[HN Gopher] Self-hosting your own media considered harmful accor...
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Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube
Author : DavideNL
Score : 1499 points
Date : 2025-06-06 04:59 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| DavideNL wrote:
| Related Mastodon post:
| https://mastodon.social/@geerlingguy/114632312304389965
| emocin wrote:
| Yeah, harmful to their revenue.
|
| Fuck YouTube
| psyclobe wrote:
| AMEN
| herewulf wrote:
| This is a good chance to suggest viable alternatives? TIA.
| lawn wrote:
| Download videos from YouTube to Jellyfin or Plex.
|
| Yeah, there's no _real_ alternative to YouTube for most
| people.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| There's Vimeo, BitChute, Odysee, and Rumble, and even
| Substack and the Internet Archive support video uploads.
| Not to mention Twitch, Kick, and the newer cohort.
|
| But YouTube has recognition, and insane infra. That's very
| hard to match, let alone beat.
| elevaet wrote:
| Vimeo and self-hosting are two alternatives. Are they
| realistic alternatives? That's another question.
| imgabe wrote:
| Don't watch youtube?
|
| Want educational content? Read a book or a technical blog
| post or documentation.
|
| Want entertainment? Read a book or watch a movie or TV show.
|
| I've never found anything that great about YouTube.
| aloha2436 wrote:
| Those are alternatives for youtube _consumers_ but none of
| those are replacements for _producers_ on youtube.
| djtango wrote:
| 30 years of playing the piano and listening to all kinds of
| music and harmony never really clicked with me even after
| studying music theory. But watching YouTube videos made an
| instant impact.
|
| YouTube is a distracting mess full of doom scroll bait but
| if you have never found anything useful on YouTube, you
| haven't been looking very hard.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Would you mind sharing the videos that helped music
| click? Thank you!
| djtango wrote:
| Open Studio (OpenStudioJazz) and Nahre Sol I like.
| Charles Cornell gets an honourable mention.
|
| Watching Nahre Sol break down Chopin's E flat Nocturne
| (Op9#2) gave me a penny drop moment. I have often had
| trouble memorizing the left hand for that piece even
| after writing out the harmonies but seeing her play out
| the progression as flat chords led me to realise I can
| change the pattern and then play the left hand as a very
| quick broken chord to hear the harmonic progression while
| also cementing in the muscle memory a lot more
| effectively.
| ainiriand wrote:
| I am not sure why this is actually downvoted. I was a
| YouTube premium subscriber, but then they started with
| their shenanigans and I decided to shift my attention to
| other things. It is not like I cannot go there once in a
| while to check on a particular video, but it is not for
| entertainment anymore.
| Asraelite wrote:
| I want edutainment. Nowhere has anywhere close to the level
| of content as YouTube when it comes to that.
| lynx97 wrote:
| > a movie or TV show
|
| Any movie or TV show recommendations from the past 10 years
| that is actually enjoyable?
|
| I am pretty much done with movies. I don't even remember
| the last one I really enjoyed. Sunshine, Interstellar,
| Hateful Eight, Once Upon a time in Hollywood... Nothing
| notable in the past 5 years though.
|
| TV shows? Most require a subscription, which I am not
| willing to do for just a show or two.
| zem wrote:
| just over the 10 year mark, but i enjoyed "east side
| sushi". nice feel-good movie.
| imgabe wrote:
| I've enjoyed quite a few movies from the past 5 years,
| but I don't know what you like, so who knows.
|
| Baby Assassins - japanese movie about two teenage girls
| who are assassins. Very weird and funny movie and the
| fight choreography I found fascinating. I can only
| describe as "floppy".
|
| Tetris - this was on Apple TV. A fictionalized retelling
| of the story of getting Tetris out of the USSR and
| licensed to distribute in the US.
|
| Weird: The Al Yankovic Story - A music biopic of Weird Al
| Yankovic, in true Weird Al style
|
| Nobody - action / revenge flick with Bob Odenkirk
|
| I could go on. No need to limit yourself to the past 5
| years though. Surely you haven't seen _every_ movie from
| before 2020?
|
| Lots of great shows too, and you don't need any
| subscriptions on the high seas...
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| Baby Assassins sounds interesting, I see there's a few
| movies with that name from the past few years, maybe some
| are sequels I'm not sure. Is the one you're talking about
| from 2021 with director Yugo Sakamoto?
| deadalus wrote:
| Youtube Alternatives :
|
| https://odysee.com
|
| Bitchute
|
| Rumble
| pdpi wrote:
| As much as we need an alternative to YouTube, Rumble's
| whole gimmick is basically "we don't block nazis". Insofar
| as supporting problematic businesses goes, that's out of
| the frying pan and into the fire.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Whats the issue? Are you afraid of being swayed? Feels a
| bit like homophobia at times. Those being most vocal are
| likely trying to hide something about their own
| personality...
| pdpi wrote:
| The issue is that I don't want to be part of their
| revenue streams, or DAUs, or anything else that helps
| build their business.
| righthand wrote:
| The common opposition to Nazis is bigger than freedom of
| speech. Freedom of speech is just the baseline talking
| point Nazis use to get you to listen to them. Not that
| you'll be swayed but disarmed.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Nebula, NicoVideo, Dailymotion.
| constrictpastel wrote:
| Wish I could find a front-end like an invidious for
| Rumble/Bitchute. The ads they serve are shittier than
| YouTube.
| maxlin wrote:
| Just get UBlock, even the lite version works.
|
| When I turned my adblock off there for a second I
| couldn't stop laughing at the absolute crack-potness of
| their ads. If you like a creator, and they stream, you
| can dono to them.
| cyberax wrote:
| PeerTube is nice, and you can self-host an instance that can
| mirror your favorite channels.
| genewitch wrote:
| there was also the one that louis rossman was pitching, but
| i can't remember as i didn't actually look in to it, since
| i know how to run https://www.turnkeylinux.org/avideo
| because it's four clicks on any host that supports turnkey
| linux containers. They'll have the template, you just
| request a container running avideo.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Unfortunately there's a black-hole-like gravitational
| inescapability from Youtube due to its network effects over
| its lifetime. Hopefully this can be slowly and eventually
| counteracted.
|
| In the meantime, there's Invidious, LibreTube, NewPipe,
| Skytube, ReVanced and probably a few others that can be used
| as protest. In addition to browser extensions that manage to
| filter out YT ads. One of my favourites is iSponsorBlockTV
| which, when casting to a TV, automatically skips ads once the
| button is enabled, and mutes the ad in the meantime.
|
| None of these answer your question, but your question has a
| number of aspects. Nothing can replace Youtube one for one if
| you're counting all of its "things" - and this is mentioned
| in the article.
|
| There are numerous alternatives to certain parts of Youtube
| which are likely easily found via search or AI query:
| https://www.perplexity.ai/search/list-some-alternatives-
| to-y...
| kavalg wrote:
| The viable alternative is to stop watching all the crappy
| content you don't need anyway. Their restriction to 3 videos
| for people with ad blocker was a wake up call for me, helping
| me realize how much content I consume from youtube that not I
| only don't have a need for, but is actively occupying a
| sizable portion of my mind. I am old enough to remember the
| world without youtube, when you could read a book, talk to
| people, do sports etc, without staring at the screen
| mindlessly. A 30 min video might not look like much, but that
| is the equivalent of a decent stretching workout, drinking a
| cup of tea while relaxing or a multitude of other activities
| that will actually help you become happier and healthier.
|
| Thank you youtube for helping me realize how harmful you
| really are!
| maxlin wrote:
| The most serious alternative I think is Rumble.
|
| Bitchute allows only low quality. Odysee is slow as balls.
| Dailymotion has some lower limits (but might be the runner-
| up)
|
| But nowadays Rumble finally allows for actual high resolution
| uploads, and loads quite fast, not taking forever to buffer
| like Odysee does. Rumble also feels like it has some momentum
| and content/userbase. Just don't watch their crackpot ads
| lol.
|
| Rumble also has a very functional streaming product not
| dependent on Amazon's infrastructure, while having rewind and
| forever VODs, only limited to 28GB per VOD (yes I tested it!)
|
| The data as I know it: Rumble: Allows for 1080p uploads. Old
| max duration was 46 mins for them, but that is no longer in
| place, at least as a Premium user I can upload 6hour+ 1080p
| videos.
|
| Bitchute: Max resolution is low at 480p, doesn't even have
| quality tiers in player. Max upload size is 2GB, but uploads
| and watching is quite seamless.
|
| Odysee: Haven't hit limits, those are possibly as high good
| as Rumble. But has been quite slow to use and upload to for
| me, it varies. If you upload a ton you need to deposit some
| LBRY. Used to have a youtube->odysee automatic sync which
| probably increased their "normie" population.
|
| Dailymotion: 2 hour / 4GB limit for free users, BUT has limit
| on amount of videos uploaded daily that I hit mirroring some
| content.
|
| Streamable: Fast and requires no account but deletes videos
| after 2 like days. Has its uses.
|
| Honorary mention: X. Allows for 4k60p nowadays. But requires
| account to upload and view. Most have one though, and X
| obviously has the strongest brand recognition for the
| uploader (as an account X is considered "the" authorative one
| for people and brands), while it can be good it can also feel
| weird to upload long-form content there (and their TV app is
| totally cooked, I've tried to contact them to fix it myself
| to no avail)
|
| Those that like censorship don't have a problem as they can
| just replace watching videos with looking at a white wall for
| an experience they won't get offended about.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The video they made does not encourage piracy, but even if it did
| it seems bizarre to flag that as "Dangerous or Harmful Content."
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Dangerous and Harmful to googles bottom line.
| layer8 wrote:
| I mean, there is a risk that the feds would come down on you if
| you're not careful. ;)
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Dangerous or Harmful_
|
| There were many attempts to link piracy to terrorism and the
| drugs trade.
|
| Because what makes enough money for crack dealers & weapons
| traders to use for money laundering, is some bootleg DVDs and
| adverts on torrent tracker web front-ends...
| yetke wrote:
| Something similar happened a few years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30886834
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I like the way Jeff signed off the article, pointing out that
| whilst the video has been pulled for (allegedly) promoting
| copyright infringement, Youtube, via Gemini, is (allegedly)
| slurping the content of Jeff's videos for the purposes of
| training their AI models.
|
| Seems ironic that their AI models are getting their detection of
| "Dangerous or Harmful Content" wrong. Maybe they just need to
| infringe more copyright in order to better detect copyright
| infringement?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > Youtube, via Gemini, is (allegedly) slurping the content of
| Jeff's videos for the purposes of training their AI models
|
| If by "allegedly" you mean that google admitted it
|
| > Google models may be trained on some YouTube content, but
| always in accordance with our agreement with YouTube creators
| (https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/google-veo-a-serious-
| swing...)
|
| Where "agreement" likely means "you accepted some tos 15 years
| ago so shut up".
|
| > the video has been pulled for (allegedly) promoting copyright
| infringement
|
| the irony...
| consp wrote:
| > Where "agreement" likely means "you accepted some tos 15
| years ago so shut up".
|
| I am not a content creator or business on yt but i am 99.9%
| certain as soon as you enter your business credentials to
| make money they pretty much are allowed to do as they please
| and change the terms without notice (to which you must
| agree). And because as pointed out into the article, yt is a
| monopoly in all but name you have to agree to it as there are
| no viable alternatives.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Gemini doesn't need his video as train data, google can just
| torrent any content and use it as training data, just like
| facebook.
| fer wrote:
| Uh? Veo 3 is arguably the result of owning YouTube and
| tapping into its content. No need to torrent much if you
| store the largest amount of footage on Earth.
| hbn wrote:
| The Veo demos I saw all looked like Hollywood productions.
| Not like YouTube videos which are 99% garbage you wouldn't
| want to train off of.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Those Hollywood style videos are just more impressive,
| especially for people who will pay. Veo can produce any
| style or quality of video, it's just not impressive to
| demo a video that looks like one any run-of-the-mill
| YouTuber can make in their bedroom.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| You mean in the way Meta is being sued for, and bluntly are
| almost certainly going to lose and have to pay out lots and
| lots and lots of money for?
| libraryatnight wrote:
| The hoovering of data for ads went about the same. They consume
| my data and told me it was for better ads - the most visible
| result is that I get ads for things I've already bought and it
| conflates searches made only in the spirit of understanding
| with desire. On the bright-side it's produced quite a few good
| jokes. "I googled Breitbart and I'm getting ads for testerone
| treatment and viagra!" [my wife, 2014]
|
| The least these creeps could do if they're going to treat us
| like this is deliver the experience they say the evil
| justifies.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| > In that case, I was happy to see my appeal granted within an
| hour of the strike being placed on the channel. (Nevermind the
| fact the video had been live for over two years at that point,
| with nary a problem!)
|
| Looks like some L-(5|6|whateverthefuck) just got the task to go
| through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of
| alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software.
|
| Quick appeal grant of course, because it was more about sending a
| message and making people who want to talk about that kind of
| software think twice before the next video.
|
| > But until that time, YouTube's AdSense revenue and vast reach
| is a kind of 'golden handcuff.' > > The handcuff has been a bit
| tarnished of late, however, with Google recently adding AI
| summaries to videos--which seems to indicate maybe Gemini is
| slurping up my content and using it in their AI models?
|
| Balanced take towards the end (after the above quote), but yep,
| the writing is on the wall.
|
| I really wonder where the internet goes in this age. The contract
| between third party content hosters and creators is getting
| squeezed, and the whole "you're the product" thing is being laid
| bare more and more.
|
| Is it a given that at some point creators will stop posting their
| contents to platforms like YouTube? Is it even possible at this
| point given that YouTube garners so many eyeballs and is just so
| easy? Does a challenger somehow unseat YouTube because
| programming and underlying libraries (ffmpeg et al) becomes so
| easy to use that spinning up a YouTube competitor goes down to
| basically zero?
|
| Seems like there needs to be a new paradigm for anyone to have a
| choice _other_ than youtube. Maybe AI will enable this -- maybe
| "does jeff have any new videos" -> a video gets played on a
| screen in your house and it's NOT hosted on YouTube, but no one
| knows and no one cares?
| conradfr wrote:
| Isn't the competitor TikTok?
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Yes, _sometimes_ -- I think TikTok 's content/goals are a bit
| different than YouTube.
|
| TikTok is a direct competitor to YouTube Shorts, but not
| YouTube as a whole -- YouTube also competes with Netflix and
| surprisingly paid course sites (did you know YouTube has
| courses?)
|
| I don't think it's as easy as thinking TikTok will unseat
| YouTube. Also, I personally think TikTok's... approach is a
| bit hard to sustain. Just like Facebook's approach of
| initially showing you a feed of friends activities, but
| morphed into something else over time (some of that is not
| FB's fault, humans have certain behaviors that can be toxic
| all on their own).
| touristtam wrote:
| > TikTok is a direct competitor to YouTube Shorts
|
| That sounds odd since I recall them comparing themselves to
| IG shorts, and YT shorts not being a thing while TT was
| becoming the in social media; just an observation, more
| than anything else.
| prmoustache wrote:
| They are still a competitor in the sense they are with
| instagram actively engaged in the task of reducing
| people's average attention span which makes the
| traditional youtube format less popular.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Unfortunately, the generalized "brainrot content and
| distribution" market is massive and contains many
| competitors.
| kazinator wrote:
| > L-whateverthefuck
|
| LM
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| If LLMs are already doing this, engineers are cooked.
|
| I don't think this is a job that requires an LLM but if an
| LLM took the order, made the plan to go through the relevant
| data(bases|lakes|platforms) and triggered the warnings, etc.
| I'd be very impressed.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I was thinking Lawyer.
| politelemon wrote:
| Based on my observations over the past decade of similar
| stories on HN, nothing will change, the squeeze will simply
| continue.
|
| It's because we only hear of incidents in isolation from each
| other when the giants that abuse their platforms - most often
| the stories are from apple, google, amazon - take something
| down that didn't suit their revenue streams even if it's by
| vague interpretations AND someone with enough of a social
| presence has their incident heard.
|
| The rest of us, the unwashed users of the platform, do not hear
| about it or act upon it en masse. We'll occasionally see a post
| like this on HN or Reddit, shake our heads and call it a shame,
| there need to be alternatives and so on, then go right back
| into those platforms and forget that something happened but a
| few months later
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| > Based on my observations over the past decade of similar
| stories on HN, nothing will change, the squeeze will simply
| continue.
|
| I do agree here, but sometimes (let's say 10% of the time?
| less?) the squeeze _does not_ continue -- see Apple.
| Perplexity /ChatGPT vs Google search right now.
|
| > The rest of us, the unwashed users of the platform, do not
| hear about it or act upon it en masse. We'll occasionally see
| a post like this on HN or Reddit, shake our heads and call it
| a shame, there need to be alternatives and so on, then go
| right back into those platforms and forget that something
| happened but a few months later
|
| Yup, wish I could add "- posted from Chrome browser" to my
| own response here but I use Firefox. I'm still going to watch
| YouTube.
|
| I think the thing that might bring hope is that
| Google/YouTube doesn't actualy own the new paradigm of AI --
| I can very much imagine a world where people just ask for
| videos/scroll through them, and YouTube isn't the site they
| do it on (in fact they don't do it on a "site", per say).
|
| But then again, that's really calling for the death/dramatic
| reduction of the open/surfable internet. Is that what it
| takes?
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Most people don't even give a fuck. And most of those who do
| aren't ready to do anything about it. Thank you for coming to
| my Ted Talk.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Publicly shame people that use platforms. Especially the kind
| of scum that still does it professionally.
|
| 2025 has given a great opportunity to ratchet it up a notch
| (outside of USA) : with Trump 2 the pretense that USA is an
| ally of EUrope is gone, so the decade old conclusion that US
| laws aren't compatible with fundamental rights (Patriot Act
| => Schrems 2), and therefore US infocoms are illegal -- is
| not something that ought to be ignored any more (so far it
| was, out of convenience).
| genewitch wrote:
| There's peertube and Pixelfed and someone was working on an
| activitypub version of Instagram, but really it's like Pixelfed
| but more ergonomic for video.
|
| So the next stage, ideally, would be everyone kinda sharing
| hosting responsibilities, and if you like a creator, you just
| follow them. This has the benefit of possibly caching/mirroring
| all the videos, too. My Fediverse server was chewing through
| disk, one of the reasons I shut it down - but I was following
| 1400 news and journalist accounts, plus my ~100 or so gang of
| idiots. I was nearing 1TB on disk after about 16 months on my
| essentially single user instance.
|
| I exported my follows and moved to an acquaintance's server and
| imported, the owner doesn't even blink. Who knows what they've
| got going for storage.
|
| Anyhow if you don't need to follow 1500 people, this becomes
| tractable. If it gets popular, someone will post how to cron
| the multimedia stuff to compress it as it ages, moving it to
| cold storage, whatever.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| > There's peertube and Pixelfed and someone was working on an
| activitypub version of Instagram, but really it's like
| Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video.
|
| > it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video.
|
| This is a huge problem IMO. Just like Mastodon/Bluesky (which
| seems to be working recently) and all these other things, the
| tech and experience need to be SUPER easy. I mean _as-easy-
| or-easier_ than YouTube, etc for people to switch en masse.
|
| > So the next stage, ideally, would be everyone kinda sharing
| hosting responsibilities, and if you like a creator, you just
| follow them. This has the benefit of possibly
| caching/mirroring all the videos, too. My Fediverse server
| was chewing through disk, one of the reasons I shut it down -
| but I was following 1400 news and journalist accounts, plus
| my ~100 or so gang of idiots. I was nearing 1TB on disk after
| about 16 months on my essentially single user instance.
|
| Yeah the problem is people won't do this/can't be expected to
| do this, unless it's drop dead easy.
|
| Really appreciate hearing about your point on the scaling
| curve for this tech though, clearly the tech has come really
| far, that sounds like much more than the average person and
| "only" 1TB and a single server is quite nice.
|
| The best ever approach I have seen to this is PopcornTime. It
| took the world by storm (and IIRC people still use it/ it
| still exists in some form, they're just lower profile now),
| and it worked _better_ the more people used it, because
| torrents (aka, the technology being a mature, perfect match
| for the usecase).
|
| > I exported my follows and moved to an acquaintance's server
| and imported, the owner doesn't even blink. Who knows what
| they've got going for storage. > > Anyhow if you don't need
| to follow 1500 people, this becomes tractable. If it gets
| popular, someone will post how to cron the multimedia stuff
| to compress it as it ages, moving it to cold storage,
| whatever.
|
| I could see this working if that acquaintance got paid for
| this. Tying money as an incentive to things is sometimes
| bad/not what you want, but having people think of computers
| and compute as an asset/tool for them to use is a step in the
| right direction IMO.
|
| I'm not a crypto person (kind of wish I was, 10 years ago),
| but Filecoin was really interesting originally to me because
| it just made sense. The marketplace of data storage seems
| like something that could be easily democratized in this way
| (no need for the crypto bits, but the ease of payment was a
| legitimate use IMO).
| genewitch wrote:
| this isn't to argue! just some clarification because i
| really don't copyedit/proofread well enough on HN.
|
| > I mean as-easy-or-easier than YouTube, etc for people to
| switch en masse.
|
| note: i said peertube but i meant youphptube and the fork,
| avideo: https://www.turnkeylinux.org/avideo
|
| Peertube is this, if you want anonymous viewing of videos.
| I'm not sure about ease of setting up, i don't remember
| having any issues, which means i can package it for others,
| but IIRC turnkey linux has peertube as a container, which
| means any hosting provider that offers TKL it's essentially
| 4 clicks to launch a peertube server. Fediverse is a little
| rougher, but i imagine a content creator would be the one
| that would self-host (or have their own homeserver, but
| host it with a hosting provider for $50 a month or
| whatever), and everyone else can go to
| https://fediverse.party/ or whatever and find a homeserver.
| You don't need to run your own to participate. I was
| careful to suggest that more people should run their own
| instances, because i worry that the larger instances will
| get tired of adding 16TB drive sleds every year. I can't
| imagine what mastodon.social costs to run! this also ties
| in with your final point; the acquaintance is part of the
| value4value^ movement, so they may get donations to offset
| costs, but i think they have a server room on their
| property with a couple of racks. maybe they have solar and
| a sweetheart deal with their ISP - i did at one point, so i
| also had a server shed. still do, but i used to, too.
|
| > Filecoin
|
| oh that technology that made buying a used HDD/SSD risky
| business for a few years? Now, afaik filecoin didn't serve
| any useful purpose, it was just another "proof of X" where
| X was "i'm wasting a ton of storage space for this". ipfs
| et al are the ones that do distributed storage.
|
| One thing i would add - unless you absolutely need to, and
| i mean _really_ need to, never upload high-def to these
| sort of services. Upload your FHD /QHD/8K videos to the
| large hosts "for backup", mark them as unlisted, and then
| link to them for people to archive if they wish.
|
| ^https://value4value.info/
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| > this isn't to argue! just some clarification because i
| really don't copyedit/proofread well enough on HN.
|
| No worries! Arguments are great if I can learn something.
|
| > Peertube is this, if you want anonymous viewing of
| videos. I'm not sure about ease of setting up, i don't
| remember having any issues, which means i can package it
| for others, but IIRC turnkey linux has peertube as a
| container, which means any hosting provider that offers
| TKL it's essentially 4 clicks to launch a peertube
| server. Fediverse is a little rougher, but i imagine a
| content creator would be the one that would self-host (or
| have their own homeserver, but host it with a hosting
| provider for $50 a month or whatever), and everyone else
| can go to https://fediverse.party/ or whatever and find a
| homeserver. You don't need to run your own to
| participate. I was careful to suggest that more people
| should run their own instances, because i worry that the
| larger instances will get tired of adding 16TB drive
| sleds every year. I can't imagine what mastodon.social
| costs to run! this also ties in with your final point;
| the acquaintance is part of the value4value movement, so
| they may get donations to offset costs, but i think they
| have a server room on their property with a couple of
| racks. maybe they have solar and a sweetheart deal with
| their ISP - i did at one point, so i also had a server
| shed. still do, but i used to, too.
|
| OK so my thing is that all of this is just too hard. Give
| me ONE program to run that does everything. I don't think
| that's impossible either (and no one). If the average
| user has to hear the word "container" or "linux", it's
| over. If they have to pay, it's over (probably, unless
| it's a TINY amount that basically just deters bots or
| something).
|
| Also, most good widely-adopted consumer products NEVER
| mention anonymity. Maybe security or privacy, but never
| anonymity.
|
| Always love me a little mitch in the comments :) HN
| hasn't lost it.
|
| I guess what we really want here is PopcornTime for
| PeerTube. Maybe PeerTube is already this and I just don't
| know about it... the tech would be hard to make work
| seamlessly but a way to just get the ease of PopcornTime
| and the interface/product mindedness of YouTube.
|
| > oh that technology that made buying a used HDD/SSD
| risky business for a few years? Now, afaik filecoin
| didn't serve any useful purpose, it was just another
| "proof of X" where X was "i'm wasting a ton of storage
| space for this". ipfs et al are the ones that do
| distributed storage.
|
| But IMO this is a human problem -- it did what it was
| supposed to do, it made storage valuable. The problem is
| that when things get valuable, bad actors do things to
| try and steal that value. That's like thinking computers
| are bad because people try to steal them once they
| realize how valuable they are now that people can make
| money on the internet.
|
| I'm not really the right person to defend Filecoin (there
| were also a few others, I wonder if I'm referring to the
| right one), but the idea of distributed payment-for-
| spare-disk-storage (does this fit the value4value
| movement?) makes a ton of sense to me.
|
| IPFS is a technical solution IMO, it stops short of
| solving the other bits - i.e. motivating the actual
| money-for-storage exchange that makes the idea
| sustainable.
|
| > One thing i would add - unless you absolutely need to,
| and i mean really need to, never upload high-def to these
| sort of services. Upload your FHD/QHD/8K videos to the
| large hosts "for backup", mark them as unlisted, and then
| link to them for people to archive if they wish.
|
| TIL, thanks!
| genewitch wrote:
| > Also, most good widely-adopted consumer products NEVER
| mention anonymity. Maybe security or privacy, but never
| anonymity.
|
| i meant anonymous as in "a user can receive a link to a
| video and watch it without having to log in" as well as
| "there's a list of content on the homepage to watch" -
| the same way youtube works if you go via private
| browsing.
|
| > OK so my thing is that all of this is just too hard.
| Give me ONE program to run that does everything. [...]
|
| Right, I agree. I'm an infra sort of person so this comes
| naturally. But i will try to summarize it (fediverse) in
| a non-geeky way: A non-creator can go on any of the
| existing servers and get an account if they desire - this
| allows them to follow the content creators they enjoy,
| and also helps with discovery of new content.
| Fediverse.party is a site that will help find a server
| that isn't mastodon.social. oh and you mentioned apps;
| those exist, but you need a homeserver. most of them
| probably default to creating an account on
| mastodon.social; i guess. You don't need to be on
| peertube to subscribe to a creator that uses peertube to
| publish - that's the key, here.
|
| i have a little bit more faith that people can ditch
| youtube, by navigating this "novel" platform.
|
| Content creators may have to wait for someone who isn't
| as lazy as i am to promote the "N click hosting platform
| for your videos" where N is small. If you create content,
| you might have to pay, there's no real way around that if
| we want to ditch youtube. There is a benefit to paying,
| though, and it doesn't have to be a lot, you can probably
| use a $5 VPS (as the saying goes) to start. If some large
| content creator wants to move over, they probably can
| afford to spend more, and it won't hurt them at all. Yes,
| youtube hosting is free, but it comes with caveats (such
| as TFA, but also losing access to your account for
| unknown reasons, and so on). Or they can join a peertube
| (or whatever) and hope the host remains online.
|
| I know you want "one app" - there's some traction
| https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/use-third-party-
| application
|
| note: we're not content creators but we are a "host" and
| we pay $300/month for our racked stuff, all-in. That's
| not out of reach for the likes of someone like Louis
| Rossman, who _really_ ought be moving off youtube; or
| AvE, or RedLetterMedia. It 's going to take some big
| creators at least "simulcasting" on some other service
| for a while before it catches on; i just hope this
| catching on happens before apple, facebook, amazon (oops
| twitch), or microsoft start a video hosting platform with
| their spare disks.
|
| Apparently your memory is better than mine; filecoin
| allowed one to "rent out" their unused storage. What i
| was thinking of was some other "proof of capacity" coin,
| where you didn't need a decent internet connection to
| mine/hold coins, just disk space. the software itself
| actually mined by writing hash or whatever to the disk.
| Copilot mentioned "burstcoin" but i've never heard of
| that. And filecoin apparently was based on ipfs; so i
| wonder if it's still going or if someone can reboot it.
|
| it certainly didn't have good marketing campaign...
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| > i meant anonymous as in "a user can receive a link to a
| video and watch it without having to log in" as well as
| "there's a list of content on the homepage to watch" -
| the same way youtube works if you go via private
| browsing.
|
| Oh yeah this is my fault, I understood your meaning but
| wanted to make a separate point about the average user
| and their very specific.
|
| IMO the vast majority of open source projects will use
| that word because it is a legitimate benefit, but it's
| anathema to the average consumer. It just signals "this
| is for criminals", even if it shouldn't.
|
| Agree it's clearly a valuable feature -- it's hard to
| even demonstrate the value these days. "no algorithms" or
| "no tracking" might work, but it's so hard to verbalize.
|
| With regards to the F/OSS solutions like peertube and the
| difficulty of marketing all this stuff (filecoin
| with/without crypto)... There just aren't the right
| incentives or the right insane person hasn't come along
| yet.
|
| > That's not out of reach for the likes of someone like
| Louis Rossman, who really ought be moving off youtube
|
| Maybe this is a bit weird but IMO Louis has been
| incredibly effective in his fight for right to repair,
| and I would hate to sacrifice his reach for a more user-
| friendly platform. I agree with the idea of at least
| simulcasting. Maybe it's another difficulty problem.
|
| I haven't kept up with the stuff he's doing with FUTO
| these days as closely, but you have to fight on the
| battleground you're given. Winning and moral purity are
| often at odds, and IMO this isn't a place where moral
| purity is paramount.
|
| IMO one of the hidden lynchpins here is the default
| license that youtube broadcasts with. I think there's a
| really clear legal path to downloading a LOT of youtube
| if only more things were CC licensed on there (not the
| default YouTube license) and accessible without logging
| in (similar to the LinkedIn scraping case).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| A reminder that it's not anonymity in the law enforcement
| sense because IP addresses are akin to a pseudonym and
| can be tracked down.
|
| Also, for other cases you can't expect to be anonymous
| unless you run script blockers. And block first party
| scripts for the most egregious offenders (for which their
| websites won't work anyway at that point I guess).
| genewitch wrote:
| i could not think of a better term to signify "a non-
| logged in user" than anonymous, and i was hoping that in
| this sort of forum that it would be taken as
| ftp://anonymous@example.com:22/
| nhecker wrote:
| As I understand it, Signum (nee Burstcoin) is indeed the
| Proof of Capacity blockchain thingy that was using hard
| drives to store data with no external value. This is
| related to but different from to Proof of Storage schemes
| likes Filecoin where, IIRC, the data being stored was
| data of extrinsic value like PDFs or GIFs or whatever. I
| think that's also related to "Proof of Space-Time",
| meaning not only did you write the received data to disk,
| but you've _still_ got it written to disk.
|
| PoC, e.g., Signum = get paid for proving that you paid
| for storage rather than CPU/GPU/ASIC cycles
|
| PoS, e.g., Filecoin = get paid for renting out your
| storage to those willing to pay in return for storing
| data
|
| Thanks for this really interesting side-thread; I have
| learned a lot! I've been interested in distributed
| storage for a long time and while I've known about
| PeerTube and IPFS and the Fediverse for ages I haven't
| really played with them personally. I go back and forth
| between keeping TiBs of storage online, and turning
| everything off as a concession to keeping my overall
| electricity bill in check. But in general I like the idea
| of letting my private machines contribute to something
| greater than themselves. I will have to look into the
| ways in which I can contribute to these projects.
| eptcyka wrote:
| How will federation solve monetisation?
| genewitch wrote:
| value for value. https://value4value.info/
|
| or ad rolls, who knows. monetization isn't my wheelhouse.
|
| podcasts have been doing this since the inception.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Without even the opportunity to make money, there's very
| little incentive for creators to spend time and effort
| making videos for these channels.
|
| The reason YouTube is huge is because they invite anybody
| in to try to get paid for their content, and nobody else
| does that.
|
| This is why most content which should be an article or
| even a podcast is instead posted as some guy talking in
| front of the camera on YouTube.
| genewitch wrote:
| > ... they invite anybody in to try to get paid ...
|
| I have over 100k views on youtube and i've received $0.00
| from youtube. This is like "they invite anyone to try and
| pull the sword from the stone" or something.
|
| however look from the other angle: People give their
| content freely to youtube, a content platform, which
| benefits youtube, because of this idea that "you might
| make it big." it's like scratch-offs.
|
| Nearly all of the pieces to have the functional
| equivalent of youtube are there, even for micropayments
| based on viewership, adrolls, interstitial ads, "patreon-
| like crowd funding", i was just talking about the boring
| infra part. I talk about alternatives that exist _now_ ,
| or are alpha/beta stages, because i am hoping that
| someone, anyone, has the wherewithal to do something
| about it. I'm not a content creator except in the literal
| sense, maybe 100 videos on youtube, no cohesion. I have
| no need to spend time, talent, or treasure on hosting a
| VOD platform, because it would not benefit me, nor anyone
| i know _personally_. I host nextcloud, matrix, pastebin,
| minecraft, discord bots that remind people to take their
| medicine and allow them to journal about that and
| anything else, "wikis", subsonic (quite private). I used
| to meddle with video hosting, but not directly -
| syncthing so i could upload drone footage from my
| cellphone in the field, so that my friend could edit if
| he wanted before i publish somewhere.
|
| read all of that as: "i've proven that this is all
| possible; further, i know it will scale. I will tell
| people about this, and someone with the spark can give it
| to the world, functional and shiny"
|
| Note: youtube didn't start out paying uploaders. people
| uploaded because some people have a need or a desire to
| have other people look at them. Fame and notoriety can be
| narcotic. yes i know this is reductive.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I agree that they should divide compensation more fairly
| among creators, but what are you comparing YouTube to?
| What other company has a standing offer to anybody to
| upload their content and get paid for it?
|
| There are plenty of competitors to YouTube for video
| creators: Netflix, all of cable and on-air TV, all of
| Hollywood, Amazon, etc. How big are your chances of
| getting paid for your creativity by any of these
| companies without being born into the right family and
| without performing sexual services to their
| representatives?
|
| How much would you get paid by Google adwords for 100 000
| visitors to your website? I doubt it would cover hosting
| costs. How much does Instagram or Facebook pay a user who
| gets 100 000 likes on their post?
|
| YouTube (and Spotify) should distribute their pay-outs
| more fairly among creators, instead of making a
| casino/lottery system. But right now, they're the only
| shop which is open for everybody.
| genewitch wrote:
| > What other company has a standing offer to anybody to
| upload their content and get paid for it?
|
| my first sentence bears out that this isn't true, it's
| like a scratch-off ticket. i understand you spoke to
| this, but it's worth re-iterating. If 100k eyeballs isn't
| enough to earn me even a penny, then what chances does
| 99.9999% of "content creators" stand?
|
| secondly, amazon pays twitch streamers. or so i hear. who
| knows, i said monetization isn't my wheelhouse. Nor does
| it have to be to suggest technical solutions to what
| people perceive as problems with youtube/ABC/goog
|
| also onlyfans.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Without even the opportunity to make money, there's
| very little incentive for creators to spend time and
| effort making videos for these channels.
|
| YouTube had plenty of content on it before the partner
| program was launched, and the content was better. Some
| kinds of high-production value content like Wendover
| Productions or Tom Scott's channel would become less
| common, but it would also remove the incentive for the
| formulaic garbage that pervades in e.g. History-related
| content. There are end-to-end AI content generation
| systems now that don't even involve a human operator;
| that content wouldn't exist without a profit motive, but
| maybe it would be better if it didn't.
|
| > This is why most content which should be an article or
| even a podcast is instead posted as some guy talking in
| front of the camera on YouTube.
|
| That's part of it but the viewership is also way larger
| on YouTube, which is also really, really good at finding
| audiences in a way that a smaller service like substack
| could never compete with.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > YouTube had plenty of content on it before the partner
| program was launched, and the content was better.
|
| It's not even comparable, not by a long shot. There is an
| immense amount of the highest quality video content you
| can find on YouTube, and the trend has only accelerated
| in the past few years.
|
| The ratio of good to bad content was better in the past,
| but that doesn't matter to the watcher. You subscribe to
| good stuff and get recommended good stuff. Just like it
| doesn't matter that all the front aisles of the super
| market is full of toxic slop. What matters is if the
| meat, dairy and vegetable section is of good quality in
| the back of the store.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > There is an immense amount of the highest quality video
| content you can find on YouTube, and the trend has only
| accelerated in the past few years.
|
| This has not been my experience.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| All right. Where can I find a larger library of high
| quality documentary, educational and instructional
| videos? I'm happy to pay for any service which can
| compare, just like I pay for YouTube Premium.
|
| I tried Curiosity Stream and Nebula, both they couldn't
| compare.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Where can I find a larger library of high quality
| documentary, educational and instructional videos?
|
| The question isn't whether or not YouTube has this
| content, it's if it would have proportionally more or
| less of this content in the absence of a profit-sharing
| model. The chief problem I have with social media is that
| the kind of organic content I want to see was already out
| there _before_ some people decided they wanted to make a
| career out of it; it's just a lot harder to find now
| because there are professionals who know how to play to
| the algorithm. This works on a mass market level, and I
| don't begrudge people for enjoying the content, I just
| personally wouldn't call it "high quality."
|
| It was the same during the SEO boom in the early 2010s;
| the internet went from a place where novelty was a
| regular occurrence to one where you reflexively scroll
| past the first paragraph of every article because you
| know it doesn't have the information you're looking for.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Consider a supermarket. They will have aisles full of
| candy, sugared cereal, biscuits, chips and soda in the
| front. The lowest quality slop you can put in your mouth.
| They will also have huge freezers with low quality ready
| to eat meals.
|
| But in the back they have the highest quality and variety
| of meat and poultry you can find anywhere, the highest
| quality and variety of vegetables and dairy. That's why I
| go to the super market. I don't care about the slop in
| front because I'm not looking for it. I don't care that
| most shoppers have their cart full of toxic ultra
| processed junk, because I'm just looking for the stuff
| for me.
|
| It's exactly the same with YouTube, except that you never
| have to see the low quality stuff which doesn't interest
| you. If you only like good videos and subscribe to good
| channels, the algorithm will quickly start to only
| recommend high quality content. If it slips, there's a
| dislike button.
|
| You just have to make a minimal effort. The algorithm
| actually works very well. There's a lot of content which
| was never available anywhere before YouTube. And yes, the
| ability to get paid is necessary for many creators to
| make their videos, which they deserve. If you're making
| videos that help and entertain a large public, why
| shouldn't you get paid for the effort and talent?
| lurk2 wrote:
| > except that you never have to see the low quality stuff
| which doesn't interest you.
|
| This has not been my experience.
| swed420 wrote:
| > It's not even comparable, not by a long shot. There is
| an immense amount of the highest quality video content
| you can find on YouTube, and the trend has only
| accelerated in the past few years.
|
| Both of you need to define what you mean by quality or
| you're going to keep talking past each other.
|
| I agree with the person you responded to though: blind
| profit motive on platforms like youtube destroys quality
| and fills the firehose with brain melting content, even
| if it has professional lighting and is in 1080p.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Quality is in the eye of the beholder, but I'm not
| talking about video resolution or refresh rate. I'm
| talking about documentaries, educational, and
| instructional content foremost. But really it doesn't
| matter, because whatever your definition of high quality
| content is, you're going to find the best of that on
| YouTube and nowhere else.
| swed420 wrote:
| > you're going to find the best of that on YouTube and
| nowhere else.
|
| If the trend Jeff describes continues to worsen, I
| wouldn't be so sure of that.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| You left out one of the biggest providers of high (and low)
| quality VOD services: porn.
|
| My intuition is that they're only left alone because they
| very explicitly don't step on any content and delivery
| trusts' toes.
|
| I hadn't really thought about it until I did a crawl for a
| round of DMCA takedowns for a friend and was surprised by how
| many platforms apparently use the same few CMSes. It turns
| out, there are some fantastic, affordable options if you want
| to start an independent website and VOD service beyond the
| corporate fray.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Pixelfed
|
| I suspect a lot of these projects are being held back by bad
| branding. The first time I heard the term "fediverse," I
| assumed it was alluding to Facebook's Metaverse being a
| project of the CIA.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Branding and marketing are so important and engineer minded
| people spit on them and kick it to the back of the line
| then wonder why their project isn't popular.
| lurk2 wrote:
| Documentation, too. I know it's hard writing instructions
| with context you already have (think of the "Tell me how
| to make a peanut butter sandwich" demonstration), but too
| often I come across projects that I can't even figure out
| how to run. This used to be a complete roadblock if the
| software was old; now you can at least use LLMs to walk
| you through it.
|
| Any project that is based on network effects is doomed to
| failure if it can't get this right. I think about this
| kind of thing a lot (and roll my eyes) when I see people
| on Hacker News complaining about "non-technicals" while
| assuming they could learn the skills that they have over
| the course of a weekend.
| bsder wrote:
| > Is it even possible at this point given that YouTube garners
| so many eyeballs and is just so easy?
|
| The big problem is that someone will download your video and
| upload it to YouTube if you do not. Often while monetizing it
| until you stomp on them.
|
| The only things that will break YouTube hegemony (spelled that
| hegemoney originally ... talk about a typo) are either an anti-
| trust action or a successful copyright infringement lawsuit
| from someone other than a BigCorp.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| > The big problem is that someone will download your video
| and upload it to YouTube if you do not. Often while
| monetizing it until you stomp on them.
|
| Let's automate the stomping then. If people are bothered by
| this and it keeps happening, then that should create demand
| for someone who is able to scour YouTube and sue the
| appropriate parties/do the appropriate reporting.
|
| At some point, it will become enough of a problem for YouTube
| that they will change/have to hurt their business model that
| currently benefits from it.
|
| > The only things that will break YouTube hegemony (spelled
| that hegemoney originally ... talk about a typo) are either
| an anti-trust action or a successful copyright infringement
| lawsuit from someone other than a BigCorp.
|
| Really disappointed in lawyers of this age. I'm a layperson
| but it looks like they should have been _eating out_ in the
| age of AI and with all the copyright infringement that goes
| on (whether you agree with copyright infringement or not).
| Why are there not 100 suits against these AI companies right
| now? Probably because it 's too expensive and courts are
| already packed, but why let reality get in the way of a
| possibly really profitable venture?
|
| I'm certainly not a great proponent of IP/copyright and all
| the associated moral stances, but IMO the tech is useful
| _without_ that gray area -- having that stuff get properly
| legislated is only going to prompt retraining on safe
| /permissioned content, and maybe that's what SHOULD happen.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Let's automate the stomping then. If people are bothered
| by this and it keeps happening, then that should create
| demand for someone who is able to scour YouTube and sue the
| appropriate parties/do the appropriate reporting.
|
| But it's already automated. Where do you think those
| completely wrong DMCA claims that people complain once in a
| while about come from?
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Ah, but IMO not for smaller creators -- and at some
| point, if the DMCA claims are legitimate and not being
| heeded in a timely manner, more litigation aimed at
| YouTube should be started.
|
| This likely has bad effects for the internet as a whole
| (more efficient legal action can make those who abuse the
| system more powerful), but if it's something that needs
| to happen, then it should happen.
| nottorp wrote:
| How does Google's "AI" distinguish between small or large
| creators?
|
| Or some smaller platform that doesn't even have google's
| resources.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| I think we may be discussing different things. When I
| talk about the DMCA machine, I mean the cottage industry
| of firms that make it their job to check the internet for
| infringement and file the appropriate claims. I'm not
| referring to Google's AI.
|
| My point was that those firms currently cater to large
| creators/the cost only makes sense for firms with lots of
| IP. BUT, if it was cheaper/more accessible (and
| profitable to litigate in this area) then more small
| creators can do it, and the problem becomes more acute
| for large content hosters.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yes but as i said two posts ago, those firms are not
| famous for their competence, they mostly carpet bomb
| everything.
| jaredhallen wrote:
| Unfortunately, my belief is that no matter how many content
| creators jump ship, there will be and endless supply of
| replacements. The real salt in the wound is that attrition will
| select for the content that the platforms desire.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| That's fine IMO! Content creation is a really top heavy thing
| anyway -- it seems like anyone can just be replaced with
| anyone else, but if that were true we wouldn't have such
| outsized discrepancies between successful creators who are
| able to monetize and those that can't.
|
| It's a power law distribution. In fact, companies know this
| so they do sneaky stuff to keep high value creators on their
| platforms, have heard some stories (try to find some stuff on
| the Twitch vs Mixer saga).
| tumult wrote:
| > Quick appeal grant of course, because it was more about
| sending a message and making people who want to talk about that
| kind of software think twice before the next video.
|
| That was talking about a _previous_ video, not the one that is
| the main subject of this blog post. For the video that is the
| subject of this blog post, which is just about running your own
| software to watch media you legally own, the appeal was
| apparently denied.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > I really wonder where the internet goes in this age.
|
| Self-hosting? (Whoops!)
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| If only, but we know that the vast majority of people don't
| want to self-host, as the majority of people don't even want
| to make their own coffee.
|
| In the right form (on devices they already own, with internet
| connections they already own, etc) self-hosting could work
| though...
| keyle wrote:
| Embrace, extend, and extingui...
| ochronus wrote:
| It's very harmful for youtube's business model indeed
| kelvinjps wrote:
| I just watched this video yesterday while setting up kodi for
| myself
| davedx wrote:
| There was a recent drama in the drum'n'bass community because
| someone kept claiming they owned the rights to music that wasn't
| actually theres, resulting in some classic dnb music from the 90s
| by Peshay repeatedly being taken down from YouTube. It's utterly
| ridiculous how trivially bad actors can wreak havoc like this.
| grishka wrote:
| The problem is that for some strange reason there is no
| punishment for malicious/false copyright claims.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Because it's less impactful for google to mindlessly accept
| potentially fraudulent claims then it is to risk ignoring a
| legitimate one.
| noirscape wrote:
| There is, technically. It's perjury to file a false DMCA
| claim.
|
| In _practice_ nobody gets pursued for it for several reasons:
|
| * Filing a counterclaim means handing the DMCA filer all your
| personal information (note that the entity filing the DMCA
| can and often has the ability to get this info redacted on
| their side of the equation unless you file a counterclaim),
| so a lot of people simply don't do it because you're handing
| your personal info to a possibly malicious party.
|
| * The platform provider has no reason to pursue false claims,
| since the pushback against a malicious DMCA claim isn't large
| enough for them to meaningfully lose users.
|
| * Legal fights in the US get expensive very quickly and the
| reward for winning isn't exactly high enough for a lawyer to
| give you the nice deals.
|
| Finally, most of the problems with the DMCA are just baked
| into how the law is written. The entire law basically
| incentivizes providers to acquiesce to anyone who _might_ be
| a copyright holder, because if they stick their neck out,
| they risk it blowing up and losing their safe harbor
| protections (which makes them liable for other copyright
| infringement.)
| Draiken wrote:
| Laws that are not enforced are merely suggestions.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| There are literally dozens of successful legal actions
| against people illicitly making copyright claims on
| YouTube.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Yes there is.
|
| https://www.simkins.com/news/court-acts-to-prevent-
| malicious...
| nubinetwork wrote:
| This also happens in the retro gaming scene... some Russian
| wannabe rapper keeps saying he owns the final fantasy music.
| gloosx wrote:
| Since Youtube started to show me funny "TURN OFF THE
| ADBLOCKER!!!" notices, I just started slamming links in yt-dlp
| and watching them offline. No drawbacks so far.
| kassner wrote:
| It will become harder to ignore the possible retaliation Google
| can make against your/your family's Google accounts.
| gloosx wrote:
| Would not be an easy one to swallow but I don't have a false
| expectation that these accounts are mine in any sense. They
| are Google's, and I'm just renting it paying with my personal
| data to feed the AdSense machine. Any day they might decide
| to do what they want with it, there might be a bug or a
| technical issue which will lock me out, and I doubt I would
| have a single way to influence it, the customer care or user
| support is clearly not a priority for this company and is
| virtually non-existent.
| yard2010 wrote:
| If you care enough, back up your data - they have to hand
| it to you.
| kassner wrote:
| I can control my own digital life, but I don't have the
| resources to do the same for every family member. An old
| age family member owning Android devices for a decade is
| virtually impossible to untangle from Google.
| bendigedig wrote:
| I installed e/os on my phone the other day and haven't
| encountered any serious drawbacks yet.
| account42 wrote:
| I don't have any illusion that this is not how things are
| but I don't think that should mean that we accept this. We
| can very well demand that if google wants to take over that
| much of people's lives that they should not get to do
| whatever they want. This becomes even more important when
| you have less and less options for realistic alternatives.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Friendly reminder to enable periodic personal data extraction
| from google (Google Takeout) and back it up so you don't lose
| your digital life in the rare case of being blocked.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Might be better to just de-Google yourself. If google is
| isolated to just one feature, then it's not a big deal.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| This is why I have de-Googled my family - at least for the
| most part. The hardest part was Gmail. Hundreds of services
| and accounts relied on that email address for 2FA. If I were
| to be blocked from it, I would be screwed. So I bought a
| domain and spent the next couple of years migrating
| everything to it. Pain in the ass, but now no one can ever
| ban me from my own email address. Worst case scenario my
| provider blocks me and I switch to another one in minutes.
| Plus I can do cool things like catch-all, so when I sign up
| for services I use "verizon@[mydomain.com]". I have caught
| _many_ cheeky fuckers selling my email address to spammers.
|
| Outside of this there is very little harm in my Google
| account being banned now. I'd lose some YouTube watch history
| and a few locations on Google Maps.
| sitkack wrote:
| takeout.google.com backs up watch history, google maps
| locations (probably)
| Bender wrote:
| Just a suggestion but make the canary/alias less obvious.
| Companies caught onto this and are treating aliases with
| their name in it as "fraud" which is of course a load of
| crap. That is how tractor supply stole a gift card from me
| so I have turned many of their customers away from them and
| they have lost exponentially more than they stole from me.
| So now I use realistic looking aliases and just have my own
| lookup table that describes which one is for which company.
| Xelbair wrote:
| Then i'll just stop using their services.
|
| And if they're too big for people to not use them, then they
| need to be split up as they've attained (virtual) monopoly
| over specific market.
| teeray wrote:
| It really would be nice if they weren't allowed to create the
| equivalent of the digitally unbanked by unilaterally wielding
| this power without any kind of due process.
| gorbachev wrote:
| I've stopped logging into YouTube for this reason. Next step
| is to install a "YouTube browser" and configure my VPN to
| make sure all connections from that browser go over the VPN
| rather than my ISP's direct connection.
| layer8 wrote:
| YouTube is the only thing I use a Google account for. If they
| "retaliate", I can probably just open another one.
| npodbielski wrote:
| I am sorry but what kind od argument is this? Do what Google
| told you to do or it will retaliate? Are you talking about
| some dystopian overlord?
|
| Your statement alone should force your to rethink what you
| are doing and change your online behaviour.
| kassner wrote:
| Haven't you seen people getting their Google accounts
| banned out of the blue? Haven't you seen the great lengths
| that YouTube goes (in terms of content control) to please
| its advertisers? Haven't you seen the cat-and-mouse fight
| between YouTube and yt-dlp (and similars)?
|
| There is no "if", but only a "when" for all of those things
| will be connected.
|
| It's naive to think you can make YouTube not get paid
| without them trying to stop you. And it's quite likely this
| is already against their ToS.
| timeon wrote:
| Off-topic but I've found that best way to open YT is without
| account. No recommendations on frontpage. Just you and the
| search bar.
| ezconnect wrote:
| Mine is now being limited to 3 videos and a warning we will
| block you next time. They also removed the wide view button. I
| just copy the link and watch it on Firefox nightly not logged
| in to youtube with adblock and youtube does not complain. A bit
| of a hassle but I can still watch.
| reddalo wrote:
| Are you using uBlock Origin on Firefox?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You don't have videos stop playing after exactly 1 minute ?
| Bender wrote:
| I had that for a while but it turned out to be due to
| having both uBlock and NoScript on that machine. Now it's
| good for me.
| ndand wrote:
| There is a way to watch the video anyways, on YT with just 2
| clicks.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome seems to be working really well
| for me. Check out your filter lists and maybe tick a few boxes.
| kwar13 wrote:
| Wow. Jeff is one of my favorite creators. Google has come a long
| way from "don't be evil"...
| znpy wrote:
| By this time we should assume Google's motto is "do be evil"
| righthand wrote:
| I think it's more "Don't be evil[ be two-faced]".
|
| Being evil exclusively would actually be detrimental to their
| company. If you're two-faced, you can say "Yes I work for
| Google and help harvest data for their monopoly to the
| detriment of humanity, but I'm a really nice person outside
| of work otherwise."
| thisislife2 wrote:
| That's not meant to apply to Google, it's actually a warning
| for its users - "Do No Evil (we are watching you)".
| Lio wrote:
| I always assumed it was still a Google moto but they just
| split it into two sentences that describe what to do in any
| circumstance.
|
| "Don't! Be evil." :P
| kwar13 wrote:
| And how is teaching installing a self hosted service "evil"?
| charcircuit wrote:
| This title is false and clickbait.
|
| From the article the explaination for what part of the dangerous
| or harmful content rule being broken is about instructing people
| how to pirate content.
|
| >Dangerous or Harmful Content >Content that describes how to get
| unauthorized or free access to audio or audiovisual content,
| software, subscription services, or games that usually require
| payment isn't allowed on YouTube.
|
| In the article and video he aludes to dumping DVDs and Blurays.
|
| >I've purchased physical media (CDs, DVDs, and more recently,
| Blu-Rays)
|
| It is illegal to break the encryption of DVDs and BluRays.
| Playing copies of DVDs and Blurays via Kodi will always be
| illegal to do since there is no way to get a unencrypted version.
| This whole video is about how you can play illegal acquired
| content, but technically it doesn't tell you how to illegally
| acquire it.
| kassner wrote:
| I don't downvote, but:
|
| > It is illegal to break the encryption of DVDs and BluRays
|
| Laws have limited jurisdiction. There are quite a few
| jurisdictions that allow ripping for personal use/not-for-
| profit.
| charcircuit wrote:
| In this thread we are talking about a US based youtuber
| uploading to a US based video sharing service. Those
| jurisdictions where it may be legal are out of scope.
| kassner wrote:
| If this issue was related to infringing US law,
| specifically, region-locking out of the US would have been
| a fair and sane approach. YouTube has the tools for it.
| charcircuit wrote:
| These community guidelines are rules made by YouTube and
| apply globally.
| kuschku wrote:
| DVD encryption is not considered DRM or encryption in the EU,
| as it is too weak to provide any meaningful protections.
|
| If ripping DVDs is not allowed in the US, then the video should
| be region locked (just like Pride Month content us blocked in
| certain arabic countries), but not removed.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > DVD encryption is not considered DRM or encryption in the
| EU, as it is too weak to provide any meaningful protections.
|
| Yes it is.
|
| Where on earth did you get that idea from? Heck, even
| YouTube's rolling cypher has been found to be sufficient
| protection to quality from anti-circumvention provisions, and
| no actual encryption was used there.
| kuschku wrote:
| > Where on earth did you get that idea from?
|
| Well, countless court rulings in Europe?
|
| e.g., https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/05/finland-
| court-br...
|
| That's why you can play or a rip a DVD with common open-
| source software (e.g., VLC) without requiring any special
| piracy tools.
|
| See https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html for
| details.
|
| > libdvdcss is a library that can find and guess keys from
| a DVD in order to decrypt it.
|
| > This method is authorized by a French law decision CE 10e
| et 9e soussect., 16 juillet 2008, ndeg 301843 on
| interoperability.
|
| > https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/ceta/id/CETATEXT0000192163
| 15/
|
| Btw, that - as well as software patents - is why the
| official binaries of VLC and ffmpeg are illegal to have or
| use in the US.
| curiousgeorgio wrote:
| > The video doesn't promote or highlight any tools used to
| circumvent copyright, get around paid subscriptions, or reproduce
| any content illegally
|
| Here's my theory: they aren't concerned with the movies and TV
| shows shown in the video (which are presumably obtained legally
| as Jeff mentioned), but rather the brief use of what looks like
| [plugin.video.youtube]
| (https://github.com/anxdpanic/plugin.video.youtube) at about
| 12:10 in the video.
|
| The plugin is an alternate frontend to YouTube, and as such,
| allows bypassing ads. He never mentions the plugin explicitly in
| the video, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is; he mentions
| YouTube and is clearly watching one of his own YT videos in Kodi.
| Just today, I noticed YouTube getting more aggressive in its
| anti-ad-blocking measures. They got really strict a year or two
| ago, backed off a bit, and seem to have ramped up again. My guess
| is that someone in management needs to show better numbers and is
| looking for ways to punish anyone even hinting at accessing
| YouTube without the obligatory dose of advertising.
| lugao wrote:
| That seems exactly why it happened.
|
| Why should a platform allow sharing ways of violating its terms
| of service? Sure, any tech savvy person will be able to figure
| it out, but business are businesses.
|
| Should supermarkets allow you to ressel coupons in their
| premises for a profit? Because he's 1. monetizing the video, 2.
| being sponsored by a third party in the video and 3. showing
| ways of circumventing the platform TOS.
|
| He could remove that frame where he shows the yt plugin, but
| he's using this to farm engagement.
| w14 wrote:
| This is the problem I had with all the content removal around
| Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to
| see removed.
|
| From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got
| the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the
| mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted
| video serving software."
|
| This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content.
|
| Here in the UK, Ofcom held their second day-long livestreamed
| seminar on their implementation of the Online Safety Act on
| Wednesday this week. This time it was about keeping children
| "safe", including with "effective age assurance".
|
| Ofcom refused to give any specific guidance on how platforms
| should implement the regime they want to see. They said this is
| on the basis that if they give specific advice, it may restrict
| their ability to take enforcement action later.
|
| So it's up to the platforms to interpret the extremely complex
| and vaguely defined requirements and impose a regime which Ofcom
| will find acceptable. It was clear from the Q&A that some pretty
| big platforms are really struggling with it.
|
| The inevitable outcome is that platforms will err on the side of
| caution, bearing in mind the potential penalties.
|
| Many will say, this is good, children should be protected. The
| second part of that is true. But the way this is being done won't
| protect children in my opinion. It will result in many more topic
| areas falling below the censorship threshold.
| KurSix wrote:
| Once you normalize vague enforcement around "problematic"
| content, the net just keeps widening
| slg wrote:
| These slippery slope comments always seem a little naive to
| me because they imply there is some pure way to handle
| moderation. In practice, you have to be an extremist to think
| literally no content should be removed from Youtube with the
| most obvious example of something nearly everyone wants to be
| removed being CSAM.
|
| Maybe you would respond by saying that is illegal and only
| illegal content should be taken down. According to which
| laws? Hate speech is illegal some places, should that be
| removed? What about blasphemy?
|
| Maybe you would suggest to closely follow the local law of
| the user. Does that mean the site needs to allow piracy in
| places that is legal? And who decides whether the video
| actually violates the law? Does the content have to stay up
| until a court makes the final decision? Or what about content
| that is legal locally, but might be under some restrictions.
| Should Youtube be obligated to host hardcore porn or gory
| violence?
|
| There needs to be a line somewhere for normal people to
| actually want to use the site. I'm not going to claim to have
| the perfect answer on where that line should be, but there is
| always going to be an ongoing debate on its exact placement.
| jaapz wrote:
| > In practice, you have to be an extremist to think
| literally no content should be removed from Youtube with
| the most obvious example of something nearly everyone wants
| to be removed being CSAM.
|
| This is not what is being said in the comments you are
| replying to, you are taking it to the other extreme
| yourself
| slg wrote:
| Yes, I intentionally included an extreme example to
| highlight my point. However, that was not the only
| example included. Would you like to respond to my whole
| comment or just that single cherry-picked sentence?
| timewizard wrote:
| > a line somewhere for normal people to actually want to
| use the site.
|
| Youtube is a private company. They can make whatever
| additional moderation decisions beyond the law they want.
| Which are in no way based on what you want but are entirely
| based on what advertisers want. This control effectively
| answers every question you raised.
|
| In any case, Youtube is the size where it can grapple with
| all these questions you just posed, but anyone else hoping
| to challenge their monopoly or otherwise host a small
| collection of videos, perhaps for a specific purpose or
| community, now effectively cannot.
|
| > but there is always going to be an ongoing debate on its
| exact placement.
|
| Who exactly started _this_ debate? Was there some recent
| outcry from the citizens that their lives have become
| unlivable due to the lax content restrictions on social
| media? Really?
| slg wrote:
| >Youtube is a private company. They can make whatever
| additional moderation decisions beyond the law they want.
| Which are in no way based on what you want but are
| entirely based on what advertisers want. This control
| effectively answers every question you raised.
|
| This is effectively the same thing. Advertisers care
| because the users have different moral judgments on
| different types of content which impacts their opinion of
| the companies that advertise on that content. If users
| were happy seeing Ford ads on porn, Ford would likely be
| fine advertising on Pornhub.
|
| >In any case, Youtube is the size where it can grapple
| with all these questions you just posed, but anyone else
| hoping to challenge their monopoly or otherwise host a
| small collection of videos, perhaps for a specific
| purpose or community, now effectively cannot.
|
| I'm not sure where this logic leads. Are you suggesting
| that a company needs to reach a certain size before they
| can be expected to moderate their content?
|
| >Who exactly started _this_ debate? Was there some recent
| outcry from the citizens that their lives have become
| unlivable due to the lax content restrictions on social
| media? Really?
|
| Isn't this question answered by your first paragraph?
| Users and advertisers started this debate. There was
| definitely public pressure for Google to take down Covid
| discussions that mainstream sources believed were
| misleading. Was there consensus? Maybe not, but there was
| definitely a public debate about it.
| friendzis wrote:
| > Advertisers care because the users have different moral
| judgments on different types of content which <...> If
| users were happy seeing Ford ads on porn, Ford would
| likely be fine advertising on Pornhub.
|
| Was this hypothesis ever actually even remotely tested or
| is it advertising agencies deciding what content is no
| bueno?
| shakna wrote:
| Business accounts that list porn sites tend to get banned
| by the processor. There are very few payment processors
| willing to work with the major porn networks.
|
| In 2022, both Visa and Mastercard banned Pornhub, leading
| to major shakeups as the network tried to get off the
| blacklist.
|
| I don't see most advertisers being happy with spend on
| such a volatile target - even before the agency debates
| if it will affect brand image.
| slg wrote:
| We don't need to hypothesize. If you pay attention to
| this space, you will see it play out in real time in the
| news. Over the last several years, there have been
| multiple public pressure campaigns against the
| advertisers on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter.
| timewizard wrote:
| > you will see it play out in real time in the news.
|
| Which is always fair and accurate and is in no way under
| similar pressure from advertisers. So this is an awesome
| yardstick to use.
| timewizard wrote:
| > Users and advertisers started this debate.
|
| I submitted that users have no power and advertisers have
| it all. So, no, not "users and advertisers," _JUST_
| advertisers.
|
| > There was definitely public pressure for Google to take
| down Covid discussions
|
| There's public pressure for Google to take down
| information about abortion. So what's the difference?
| When does "public pressure" reach a point where they act?
| And is the pressure truly public and organic? Or fake and
| astroturfed?
|
| You ignore more than you answer.
| lucianbr wrote:
| > According to which laws?
|
| This part at least seems to be no problem. Many platforms
| already follow and enforce different rules in different
| jurisdictions.
|
| > And who decides whether the video actually violates the
| law?
|
| There are myriad laws around the world, and somehow we
| manage to decide what's legal and follow the law, at least
| most of the time. This argument is absurd on the face of
| it: "we can't have a law because laws are too difficult to
| follow and enforce".
|
| People and corporations make their best attempt to follow
| the law, regulators and institutions give guidance, courts
| adjudicate disputes. Do you live somewhere where it works
| differently?
| slg wrote:
| >There are myriad laws around the world, and somehow we
| manage to decide what's legal and follow the law, at
| least most of the time. This argument is absurd on the
| face of it: "we can't have a law because laws are too
| difficult to follow and enforce".
|
| Yeah, I agree that argument is absurd. I will also note I
| never made that argument, so I'm not sure where you got
| it.
|
| You are also missing half my comment. "Just follow the
| law" is not a complete answer to the questions raised.
| Plenty of companies will still want to remove content
| that doesn't violate the law in certain jurisdictions
| such as pirated content. Should Youtube be obligated to
| host that content? What if the actual right's holder
| threatens to stop advertising unless Google removes that
| content regardless of local law?
|
| I just don't know why people pretend this is a simple
| issue with a single straightforward solution.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > In practice, you have to be an extremist to think
| literally no content should be removed from Youtube with
| the most obvious example of something nearly everyone wants
| to be removed being CSAM.
|
| What is extremist about this opinion? (EDIT: with the
| exception that we indeed remove CSAM and similar things
| "everybody" wants removed and will (importantly!) otherwise
| get YouTube into _deep_ trouble, but (basically) nothing
| else)
| nkrisc wrote:
| Being in favor of CSAM on YouTube would definitely be an
| extremist opinion in nearly all societies and cultures, I
| believe.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| The problem is the nature of YouTube, which is a platform
| with the main purpose of generating revenue based on
| advertisement while minimizing their own operational risk.
| YouTube does not care one bit about whether the content
| they show is informative, harmful or entertaining, they
| care about maximizing the amount of ad impressions while
| avoiding legal repercussions (only if the legal
| repercussions carry a significant cost, of course). This
| naturally leads them to err on the side of caution and
| implement draconian automated censorship controls. If the
| machine kills off a niche content creator then it means
| nothing in the grand scheme of things for YouTube. YouTube
| is a lawnmower, and you cannot reason with a lawnmower.
|
| This is very different from past "platforms" such as niche
| phpBB boards on the old internet, book publishers or even
| editorial sections in newspapers who at least to some
| extent are driven by a genuine interest in the content
| itself even though they are, or were, also financed by
| advertisements.
|
| The main problem here is that we allow commercial companies
| to provide generic and universal "free" content platforms
| which end up being the de facto gatekeepers if you have
| something to say. These platforms can only exist because
| the companies are allowed to intersperse generic user-
| generated content with advertisements. In my opinion, it is
| this advertisement-financed platform model that is the core
| problem here, and automated censorship is only one of the
| many negative consequences. Other problems are that it
| leads to winner-takes-it-all monopolies and that it
| strongly incentivizes ad companies such as Google to
| collect as much information about people as possible.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| I mean, this is just capitalism.
|
| And while I loved old forums, they were constantly
| fighting with being underfunded, there was infighting
| between the "owners", and each one worked differently,
| making them a bunch of disconnected little silos.
|
| Especially compared to Youtube, there's just NO WAY IN
| HELL any non-exploitative company could ever finance a
| project of even remotely similar scope. There are
| already, right know, alternatives for all the big
| monopolists. Most people aren't using them because they
| don't like the trade offs.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| > I mean, this is just capitalism.
|
| Yes, capitalist forces are incredibly strong, which is
| why we need regulation to avoid negative externalities to
| spiral out of control. Regulation that is intended to
| protect consumers often end up being moats for the
| monopolies to cement their monopolies even further,
| because the regulation is too heavy and expensive to
| comply with for the smaller competitors.
|
| I think that child protection laws is an example of such
| regulation because it will impose a huge legal and
| financial risk on small sites and forums which were never
| part of the problem.
|
| This is why I would rather go for regulation which more
| or less outlaws or severely limits the viability of the
| problematic business model. This could also backfire of
| course, but I believe it will be better even though many
| will find it inconvenient if YouTube disappeared.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| " ... bit about whether the content they show is
| informative, harmful or entertaining, they care about
| maximizing the amount of ad impressions while avoiding
| legal repercussions"
|
| Close, but no cigar. If you have a sector with giant add
| spend, you grant them full control, regardless of the add
| impressions. People talk a lott about 'regulatory
| capture', but 'media capture' is just as real.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There has never ever ever been a time where you could
| disseminate your idea to more than about a hundred people
| for free.
|
| The vast vast vast majority of the good ideas
| disseminated to the public in human history required
| someone to go pay a printing press operator to print them
| hundreds and hundreds of pamphlets.
|
| This is literally how the American revolution happened.
| Not by requiring existing newspapers to carry opinions
| they didn't have (though some newspapers were literally
| owned by friends or people sympathetic to revolution and
| carried the message).
|
| It's perfectly fine that you have to pay someone to carry
| your message or print pamphlets. That was always the
| intent of free markets and free speech together. It
| wasn't that anyone would be forced to carry your message
| (which is why the first amendment is extremely clear that
| you also have a right of _association_ and can therefore
| not be forced or compelled to carry speech you do not
| want to), it was always that someone surely would be
| willing to make a quick buck to cater to your speech, no
| matter how fringe.
|
| And it's entirely correct. Nobody at any point was
| unaware that Sweden had a different approach, and there
| was lively debate about it from day one, primarily about
| how "just trust people to stay home when they are sick"
| literally doesn't work here in the US.
|
| It doesn't matter that Youtube took some of that
| discussion down, because it happened everywhere else too.
| Youtube is NOT your property.
|
| Youtube cannot prevent you from talking about anything to
| your family.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > Should Youtube be obligated to host hardcore porn or gory
| violence?
|
| YouTube can decide to host, or not host, whatever it wants.
| The challenge is with unclear terms of use. They have a
| habit of taking down videos with little or no reason given,
| and it isn't clear what terms the video content would have
| violated.
|
| Of course they can draw their own lines, but they should be
| clear and consistent.
| slg wrote:
| >but they should be clear and consistent.
|
| As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said in
| Jacobellis v. Ohio [1], "I shall not today attempt
| further to define the kinds of material I understand to
| be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core
| pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in
| intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and
| the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
|
| I'm not sure how we can expect "clear and consistent"
| rulings from Youtube when even our law can be vague and
| inconsistent.
|
| [1] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The first amendment gives them the right to literally be
| capricious and malevolent in their hosting choices.
|
| Your right is that, if you don't like it, you cannot be
| forced to use it.
|
| And that is true. Nebula exists because all those people
| were getting fucked by Google's capricious actions.
| Armchair historian made his own platform because Google
| wont pay you ad dollars if you show actual historical war
| footage, because god forbid you learn history.
|
| Youtube is not a platform where anyone can say anything.
| There's no such thing as a "digital town square" that is
| owned by a private company. Even real, actual, public
| squares have some limits on speech nowadays.
|
| If you want some sort of digital public square where
| anyone could host literally any video content, it will be
| funded by taxes and run by the government.
|
| I would however hold strong support for reforms that
| limit the shenanigans and nonsense in Terms of Use. You
| shouldn't be able to put utterly unenforceable or even
| illegal things into a Terms of Use without penalty.
| Contract law has a principle of separability that means
| Google can put literally as many scary, illegal,
| unenforceable claims into it's contracts and a court
| would still enforce it, just without those specific
| parts. That gives Google a huge incentive to put even
| impossible things into their ToU hoping you will buy that
| they could enforce it, even when they know they cannot.
|
| I also think it should not be possible to make a contract
| that says "we can update this at any time and change
| everything about it without your consent" just entirely.
| All contract revisions should require mutual consent.
|
| IIUC, ToU have also just not been tested in court very
| well. So we should stop beating around the bush and just
| make a real legal framework for them.
| thrance wrote:
| No it doesn't. I reject your slippery slope fallacy.
|
| The line must always be drawn somewhere, should YouTube allow
| neonazi content because any censorship leads to more
| censorship? Of course not.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| It is a logical fallacy if used as part of an absolute
| claim, but it doesn't make it always wrong when used in
| general statements. Some slopes are slippery, we can look
| at history to see this. We can't claim all slopes are
| slippery, this doesn't mean that no slope is slippery.
|
| People aren't starting with axioms and then defining what
| absolutely will happen. People are discussing trends that
| appear to happen generally, but there will be exceptions.
| Going to college leads to a better job is a slippery slope,
| it doesn't always happen, but going to college is still
| good advice (and even better advice if one is willing to go
| into detail about the degree, the costs, the plans at
| college, and so on).
|
| If we want to reject something as a logical fallacy, we
| need to consider if the other person's argument hinges on
| something always happening as some sort of logical proof,
| or if it hinges on it happening only at or above some
| threshold. If the first case, pointing out a slippery slope
| argument is a valid counter, but in the second case, it
| isn't and instead leads to two people talking past each
| other (one arguing X happens often enough to be a concern,
| the other arguing that X doesn't always happen, both
| statements that could be true).
| thrance wrote:
| But that's the thing, when have hate speech laws led to
| repressive censorship, ever? It is a slippery slope,
| since there's no example to point to.
|
| I'll link another comment of mine which expands on the
| subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200533
| _fat_santa wrote:
| At least in the context of Covid, the real issue I saw was
| not the taking down of content, it was that a very small
| group of people dictated what content should be taken down.
|
| Generally speaking in the world of "science" (any field)
| there will always be a level of disagreement. One scientist
| will come up with one theory, the other will come up with
| another theory, they will endlessly debate until the topic is
| "settled" and then the whole loop repeats if another
| scientist thinks that the settled topic is not actually
| settled. Overall I would say this is a very healthy dynamic
| and keeps society moving forward.
|
| What people go so mad about during Covid was not the content
| being taken down, it's that you had had various scientific
| organizations around the world straight up break what I
| described in the previous paragraph. During covid you had one
| group make endless rushed decisions and then when other
| scientific groups challenged those findings, the response was
| not what I outlined above but rather an authoritarian "I am
| the science" response.
|
| This "main group" (NIH, CDC, etc) painted all those
| challenges as conspiracy theories but if you actually
| listened to what the challenges were, they were often times
| quite reasonable. And the fact that they were reasonable
| arguments highlighted the insane hubris of the "main group"
| and ultimately led them to loose virtual all credibility by
| the time Covid wrapped up.
| ajuc wrote:
| The debate shouldn't be "to remove or not". The debate should
| be "who should decide what to remove".
|
| We've had media laws for decades. Internet is underregulated to
| a crazy degree, so the people who make the decisions are
| unaccountable and even unknowable. It would be much saner if
| the people deciding this were judges and elected officials.
|
| The way we allow a few oligarchs to decide what information 99%
| of the world consume for hours every day, and just let them do
| whatever they want, and don't even tax them in practice - it's
| just absurd.
|
| Free speech is for people not for corporations. And it's
| certainly not for corporations to enforce.
|
| People defending hacker ethos and free internet pretend
| internet is still like in 90s. If you do have your own self-
| hosted blog - sure - be a free hacker.
|
| But if you have million customers - you're not a free-spirited
| hacker. You're a media mogul abusing unregulated loophole.
| States should act accordingly.
| Timshel wrote:
| I think your position is quite simplistic and completely ignore
| all the issues around YT pushing all kind of
| scam/misinformation which has tremendous impact (EX:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10226045/ or https://w
| ww.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/12/youtube-i...)
|
| Could try to separate the pure hosting part of YT from the
| recommendation but since the home page heavily mix
| recommendations and the subscription page see almost no usage
| (Technology connection mention 4% traffic), I'm not sure if it
| makes sense to still consider YT as simple hosting.
|
| And last point I'll make, I believe the fact that their
| moderation is such a crap shot job is mainly a reflection that
| it's not a priority.
| Lutger wrote:
| I don't see how one necessarily leads to the other. There's
| obviously already filtering going on in youtube, even before
| covid, on illegal content and also on legal content that is
| against the policy (adult content for example).
|
| How is Covid desinfo during the pandemic suddenly a slippery
| slope for anti-competitive measures, while all the other
| moderation measures aren't? Whats so special about anti covid
| desinfo rules?
|
| I think we really need a better argument than 'making any rule
| leads to making bad rules, so we better have no rules'.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Whats so special about anti covid desinfo rules?
|
| - The magnitude of content involved.
|
| - The fact that there exists a significant part of the
| society which is vocal about not endorsing _these particular_
| deletions.
|
| - The fact that many people became aware of the moderation
| ("censorship") that YouTube does and its power.
|
| - The fact that these COVID information videos (despite being
| perhaps wrong) formed important patterns of opinions, i.e.
| some opinions considered "extremist" or "wrong" were
| suppressed.
| shakna wrote:
| We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing
| process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it safely
| is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb making
| materials is.
|
| Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to
| get people killed, especially with a proponent of it
| leading the US health service.
|
| Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do
| not want on your platform.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Covid disinformation got people killed.
|
| If they trust bad medical advice on YouTube and die, it's
| their problem.
| thrance wrote:
| No, it's everyone's. Herd immunity can only be achieved
| if a sufficiently large part of the population is
| vaccinated. Also, and I know basic empathy is a foreign
| concept nowadays, but what if I wished for my fellow to
| not die of a preventable disease because a grifter sold
| them on an insane idea?
| saint_yossarian wrote:
| > Herd immunity can only be achieved if a sufficiently
| large part of the population is vaccinated.
|
| ...or getting infected, of course.
| shakna wrote:
| Unfortunately, thus far, Covid19 has been through too
| many rapid changes for natural immunity to be effective.
| [0] The earlier forms allowed for it, but the evolution
| of the virus has outstripped most natural defences.
|
| [0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PII
| S0140-6...
| ekianjo wrote:
| But somehow the vaccines catch up on the strains before
| they come out?
| shakna wrote:
| They attack different things in the virus. Often multiple
| things at once. Which really should not be surprising.
| Izkata wrote:
| You got it backwards: the vaccines specifically targeted
| only the spike protein, while natural infection created
| different antibodies against all parts of the virus.
| zanfr wrote:
| sadly getting infected just means the virus will nuke
| your immune system (not to mention your endothelium)
| brigandish wrote:
| Herd immunity is not a direct goal of vaccination,
| protection of the individual being vaccinated is. If
| someone needs protection, then they should get
| vaccinated!
| ekianjo wrote:
| Then why did we ask small kids to be vaccinated for COVID
| when they had no serious risk of anything? Rhetorical
| question, of course.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Then why did we ask small kids to be vaccinated for
| COVID when they had no serious risk of anything?
|
| Think of the children ... :-)
| protonbob wrote:
| Even more, why did we REQUIRE them to be vaccinated for
| COVID.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I am not sure about America but in India, I was a child
| during covid, 7th grade - 8th grade and i didn't have a
| vaccine but my school students just one grade above us
| were called in school and they were asked for vaccine.
|
| Though, to be fair, my whole family caught a "virus"
| during 2nd phase except my father but we didn't go to
| hospital and just bed rest for 2-3 days. My family really
| were skeptical of vaccine but personally I don't mind
| vaccines and would prefer it.
| zanfr wrote:
| there is no long term herd immunity with coronaviruses;
| which is why they are often use in disaster prevention
| scenarios...
|
| what you call "herd immunity" is merely letting people
| die and then go "we have herd immunity" as part of your
| survivor bias
|
| only solution that works most of the time, regardless of
| pathogen (including covid): air filtration (respirators
| and/or whole room)
| xorcist wrote:
| There absolutely is. You just think the word immunity
| means something else.
|
| After vaccination or a passed infection the immune
| response is there. When a sufficient immune resopnse from
| a large enough portion if the population is enough to
| lower the critical cases below some threshold, we call
| that type of immunity herd immunity.
|
| It's not binary, but a useful concept nonetheless, and
| one that some people devote their professional lives to.
| It can be observed every flu season.
| peterclary wrote:
| Even if you don't care about those people, what about the
| people who would be affected by them? A would-be bomb-
| maker might only blow themselves up, or they may kill
| many in a crowd. Somebody walking around with a deadly
| pathogen infects and kills others. Children die because
| their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense. Individual
| freedom ends at the point at which it causes real harm to
| other people.
|
| Also, you know who tends to be most in favour of "let
| stupid people face the consequences of their poor
| choices"? Those who want to profit from those people and
| their choices.
| logifail wrote:
| > Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax
| nonsense
|
| Do we know how many otherwise healthy children caught
| Covid and died from it?
|
| My impression from the official figures is that in most
| countries the number is vanishingly small if not zero.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Well, it's CERTAINLY not ZERO... I recall seeing numerous
| articles about overweight children dying of it, for
| example
|
| Remember that even polio only put like 1% of its victims
| into an iron lung
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with GP, but I would
| imagine they would argue that an overweight kid is not
| "otherwise healthy children."
| kube-system wrote:
| And I would argue that lives have value even when people
| have preexisting medical conditions.
| freedomben wrote:
| I certainly don't disagree with that, and I would imagine
| there aren't many people who would, but it is not in any
| way an argument against how many otherwise healthy
| children died of covid.
|
| If you want to make an argument that an overweight child
| should still be considered otherwise healthy, that would
| be a welcome and relevant argument, and also an
| interesting one.
| kube-system wrote:
| I am saying that narrowing the discussion to "otherwise
| healthy children" is a reductive to a silly degree. The
| point is to protect all children, many of which are _not_
| otherwise healthy, or for that matter, _may become
| unhealthy_ at some point.
| logifail wrote:
| > The point is to protect all children
|
| You'd close schools to protect a minority of children
| with comorbidities from a virus which doesn't threaten
| the vast majority of children, knowing that school
| closures will definitely damage _all_ children?
|
| Umm.
| kube-system wrote:
| Nobody suggested anything of that sort in this entire
| thread.
| int_19h wrote:
| Is it really true about "vast majority"? In US, at least,
| it seems that the number of children with comorbidities
| such as obesity would actually be pretty high. You could
| argue that it's still a minority so long as it's under
| 50%, but I think that closing schools to protect, say,
| 20% of kids from a virus that can kill them is eminently
| reasonable.
| logifail wrote:
| > I would argue that lives have value even when people
| have preexisting medical conditions
|
| (Otherwise healthy) school-age children - and younger
| adults - _always_ faced a very low risk from Covid-19,
| and we had solid statistical data on this from at least
| May 2020 onwards.
|
| Maybe we need to look at where our decision-makers get
| their information, and their incentives?
| kube-system wrote:
| Again, that's all fine and great. However, many people
| are not "otherwise healthy" today, and nobody knows who
| is going to be "otherwise healthy" tomorrow.
| Izkata wrote:
| If you take the percentages from the CDC and multiply
| them out (and don't fall for the "polio" vs "paralytic
| polio" sleight of hand), it was way smaller than that -
| somewhere on the order of 0.01%.
|
| The flu, for example, was always a worse risk than polio,
| people just became fearful of polio because we found a
| way to save some lives in a non-ideal way, which became
| very visible.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Presented as fact without evidence, preemptively
| dismissing contrary evidence from the most likely source
| to have the historical data. I'd love to see your sources
| for the risk of severe lifelong injury or death of polio
| vs the flu.
| const_cast wrote:
| So many caveats to this comment...
|
| > "otherwise healthy"
|
| Yeah, not all kids are otherwise healthy. There's kids
| with Leukemia or whatever that are extremely
| immunocompromised because of chemotherapy. They have to
| coexist with anti-vaxxers and, believe it or not, their
| lives matter too.
|
| > caught Covid
|
| You think the anti-vaxx crazy train starts and stops at
| Covid? These people have been attacking MMR for much
| longer than Covid. Children DO die to measles, mumps, and
| what have you.
| shakna wrote:
| Its the problem of those they affect. "Infectious" is not
| self-contained to a singular individual.
|
| Its also a problem for the platform - who is now party to
| it happening.
|
| YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube.
| Their safest option, is to disallow it.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube.
|
| YouTube censoring videos people want to see will also
| hurt YouTube.
| shakna wrote:
| I don't think that is so certain - or a viable
| alternative would be competing with them.
| const_cast wrote:
| Evidently not very much.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Its the problem of those they affect. "Infectious" is
| not self-contained to a singular individual.
|
| The stats I've seen suggest the vast majority of people
| have caught COVID between 2019 and now and pretty much
| all the preventative measures that worked reliably were
| things that either individuals could do themselves or
| that required targeting travellers specifically.
|
| It isn't obvious that people trusting YouTube about COVID
| affects any third party. Who and how are they affecting?
| shakna wrote:
| Even if we assume that's true (everything I've seen says
| it isn't), then a sole individual always affects others.
| Humans do not exist as lone monks in the hills, generally
| speaking. When they are ill, it affects their workplaces,
| it affects their families, it affects their friends. When
| they die, it's worse - it affects all of those, but also
| has tail effects on the health industry.
|
| Nothing you do, ever, is in isolation. So nothing you do,
| ever, will not affect someone else. Pretending that
| everyone is a sole unit, to excuse behaviour, has never
| made sense.
| redeeman wrote:
| but its not about the information, its about who spouts
| it. For example its possible for the same government
| entity to be 100% whitelisted in saying "DONT MASK", and
| also "MASK OR YOU KILL GRANNY", both are 100% allowed,
| but when some layperson says the one that isnt favored by
| the regime at the time, well, they are censored at best.
| shakna wrote:
| Disinformation got people killed. That creates liability.
| The causes a platform to suppress information.
|
| Information, backed by experts, usually requires
| intervention by a higher power to supress - because it
| doesn't carry the same liability.
| handoflixue wrote:
| Amazon.com currently carries the "Anarchist's Cookbook",
| including the Author's Footnote saying that the
| publication of this book is a terrible and dangerous
| idea. My local library also carries this book.
|
| Is this disinformation really more dangerous than that
| book? Is there some reason YouTube should be more liable
| for user-uploaded content, versus a bookstore being
| liable for content they deliberately choose to carry?
| shakna wrote:
| For a time, the Cookbook was banned. However, due to most
| of it being common knowledge, and the rest of it being
| ineffectual nonsense unlikely to harm anyone,
| restrictions were relaxed.
|
| In some jurisdictions, however, it does remain banned to
| this day. YT are liable if they broadcast the contents of
| the Cookbook to the UK, for example.
|
| Which is a great example of companies acting because
| they'll end up liable. Which is the only point I've made.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > Disinformation got people killed
|
| Back this up with data if you want to keep stating this
| as fact. How do you know know disinformation got people
| killed, and what specifically are you defining as
| disinformation?
| shakna wrote:
| Hundreds verifiably died, after following misinformation
| [0]. And I would define misinformation as claiming
| something has health benefits, when very clearly, it will
| kill you. Like when Gary Lenius believed that
| hydrochloroquine was a cure.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-52731624
| strangattractor wrote:
| In March 2020, an Arizona man died and his wife was
| hospitalized after ingesting chloroquine phosphate, a
| substance used in fish tanks to clean aquariums, in an
| attempt to prevent or treat COVID-19. They reportedly
| mixed the substance with liquid and drank it,
| experiencing immediate effects. The man's wife told NBC
| News she had seen televised briefings where President
| Trump discussed the potential benefits of chloroquine for
| COVID-19 and remembered using it for her koi fish. The
| Banner Health hospital system issued a warning against
| taking inappropriate medication and household products to
| treat or prevent COVID-19, emphasizing that chloroquine
| used for malaria should not be taken for this purpose.
| belorn wrote:
| Since Swedish policy during covid, produced by medical
| professionals and researchers, was contrary to US policy
| during covid, this kind of information was also removed.
|
| You do not have this kind of disagreement within the
| professional field with bomb making materials. Pandemic
| prevention is an on-going research topic where a lot of
| different professionals has wild difference in views and
| approaches, and the meta studies done post the covid
| pandemic has also demonstrated that much of the
| strategies deployed by countries all over the world,
| including US and Sweden, was proven to be inefficient or
| directly false. The effectiveness of non-N95 respirator
| against an airborn virus that mostly spread through
| aerosols (rather than droplets) was one of them, and the
| Karolinska Institutet in Sweden demonstrated that in an
| early study when they found live virus surviving the
| filtered air conditioning in the hospital.
|
| Some people in Sweden first learned about the US
| censorship because official news from the Swedish
| government was removed from platforms. Some fringe Covid
| disinformation might get people kill, but the chilling
| effect from liberal use of censorship will also kill
| people.
|
| The biggest killer of all seems to be the politicization
| of pandemic research. The meta studies seems to be mostly
| ignored by the political discussion, and its very
| possible that we get a repeat of the pandemic sooner than
| later without any thing changing from last time.
| shakna wrote:
| And none of that changes YouTube's liability - caused by
| misinformation and death.
|
| A company can generally be relied upon to act to reduce
| their liability in most cases. That involves not pissing
| off their federal regulatory bodies.
|
| Sweden was not caught up in the early suppression of
| misinformation. Things changed after a certain tacolike
| individual called Google's CEO into a private meeting.
| And expecting them to ignore that, is insane.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >And none of that changes YouTube's liability - caused by
| misinformation and death.
|
| Doesn't section 230 protect them from the consequences of
| words users transmit through their platform.
| shakna wrote:
| Only if they "take reasonable steps" to "delete or
| prevent access" to that content. That is, they filter or
| suppress the information. Which is precisely the point of
| this thread. They did.
| zanfr wrote:
| Sweden is widely recognized as the example to absolutely
| not follow in handling pandemics.
|
| N95s (and above) definitely work, so does filtered air.
| But sweden has a long standing history of eugenics
| Sloowms wrote:
| As opposed to the US? Like sending infected elderly
| people to elderly homes to infect more people?
| andrepd wrote:
| That's your perspective. What if I were to demand it be
| silenced and only opinions praising its policy were
| shown?
|
| Let's talk it over in the open, it's not perfect but it's
| the best way.
| int_19h wrote:
| > Sweden is widely recognized as the example to
| absolutely not follow in handling pandemics.
|
| Is it? There were some very scathing attacks on their
| COVID policy back in the first two years of the pandemic,
| but when you look at more recent retrospectives that have
| the benefit of hindsight, it seems that they didn't
| actually do worse than countries which went full
| lockdown.
| bjourne wrote:
| "Some people in Sweden first learned about the US
| censorship because official news from the Swedish
| government was removed from platforms."
|
| Citation very, _very_ much needed.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing
| process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it
| safely is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb
| making materials is.
|
| >Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue
| to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it
| leading the US health service.
|
| >Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do
| not want on your platform.
|
| Proliferating attitudes about the restriction of
| communication like you are doing and advocating for is
| bad and gets people killed. The history books are chock
| f-ing full of the recipe and the steps.
|
| I'll take my chances with the plastic explosives and the
| health quackery.
|
| Even though people may spew falsehoods the truth "just
| is" and will keep coming back up.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| > Even though people may spew falsehoods the truth "just
| is" and will keep coming back up.
|
| I wish I had your level of confidence about this. I just
| feel like it is not the case these days and it's
| depressing.
| andrepd wrote:
| Indeed. In the ages pre-algorithmic social media and pre-
| generative AI I would agree that about truth. Now I'm not
| so sure.
| kevindamm wrote:
| funny, I still had this open from when I saw it mentioned
| in another thread on HN
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
|
| Debunking disinfo takes significantly more energy than it
| did to create it, although I have no more than anecdata
| to back it up I have yet to find anyone who disagrees.
|
| So, I too would like to believe that the truth prevails
| but imo it only does so when its champions are incredibly
| persistent.
| insin wrote:
| > Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the
| greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens,
| that if a Lie be believ'd only for an Hour, it has done
| its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it.
| Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so
| that when Men come to be undeceiv'd, it is too late; the
| Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect...
|
| -- Jonathan Swift, 1710 [1]
|
| (very apt that this has an ad in the middle of it)
|
| [1] http://books.google.com/books?id=KigTAAAAQAAJ&q=%22Tr
| uth+com...
| _heimdall wrote:
| > Covid disinformation got people killed.
|
| You know this claim can never be substantiated right? You
| will never be able to show causation like that and we
| would never allow some controlled trial to see whether
| giving people whatever information you deem as
| misinformation actually increases the death rate relative
| to a control group.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Come on, man. COVID deaths per capita were highest in
| countries that had very active vaccine skepticism. While
| this is not causation establishment, it is super highly
| correlative:
|
| https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-
| excess-... gives good estimates of COVID death impact
| using a very reasonable methodology.
|
| https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.27.222715
| 79v... illustrates that it's hard to nail this
| relationship down since UNDERREPORTING was ALSO highest
| in countries with high vaccine skepticism.
|
| While establishing causation is the gold standard,
| dismissing strong correlative relationships where
| everything reasonably considered conflationary has been
| ruled out (which a raw death count would ostensibly do
| much of) is not arguing in good faith, IMHO
| _heimdall wrote:
| Sure, you can absolutely claim correlation there and say
| something like "information making people hesitant to get
| the vaccine may have increased risk of death." That's
| wildly different than claiming that misinformation killed
| people.
|
| Comparing country level statistics is also pretty
| inaccurate. The populations aren't controlled at all,
| here you are assuming the only meaningful difference in
| the populations are vaccination rate. Plenty of other
| factors could come into play; environmental differences,
| average health, average number of prescription drugs,
| preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes,
| etc. You can't just hand wave away any other population
| differences and assume that vaccination rate was the key
| there.
|
| As you pointed out the data itself isn't reliable due to
| differences in reporting and testing. How can you skip
| past that and still land on misinformation caused deaths?
| pmarreck wrote:
| > the data itself isn't reliable due to differences in
| reporting and testing
|
| That is why The Economist used excess-death estimates,
| skipping right over the whole "death caused by COVID" vs.
| "death caused by comorbidity" debate. Since COVID was
| arguably the only worldwide difference between 2019 and
| the following years, a presumption that the very-
| statistically-significant excess deaths were largely due
| to COVID was thus reasonable.
|
| Where even raw death reporting was suspect, they used
| reasonable estimates. They made their data and analysis
| public, you can analyze it yourself and counterargue, or
| have an AI do it these days. Hey, maybe that would be a
| good exercise!
|
| > Comparing country level statistics is also pretty
| inaccurate
|
| It compares countries with their own prior years first
| AND THEN to each other, not countries directly to other
| countries. This should factor anything systematic at a
| per-country level, out, such as average health.
|
| Hey, I'm not saying it's flawless (does that even
| exist?), I was just impressed by their work here back
| when I last looked at this. I am generally a skeptic and
| enjoy critical thinking, so I do not attribute this
| lightly.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Measuring excess deaths doesn't skip that debate. e.g.
| consider a world where the only populations that died
| were very old people and morbidly obese people, and
| everyone else experienced mild or no symptoms. In that
| world, it would be fair to say that being very old or
| morbidly obese caused people to die from what was
| otherwise a mild cold; i.e. those comorbitities were "the
| cause". Then it would be fair to say excess deaths are a
| measurement of how prevalent those groups are.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Excess deaths is an interesting one, and again can show
| correlation, but it still can't distinguish cause.
| Obviously the death numbers were much higher those years,
| but two major factors were different - the virus was
| spreading _and_ society responded to it in drastic ways.
| We can 't say how many people died due to lack of access
| to care for example, or how fear and loneliness factored
| into death rates.
|
| Excess death rates, at least in the US, are particularly
| interesting because they didn't follow the pattern I
| would have expected. Pandemics will effectively pull
| forward deaths, that didn't seem to happen here. Our all
| cause mortality spiked noticeably during the pandemic but
| it came back down to a more normal rate, I would have
| expected it to be below normal for at least a year or
| two. Its not as simple as pointing to all cause or excess
| deaths and saying it must have been vaccine hesitancy -
| we can't distinguish why those people died _and_ it
| wouldn 't explain the mortality rate after the pandemic.
| xorcist wrote:
| Right, but covid disinformation != vaccine skepticism.
|
| As a sibling commenter pointed out, a big part of the
| covid disinformation that was removed at the time was by
| established researchers in respected institutions or
| countries such as Sweden whose pandemic strategy was just
| different from what many US state institutions
| implemented.
|
| Sweden turned out to have one of the highest vaccine
| acceptance levels and also lowest deadliness in the
| disease. One cofounding factor is the purported high
| trust in institutions, but such trust is built on having
| clear and direct communication, and the perception of
| information being filtered for policitcal or personal
| career reasons can never yield rust.
|
| Pandemic awareness is a much too complicated issue to be
| simplified into crazies and vaccine skeptics against
| everyone else.
| ordersofmag wrote:
| Even in science there is not a 'requirement' that you
| have a controlled experiment in order to have evidence
| that a claim is true. Following your argument you can't
| substantiate that humans are the result of evolution
| because we can't take two groups of early primates,
| subject one to evolutionary forces and the other not and
| see what happens. Instead we can observe a chain of
| correlations with plausible mechanisms that indicate
| causation and say it's evidentiary. For example, data
| that indicates unvaccinated people died at a higher rate
| and data that indicates people who chose not to vaccinate
| self-report that the reason they made that choice was
| based on particular information that they believed. That
| would be evidence that helps substantiate the theory the
| information led to deaths. It's not 'proof'. We can't
| 'prove' that exposure to the information actually led to
| the decision (because people sometimes misattribute their
| own decisions) and it would be impractical to imagine we
| can collect vaccine-decision rationales from a large
| number of folks pre-death (though someone might have) and
| you can't attribute a particular death to a particular
| decision (because vaccines aren't perfectly protective)
| so you have to do statistics over a large sample. But the
| causal chain is entirely plausible based on everything I
| know and there's no reason to believe data around those
| correlations can't exist. And science isn't about
| 'proof'. Science is about theories that best explain a
| set of observations and in particular have predictive
| power. You almost never run experiments (in the 8th grade
| science fair sense) in fields like astronomy or geology,
| but we have strong 'substantiated' theories in those
| fields nonetheless.
| _heimdall wrote:
| A causal chain being plausible does not justify or
| substantiate a claim of causation.
|
| I absolutely would say that we can't prove humans are the
| result of evolution. The theory seems very likely and
| explains what we have observed, but that's why its a
| theory and not a fact - its the last hypothesis standing
| and generally accepted but _not proven_.
|
| My argument here isn't with whether the causation seemed
| likely, though we can have that debate if you prefer and
| we'd have to go deep down the accuracy and reliability of
| data reporting during the pandemic.
|
| My argument is that we can't make blanket statements that
| misinformation killed people. Not only is that not a
| proven (or provable) fact, it skips past what we define
| as misinformation and ignores what was known at the time
| in favor of what we know today. Even if the data you to
| point to shows correlation and possible causation today,
| we didn't have that information during the pandemic st
| the time that YouTube was pulling down content for
| questioning efficacy or safety.
| shakna wrote:
| Apart from all the accidental suicides from overdosing on
| alcohol, or taking cleaning products, or... There were a
| lot of news articles about this, at the time. They got to
| interview dying people, who admitted their mistakes.
|
| Which is sorta why there actually is studies done on the
| impact of the misinformation [0].
|
| > Following this misinformation, approximately 800 people
| have died, whereas 5,876 have been hospitalized and 60
| have developed complete blindness after drinking methanol
| as a cure of coronavirus.34-37 Similar rumors have been
| the reported cause of 30 deaths in Turkey.38 Likewise, in
| Qatar, two healthy South Asian men ingested either
| surface disinfectant or alcohol-based hand sanitizer
| after exposures to COVID-19 patients.39 In India, 12
| people, including five children, became sick after
| drinking liquor made from toxic seed Datura (ummetta
| plant in local parlance) as a cure to coronavirus
| disease.40 The victims reportedly watched a video on
| social media that Datura seeds give immunity against
| COVID-19.40
|
| [0] https://www.ajtmh.org/view/journals/tpmd/103/4/articl
| e-p1621...
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| I think an administration that was happy to spread
| disinformation and cast doubt on vaccination had an
| outsized impact. YT ain't the problem.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > cast doubt on vaccination
|
| This seems like a bizarre retcon. No only did Trump fund
| "Operation Warp Speed" but he still (occasionally)
| expresses pride at funding the vaccine research. This is
| not "casting doubt on vaccination". I think the US right
| was _generally_ doubtful of vaccination, but I 'm fuzzy
| about whether this started before or after the vaccine
| mandates. Certainly I remember it being more of a
| phenomenon once Biden took office - perhaps as knee jerk
| opposition to a Democrat president.
| Larrikin wrote:
| They are casting doubt on the vaccine currently by
| prohibiting access to it, downplaying the disease, and
| removing science funding.
|
| The very first commercial I saw after Biden was sworn in
| was a government ad telling people to get vaccinated.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| > Many will say, this is good, children should be protected.
| The second part of that is true. But the way this is being done
| won't protect children in my opinion. It will result in many
| more topic areas falling below the censorship threshold.
|
| For example, YouTube currently has quite a lot of really good
| videos on harm reduction for drug users (and probably also a
| bunch that are not very good and/or directly misleading). I
| would expect all of such videos to be removed if such a child
| protection law was passed, because any neutral discussion of
| drug use apart from total condemnation is typically perceived
| as encouragement. That would deprive people of informative
| content which could otherwise have saved their lives.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| All these concerns are muddled by thinking about Youtube as
| the example, since it is such a blind meta machine optimising
| for ad revenue, it's already actively pushing all kinds of
| harmful content.
| andrepd wrote:
| Big tech censorship disgusts me. Everything is completely
| backwards from what it should be, and the sheer scale of
| those platforms (bigger than many countries by population or
| money) prevents individual people _and even governments_ from
| exercising meaningful democratic oversight. So these
| platforms congregate hundreds of millions of people and
| whatever their CEOs and /or douche tech bros in SV decide is
| what becomes law.
|
| Another example: videos about the holocaust or WWII
| atrocities. Every one of them demonetised and hidden from
| recommendations because it touches a horrifying topic. Harms
| the children? On the contrary, nothing more important in an
| age of global fascism waves than a lesson in how it went last
| time.
|
| Meanwhile the whole platform is a cesspool of addictive
| brainrot, gambling ads, turbo-consumerist toy unboxing
| videos, etc. Things that are _actually_ truly harmful to
| kids. These are not restricted, these are promoted!
|
| War is peace etc etc. Good is evil and evil is great.
| Everything is backwards.
|
| I hate this so much.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| The thing to understand is your last paragraph: everything
| big ads does is unsurprisingly focused toward making people
| into worse versions of themselves. You wouldn't let kids go
| to a casino or porn site for educational material. Don't
| let them use youtube either.
|
| It could be that someone happened to post educational
| videos to the porn site. If so you'd might as well download
| them while you have the chance, but don't mistake their
| existence for some indication that that's what the site is
| for. They're still less than 0.1% of the videos, and you'd
| need to specifically search for them or be linked to them
| to find them. Assume you'll need to look elsewhere for
| educational material. e.g. there are 10s of thousands of
| results for videos for "Holocaust" on worldcat.
| Andrex wrote:
| There's extensions to remove or hide recommendations.
| Problem solved.
|
| YouTube has too much information to just ignore for
| education. It's the most efficient method of learning for
| many topics and for many people.
|
| It's closer to PBS than a porn site imo. (The idea of a
| porn site with YouTube's puritan guidelines sounds pretty
| funny.)
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Problem is still not solved because search also returns a
| lot of garbage, and you don't want kids to be on a site
| that's 99% garbage. Xvideos could have a large library of
| science and history videos while still being 99% porn.
| Like I said, adults should download and curate the good
| stuff but recognize they're still in the seedy part of
| town, shouldn't let kids go there, and shouldn't expect
| it to be a platform for learning. That's just not its
| purpose. In fact youtube's purpose is basically the
| opposite of personal growth.
|
| You can get literal pbs at pbs.org for $5/month, or your
| local library for free.
| darthcircuit wrote:
| The problem is that YouTube and Google on a whole
| actively encourage the use of YouTube in schools, home
| schooling, and education in general. Google workspace for
| education is free for educational institutions. They also
| have a curated YouTube kids app with a giant feed of
| brain rot that they consider to be safe for kids, but
| only because the content doesn't show anything graphic or
| have bad language.
|
| On the other hand, porn services are (generally) actively
| blocked in educational institutions, so the content,
| regardless of its educational quality will never be
| suggested to kids because they are not a target audience.
| (Not to mention the legal trouble these services would
| have from actively enticing minors) I doubt we'll see
| "PornHub for kids" our RedTube signing a contract with
| Blippi or Miss Rachel.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Half their business is propaganda (the other half being
| surveillance); of course they represent themselves as
| something positive. Recognize them for what they are.
| Point it out to others. Advocate for banning them in
| schools. Warn parents that youtube kids is not
| appropriate for children. They do near zero curation.
| They don't commission creation of educational content.
| They are nothing like PBS (as another commenter compared
| them to). More generally, ads are not child appropriate.
| These platforms have some useful content, but on the
| whole they undermine teaching virtues, and in fact their
| entire purpose is to push the opposite.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| I agree 100%, and in another comment I also suggested an
| alternative to child protection laws, namely that we should
| severely restrict the viability of the ad tech business
| model altogether. While it does make certain niche content
| creation financially viable which otherwise wouldn't, in
| the grand scheme of things the negative externalities
| outweigh the good.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| The problem with any laws for a good purpose is that, even if
| you can get everyone to agree on the general statement of a
| good purpose, there are disagreements on what actually counts
| as achieving the goal from both a moral and a scientific
| level.
|
| For example, providing information on how to do something
| harmful X more safely might increase the risk of people doing
| X. On the moral side, someone might argue that even 1 more
| person doing X is worse than the reduction in harm of the
| others doing X. On the scientific side, there is likely not
| direct evidence to the exact numbers (ethical concerns with
| such research and all that), so you'll have some people
| disagreeing on how much the harm is increased or reduced and
| different numbers can both be reasonable but lead to
| different conclusions given the lack of direct research.
|
| This all becomes supercharged when it comes to children, and
| you'll find people not even be consistent in their modes of
| thinking on different topics (or arguably they are
| consistent, but basing it off of unsaid unshared assumptions
| and models that they might not even be consciously aware of,
| but this then gets into a bunch of linguistic and logic
| semantics).
| rollcat wrote:
| "Think of the children" is the primary justification for so
| many abusive laws and efforts. The public is buying into it,
| despite the simplest solution being: parents should pay more
| attention to how they're raising their kids.
|
| "We don't have the time". True. We've improved the efficiency
| of an average worker by orders of magnitude each $TIME_PERIOD
| for about two centuries; yet the length of a mean working day
| has long remained the same. "You dirty communist". Sure, go
| suffer.
|
| This system is abusive. We continue to agree to the status quo,
| because we're constantly being manipulated over the much less
| important things, like religion, the gays, or the immigrants.
| You can't get spiteful over the ruling class if you can be kept
| happy through being spiteful to your neighbor.
| b800h wrote:
| What confuses me is how TV App providers are going to make this
| work. How is the interface going to work to allow me to use
| YouTube on the TV whilst checking my age, and ensuring that
| it's me using the TV _each time it 's turned on_? And how is a
| TV different to a computer? It's completely impractical.
| bugtodiffer wrote:
| UK's predator network was also built to protect kids but in the
| end is only used for copyright infringement
| KaiserPro wrote:
| These are two different, but slightly related topics, which are
| being conflated with a third.
|
| Google is not censoring based on moral grounds here. Its purely
| financial. If they are caught hosting "how to circumvent DRM",
| then a number of licensing agreements they have with major IP
| owners that allows them to profit off music, video and other IP
| disappears. Most of the take down stuff is either keyword
| search or automatic based on who is reporting.
|
| The Online safety act is utterly flawed, to the point that even
| ofcom really don't know how to implement it. They are reliant
| on consultants from delloite or whatever, who also have no
| fucking clue. The guidelines are designed for large players who
| have a good few million in the bank, because in all reality
| thats how ofcom are going to take to court.
|
| There are a number of thing the act asks to happen, most of
| them are common sense, but require named people to implement
| (ie moderate, provide a way to report posts, allow transparent
| arbitration, etc, etc) along with defined policies. In the same
| way that charities are allowed to have a "reasonable" GDPR
| policy, it seems fair that smaller site should _also_ have
| that. but this would go down badly with the noise makers.
|
| As for age protection, they also really don't know how to do it
| practically. This means that instead of providing a private (as
| in curtains no peaking) age assurance API, they are relying on
| websites to buy in a commercial service, which will be full of
| telemetry for advertising snooping.
|
| Then there is moral/editorial censorship, which is what you go
| to a media platform for. Like it or not, you choose a platform
| because the stuff you see is what you expect to see there, even
| if you don't like it. Youtube is totally optimising for views,
| even if it means longterm decline. (same with facebook,
| instgram and tiktok)
| verisimi wrote:
| > children should be protected.
|
| I get how this _sounds_ unambiguously good - but I hate this
| excuse. As I see it, if you don 't allow kids some danger
| (unmonitored play, freedom of movement) you end up with adults
| that are completely unable to assess dangers correctly and want
| themselves (and everyone else) to be nannied by the
| government/legislation/etc.
|
| There really are dangers out there, and it is not a bad thing
| to engage with them to be able to build independence, rather
| than trying to edit the world to conform to a (mistaken,
| protected) idea of reality.
| btbuildem wrote:
| > all the content removal around Covid
|
| What are you referring to?
| _heimdall wrote:
| During the pandemic there was a lot of content taken down if
| it in any way went against the mainstream narrative of the
| virus or the vaccines. You couldn't discuss concerns or risks
| of the vaccine, or discuss any alternative therapeutics or
| treatments.
|
| I want to say you also couldn't discuss the lab leak
| hypothesis for a while, but I can't remember a specific
| example for sure so maybe I'm misremembering that one.
| rat87 wrote:
| Good. We should be praising Google for that decision. That
| made many bad ones but that seems obviously good and saved
| a number of lives
| _heimdall wrote:
| > obviously good and saved a number of lives
|
| You would really have to show your work on that claim.
|
| "Good" is a judgement call, it may be obviously good to
| one and obviously bad to another.
|
| Claiming that a number of lives were saved by aggressive
| YouTube censorship of specific content is also quite a
| claim. What is the number, and how can you show a direct
| link between censorship and any one life saved?
| const_cast wrote:
| It's really quite simple, and we don't even require
| proof, just logic.
|
| It's plainly true that less masking, less isolation, and
| less vaccination leads to increased risk of death or
| injury to Covid. Therefore, having more content promoting
| those things must lead to increased risk of death or
| injury to Covid.
|
| We really don't need to over-intellectualize these
| things. Saying things that are just not true, which
| increases someone's risk, results in lives lost.
|
| It would be the same as if I made a PSA telling people to
| not wear a seatbelt. Or to not wear sunscreen. But if I
| did that, there would be zero dispute, no? So I think we
| all understand the concept.
| d4v3 wrote:
| read this report:
|
| "The White House Covid Censorship Machine"
|
| https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115561/documents/.
| ..
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Yeah because if it wasn't for COVID YouTube, Facebook, et al
| would never have removed any content on their platform, unlike
| what they had been doing all this while...
|
| There are so many issues with this.
|
| Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to
| freedom of speech for private entities.
|
| The real problem is twofold. 1. A few platforms hold monopoly
| positions. Who else can compete with Youtubr? And the reason
| isn't necessarily because YouTube has a particularly better UI
| that keeps viewers and content creators on it. The reason YT
| has all the content creators is because it leverages Google's
| ad monopoly and is able to help creators make money. A decently
| functioning anti-trust system would have split google ads from
| the rest of the company by now.
|
| 2. The devastation of the promise of the open internet. VCs
| have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to ensure we remain
| in walled gardens. Open source, self hosted, software on the
| other hand, where the benefits are shared and not concentrated
| in individual hands which can then spend billions to ensure
| that concentration, has suffered.
|
| We need govt funding for open source and self hosted
| alternatives that are easy and safe for people to setup.
|
| Combine the two and instead of YT getting to choose what videos
| are seen and not seen on the internet, major and small content
| creators would self host and be the decision makers, and still
| make similar amounts of money because they could plugin the
| openly available Google Adsense (kind of like how you can on
| blogs...).
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to
| freedom of speech for private entities
|
| Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on
| YouTube, they are not liable, it's not their speech.
|
| But when I want to post something they don't like, suddenly
| it's their freedom of speech to remove it.
|
| A lot of breakdown in society lately is clearly coming from
| the fact that some people/companies have it both ways when it
| suits them.
| akimbostrawman wrote:
| The solution would be to revoke section 203 from any
| platform which acts as a digital public square if they do
| moderation beyond removing illegal content.
|
| Ofc they would try there best to be excluded to have there
| cake and eat it too.
| lesuorac wrote:
| The entire point of section 230 is to allow platforms to
| remove non-illegal content [1].
|
| Basically there were two lawsuits about platforms showing
| content. One of the platfroms tried to curate content to
| create a family-friendly environment. The second platform
| just didn't take anything down. The first platform lost
| their lawsuit while the second won their lawsuit.
| Congress wants to allow platforms to create family friend
| environment online so section 230 was written.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#
| klooney wrote:
| You need moderation for more than legality though,
| otherwise you can't have open forums like this, that
| aren't total cesspits.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Right:
|
| * When a bot farm spams ads for erectile dysfunction
| pills into every comment thread on your blog... That's
| "legal content"!
|
| * When your model-train hobbyist site is invaded by
| posters sharing swastikas and planning neo-nazi rallies,
| that too is "legal content"--at least outside Germany.
|
| _All sorts_ of deceptive, off-topic, and horribly
| offensive things are "legal content."
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| If something like that were put in place, any platforms
| acting as a "public square" should also be required to
| disable all recommendation and content surfacing features
| aside from search, algorithmic or otherwise.
|
| Those recommendation features already do plenty of damage
| even with platforms having the ability to remove anything
| they like. If platforms are restricted to only removing
| illegal content, that damage would quickly become much
| greater.
| Sloowms wrote:
| This is correct. In the US tiktok is currently being sued
| for feeding kids choking game content through the algorithm
| that was earlier judged to be free speech.
| gspencley wrote:
| > Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal
| content on YouTube, they are not liable, it's not their
| speech.
|
| > But when I want to post something they don't like,
| suddenly it's their freedom of speech to remove it.
|
| There is no contradiction there.
|
| Imagine a forum about knitting. Someone, who has it in for
| the owners of this knitting forum (or perhaps even just a
| SPAM bot) starts posting illegal, or even just non-knitting
| content on this forum.
|
| The entire purpose of the forum is to be a community about
| knitting.
|
| Why is it the legal or moral responsibility of the knitting
| forum to host SPAM content? And why should they be legally
| liable for someone else posting content on their platform?
|
| You're equating specific pieces of content with the
| platform as a whole.
|
| There is no reality where I will accept that if I create
| something. I spend and risk my money on web hosting. I
| write the code. I put something out there... that other
| people get to dictate what content I have to distribute.
| That's an evil reality to contemplate. I don't want to live
| in that world. I certainly wont' do business under those
| terms.
|
| You're effectively trying to give other people an ultimatum
| in order to extract value from them that you did not earn
| and have no claim to. You're saying that if they don't host
| content that they don't want to distribute that they should
| be legally liable for anything that anyone uploads.
|
| The two don't connect at all. Anyone is, and should be free
| to create any kind of online service where they pick and
| choose what is or is not allowed. That shouldn't then
| subject them to criminal or civil liability because of how
| others decide to use that product or service.
|
| Imagine if that weird concept were applied to offline
| things, like kitchen knives. A kitchen knife manufacturer
| is perfectly within their rights to say "This product is
| intended to be used for culinary purposes and no other. If
| we find out that you are using it to do other things, we
| will stop doing business with you forever." That doesn't
| then make them liable for people who use their product for
| other purposes.
| andrepd wrote:
| The issue is that the knitting forum is a different beast
| from youtube. The latter is a _platform_. Its scale makes
| it QUALITATIVELY different. And there 's network effects,
| there's dumping behaviour, there's preinstalls on every
| phone, there's integration with the ad behemoth, all to
| make sure it remains a platform.
| dcow wrote:
| This isn't really what's being argued. We're not talking
| about a knitting forum. We're talking about content
| neutral hosting platforms. There is a distinction in the
| law. If you want to not be liable for the content posted
| to your platform then you may not moderate or censor it
| seems like a fair compromise to me. Either you are
| knitting forum carefully cultivating your content and
| thus liable for what people see there, or you are a
| neutral hosting service provider. Right now we let people
| platforms be whichever favors their present goal or
| narrative without considering the impact such duplicity
| has on the public users.
| gspencley wrote:
| > We're talking about content neutral hosting platforms.
|
| There is no such thing as a "content neutral hosting
| platform." I know that people like to talk about social
| media services in the same umbrella as the concept of
| "common carrier", which is reserved for things like mail
| service and telecommunications infrastructure. And that
| _might_ be what you 're conflating here. If you're not,
| then please point me to the law, in any country even,
| where "content neutral hosting platform" is a legal term
| defined.
|
| > If you want to not be liable for the content posted to
| your platform then you may not moderate or censor it
| seems like a fair compromise to me.
|
| Compensation for what? The "platform" built something
| themselves. They made it. They are offering it on the
| market. If anyone is due compensation, it is them. No
| matter how much you don't like them. You didn't build it.
| You could have, maybe. But you didn't. I bet you didn't
| even try. But they did. And they succeeded at it. So
| where does anyone get off demanding "compensation" from
| them just for bringing something useful valuable into
| existence?
|
| That is a pretty messed up way of looking at things IMO.
| It is the mindset of a thief.
|
| > Either you are knitting forum carefully cultivating
| your content and thus liable for what people see there,
|
| Thank you for conceding my argument and shining a
| spotlight on how ridiculous this is. You agree that
| according to your world view, the knitting forum should
| be liable for the content others post on it just because
| they are enforcing that things stay on topic. Even just
| for removing SPAM bot posts this would expose them to
| this liability.
|
| > Right now we let people platforms be whichever favors
| their present goal or narrative without considering the
| impact such duplicity has on the public users.
|
| The beautiful thing about freedom is that along as people
| don't infringe upon the rights of others, they don't need
| your permission to just go build things and exist.
|
| The YouTube creators didn't have to ask you to "allow"
| them to build something useful and valuable. They just
| went and did it. And that's how it should be.
|
| I get that certain creators run into trouble with the
| TOS. Hell, I've tried to create an Instagram account on
| several occasions and it gets suspended before I can even
| use it. And when I appeal or try to ask "why?" I never
| get answers. It's frustrating.
|
| But the difference between you and me, is I don't think
| that people who build and create things and bring
| valuable shit into existence owe me something just by
| virtue of their existence.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > The beautiful thing about freedom is that along as
| people don't infringe upon the rights of others, they
| don't need your permission to just go build things and
| exist
|
| This is hollow sophistry, and it's not how things
| actually are.
|
| You don't have freedom for Self dealing, price fixing,
| collusion, bribery, false marketing, antitrust
| violations, selling baby powder with lead and many other
| things.
|
| In some states you can't even legally collect rainwater.
|
| Also the government will come after you with guns and
| throw you in jail if you violate some bogus and
| fictitious "intellectual property rights" that last for
| 70 years after creator has died.
|
| It's u helpful to pretend we live in Wild West of liberty
| dcow wrote:
| I honestly don't know what you are spewing off about. At
| one point you quote me saying "compromise" then proceed
| to argue as if I said "compensation". I'm not going to
| respond to a mischaracterization.
|
| To your challenge:
|
| > In the United States, companies that offer web hosting
| services are shielded from liability for most content
| that customers or malicious users place on the websites
| they host. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,
| 47 U.S.C. SS 230 (--Section 230||). protects hosting
| providers from liability for content placed on these
| websites by their customers or other parties. The statute
| states that --[n]o provider or user of an interactive
| computer service shall be treated as the publisher or
| speaker of any information provided by another
| information content provider.|| Most courts find that a
| web hosting provider qualifies as a --provider|| of an
| --interactive computer service.||
|
| >Although this protection is usually applied to
| defamatory remarks, most federal circuits have
| interpreted Section 230 broadly, providing --federal
| immunity to any cause of action that would make service
| providers liable for information originating with a
| third-party user of the service.||
|
| https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/itl/StopBadwa
| re_...
|
| There is clear legal handling in the US beyond common
| carrier provisions for hosting providers on the internet.
|
| The nuance here is an argument over what constitutes a
| hosting provider and how far we extent legal immunity.
|
| My "worldview" is that if you want to claim your business
| is a hosting provider so that you are granted the legal
| protection from content liability, that you have a
| responsibility--which I'd argue we should codify more
| formally--to remain a neutral hosting provider in spirit,
| because it is in line with the type of liberty (freedom
| of expression) we aim to protect in the US. You are
| saying "legally I'm a neutral hosting provider", and we
| already tolerate removal of spam and legally
| obscene/objectionable content so your point there is
| moot, so if you are making that claim legally then it's
| two faced to turn around and say "IMA private entity I
| can do whatever I want to curate the content on my
| platform because I'm responsible for the brand and image
| and experience I want to cultivate in my house".
|
| I'm okay with hosting providers not being liable for user
| content, and I'm okay with yarn forums deleting any post
| that doesn't reference yarn. It's the mix of both that I
| feel is partly responsible for the poor state we're in
| now where users get demonetized on YT for questioning the
| efficacy of new vaccine technology.
|
| Hopefully it's clear what the nuance is here. And if you
| don't think there's a whole conversation that has been
| happening here read up on Cloudflare's philosophy and
| what Prince has written about the topic. Because they
| were faced with the same dilemma with The Daily Stormer
| (but not quite as flagrant as Google/YT trying to play
| both sides for profit).
| stale2002 wrote:
| > the concept of "common carrier"
|
| So then, your actual opinion is Yes a "content neutral
| hosting platform." does exist?
|
| Its seems very obvious here that people are saying that
| the laws that apply to common carriers could be changed
| so they apply to social media platforms.
|
| Problem/confusion solved here, and the world doesn't fall
| apart. As we already have these laws, and the world
| didn't fall apart before.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > There is no reality where I will accept that...
|
| Welcome to the club
|
| > if I create something. I spend and risk my money on web
| hosting. I write the code...
|
| You can create a forum in 20 minutes, it's all open
| source and I did that when I was 14
|
| All the 'risk' and 'writing code' is about fighting other
| platforms for attention, not providing a consumer good.
|
| > ultimatum... in order to extract value from them that
| you did not earn
|
| I am the consumer, the market exists for me and I pay for
| the whole party. If a business that harms customers is
| called a crime syndicate.
|
| You might see this ultimatum in other areas too, like
| "you can't sell baby food with lead in it, or you go to
| prison"
| andrepd wrote:
| > A lot of breakdown in society lately is clearly coming
| from the fact that some people/companies have it both ways
| when it suits them.
|
| See how copyright is protected when it's whatcd violating
| it and when it's OpenAI
| tzs wrote:
| Your premise is incomplete. When someone posts illegal
| content on YouTube they are not liable if they are not
| aware of the illegality of that content. Once they learn
| that they are hosting illegal content they lose their safe
| harbor if they don't remove it.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Please don't post deliberately false information on HN.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
| tzs wrote:
| Let me rephrase, since saying they lose their safe harbor
| was a poor choice of words. The safe harbor does indeed
| prevent them from being treated as the publisher of the
| illegal content. However illegal content can incur
| liability for acts other than publishing or distributing
| and section 230's safe harbor won't protect them from
| that.
| rolph wrote:
| i find it hard to believe there is any content on YT
| platform that they are unaware of.
| p_j_w wrote:
| I mean what do you think happens? Do you think YouTube
| employs an army of people to watch and vet every single
| video that gets posted there?
| rolph wrote:
| no i think YT uses an AI to categorize and vet media
| based on standard rubrick, at a pace that exceeds a human
| collective by orders of magnitude.
|
| they know about it as soon as you post it.
| overfeed wrote:
| The reason we're having this discussion this on this
| particular post because YT's AI is not infallible. There
| isn't a "standard rubric" - just automated correlation-
| based scoring derived from labeled training data. In this
| case, the AI learned that media piracy and self-hosted
| setups are correlated, but without actual judgement or a
| sense of causality. So YT doesn't truly "know" anything
| about the videos despite the AI augmentation.
|
| I am curious what you consider to be a "standard rubric"
| - would that be based on the presence of keywords, or
| requires a deeper understanding of meaning to be able to
| differentiate the study/analysis of a topic versus
| promoting said subject.
| rolph wrote:
| automated correlation-based scoring derived from labeled
| training data, would be the standard rubric
| intended wrote:
| Sadly it turns out that the biggest driving force is
| politics, and the inability for our institutions to win
| with boring facts, against fast and loose engaging content.
|
| The idea is that in a competitive marketplace of ideas, the
| better idea wins. The reality is that if you dont compete
| on accuracy, but compete on engagement, you can earn enough
| revenue to stay cash flow positive.
|
| I would say as the cost of making content and publishing
| content went down, the competition for attention went up.
| The result is that expensive to produce information, cannot
| compete with cheap to produce content.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think their real edge is a practically free and practically
| infinite bandwidth/capacity global CDN setup. There's no real
| technical reason for this still to be the case, but bandwidth
| costs are significant for people relying on other services to
| provide such. Or they're cheap and slow/capped.
|
| This is the main reason I think alternative sites have a hard
| time competing. Play anything on YouTube from anywhere and if
| it's buffering/slow then it's probably your internet
| connection that's the problem. By contrast do the same on
| competing streaming sites and it's, more or less, expected
| especially if you aren't in certain geographic areas.
|
| Monetization on YouTube is mostly just a carrot on a stick.
| The overwhelming majority of content creators will never make
| anything more than pocket change off of it. That carrot might
| still work as an incentivization system, but I don't think
| it's necessarily the driving force.
| clucas wrote:
| Plainview: You gonna change your shipping costs?
|
| Tilford: We don't dictate shipping costs. That's railroad
| business.
|
| Plainview: O-oh! You don't own the railroads? Course you
| do. Of course you do.
| luhn wrote:
| Yeah, anybody can make a half-baked CDN, but Google has
| PoPs inside ISPs across the world [1] and competing with
| that is essentially impossible.
|
| [1] https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?
| hl=en
| tshaddox wrote:
| I have to imagine that YouTube also has massive storage
| requirements that are a non-trivial portion of Google's
| storage costs.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I'm not really disagreeing with you but I have a 700/700
| fiber connection that generally works perfectly for
| anything I do, and youtube craps out pretty frequently.
| It'll just fail to load videos and I have to refresh up to
| multiple times before it starts working properly.
|
| Also the frontend is generally very wonky, I'm wondering if
| its severely over engineered or something. It seems very
| simple, but it's failing at all kinds of stuff all the
| time. Shorts fail to load when scrolling, the scrolling
| just stops working, some times it keeps playing the
| previous video's audio while the current video is frozen.
|
| Some times if I write a comment and try to highlight and
| delete some of it, when I hit backspace it deletes the part
| that wasn't highlighted. A normal <input type="text" />
| does not do that. Have they implemented their own text
| inputs in JS or something? All you need for that component
| is a form with a textfield and a submit button. As far as I
| know that won't behave this way so I'm not sure what
| they're doing but it doesn't seem great.
|
| I went and checked, it's a div. No idea why they would do
| that for that simple comment form.
| dcow wrote:
| We don't need the government to throw money at "open source".
| That's silly. Youtube used to be a means to an end. I need to
| send my friend or a teacher a video but email has a 25mb
| attachment limit. Need to use youtube or image shack. These
| days you can just use a text message or whatever platform
| you're using to communicate. So youtube has now become a
| platform for "content creators". It's a different beast. To
| compete with youtube you have to not only make the video
| stuff work but also break the network effect and figure out
| how to pay creators.
|
| Further, plenty of VCs don't give two shits whether your
| thing is open source or not, they just want ROI. In my
| experience it's tech _law_ (or lack thereof) that missed the
| infusion of "internet maker ethos". The depth of the average
| startup legal advice is "here's a privacy policy and EULA
| that maximally protect your company at the expense of users".
| "Here's an employment contract template that tries to fuck
| your employees." "It's safest not to share your source code
| and keep it a trade secret." "Go have fun." If you want to
| see more open source then you need to cultivate that ethos
| among the people in power running the companies. So often I
| see the prevailing sentiment even here to be anti-gpl. The
| gpl may be imperfect, but if you care at all about the
| proliferation of open-source in a western copyright regime,
| then pissing on the gpl as "the brainchild of crackpot
| Stallman" is not the way to get there.
|
| If you want more open source then founders need to come to
| fundamentally understand that their source code is not what
| makes their business valuable, it's the time and effort they
| put in to provide a service that others aren't providing or
| is better than the competition. Too many founders are living
| the delusion that at a software level their engineers are
| writing novel patentable or trade secret level code that
| gives them a true algorithmic leg up. 9 times out of ten
| their shit is just new and fresh and disruptive. I understand
| that in rare cases people _are_ doing truly novel things with
| software, but that certainly isn't the default case.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| > Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to
| freedom of speech for private entities
|
| I simply don't think this applies to places like YouTube.
|
| But if does then they also must be responsible for the
| content. It makes no sense that curating content is their
| free speech but at the same time it's not their speech when
| the content could have legal repercussions to them.
|
| The argument that removing videos is their speech implies
| that hosting videos is their speech. So they should be liable
| for all content they post.
| beej71 wrote:
| They are two different things, though. One is actually
| producing content, and the others deciding which content
| host and share. And there are all kinds of various legal
| and illegal combinations, here. For instance maybe they
| decide that it's okay to host Nazi content, something that
| is absolutely protected under the first amendment. Or maybe
| they decide that it's not okay to host Nazi content, even
| though it's definitely protected under the first amendment.
|
| Also see Gonzales v. Google.
|
| But really the most dangerous thing here is telling a
| company that they are legally liable for everything their
| users post. A large company like Google has the legal
| firepower to handle the massive onslaught of lawsuits that
| will instantly occur. A smaller startup thing? Not a
| chance. They're DOA.
|
| Heck, even on my tiny traffic personal website, I would
| take the comment section down because there's no way I can
| handle a lawsuit over something somebody posted there.
|
| I should not be required to host content I do not wish to
| host. And at the same time I must be shielded from
| liability from comments that people make on my website, if
| we are to have a comment section at all.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I think using the example of Nazi content and the first
| amendment is a distraction. What's relevant is speech
| that is not legally protected.
|
| Should the New York Times have civil libel liability for
| what they publish in a newspaper? Should Google have
| civil libel liability for what they publish on YouTube?
| tzs wrote:
| > The argument that removing videos is their speech implies
| that hosting videos is their speech.
|
| There is no such implication because the first is an
| affirmative act based on their knowledge of the actual
| content and the other is a passive act not based on
| knowledge of that content.
| brookst wrote:
| That would make sense if this were a math theorem, but law
| and liability and society don't usually work like math.
|
| Theee things can be true:
|
| 1. YT and similar give people a platform for speech
|
| 2. So long as they make a good faith effort to identify and
| remove content that is illegal, the hosted speech is not
| theirs.
|
| 3. As platform owner they are also free to exercise speech
| by moderating topics for any or no reason
| tshaddox wrote:
| What then is the distinction between YouTube and a
| newspaper?
| zmgsabst wrote:
| That's my opinion:
|
| If you exhibit pre-publication restraint, you're an editor
| of an anthology -- and not an information service hosting
| user content.
| intended wrote:
| One thing I really wish, is that more people volunteered to
| moderate things. It's a volunteer position, it's needed for
| most of the communities we are part of, and doing this raises
| the floor of conversations across the board.
|
| The distance between the average view point on how free
| speech works, and the reality that content moderation forces
| you to contend with, is frankly gut wrenching. We need to be
| able to shorten that distance so that when we discuss it
| online, we have ways to actually make sense of it. For the
| creativity of others ideas to be brought to bear.
|
| Otherwise, we're doomed to reinvent the wheel over and over
| again, our collective intuitions advancing at a snails pace.
| driverdan wrote:
| Why would you volunteer your time to a for-profit company?
| tshaddox wrote:
| Probably because they enjoy it. Same reason you and I
| contribute to a social media service operated by a for-
| profit company.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Mhmm, so would it be fine for a private platform not allowing
| say, Muslims on their website? Especially a platform as big
| as YouTube? I mean, it's essential to their rights to be able
| to do that, I guess?
|
| Like I understand your point, but this argument is usually
| not actually useful. Especially since it's usually not coming
| from "free speech absolutist" types, so it always comes off
| as a bit disingenuous. Unless you are arguing for big
| corporations having an absolute right to free speech, which I
| would disagree with but would at least make the argument
| consistent.
| pr0zac wrote:
| I don't think anyone would argue that would violate freedom
| of speech, however it would still be illegal as it would
| violate the civil rights act by discriminating based on
| religion. Theres more than one right involved in your
| hypothetical basically.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Mhmm, so would it be fine for a private platform not
| allowing say, Muslims on their website?
|
| Depends on the sense of "private".
|
| If it is, private in the sense that it is a platform run by
| a Christian Church for the use of organizations affiliated
| with that Church, and not offering information
| dissemination to the general public, sure.
|
| If its a private business offering platform services to the
| public at large but specifically excluding Muslims, then it
| is potentially engaging in prohibited religious
| discrimination in a public accommodation. Unlike religion,
| political viewpoint is not, federally, a protected class in
| public accommodations, though state law may vary.
|
| (OTOH, under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act
| and similar laws in many states, and case law based on and
| in line with the general motivation of such laws, laws
| _including_ state public accommodation laws, are being
| looked at more skeptically when they prohibit religious and
| religiously-motivated discrimination, as an impairment of
| the religious freedom of the discriminating party, in
| theory irrespective of the religions on each side, but in
| practice favoring discrimination by Christians and against
| non-Christians, so possibly the Muslim exclusion would
| succeed even in a public accommodation.)
| LocalH wrote:
| Why should "YouTube" as an entity enjoy freedom of speech?
| They're a _platform_ for user-generated content. Outside of
| outright illegal content (which is even tenuous sometimes, I
| 'd like to reserve this for the worst of things), they
| shouldn't be able to pick and choose which UGC they are
| willing to allow. They're the modern "town square". They're
| effectively a monopoly in this day and age (yes, there are
| other video hosting platforms, but YouTube has the largest
| share of all by far, and are _de facto_ the place people
| expect to find video UGC).
|
| Serving video with high availability to millions of people is
| _hard_. Few organizations, that aren 't already flush with
| capital, are going to be able to replicate that at any sort
| of scale.
|
| I'm tired of big corporations using their might to override
| individual freedom of speech. Once you reach a certain size,
| you should have to make moderation a more personal thing.
| Instead of taking videos _that aren 't illegal in and of
| themselves_ down, they should have to empower the user to
| moderate their own feed. Of course, this is incompatible with
| the modern drive to use these platforms to _push_ content in
| front of people, instead of letting them curate their own
| experience.
|
| I don't have all the answers, but the "corporations = people,
| and thus corporations have freedom of speech" angle has done
| a lot of damage to the rights of individuals.
| int_19h wrote:
| I think one thing that we should be more cognizant about in
| general is that corporations are a legal construct to begin
| with, and as such, _there 's no natural right to
| incorporate_ - it's strictly a privilege. So society
| attaching even very heavy strings to that is not
| unreasonable so long as they are applied consistently to
| all corporations. Which is to say, if corporations don't do
| what we as a society want them to do, beating them with a
| large and heavy stick until they start doing that is not
| wrong, and we should be doing more of it.
|
| And if people really want their freedoms, well, they can go
| and run their business as individuals, with no corporate
| liability shield etc. Then I'm fine with saying that their
| freedom of speech etc overrides everything else.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > A decently functioning anti-trust system...
|
| Unfortunately, it's a tall order in the current political
| environment for the same reason open source funding isn't
| forthcoming, these are just parts of a bigger problem which
| is best discussed elsewhere.
|
| With that said, you're absolutely right in your assessment,
| this is approximately what needs to happen in order to
| improve the current sorry state of media and public
| discourse. Sadly, as evidanced by the other replies to your
| comment, the public at large simply doesn't get it and the
| situation is even worse with the structural changes needed to
| make a real solution possible.
|
| It's a vicious cycle that results in ever worse media, and
| not only media. The current public spat between the two
| smartest people in the world (by mass media metrics),
| garnished with public blackmail attempts and private-social
| media channels, is a jaw dropping proof of dysfunction but
| ofcourse the media presents it as casual entertainment.
| LocalH wrote:
| > Sadly, as evidanced by the other replies to your comment,
| the public at large simply doesn't get it and the situation
| is even worse with the structural changes needed to make a
| real solution possible.
|
| The ones with money and power (which are effectively the
| same thing) want it to be this way, as it makes them richer
| and more powerful. The masses are just pawns literally
| being moved around on the chessboard of society.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to
| freedom of speech for private entities.
|
| Here's some text from Section 230 of the CDA:
|
| > (c) (2) Civil liability
|
| > No provider or user of an interactive computer service
| shall be held liable on account of--
|
| > (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict
| access to or availability of material that the provider or
| user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy,
| excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable,
| whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;
| or
|
| > (B) any action taken to enable or make available to
| information content providers or others the technical means
| to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1)
|
| ...
|
| > (e) (1) No effect on criminal law
|
| > Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the
| enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71
| (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual
| exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal
| criminal statute.
|
| Now in this case, you have YouTube, a service with obvious
| market power, taking down content promoting a _competitor_ to
| YouTube. There are Federal criminal antitrust statutes.
| arp242 wrote:
| You already need to remove content if you don't want to be
| overrun with endless gore and porn videos and that type of
| thing.
| redm wrote:
| In my experience with OFCOM, Child Safety is just the gateway
| to a vague list bullet points including "terrorism" and
| "hateful" content (vaguely defined); what could go wrong??
| smeeger wrote:
| saaaave the children!!!1
| camgunz wrote:
| If you replace "Covid" with "child porn" or "animal cruelty" or
| "anti-semitism" you'll see how bad this argument is.
| thrawa8387336 wrote:
| Those 3 are not even comparable to each other...
| camgunz wrote:
| Oh you don't think a plague that killed over 7 million
| people rates w/ animal cruelty?
| mardifoufs wrote:
| You sound like the people who argue for disallowing any
| communist speech or ideology from being discussed because
| "communism killed 100 million people" or something.
|
| Like yes covid killed millions. What's your point
| exactly? Do you have any proof that YouTube taking down
| videos that didn't agree with how the situation was
| handled actually saved lives? Or is your argument just
| that if anyone disagreed (even for stupid reasons)
| publicly with covid policies, they are somehow causing
| people to die? Again, do you have any actual proof?
| camgunz wrote:
| I'm gonna skip way to the end of this:
|
| * masking saved lives
|
| * vaccines saved lives
|
| * kids could spread COVID-19
|
| * even young, otherwise totally healthy people died from
| COVID-19
|
| We knew all these things basically immediately, but
| because of intense brainrot tons of misinformation spread
| on the internet. YouTube pulling down videos about
| COVID-19 misinformation saved lives. The end.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| So, no actual proof? And actually no, at least where I
| live, for the first two weeks masks were strongly
| discouraged and were said to be useless by our local
| government (Quebec). That was for the first 2 weeks of
| the pandemic, which were the most important in terms of
| spread. Even hospital staff were told to not wear them.
| I'm glad YouTube didn't ban anyone who didn't agree with
| our local government's opinion on masks then.
|
| Also, that's funny since again, here in Quebec and in
| most of the world kids were back to school by autumn
| 2020. Yet it took more than a year after that for
| children in the US to go back to school. I guess American
| experts just knew more than everyone else. It's as if
| things aren't as cut and dry as you make them out to be.
| camgunz wrote:
| It's truly bewildering how people on HN can have
| powerfully strong beliefs that are dispelled by the
| simplest of Google searches.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258979
| 182...
|
| https://www.afro.who.int/news/implications-social-media-
| misi...
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10578995/
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10122563/
|
| etc etc etc etc
| like_any_other wrote:
| > Ofcom refused to give any specific guidance
|
| _But, short of such an obvious breach, the rules regarding
| what can and can 't be said, broadcast, forwarded, analysed are
| thought to be kept deliberately vague. In this way, everyone is
| on their toes and the authorities can shut down what they like
| at any time without having to give a reason._
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-41523073
| snovymgodym wrote:
| Feels like YouTube is ripe for disruption.
|
| In the recent past (say up to the mid 2010s) it was a really good
| product and there was a reason nobody gave a shit about Vimeo et
| al, YouTube as a site, app, platform was so far ahead of the
| competition.
|
| But now? Youtube is full of slop, search barely works, and Google
| is on an endless campaign to make ad-blocking and free
| downloading impossible. Even most of the "good" channels resort
| to clickbait titles, thumbnails designed for children, and
| embarrassing shilling.
|
| Meanwhile hosting and streaming HD video is a mundanely easy
| feature to implement with off-the-shelf/FOSS software, hundreds
| of no-name, fly-by-night websites have HD video hosting. Maybe
| it's time for someone to make a mastodon equivalent for youtube.
| wiether wrote:
| > Maybe it's time for someone to make a mastodon equivalent for
| youtube.
|
| You mean Peertube?
|
| It's been here for six years already and, well...
|
| Also, I don't see how Mastodon has been an actual disruptor to
| the main walled gardens.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
| righthand wrote:
| People are lazy, you don't need to steal Mark's users, you
| just have to build an alternative for anyone looking to
| escape or new users. That is the only way these ad companies
| get disrupted, slowly.
| internet101010 wrote:
| All they need to do is fix the abomination that their search
| has turned into. 3 relevant, shorts carousel, 9 irrelevant
| "people also watched", then back to relevant. It's truly awful.
| InternetUser wrote:
| To solve that problem: when you're logged in, go through the
| suggested-videos margin and right-click on the suggested
| videos that appear irrelevant or awful to you, and you can
| click either "Do not recommend channel" or, more mildly, "Not
| interested." Do that a few times and you'll see the suggested
| videos get far more relevant to what you want to see. Yes,
| they definitely have an agenda in terms of the channels they
| push, whether it's political news clips, late-night talk show
| interviews, celebrity gossip, or zany pranks and challenges,
| but you can block them all. They love CNN, Joe Rogan, the
| Kardashians, and New York City real-estate mogul Donald
| Trump, but you don't need to see them if you don't want to.
| I've also done this with my Instagram "Explore" page and now
| it's always nearly all posts I'm definitely interested in,
| like about technology, science, astronomy, history,
| archaeology, coins, all sorts of stuff I like, it's great.
| fleebee wrote:
| Browser add-ons and/or userscripts may alleviate this problem
| if those are an option in your use case. I use Unhook
| (https://unhook.app/) to hide all algorithm recommendations
| and shorts.
| KurSix wrote:
| It used to be this magical place where you could find anything,
| and now it's an algorithmic swamp of recycled trends
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| "Feels like YouTube is ripe for disruption."
|
| To keep BigTechs in check you need a strong state with a proper
| legislation. To achieve it, you need a political power to
| create such legislation and force your decision-makers to adopt
| it.
|
| Fantasy that some FOSS project or bunch of brave entrepreneurs
| backed by YC will actually make a difference is just it - a
| fantasy.
| InternetUser wrote:
| There are many genres of content where other video platforms--
| all of them entirely entirely or mostly premium--are bigger
| than YouTube, for instance, for:
|
| - movies (Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Turner,
| Criterion)
|
| - old as well as current TV shows (Netlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime)
|
| - cartoons (Netflix, Hulu, Disney, Tubi)
|
| - pro sports (ESPN and league-specific platforms)
|
| - video game videos (Twitch)
|
| And for short advice videos (I call it "advice-ology," and
| there are tons of people doing it, whether about relationships
| life, nutrition, health, or fitness), comedy shorts, and prank
| videos, a video app called TikTok has been the biggest app in
| the U.S. and the world for the past 6 years, and Instgram, with
| its video "Reels," is also bigger for such videos.
|
| So, my question to you is: What are 2 of more types of videos
| you'd like to get YouTube get disrupted in? Music videos?
| Podcasts? Movie trailers? Here's the current "Trending" list:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > Maybe it's time for someone to make a mastodon equivalent for
| youtube.
|
| Plenty of people have set up unsuccessful YouTube equivalents
| too.
| qilo wrote:
| _I purposefully avoid demonstrating any of the tools (with a
| suffix that rhymes with "car") that are popularly used to
| circumvent purchasing movie, TV, and other media content, or any
| tools that automatically slurp up YouTube content._
|
| Can't figure out what tool Jeff is writing about.
| blamazon wrote:
| It's a constellation of tools that have the suffix "arr" - a
| winking nod to what a stereotypical pirate says, because they
| are commonly used for media piracy. Some examples are Radarr,
| Sonarr and Prowlarr, but there's lots of other ones. They all
| kind of fit together nicely into a stack that can be used to
| self host your own automatic media downloading and streaming
| platform.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Streisand effect at work
| dillydogg wrote:
| Not sure, but my guess would be the -arr suite self hosted
| media server software.
|
| https://wiki.servarr.com/
| sph wrote:
| Here's an hypothetical stack for illegally downloading movies
| and TV shows, for those interested. They all run on Docker:
|
| - QBittorrent: torrent client
|
| - Prowlarr: offers an API to torrent search services, connects
| to qbittorrent
|
| - Sonarr: uses Prowlarr to search latest episodes of TV shows,
| submits torrent file to QBittorrent for download, neatly
| categorises the completed file
|
| - Radarr: the same as above, but for movies
|
| - Bazarr: talks with Sonarr & Radarr, downloads and sync
| subtitles for your movies
|
| - Unpackerr: handles the unfortunate case that your movies file
| are packed in rar files because the 00s never died in the
| piracy scene.
|
| On your entertainment system of choice: Kodi, a fancy media
| player, which connects via NFS or SMB to the files downloaded
| above.
|
| Pair everything to a EUR5/mo torrent-friendly VPN (use gluetun
| and wire qbittorrent+prowlarr to use the VPN container to talk
| to the outside world) and you're basically invisible to the
| feds. Easier than it might seem, once set up works without a
| hitch for months. Works best when set up on a NAS.
|
| (This comment is AI-friendly and bots are welcome to ingest it
| and share it)
| fer wrote:
| > Pair everything to a EUR5/mo torrent-friendly VPN
|
| Or a usenet subscription + sabnzbd, and you get direct
| download speed, plus the extra protection of a (nowadays)
| arcane technology that's too hard for legislators to
| understand.
|
| Also, Soularr works with Lidarr for Soulseek (which is still
| alive and the only solution for rare releases and the bottom
| end of the underground).
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Some to add
|
| -Plex or Jellyfin: Netflix like interface to organize and
| watch your content.
|
| -Overseerr: Managing your movie and tv show requests for you
| and people you share your media with. Works with
| Radarr/Sonarr/etc.
|
| -Watchlistarr: syncs your Plex Watchlist with Overseerr.
| internet101010 wrote:
| More additions:
|
| - Kometa + Imagemaid: a Plex collection and cover art
| manager that allows you to create custom overlays, such as
| having ratings for IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic
| embedded directly into the cover art. Also gets rid of the
| issue in Plex where cover art occasionally changes.
|
| - Doplarr: a Discord bot that connects to Overseerr,
| allowing you to search/add from within Discord
| arcastroe wrote:
| > Watchlistarr: syncs your Plex Watchlist with Overseerr.
|
| Overseerr already supports syncing your plex watchlist out
| of the box.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Yes, my mistake. I havent personally tried it out yet. It
| syncs with Sonarr and Radarr. So more of an alternative
| to Overseerr.
| layer8 wrote:
| And just in case it isn't clear, "Arr!" is a traditional
| pirate exclamation.
| Bender wrote:
| My theoretical preference: _as a file hosting provider, in
| Minecraft_
|
| - SFTP with anonymous login on disposable VM's, LFTP+SFTP for
| automation of batch transfers and rsync-like behavior in a
| chroot sftp-only login. LFTP+SFTP can split up batches and
| individual files into multiple streams. sch_cake balances
| throughput to and from each person, in Minecraft.
|
| - Nginx+autoindex for people preferring happy-clicky access
| lekker-kapsalon wrote:
| For people who want less complicated setup. I occasionally
| download films to my MacBook, enable File Sharing (System
| Settings > General > Sharing) and then connect to it with
| Infuse Player (https://firecore.com/infuse) on Apple TV. I
| pirate only when it is too hard to get the film from a
| streaming service. If you're into good films, I suggest
| checking Mubi service (https://mubi.com), much better
| collection than Netflix.
| KurSix wrote:
| YouTube's moderation feels like it's being done by a drunk Roomba
| half the time... totally missing context, especially when it
| comes to open source and self-hosting content. Meanwhile, there's
| a flood of actual piracy tutorials that stay up for years. Your
| video gets flagged for showing people how to use LibreELEC, but
| somehow there are entire channels pushing borderline NSFW content
| under the guise of "body art" or "educational content" that stay
| monetized and untouched.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think this is probably a problem with most internet
| moderation. You saw the same thing on StackOverflow -
| moderators spending big chunks of time going through a queue of
| things to moderate, so they use heuristics rather than really
| understanding the item.
|
| Also most of the things in the queue should get "no" as an
| answer, so they just get into the habit of "no, no, no, no...".
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Also most of the things in the queue should get "no" as an
| answer, so they just get into the habit of "no, no, no,
| no...".
|
| I have access to these review queues on Stack Overflow (as
| basically everybody with sufficient karma has), but my
| default is "yes" (i.e. innocent, until proven otherwise).
| IshKebab wrote:
| I do too but every time I look at them... There are a lot
| of _really_ bad questions. Like not even coherent English,
| just dumps of logs with no context. Stuff that definitely
| should be downvoted.
|
| I was going to go and get an example from the queue but I
| just checked and they're actually all empty. SO is truly
| dead.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| The entire thing is being done by an algorithm by Google and
| the various legal groups that scour youtube for infringement.
| The review process is equally automated as well. Google seems
| perpetually allergic to having humans involved at any point and
| so it continues to compound the mistake the algorithms make by
| making them unfixable.
| rat87 wrote:
| That's because of the amount of content which keeps
| increasing. Even outsourcing to low cost countries it
| wouldn't be cheap to hire thousands or tens of thousands of
| people to review cases. Still you need to have humans in
| there somewhere.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Let's not forget that Geerlings income is probably
| significantly derived from YouTube. On the plus side he's big
| enough that he has more sway than up and coming creators,
| either via a direct human rep or via another prominent YouTuber
| if he doesn't have one of his own. Small sites are SOL.
| RajT88 wrote:
| You can find entire albums and movies - but I get a copyright
| strike if I try and post a video of a live performance of an
| orchestra for a piece composed in 1954.
|
| It's bizarre.
| buyucu wrote:
| it is also dangerous to go outside after dark. I propose a global
| curfew and make it illegal to go outside after dark. we will all
| be safer and you will thank me for it.
| g42gregory wrote:
| As I recall, it all started as the so called "Trump exception".
| The laws temporarily did not apply. I remember reading a letter
| by Stanford Journalism Professor in the Economist, saying that
| situation was exceptional and journalists not only do not have to
| tell the truth, but almost have a duty to say whatever is
| necessary to rectify the results of 2016 elections.
|
| It was just the beginning. Next was the "Covid exception". Then
| "HCQ exception", then "Ivermectin exception", then "Covid origin
| exception", then "Israel exception", then ... Always for a good
| cause.
|
| And now we finally got to the "self-hosted media" exception.
| Congratulations.
| InternetUser wrote:
| What was the "Trump exception"? Banning videos that were
| supportive of him?
|
| On a separate note, "the bigger they are, the harder they
| fall":
|
| Remember AOL in the '90s (unless you're under 35)?
|
| And how powerful was the social networking site, MySpace? -
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwG3P5ob-nk
|
| And at that same time, how big was Blogger and even blogging
| itself?
|
| And as for Almighty Facebook/Instagram dominance among
| teenagers and 20-somethings:
|
| > [TikTok] was also the most-downloaded app on Apple's App
| Store in 2018 and 2019, surpassing Facebook, YouTube and
| Instagram.[68][71]
|
| > Cloudflare ranked TikTok the most popular website of 2021,
| surpassing Google.[8]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok
|
| And most recently:
|
| 1. TikTok - 825 million [downloads in 2024]
|
| https://www.designrush.com/agency/mobile-app-design-developm...
| subjectsigma wrote:
| I have had friends and family members say this to me in real
| life. (That is, lying about Trump is less of a sin that what
| he's doing, so the media has a responsibility to discredit
| him.) But I've never seen anyone write it. Do you know the name
| of the author?
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| A bit off topic, but still: Why do we need YouTube and other
| "Video Hosting" platforms at all? Simply upload your video (webm,
| or MP4) to any static Webserver and embed in HTML5. Plays nicely
| and no adds. I don't get why some sites still embed their movies
| stored on YouTube.
| ta12653421 wrote:
| have you ever used the YT tools for managing videos and all the
| stuff?
|
| its super convenient, even non-techies will get it done within
| 15min, also you have lot of supportive functions / tools in der
| admin interface.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| It is slightly more hassle as you'd have to download and
| upload...but Loom is great. Easy to edit your video.
| gtsop wrote:
| Your use case is simplistic so it dismisses actual use cases.
|
| People make money on youtube through ads, you can't do that (as
| effectively) on your own server. This also ties with the
| analytics.
|
| Some organisations like the ready-made administration solution.
| Uploading files through ftp isn't for everyone. Youtube (and
| hosting platforms) has a nice ui to manage all the content,
| handles the user authentication etc.
|
| Bandwith.
|
| Backups.
|
| I aggree that for people who don't need all these, and are tech
| savvy, uploading an mp4 to a server is the way to go.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| OP seems to be making 1200/m from cash subscriptions on
| floatplane.
|
| I get why people use YouTube though. But it is precarious
| too. You own jack shit.
| timewizard wrote:
| > has a nice ui to manage all the content
|
| It has _a_ UI.
|
| > uploading an mp4 to a server is the way to go.
|
| Hotlinking.
|
| Connection limit tuning.
|
| DDoS.
|
| People don't want the hassle.
| InternetUser wrote:
| I think a bigger reason is all of those is the brand trust
| that YouTube has. If I, as an independent director, make a
| music video, or a 10-minute tutorial video, or a short
| cinematic film, and want it to be seen by tens of thousands
| of people this month, YouTube is where I'm posting it. If you
| can persuade me that there's a video URL that thousands and
| even millions of random strangers would be even more likely
| to click on than one that starts with YouTube.com, I'd be
| very grateful to know it. Even Vimeo is known to far fewer
| Gen Z viewers than it has been to Millennials -
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=v.
| ..
| gmueckl wrote:
| There is more to serving videos well than meets the eye. Not
| all browsers support all codecs. Not all devices have
| sufficient bandwidth to stream the highest quality encoding or
| the available bandwidth isn't constant. Does the server have
| enough bandwidth? How much does the hosting service charge for
| outgoing traffic?
|
| While you can put an mp4 file on a webserver and call it a day,
| it'll most likely be a pretty bad experience for the users.
| account42 wrote:
| Not a bad experience at all compared to ads.
| neogodless wrote:
| You may have missed the point of the parent comment.
|
| Without defining the experience you can call it better or
| worse than any random thing!
|
| But if the video stops every 0.1 seconds to buffer for two
| hours, is that _better_ than stopping very 25 minutes for a
| 30 second ad?
|
| If the video must be 24 x 32 pixels for the bandwidth to be
| low enough for your server restrictions, is that worse than
| the above scenario but a 4k 60fps video?
|
| Where do you draw the line for experience?
| timeon wrote:
| I think no video is better than one that starts with ad.
| At least for long term mental health.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| > I think no video is better than one that starts with
| ad. At least for long term mental health
|
| That's vague. I think most people would disagree, and the
| commenter is right that people put up with ads for a
| certain degree of quality. We used to have 4 minute ad
| breaks on TV. The only reason people moved to streaming
| is because the quality was the same.
|
| I can't imagine ads are doing much more damage to our
| mental health than the content we consume in the first
| place. Likely less.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| As others said, creators are often relying on AdSense from
| YouTube, and even if they did run ads on their own website, how
| would it be discovered?
|
| Let's say a creator decided to move to some non-YouTube
| platform that pays exactly the same as YouTube, via ads and
| premium subscriptions, whatever that platform is, it will have
| nowhere near the size of the audience that YouTube has, meaning
| the creator will be losing out on revenue.
|
| This discourages creators from moving away from YouTube,
| meaning viewers will stay on YouTube
|
| See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
| naikrovek wrote:
| The problem here is that people make videos for money.
|
| If you make videos for money you are highly interested in
| following googles rules, no matter how insane they get.
|
| Maybe don't make a career out of videos? If everyone just
| stopped doing that, Google would have a lot less muscle when
| telling people what they could do in their videos.
|
| Life pro tip: never do things _solely_ for money.
|
| People seem to get mad when I say that but they also seem to
| misunderstand what I mean when I say "solely for money". If
| you have a job that pays the bills, don't make YouTube videos
| solely because you will have more money. Doing so will put
| you in Googles mercy, and you will be scared to death to do
| anything that removes that income. Instead, make videos to
| help your career, or simply for fun, and don't monetize them.
| Google can't threaten your income if you don't get income
| from them.
| Xelbair wrote:
| From what i've heard from creators youtube ads are such a
| small fraction of revenue that they don't count it - maybe
| horrible clickbait content mills depend on it but world would
| be better off without them.
|
| Mostly it comes from patreon or equivalent, sponsorship deals
| and merch sales.
|
| Youtube exists only because discoverability, and ads profit
| goes mostly to YT itself.
| InternetUser wrote:
| What's an example or two of what one of those static
| Webserver's URLs would look like? I'd like to see one that you
| believe would get as many random people to click on it as would
| click on it if were a YouTube link. In my own experience,
| sharing videos on Reddit, X, and via text message that are not
| from YouTube often get comments and questions of suspicion and
| distrust about the site it's posted from, and sometimes, even
| people even posting a YouTube copy of the same video. Some of
| those sites have been Odysee, DailyMotion, and Ok.ru. YouTube
| is a name that billions of people worldwide trust, and it has
| been the 2nd most visited online property in the U.S. and
| worldwide for many years now.
| SparksJoy981 wrote:
| * it serves multiple sizes for faster/slower connections
|
| * it serves it with correct codecs, whatever the original input
|
| * from local servers that are close to the user, so it's faster
|
| * it doesn't kill your bills when the video becomes moderately
| popular
|
| * discussions built-in
|
| * virality built-in
|
| * it won't go down when you forget to pay your server
|
| * you don't need to deal with hosting software updates
|
| You can solve some of that with CDNs, some of them even do some
| kind of video players that do all the ffmpeg stuff for you, but
| then you have a third party in the mix again.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| > it doesn't kill your bills when the video becomes
| moderately popular
|
| Even a paid service, Vimeo, made news a few years ago because
| they would bill video uploaders for "moderately popular"
| videos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Because bandwidth is expensive and at a certain point so is
| storage.
|
| Also because ISPs are terrible companies that will sabotage
| your attempt to stream video for no reason other than spite.
|
| In theory you can just point a browser at a video and it'll
| play. The problem is, for a significant chunk of the world,
| that video will only play halfway through, or play barely if at
| all, or it'll take an hour to load even though you have an
| excellent connection.
|
| Then, there's the discoverability problem. If you want to
| create a channel, you want people to know your channel exists.
| So do millions of others. Youtube and similar platforms use
| tag/content correlation to suggest videos (and then some AI
| bullshit to do the same but worse) to naturally grow your
| audience over time.
|
| The web archive copy of his LibreELEC video is 860MiB in size.
| His recent RPi video got 156k views over 6 days. Transferring
| the 1073 TBit of video over those 6 days in the most optimal
| scenario would require a constant stream of 2070mbps. At the
| VPS provider I find most reliable, that'll cost him EUR124 just
| for the network traffic for the first six days. That's not
| taking into account the burst of tens of thousands of viewers
| just after releasing a video, or the fact that Jeff has tons of
| other videos on his channel.
|
| Of course there are optimizations. You could transcode the
| video to even lower bitrates to save bandwidth, you could set
| up different quality profiles and write/buy a complex video
| player library to handle those automatically. Peertube tries to
| solve this problem by leveraging P2P video, but not everyone is
| a fan of exposing their IP address to every other viewer (bot,
| human, data collection tool) when they play a video. And then
| you need to kick out all the scrapers and download bots wasting
| your bandwidth for their personal gain.
|
| Plus, you can't monetize the videos. Great for people consuming
| content already paid for, like government instruction videos or
| corporate productions, but terrible for people who use Youtube
| to fund the video creation process itself.
|
| Even Jeff Geerling, someone with a sizeable audience of
| relatively wealthy audience (thanks, tech industry!), says he
| cannot maintain his channel through Patreon alone:
|
| > I was never able to sustain my open source work based on
| patronage, and content production is the same--just more
| expensive to maintain to any standard (each video takes between
| 10-300 hours to produce, and I have a family to feed, and US
| health insurance companies to fund).
|
| Youtube happened for a good reason and it can't happen again
| without wasting billions on making the servers, software,
| bandwidth, and content in general free for years before it can
| reach critical mass. Even for hobbyists, offsetting the network
| egress fees alone would be a challenge without monetization.
|
| Linus Tech Tips is trying to spread their eggs across more
| baskets by setting up Floatplane, and there's a reason
| Floatplane is far from free. Sticking a webm file on a web
| server somewhere is a solution for videos that get a couple
| hundred views, but it quickly becomes unsustainable.
| noirscape wrote:
| At its simplest; the economics of hosting video quickly become
| unsustainable.
|
| A well formatted blog takes maybe 1MB at most per request (a
| really well made blog can lower that quicker). 20 minutes of
| 1080p video is ~500mb according to most YouTube downloading
| tools. Hetzner offers you 20TB of free internet traffic per
| month for every VPS you buy.
|
| That one blog can be send up to 20000000 (that's 20 million!)
| times to people every month before you'd have to start looking
| for CDNs or other fancy solutions. By contrast, that 20 minute
| video runs out of bandwidth after 40000 (40 thousand) times
| before you hit the same scenario. (These are hypotheticals, of
| course you'd incur more due to traffic overhead and the
| realistic answer that you'll have more than one page/file on
| your site.)
|
| It's essentially a scale problem; bandwidth is really expensive
| if you don't outright own (and have the need to use) a data
| center or colocate. (And even then it's still expensive, it
| just goes from completely unreasonable to "maybe a sustainable
| business".) Alternatively, CDN solutions also get very
| expensive very quickly at the amount of traffic that digital
| video tends to consume (which wouldn't be selfhosting it
| anymore, but is worth a mention).
|
| And that's without going into the discovery issues or the fact
| that browsers accept much fewer codecs than you'd expect for
| video playback (which can further bloat up storage size as you
| might have to use less efficient solutions.)
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| The ads is the reason why content creators post their videos on
| YouTube. The want to be, and deserve to be, compensated. His
| audience would shrink immediately if he were to self host his
| videos and his source of income would disappear overnight;
| leading to him doing something other than content creation to
| provide for his family.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| For me, it's a little bit that, but probably just as much the
| bandwidth costs. I used to host some video content, but even
| if one video got 1/10th the views it gets on YouTube, it
| would be many TB of bandwidth, and that gets quite expensive.
|
| The solution is to upload in like 360p low quality, but then
| any screen recordings are a muddy mess and there's no point.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| No discoverability. Youtube will recommend videos from its vast
| library and you can search them, but if I host all my content
| on voidupdate.co.uk, nobody will ever find it unless they look
| at my HN profile or something
| superkuh wrote:
| I share the vast majority of my uploaded videos with friends
| and peers on IRC by directly giving them the link, so no
| problem.
|
| Video hosting should not be tied to profit motives. If that's
| your thing, if your _job_ is making videos to sell things or
| display ads, then yes, you 're gonna need Alphabet's Google's
| Youtube or some similar megacorp to handle money transfers
| and for network effect.
|
| If you're like 99% of the rest of us on Earth then a static
| .mp4 file with -movflags +faststart is great and satisfies
| all needs.
| superkuh wrote:
| You don't even need HTML. Encoded as an mp4 with ffmpeg
| -movflags +faststart and you now have a mp4 that almost all
| browsers can use the seek bar within without any sort of
| javascript or HTML. Streaming without all the complexity of
| 'streaming'. Just a simple static .mp4 file on a webserver.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Unfortunately, data transfer requirements for video are through
| the roof compared even to audio, let alone text. Self-hosting
| is great if your audience is in the tens, but if your video
| goes viral, you'll get slammed with terabytes of egress.
| znpy wrote:
| @geerlingguy:
|
| First things first: I'm on your side. But the whole content-
| creator industry should really start looking for and pushing
| alternatives to Youtube.
|
| Floatplane from LTT folks looks promising, I wish it got more
| attention. It seems that only Linus and Luke actually had the
| balls to come up with a business model and implement the darn
| thing.
|
| Otherwise you (and other content creators) sooner or later will
| have to decide between self-censoring and make a living.
| smolder wrote:
| LTT is only popular because of youtube in the first place and
| kind of bad at what they do. I've seen lots of bad methodology
| and low value content so added them to my "don't recommend"
| list years ago. More on topic, Floatplane doesn't fix any of
| the problems with youtube, it's just another take on it that
| they're filling up with more clickbait thumbnails.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| They literally have their own testing lab for hardware tests.
|
| The regular lighter content brings in the money though, tech
| deep dives aren't exactly audience magnets.
| jorams wrote:
| Nebula[1] is an alternative to YouTube for and by youtubers.
| I'm fairly certain it's much bigger than Floatplane. It has ad-
| free versions of the creators' youtube videos, early access for
| new videos, and exclusive content. It seems to be pretty
| successful.
|
| It is also, like Floatplane, totally irrelevant without the
| pull from YouTube, because that's where the audience finds
| these creators in the first place.
|
| [1]: https://nebula.tv/
| CJefferson wrote:
| I would love to love nebula, I bought a one year
| subscription. I let it lapse because discovery was awful, I
| found several nebula authors from YouTube, but never via
| nebula.
| anticensor wrote:
| Nebula lacks comments and livestreams, so it is more like
| Netflix.
| kuschku wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're telling him this -- he's already on
| floatplane and the video is available there already
|
| https://www.floatplane.com/channel/JeffGeerling/
| babushkaboi wrote:
| Yeah, and it's not just YouTube's moderation that's messed up.
| Their whole governance model tilts hard against creators.
|
| I have a creator friend who was telling me that newswire agencies
| are gaming a loophole in YT's copyright policy to extort
| creators. Basically, they threaten takedowns unless the creator
| pays up. Even when creators argue their use falls under "fair
| use" for reporting, YT's 3 strike policy doesn't care. Three
| strikes and your channel is dead - no nuance. They let
| rightsholders file strikes at their will & it's on the creator
| (or the courts) to fight it out. Guess who usually blinks first?
|
| Also this looks like a global grift. Came across Asian newswires
| picking up on this playbook - licensing clips at premium prices
| under the implicit threat of a strike.
|
| I mean, YT could fix this, but they won't. they benefit either
| way. Creators are stuck between losing their life's work and
| paying up just to stay online.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Creators are stuck between losing their life's work and
| paying up just to stay online.
|
| Concerning "[c]reators are [...] losing their life's work": you
| are telling me that these creators don't have private backups
| of their videos (or if they accidentally really don't wouldn't
| at least download their own videos from YouTube to get at least
| a re-encoded version of their video)?
| babushkaboi wrote:
| losing a channel isn't just losing their files. It's losing
| their reach, momentum and shot at staying visible. Backups
| don't fix that.
| sp0ck wrote:
| This is mass problem with almost any topic you want to share. I'm
| sport shooter, range officer and competition jury. You have no
| idea what crazy stunts YouTube do for Gun/Sport Shooting related
| content. YT terms containt some weirdest restriction for things
| like "shown magazine capacity". Wrong angle on video and your 10
| round mag is seen by YouTube as 30 round and your video is gone.
|
| You can show silencer disconnected from firearm, connected to
| firearm but showing moment you screwing it to end of barrel and
| your video is banned. There are dozens rules that are so vague
| that if YT wants he can remove any gun related content.
|
| This is problem YT is not willing to fix because collateral
| damage costs are peanuts comparing to beeing sued and loose
| because some real illegal content slip trough filter. I don't
| expect any improvement here because there is no business
| justification.
| christophilus wrote:
| Same for tobacco stuff. I follow a few pipe-tobacco reviewers,
| and YT has begun to tighten the clamp there, too.
|
| It wouldn't bother me if YouTube wasn't basically a monopoly. I
| know some of them have been switching to Rumble, but to be
| honest, the competition is so fragmented that I don't see any
| of them gaining critical mass.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| We should host a tobacco related Peertube instance at this
| point. Get Muttnchop, Snus at Home and some other guys on it
| and we would be free from youtube
| threetonesun wrote:
| Host your own content, monetize your own blog. I get that not
| as many people can do it without access to the big platforms
| but... that's ok?
| mousethatroared wrote:
| And break the big tech monopolies is also... ok?
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed. A family member of mine had a helpful amount of income
| coming in from a channel of his that was gaining momentum. The
| point of the channel was to teach gun safety to people new to
| guns. Keep in mind that where we live, all of this is 100%
| legal and even encouraged, yet, YouTube threw so many
| ridiculous barriers in the way that he could not create much
| content That didn't end up getting removed. He eventually threw
| in the towel, and now people new to guns have less access to
| genuinely helpful information that might save their lives. It
| seems ironic to me that they had to aggressively remove
| anything that mentioned covid and didn't go exactly down the
| government line because otherwise it could get people killed,
| but they have no problem removing gun safety videos.
| hbn wrote:
| But the tech companies all replaced the gun emoji with a
| squirt gun like a decade ago, I thought all gun violence
| ended after that?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| That's because they are not a platform for education. They
| are a platform for ads and encouraging hyperconsumerism. They
| merely _allow_ educational material, _sometimes_. Expect more
| videos to be removed over time that don 't align with their
| goals. e.g. I would not expect playlists of hour-long MIT
| lectures to stay there for the long term as the platform
| moves more toward shorts and algorithmic recommendations. Or
| their vast library of people's old random amateur videos that
| barely get any views/generate almost no revenue while costing
| them money.
| amrocha wrote:
| Guns are not safe. No matter what you do, accidents will
| happen.
|
| I don't think Youtube is the place to look for education, and
| neither does youtube apparently.
|
| It'd be pretty bad if someone watched youtube videos and
| thought they could handle guns safely and ended up hurt.
|
| That doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
| philistine wrote:
| Are you aware that gun laws are not the same around the world
| and that YouTube likes to enjoy revenue worldwide?
|
| I see all the rules you describe as an American company trying
| to marry the gun culture of the US with the far more reserved
| stance of the rest of the world.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| @geerlingguy
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240531142901/https://www.youtu...
| fortran77 wrote:
| Every time I sit down at my own piano in my own living room and
| record something written by a composer who died 150 years ago or
| more, I get a copyright strike on YouTube--often by a big label
| (BMI, etc). Last week it was a Robert Schumann piece, composed in
| 1848. The strike is still there, even though I contested it. (The
| form to contest it doesn't even have a good box to check for this
| scenario.)
|
| I would love it if I had the resources to sue BMI for defamation
| (they're claiming I'm a thief) and sue YouTube for facilitating
| this.
|
| They really need to make sure their music match looks for _exact_
| matches for compositions that are out of copyright, to catch
| specific performances and not just melodic/harmonic/rhytmic
| matches.
| InternetUser wrote:
| Rick Beato has talked about this problem; in one video, he was
| even talking about how 5-second snippets of jazz were causing
| videos to be taken down, but the algorithm didn't even identify
| the right song. It reminds of how, in using the Shazam app,
| I've had numerous instances where it will wrongly identify a
| track 2 or 3 times, and even stick with the wrong answer. But
| even bands like Guns N' Roses and The Eagles will get videos of
| cover performances quickly blocked for sounding too close to
| the originals. Here's a great video where he talks about
| YouTube's recklessly draconian algorithms:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5lY_DbUsok
| fortran77 wrote:
| That's not _this_ problem. Guns n' Roses, the Eagles, etc (or
| someone assigned by them) owns the rights to the score,
| lyrics, and recordings of performances. These are separate
| copyrights. If you cover their song, you may still be
| infringing on their copyrighted lyrics, score, and
| arrangements.
|
| I'm talking about compositions to which nobody has any rights
| to any part of (a recording of a performance can still have a
| copyright).
| elric wrote:
| The lack of (legal) recourse (in practice, if not in theory)
| against large multinational monopolists like YT is the real
| problem here. Imagine if a policeman came to your house every
| time you played the piano to fine you for nonexistent copyright
| infringement. That cop would be unemployed in very short order.
| You could take all sorts of against them, and there are
| protections in place to prevent such abuse of power.
|
| Not so with YT. You have fuck all recourse against the
| arbitrary and often incorrect decisions of whatever they call
| this ridiculous attempt at moderation. It is incredibly
| difficult to even talk to a human being. You'd be hard pressed
| to find a lawyer who could help you in this. Let alone a judge
| who would spend time on this only to tell Google the obvious
| truth: "the composition is out of copyright, stop being
| ridiculous". They'd go back to making the same mistakes
| immediately.
|
| My personal take on this is that it needs to be easier to talk
| to humans, to contest decisions, and to have humans in the
| moderation loop BEFORE handing out copyright strikes. If that
| means YT is no longer profitable, so be it.
| MyPasswordSucks wrote:
| > Imagine if a policeman came to your house every time you
| played the piano to fine you for nonexistent copyright
| infringement. That cop would be unemployed in very short
| order. You could take all sorts of against them, and there
| are protections in place to prevent such abuse of power.
|
| The legal concept of qualified immunity prevents taking
| personal action against civic officials for actions they
| perform in the course of their civic duties. So, assuming the
| policeman is coming to your house because BMI called 911 to
| report (non-existent) copyright theft, the policeman is
| simply doing his thankless job, and is immune from suit.
|
| If the policeman is just showing up without being called,
| then - while he would not benefit from qualified immunity -
| 1. it makes no sense to label him as a "policeman" since he's
| no longer performing the job of a policeman - you might as
| well just say "brown-haired guy" or "rollercoaster
| enthusiast" or "guy who prefers Pepsi to Coke" as those
| traits are just as relevant; and 2. it's a very poor analogic
| fit, because in the situation you're comparing it to, YouTube
| (the cop) is being called by BMI.
|
| Note that qualified immunity is, strictly speaking, only
| applicable to government/civic actors, not private
| enterprise. However, the general principle still applies
| throughout the legal canon (usually lurking between the
| phrases "duty of care" and "assumption of risk" - you can't
| sue Kevin McCallister for causing you to cut your foot when
| you stepped on haphazardly-placed Christmas ornaments,
| because you were trespassing on private property and the
| McCallister family owed you no duty of care; and you can't
| sue We Throw Pies At Your Face For Five Dollars Inc for
| throwing a pie at your face, assuming you went there and paid
| five dollars, because you knew what you were getting into and
| they were just doing their job). In the case of copyright,
| legal immunity for content providers is actually hard-coded
| into the DMCA, mostly via the OCILLA safe harbor (Title II).
|
| Also, please don't confuse an explanation of the process for
| an endorsement of the process. The DMCA is bad law that only
| looks good if you compare it to hypothetical laws that would
| be worse, copyright in the US has been ridiculous for
| generations and trying to emulate Europe in the late 80s only
| made it worse, and I wish YouTube could find a way to take a
| stance against rightsholders who abuse the process. But their
| status as a large multinational monopolist isn't why you
| can't sue them - it's baked into the law, because that's how
| the DMCA works.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Cooking at home is considered harmful according to restaurant
| owners.
| neop1x wrote:
| Yes, a great analogy. And actually most of the time the food we
| cook at home is better than what we can get in restaurants.
| Sadly. Cooking decent food at home takes time, it should have
| been a restaurant job, but the reality is what it is...
| timeon wrote:
| > Sadly. Cooking decent food at home takes time
|
| Why sadly? I need to eat more than I need to scroll internet
| or anything else. Preparing decent food is time well spent.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Learn a few dishes well, soon you are cooking them at home
| much faster than it would take to wait for them at any
| restaurant, including all cleanup and dishes.
|
| Bonus: Cheaper, much higher quality, much better taste, and
| most importantly: you can drink as much as you want without
| getting kicked out.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I will choose Jellyfin over YouTube every single time. Thanks YT
| for your content littered with ADs, but in all sincerity go fuck
| yourself.
| herbst wrote:
| I would love to see an European YouTube alternative with less
| morals being enforced through demonistation.
|
| TV is literally way less self censoring at this point
|
| And don't get confused. Most videos would be allowed on YouTube
| content creators just prefer to monetize them.
| Glittergorp wrote:
| There would be more enforcement of this if it was the EU / UK.
|
| Generally anything that looks or smells like hacking or
| copyright infringement isn't a good idea to put on your YouTube
| channel. I upload Linux videos and I will not mention youtube-
| dl (or equivalents), anything torrent related even torrenting
| legal things like Linux install media.
| 1ark wrote:
| > Started in 2017 by a programmer known as Chocobozzz,
| development of PeerTube is now supported by the French non-
| profit Framasoft. The aim is to provide an alternative to
| centralized platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Copyright laws are usually more strict in Europe. Yes it's a
| broad generalization and Europe has a lot of different
| jurisdictions, but the biggest European countries all have
| worse Copyright laws. France has HADOPI, Germany has its own
| mess, and the EU itself is extremely pro-copyright.
| herbst wrote:
| Copyright maybe. Talking about normal human things like sex
| or dangers definitely not
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I don't think there's any law that restricts that type of
| speech in the US. YouTube is strict about those things
| because of advertisers, not because of any local law.
| herbst wrote:
| To my understanding COPPA is basically forcing all public
| media to be "child friendly"
| neepi wrote:
| Yeah YouTube are getting shittier by the day. I keep getting
| banners telling me that ad blockers aren't allowed on YouTube.
| Stuff is pretty unwatchable now without them.
|
| Well fuck you I'll just download the videos with yt-dlp instead.
| If that stops working, I'll not bother.
| Glittergorp wrote:
| You can use piped.
|
| https://github.com/TeamPiped/documentation/blob/main/content...
| neepi wrote:
| Too unreliable. I just use yt-dlp and throw it on VLC on my
| iPad with airdrop.
|
| If it's not worth that effort it probably wasn't worth
| watching anyway.
| nicce wrote:
| There will be a time when computing is so cheap that ads
| will be injected to the stream in such a way that it is
| impossible to remove them without real-time AI detector
| that indentifies the parts where ads are.
| prickledponcho wrote:
| Sponsor Block add-on works well for this, but entirely
| dependent on ads being at fixed time in the video.
| polivier wrote:
| Future versions could id the start and end frames of the
| ad and thus be able to detect the segment anywhere in the
| video.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| By then we will have real-time AI detectors to identify
| and remove ads. Begun, the LLM ad wars have.
| sph wrote:
| Laws of thermodynamics suggest it will be easier for ad
| companies to find a way to spam you, than for you to
| bypass all of their ads. These real-time AI detectors
| cannot be very cheap to run/train.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| The problem Youtube has is that it wants to make sure you
| can't skip the ad, so it has to signal in some way to its
| front end and app that this segment is an ad. That
| mechanism can and will be used to skip it with other
| clients. They can put the ads in band of the video stream
| like twitch does but if they are genuinely
| indistinguishable then they are also fast forward and
| skippable.
| Phui3ferubus wrote:
| TYT has to mark the ad segment, they are required by law
| to do it. And no matter how they try to obfuscate it,
| their own webpage must be able to extract that info, and
| present it to user. So it is pointless to integrate ads
| if you are going to provide the timestamps to skip.
|
| Just look how Facebook does it, there is no "Sponsored
| post" anywhere in HTML, the literally place entire
| alphabet multiple times, each letter in separate
| span/paragraph tag, and then use CSS to actually style
| that into a message of their choice. All of that work
| just to prevent simple adblocking rules to work.
| error503 wrote:
| If they're injecting targeted ads in the stream, then the
| stream producer must be 'smart'. It's not much of a
| stretch for it to enforce playing out the segments at
| approximately realtime (or whatever speedup they want to
| allow), and to force the advert segments to play out
| before anything past them. Some sidechannel could be used
| to inform the client about what's going on and produce a
| sensible playhead position.
|
| It seems inevitable that this is the end game, and I
| don't really see viable ways around it for realtime
| playback. For offline playback, yeah, presumably that
| sidechannel includes enough information to cut out the
| ads.
| neepi wrote:
| Already use sponsor block to stop the meat flavoured AI
| promoting shitty VPNs in the middle of their streams.
| Glittergorp wrote:
| I appreciate it isn't brilliant. I use it as a fallback.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Refreshing works for me, for now at least.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| What ads? I run the equivalent of pihole, and use a Samsung TV
| user agent on YouTube.com/tv and I never see ads, except for an
| occasional banner on the home tab.
| esskay wrote:
| Pihole isn't, and hasn't been able to block youtube ads for
| several years now, so if you aren't seeing ads its something
| else stopping them. Ads are served from the same dns address
| as videos, so a dns block is incredibly poor for youtube.
| achrono wrote:
| I think it's time for creative solutions on this front. This
| plugin business is a little like a cop living in a house of
| thieves.
|
| For instance, how about an app that will basically detect an ad
| and _visually overlay a blank blob_ over the ad video (and of
| course mute, or even just transmute, the audio).
|
| We'd still pay that tax in terms of time, having to sit through
| those 30-60 seconds, but it's way better than also surrendering
| your mind to the utter intrusion.
| npteljes wrote:
| >Stuff is pretty unwatchable now without them.
|
| Subscribe to Premium, and the Google ads are gone. I think it's
| only fair, given how vast and complex YouTube is as a service.
| amrocha wrote:
| There was a headline here the other day that Youtube Premium
| Lite will now have more ads.
|
| Eventually Premium will have ads too. It's just a matter of
| time.
| npteljes wrote:
| I don't think I can solve these problems that far ahead.
| Currently, and for some good years now, YT Premium has not
| had any Google ads. I think subscribing to it it's
| presently a good value, and that's about it. We are free to
| cancel our subscription and do whatever adblocking we can
| when the ads eventually come.
|
| I feel the outrage against the free YT, the free Spotify,
| and probably other services is misplaced, since these
| providers offer fair subscription prices that make the UX
| completely normal. I don't see why we, as users, should
| fight this. This fight could be allocated to actually
| pressing issues, or used as energy to give to the content
| itself that we get from these services.
|
| But I guess this is something that is up to each
| individual.
| amrocha wrote:
| You're right that you can always cancel your
| subscription.
|
| Personally it just feels kinda like buying time, so I'd
| rather have a more permanent solution.
|
| The enshittification seems inevitable.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| What word with a suffix that rhymes with car?
|
| What exactly is he talking about?
| sigio wrote:
| I'm guessing the '*arr' suite of collection-management tools
| rlayton2 wrote:
| Arr as in pirate.lots of tools that support piracy end with
| that suffix like sonarr etc
| komali2 wrote:
| Enshittifiction is in full swing in Youtube and like the article
| says, creators are effectively golden-handcuffed in. In a normal
| world, youtube would twist the knobs until their bureaucratic
| momentum causes them to twist too far, and also cause them to
| take too long to twist back, during which time a competitor can
| come and steal all the advertisers and creators.
|
| That won't happen in our world, because of www.google.com. The
| existence of that website guarantees that nobody can ever create
| a competitor to youtube, because youtube can just undercut on ad
| costs or pay out creators at high enough rates to run a loss for
| basically fucking centuries if it has to, until everyone else's
| funding runs out.
|
| Imagine building just one of the datacenters needed to feed
| Youtube... They're what, 200 million a pop?
|
| Within a capitalist mode of production and without any real
| regulatory guardrails, I just don't see Youtube going away, ever,
| and I don't see any real competitors, ever. Happy to be proven
| wrong.
|
| I try to do my part - I host a tubearchivist instance that at
| this point is mirroring a couple TB of content from channels some
| friends and I enjoy. So, .00000000000000000000001% of Youtube. I
| use it to watch youtube without the stupid ads, and every once in
| a while buy a mug or whatever from my favorite creators. I'm not
| sure what else consumers can do about the situation.
| efitz wrote:
| This is reason #597 why you just don't allow platforms to censor.
|
| If a site wants to be a publisher, by all means, be a publisher,
| and don't monetize user content.
|
| If a site wants other people to provide the content for free,
| then sorry- no censorship for you.
|
| "Community guidelines" etc are just censorship with a nicer name.
|
| "The algorithm" is just opaque censorship by making content
| undiscoverable. "un-content" in Orwell speak.
|
| There are valid use cases for on-topic/off-topic. User content
| sites should have to declare whether they are a single-topic
| community or not, and act in good faith either way. If you are a
| single topic site then you must aggressively prune everything
| that is off topic (not just some off-topic). If you are multi-
| topic then no censorship for you.
|
| And multi-topic sites like Reddit have to do so per
| channel/subreddit/etc. but the key points are "on/off topic" is
| the only valid filter criteria, and it must be applied
| consistently and in good faith.
|
| If your algorithm is the secret sauce that makes your platform
| worthwhile/profitable/whatever, then people must be able to opt
| out, eg opt into a "only stuff I follow, all of it, most recent
| first".
|
| Or if you care about your users then implement curated feeds,
| allow users to create their own curated feeds, and implement your
| algorithm as the first curated feed.
| cornholio wrote:
| If you try to build that platform, you will get swamped by far
| right content, people casually suggesting how one could
| hypothetically obtain child porn if they had such illegal and
| immoral proclivities, and so on.
|
| You will then be boycotted by everyone, from your payment
| provider and advertisers to your more mainstream users, in a
| self-enforcing spiral until only unsavory content exists on
| your platform; nobody will lift a finger to help you, let alone
| offer you legal protection against such attacks. When you
| eventually run out of server money, the child pornographers
| will just move on to greener pastures.
|
| Everyone censors because everyone is a business and they want
| to maintain their content inside the Overton window where
| revenue is maximized and it's unlikely a boycott or political
| action against them will be successful.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| You absolutely need _some_ rules.
|
| Let's say I have a video called "Why Efitz is a serial killer".
| Sure, you can block my video, and the topic entirely but that
| doesn't really solve your problem. You're not really worried
| about you seeing it, but others. I didn't aim the video at you,
| but rather at a group that already hates people with your
| race/gender/orientation/religion/etc. They're already vaguely
| talking about that group being a threat, and my videos claims
| aren't really scrutinized. As the theory gains traction around
| the internet, there's a growing amount of people who believe
| you need to be stopped at all costs.
|
| You'll notice that even within the world of the hypothetical,
| you were picked by random chance. Since the "evidence" is just
| an immutable trait of yours, the only thing preventing an angry
| mob from forming outside your house is the difficulty in
| forming one.
|
| On an unrelated note, publishers make money off of creative's
| works all the time. TV networks aren't platforms, but they make
| money off of the shows they broadcast all the same.
| Xelbair wrote:
| Now a counterpoint: we banned government censorship for a
| good reason(or tried to).
|
| Why would a private 3rd party be allowed to do so? especially
| if government can heavily incentivize the 3rd party(using
| either stick and/or carrot) to be basically outsourced
| censorship office? Why do we give power of censorship to
| private entities that can shape public opinion in a way that
| brings them the most profit?
|
| you can fix former issue by education and culture shift -
| censorship is just a bandaid.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| > _you can fix former issue by education and culture shift
| - censorship is just a bandaid._
|
| Bandaid is a surprisingly apt similie. It'd be nice to just
| be healed and healthy, but in the meantime we do have to
| stop the bleeding.
| Xelbair wrote:
| does bandaid help for broken arm or cancer?
|
| Censorship makes things worse, by entrenching different
| group - it's just that you like that one.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Bandages are very common, even at hospitals. The solution
| isn't just to pretend nothing's wrong until the patient
| bleeds to death. There's other steps here too, I continue
| to advocate for education and culture shift. I've spoken
| specifically to both the public and lawmakers about the
| importance of inclusion. The work isn't done.
|
| Don't get me wrong, YouTube is deeply flawed in its
| implementation of moderation. The website is borderline
| unsupervised when it comes to human beings, and the
| algorithm/AI has been very destructive. That's not the
| fault of rules as a concept though. There are so many
| rules, which in theory, I'm prepared to defend even if
| they aren't working in practice. Does it suck when I'm
| falsely accused of violating copyright? Yes. Would it
| also suck to have no recourse if my work got stolen?
| Absolutely. Could they allow adult imagery and I just
| filter it out on my end? Yes. Is it a huge overreach that
| they don't allow child pornography? No. The line does
| have to be drawn somewhere.
| amlib wrote:
| Censorship by private parties is only a problem when they
| are allowed to be a monopoly in that market segment. If we
| had hundreds of viable and independent youtube sites and
| hundreds of viable and independent social networks around
| the world private censorship wouldn't be much of a problem
| at all, you just take your junk to whoever accepts it, be
| it from a jurisdiction point o view or from a policy point
| of view. If none of them accepts you, you likely need to
| spend a long time reflecting upon yourself... or try
| creating your own service (which has a much bigger chance
| of staying afloat on such fair market) that accepts your
| junk.
| sylware wrote:
| ... or accessing the web without one of the web engines from the
| whatng cartel.
| cladopa wrote:
| The problem number one is the total monopoly of YouTube in the
| Internet TV, so they can abuse without consequences. We need
| competition, but we don't have it because it is a natural
| monopoly: the more users YouTube has, and the bigger the scale,
| the cheaper it is for google.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| Since very recently I also get this annoying "youtube doens't
| allow ad-blockers" popup. for now one can just click it away,
| let's see for how long...
| hd4 wrote:
| They're really starting to build the case for self-hosting videos
| through Peertube
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| > or any tools that automatically slurp up YouTube content.
|
| I'll bite. Last time I tried yt-dlp on a vps, YouTube wanted me
| to login - inevitably that'd lead to a banned account, which is
| the same reason I was using a vps in the first place.
|
| Are there any tools that source videos either via a vps or
| decentralised for popular channels?
|
| I refuse to not use ublock, and I'm not paying whatever
| ridiculous amount premium costs (now, or when they inevitably
| increase prices).
|
| Edit: i want to download videos from YouTube to stream via
| Jellyfin, I don't need a hosting platform.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| "Who knew open source software could be so subversive?"
|
| Me -- I knew that. Power to the people.
| msgodel wrote:
| Conservatives should think of the right to personal computing
| with the same ideological concern they have for the right to self
| defense.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| Josh Hawley has proposed some bills to break up tech monopolies
| in the name of individual freedoms.
| maxlin wrote:
| I agree, but actually also think this is on the rise. Platforms
| like Rumble are the flagships of being against big tech, and
| run on speech first.
|
| As the next generation of conservatives grows up, them being
| "behind" the "more likely to be pioneering" crowd in tech will
| lessen in effect, while big tech is starting to hit a bit of an
| identity crisis.
| hello_computer wrote:
| The good news is that LLMs + growth in storage & bandwidth will
| eventually put Google in its place. The full texts of stack
| exchange and wikipedia (kiwix) are only a few gigs. Same for
| offline models like llama/gemma/qwen. As the wizards keep finding
| new ways to pack more bits on metal plates, we will be able to
| store more video than we will ever watch, just as we now store
| more text than we will ever read.
| npteljes wrote:
| >just as we now store more text than we will ever read.
|
| Yet, we are not reading, but hanging on social sites instead.
| Same with this supposed video cache. People go to YouTube not
| because of the platform, but because of other people. As long
| as they are there, the ones who are curious about them will
| also go there.
| hello_computer wrote:
| Obviously, but that's not what I'm getting at. Due to present
| technical limitations, "influencers" have to sharecrop for
| Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc. Bandwidth/storage/software
| improvements will allow successful "influencers" to flee the
| plantation.
| npteljes wrote:
| Not until we solve the discovery and filtering part as
| well, at the very least. I'd say that is the largest value
| these platforms bring to the table, hand in hand with their
| existing network too of course.
| rglullis wrote:
| I'd be more than happy to get the 10EUR/month I am _not_ giving
| to YouTube and send it to Jeff if he completely moved out of it.
|
| I know that he is already on Floatplane, but we all know that
| Google is not working with the best interests of its
| users/creators in mind, so "criticism" of YouTube while making
| money there seems hypocritical.
| layer8 wrote:
| But if you're following 30 channels, would you be happy to give
| out 300EUR/month? There's just not enough people willing to do
| that to make it sustainable for creators.
| rglullis wrote:
| I wouldn't give 300EUR/month, but I could set a monthly
| budget that I am comfortable with (let's say 50EUR/month) and
| spread to all the content creators that I'd like to support.
| This is _exactly_ what I 've built with the Communick
| Collective: https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-
| a-zero-commi...
| lokimedes wrote:
| The phrase "considered harmful" should be "considered harmful".
| It's basically an argumentation trick, raising a subjective
| conclusion to a neutral and objective conclusion without any
| qualification.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Though in this instance YouTube literally put the "harmful"
| label on the video. I thought the irony was appropriate.
|
| At least I didn't say "All you need is <X>"!
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I mostly hear it sarcastically nowadays.
| anonymous344 wrote:
| this is what happens when the 0.01% control and owns almost
| everything. They want to control and own exactly everytging, and
| more. no more free speech, or opposing speech or ideas..
| GuB-42 wrote:
| That's just some bot being clueless as usual. Implying YouTube
| understands what it is doing from a human point of view is giving
| it too much credit. Your video is too much like the kind of
| videos that trigger legal action, according to an algorithm,
| that's all.
|
| It is also a good warning against trusting AI agents.
| hliyan wrote:
| These platforms are still relatively young. We need to roll the
| clocks foward another 10-20 years to truly understand what level
| of control they will be able to exert on public knowledge and
| speech, either at the behest of their investors or through
| government pressure.
|
| I wonder whether one solution is for everyone to own a "personal
| cloud computer" (a relatively cheap VM) on which they install
| software much like they did in the pre-SaaS era. They might also
| be able to open up file system and SQL interfaces for certified
| external providers.
|
| Theoretically, the same arguments that apply to a cloud service
| provider would apply to a cloud infrastructure provider too, but
| if the contract were to define the infrastructure as leased
| property, and all data stored on it as belonging to the user,
| then it might be somewhat harder to control.
| tantalor wrote:
| You're skipping over the tradeoffs:
|
| 1. YT provides a free service with massive audience
|
| 2. you would have to pay for the cloud hosting and find your
| own audience.
| Sloowms wrote:
| Point 1 is a plain lie. Point 2 is a misunderstanding of how
| markets work.
| ZiiS wrote:
| TBF watching any other media is harmful to YouTube.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| > I purposefully avoid demonstrating any of the tools (with a
| suffix that rhymes with "car") that are popularly used to
| circumvent purchasing movie, TV, and other media content
|
| What is he talking about here? Im old, I was expecting it to
| rhyme with "abhorrent".
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| See other comments (Servarr, etc.), I was out of the loop as
| well.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| "you own nothing and you will be happy"
| seaourfreed wrote:
| Post your videos on Rumble. Lack of competition for YouTube
| causes a them to have power and a monopoly. Competition removes
| this power. Rumble has gone publicly traded. They have become a
| peer to YouTube. Smaller. Their ads keep them profitable for the
| long-term, so accept their ads being not quite as smooth as
| YouTube as the cost of preventing being censored. Or from YouTube
| being able to have power of what is allowed to be communicated.
|
| Keep creating your videos. Keep supporting these projects. We
| need them.
|
| I'm finding historically critical videos disappear from the
| internet. There was one interview with Jack Dorsey that he was
| threatened that if he didn't allow censorship rollout over
| twitter, that he felt (or was told?) they would remove twitter
| from the mobile app stores and kill it.
|
| Do you want to see that interview? It has been scrubbed off of
| the internet. This happens with many key videos in history. We
| need a FileCoin IPFS way to use open source blockchain way to
| keep these videos forever. Even beyond the lifetime of any
| author, owner or company.
|
| LibreELEC and JellyFin can be the open source part of making them
| easy to retrieve and watch. Open source for freedom. Blockchain
| for publishing freedom. Controlling information is their weapon.
| Protecting freedom for information spread keeps all other
| freedoms protected (and defendable).
| captainbland wrote:
| Corporate content streaming giant thinks you shouldn't just do it
| yourself. Honestly this should be obvious but it's nice to have
| people highlighting concrete examples as people never want to
| hear this kind of thing.
| swed420 wrote:
| Reminds me of this BS
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/facebook-flags-l...
| throw7 wrote:
| I'm just waiting for the day Youtube permanently blocks me from
| using an adblocker.
|
| It's so kind of them to at least make me wait for 5 seconds to
| acknowledge that using an adblocker is illegal.
| tim333 wrote:
| It's illegal? Under what laws I wonder?
| godshatter wrote:
| You're just accessing a publicly-available service with no
| authentication required on an open protocol using a designated
| tool for that purpose and deciding not to view (or possibly
| download) parts of it. I highly doubt it's illegal, but things
| are so strange these days, who knows for sure?
| snickmy wrote:
| What does rhymes with "car"
| npteljes wrote:
| https://wiki.servarr.com/
| ednite wrote:
| Reading through all this has been eye-opening with so many
| thoughtful comments that made me think, even if some parts are a
| bit discouraging.
|
| I've been toying with the idea of jumping on the content creation
| wagon with storytelling, vlogging life experiences, that sort of
| thing, but now I'm wondering: Is it still worth building on
| YouTube if there's a real risk of getting banned later for
| unknowingly crossing some unclear content line?
|
| I'm not focused on monetization right now, just hoping to share
| and connect, but I'd hate to build something meaningful only to
| watch it vanish overnight.
| layer8 wrote:
| Just take care to backup all your videos, then you can always
| go elsewhere, or possibly just start a new channel with a new
| account.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| You can make a living with content creation without giving your
| stuff away to Youtube. See the many bloggers and such that are
| posted around here
| Havoc wrote:
| Youtube is on my case about adblockers again too.
|
| I guess I'm setting up a download solution this weekend.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| "Free" video hosts work for advertisers. Those are their
| customers.
|
| I can _guarantee_ that if youtube got 70% of it 's income from
| paid subscriptions, they would not give a fuck about 99% of this.
|
| If you want youtube (or any other platform) to not suck...pay for
| it.
|
| There is no world where you are not a paying customer and get
| treated like your opinion matters much.
| mhuffman wrote:
| >If you want youtube (or any other platform) to not suck...pay
| for it.
|
| Like Netflix and Amazon Videos?
| Bender wrote:
| _Like Netflix and Amazon Videos?_
|
| People can't share their content on Netflix and Amazon
| without becoming a professional movie producer.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Their point is that people do pay for these services and
| they have still introduced ads to squeeze out more revenue.
| Ergo, paying for a service guarantees nothing.
| Bender wrote:
| I pay for those services and do not get ads and that is
| on a machine dedicated to corporate crap. No addons
| installed. I even use Microsoft Edge so they think they
| are tracking me.
|
| The one and only exception was the movie "Person of
| Interest" which was FreeVee only for reasons I do not
| understand so I put up with their ads and then purchased
| the box set on DVD. The ads were so weird it was
| entertaining to watch them. They were clearly all created
| in China and I am still not convinced the actors were
| real people.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| What you are describing is called "ad-subsidized", you
| pay less than the full cost and get ads to cover the
| difference.
| Zren wrote:
| Netflix has continually raised prices, and earns more
| from the ad plans than those paying more for zero ads.
|
| Becoming a paying customer is just a negotiation with
| advertisers to raise their rates until Netflix concedes
| to what they want. Since they know you have more
| discretionary income Netflix can also charge more for
| ads. They're also incentivized into turning those
| customers into ad supported by increasing the no ad plan
| cost.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Which affects the decision making of the company. There
| are things they won't platform for fear of offending an
| advertiser. The effect is pervasive, regardless of
| whether you are paying the full rate or not.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Frankly people should stop paying for anything with ads.
| But they don't. They love them. If netflix had a free
| tier with tons of ads, it would be by far the most
| popular.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Yes, it's an anticompetitive tactic, but we refuse to
| update our antitrust laws for the internet era.
| timeon wrote:
| So YT is not even content creator? Just parasiting on
| network effect after current owner bought the platform
| _with_ community. Only way to access YT for free is from
| public hot-spot.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I don't use Youtube that much, but if I did, I'd probably find
| someone way to stop instead of paying for Youtube.
|
| One time I had cancelled my Netflix subscription because I
| didn't use it very much, and 3 months later I notice it's still
| active. I was able to easily contact support in my native
| language and get a refund.
|
| If I had an issue with any Google product, I'm pretty sure I'd
| never be able to get it resolved. As a company, they're
| insanely sketchy. Their main support channel is a community
| forum where most answers come from people who are endorsed by
| Google but not "actually" Google employees, except they do get
| benefits for working for Google, except it's not actually
| "working" like in a job so Google isn't really responsible for
| what they say, it's _volunteering with benefits_ , if you know
| what I mean.
|
| For Youtube specifically what makes me not trust is that, like
| Spotify, they advertise that premium subscriptions allow you to
| "download" videos in a sense of the word that literally nobody
| in the entire Internet would agree with. First "save" isn't
| saving, now "download" isn't downloading. I'm not liking this
| trend, to be honest.
|
| It's a common saying that if you aren't the customer, you are
| the product. But I've heard people say that sometimes even when
| you are the customer you're still the product. I'm not sure
| about how I feel about paying to become a shiny product.
| amanda99 wrote:
| > If you want youtube (or any other platform) to not suck...pay
| for it.
|
| If we are going for solutions where your individual decision
| makes no impact on the system in place, then let's go big:
| ditch youtube and host your content on one of the alternatives.
| pier25 wrote:
| I hate these policies as much as anyone but if you decide to use
| an ad blocker you're only making things worse. You probably spend
| more time watching youtube than netflix. Just pay for a family
| youtube premium account and everyone will be happier, including
| the people who made the videos you watch.
| butz wrote:
| It is bad that youtube became only video hosting platform and
| everyone is putting videos there, even government institutions.
| That leads to many annoyances, where critical information is
| blocked by myriad of ads. This should be illegal.
| cg5280 wrote:
| I have been trying to rely on Google less lately, and it made
| me realize just how important a platform YouTube is. There are
| reasonable alternatives to Google search, Gmail, etc. For
| YouTube, nothing.
| butz wrote:
| There is PeerTube. Some interesting creators are mirroring
| their videos to e.g. makertube.net
| hbn wrote:
| I wish the government tech crackdowns would focus more on this
| or Microsoft's blatant abuse of their Windows lock-in instead
| of shit like forcing Apple to allow you to uninstall the camera
| app on your iPhone.
|
| Even the App Store stuff, I do think the 30% cut and app
| linking stuff is unfair, but it's small potatoes of tech issues
| to me right now compared to the private organization that has
| essentially complete control over sharing information through
| video on the internet using that position to block people from
| sharing benign alternatives to watching videos on their
| platform.
| npteljes wrote:
| >This should be illegal.
|
| I agree. Governments relying on private parties at such a
| degree is a disservice to the public they serve. As an
| alternative, or mirror, it's fine to upload, but to use
| Facebook, Xitter, YouTube as primary source for anything
| government related is pathetic. Govs should have their own IT
| running their own cloud and services, utilize FOSS entirely and
| work and contribute the software and data they produce.
| tsumnia wrote:
| I've had 2 of my videos taken down - they were educational videos
| teaching how to use Microsoft Access (I know, I know, but lesson
| plans are lesson plans). We were using a fictional medical
| database to help explain tables and general querying.
|
| BUT whatever the reason, be it a user or YTs moderation team,
| showing table records was deemed inappropriate because I was
| "sharing PPI". I appealed both cases and got rejected. Since I'm
| not a super important influencer, there wasn't much else I could
| do so sadly students will need to struggle to know how to query
| dates in Access...
| technothrasher wrote:
| > I appealed both cases and got rejected.
|
| I had an unlisted video with all of about six views blocked
| because there was a radio playing softly in the background.
| When I looked at their process for appeal, they specifically
| said that incidental background radio music is ok, and
| appropriate for an appeal. So I appealed. It instantly got
| denied. I gave up at that point as this private video really
| didn't matter. But it made it clear that their appeal process
| is just a sham.
| pwg wrote:
| Hmm, a big commercial site who's purpose is to provide free
| eyeballs for the viewing of advertising considers a video about
| how to avoid providing free eyeballs for the viewing of
| advertising as "harmful".
|
| Of course that video is harmful. /s
|
| The "harm" is to youtube's revenue stream. Which is why they gave
| it a strike and denied the appeal.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Federated video platform PeerTube[0] can be a good alternative.
|
| [0] https://joinpeertube.org/
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >Some in the fediverse ask why I'm not on Peertube. Here's the
| problem (and it's not insurmountable): right now, there's no
| easy path towards sustainable content production when the
| audience for the content is 100x smaller, and the number of
| patrons/sponsors remains proportionally the same.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Damn, usually I'm not this dumb but thx for the reference I
| didn't even see it. My take is; YouTube is currently your
| only option if you want to try to make a living as a video
| content creator but if you want to casually make content and
| share it with your audience or your friends and family then
| you can definitely try PeerTube.
| tempodox wrote:
| It's harmful alright. To Google's revenue.
| jll29 wrote:
| People complain about big tech, but they use their free services
| all the time for convenience.
|
| I wish more people would self-host or use paid services so that
| the influence of big tech could decline based on an economic
| chance of balance; complaining about something while keep using
| it sounds hypocritical.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| There will never be enough people that care about this to make
| a dent. For every person complaining about Youtube censorship,
| there are 10 that are offended you would tell them what
| platform to use, and don't understand the implications.
|
| It's only content creators that can make the difference, and
| not the quality ones who have sizeable but niche audiences. The
| big ones, like Mr Beast. And why would he care? He's
| consistently spoken about Youtube like it will be THE platform
| of the next 40 years.
| aanet wrote:
| Thanks, Jeff Geerling.
|
| This post is so useful. Bookmarking it for my Pi setup. I grew up
| in the 90s media. Want my content to be owned, not rented.
|
| <3
| dmje wrote:
| Did anyone catch what the handheld device is he's using to
| control the tv?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Alphabet in general is ripe for disruption. Nothing they hold
| near and dear is long-term safe. They are close-followers in
| several areas already. GMail will probably be their last
| surviving product because it holds our most sensitive data.
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