense and a better value to you,
| obviously. Would you still be keen to pay if it were say,
| charge by the hour? I'd probably sign up for something like
| that, as either my cost would be negligible, or yours would
| skyrocket.
| eek2121 wrote:
| I'd pay $3-$5/mo. I watch maybe 8 hours a month.
| qingcharles wrote:
| YouTube Music on its own is $10/mo, so if you were going to
| subscribe to that then YouTube Premium is really only $2/mo
| extra, which is a bargain in my eyes.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Yeah basically every time I see these threads I don't
| understand do these people think that running YouTube costs
| no money ?
|
| ~15EUR/mo and my family doesn't have to watch ads, we get
| YouTube music (not missing Spotify at all TBH) - that's
| well worth the money.
|
| If you're a student or working low paid job I can
| understand - but on a site mostly for software
| professionals and startups ?
| detuur wrote:
| Youtube certainly costs money to run. It doesn't cost as
| much as they're asking. Besides, Google has mercilessly
| injected itself in many more parts of my daily life, and
| they're making good money off of me. They're not paying
| me for that. So I'll consider it a debt paid to block all
| of their ads.
|
| Now, if Youtube was an independent company, that'd be a
| different story. But it isn't, so uBlock it is.
| lxgr wrote:
| I'd definitely pay 2-3$/month for Youtube if I could
| unbundle it from Youtube Music. I'm paying for Spotify
| and have no intention to change that (and I've given
| Youtube Music many chances).
| w-ll wrote:
| I dont know if its changed, but you can only watch 1
| thing on youtube at a time with the premium account, like
| not even with ads. it straight up stops the other video.
| moonchrome wrote:
| 15EUR is the family plan
| logifail wrote:
| > when Reddit got "smart" and drove me away, I've noticed my
| mental health improve
|
| We had a "showdown" moment with our kids some time ago due to
| inability to manage device usage. Ended up with me changing
| the wifi password and all the kids devices permanently lost
| internet access at home.
|
| The kids have been playing together - and outside! - and
| generally much happier ever since. Mental health definitely
| better. Who'd have thought it?
| psnehanshu wrote:
| I watch a lot of YouTube and I have premium subscription. I
| believe it is worth it for me. Yes I can use adblockers, but
| the premium experience is just better. It also comes with
| YouTube music which is much better than Spotify and others.
| There are other benefits like watch queue, background play on
| phone.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Premium subscription is just an antipattern of them
| removing options. The experience is not better than before
| premium was a thing.
|
| YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify. I actually
| had to leave Google play music (and YouTube music) for
| Spotify because the product was so subpar.
|
| The only benefit was that some random thing on YouTube
| might be there but, other than that, just part of the
| Google poor support of their paying users.
|
| The benefits you site are possible without their premium,
| using other apps and, again, they worsened the experience
| to push you to premium which is extremely shady.
| cvak wrote:
| Same here, it's the only subscription I pay for, worth it
| imo.
| pohuing wrote:
| Tbh I mostly pay because I hate the modern ad and behaviour
| tracking financed Internet. If your service has a paid
| option I'll pay for it. I think had we all gone down the
| freemium road decades ago the Internet would be in much
| better shape today :/
| error503 wrote:
| I'm never going to be one to buy merch, and there are a lot
| of creators whose content I occasionally enjoy but don't
| want to pay directly via e.g. Patreon. Premium views pay
| more to them, so you're also doing a bit more to support
| the creators you watch as well.
| afavour wrote:
| If they achieve even a 1% conversion rate into subscribers
| it'll be a net positive for them. I imagine they're OK with
| you leaving the service since you cost more than they make
| from you.
| twicetwice wrote:
| Yup, for me I cancelled my YouTube Premium subscription--which
| I had been happy to pay--because of YouTube shorts. They were
| constantly pushing them in the mobile app, and sometimes I
| would succumb and click on one, and then often lose several
| hours to scrolling. Skill issue, I know, but when I went
| looking for a way to disable them in the UI I found there isn't
| one. I ended up feeling like it was a adversarial relationship
| --they're using dark patterns to hijack my attention to
| increase their engagement metrics, to my loss--so why would I
| pay them? I installed NewPipe and subscribed to the creators I
| watch regularly on Patreon and I'm very happy with this setup.
| simlevesque wrote:
| If you use Revanced[1] you can patch Youtube Mobile on
| Android to completely remove Shorts.
|
| [1] https://github.com/revanced
|
| https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches/
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It's nice that alt tech is trying out all of these bottom-tier
| cloud providers and posting results. Now I know which ones to add
| to my "avoid at all costs" list (which is already quite long).
| RajT88 wrote:
| I had a customer who ran half their stuff on Azure and half on
| OCI. OCI was never a contender for expanding their footprint
| and they wanted to get off ASAP.
|
| You may think Azure is amateur hour, but it apparently does not
| hold a candle to OCI.
| sproketboy wrote:
| [dead]
| arun-mani-j wrote:
| If you like Invidious, NewPipe but want something for desktop or
| browser in general - check out Piped -
| https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
|
| So basically it is a way to use YouTube with a proxy server in
| between. Quoting directly from LibreTube (an Android app based on
| Piped) -
|
| > With NewPipe, the extraction is done locally on your phone, and
| all the requests sent towards YouTube/Google are done directly
| from the network you're connected to, which doesn't use a
| middleman server in between. Therefore, Google can still access
| information such as the user's IP address. Aside from that,
| subscriptions can only be stored locally.
|
| > LibreTube takes this one step further and proxies all requests
| via Piped (which uses the NewPipeExtractor). This prevents Google
| servers from accessing your IP address or any other personal
| data.
|
| > Apart from that, Piped allows syncing your subscriptions
| between LibreTube and Piped, which can be used on desktop too.
|
| You can also self host it or use an instance like
| https://piped.video/
| Remmy wrote:
| I recently moved to TubeSync and Jellyfin for YouTube videos.
| TubeSync will make a copy of the channel locally while applying
| Sponsorblock filters directly to the video file.
|
| It checks nightly for any new videos on the channel and Jellyfin
| sends me a notification when a new video is ready to watch.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-04 23:01 UTC)