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.
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…).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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. § 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.‖
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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'.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
I don't like the president, but I don't remember seeing him say to take chloroquine phosphate tablets. I definitely heard him say that he though hydroxychloroquine might me a possible treatment, presumably referring to hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets.
More importantly though, the then (and unfortunately now) president isn't a doctor and didn't directly tell people to take it. If a person heard that and decided to eat a bottle of pills meant for a fish tank, I don't know who we could lay blame on other than the person that made that choice.
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.
> A BBC team tracking coronavirus misinformation has found links to assaults, arsons and deaths. And experts say the potential for indirect harm caused by rumours, conspiracy theories and bad health information could be much bigger.
The claims in the article, which is notably from very early in the pandemic, are focused mainly on looting, rioting, etc.
There are also stories of people poisoning themselves with household cleaners that they believed to be doses of hydroxychloroquine sulfate.
I'm not sure how that's relevant though, they were dosing themselves with household chemicals based on what they heard from the then (and unfortunately now) president who notably has no medical background.
If a person says advil is useful for headaches and someone is harmed when they take a whole bottle, I wouldn't blame the first person for that decision and I definitely wouldn't begin to say speech should have been censored to avoid it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
Russia's official propaganda technique [0], is about spewing falsehoods, because the truth does not keep coming back up. Lie enough, and people do give up.
Hitler and Goebbels did effectively make use of a ministry dedicated to spewing out as many falsehoods as they could, and it very effectively controlled the flow and acceptance of information in Nazi Germany.
Pol Pot and his Little Red Book empowered the Khmer Rouge, and actively buried the truth to the point where people assisted the regime to become one of the most bloody in all of history.
As Orwell warned us, because he lived through Soviet Russia and their propaganda machine, the truth does not survive when there are those dedicated to twisting it or hiding it to fit their purpose.
> 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)
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.
> 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?
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.
I mean, ok. Everything is connected to everything else, true enough. That seems a bit vague. Do you have a specific example to illustrate what you are talking about? Because the 'disinformation' that I saw being banned was typically people with PhDs in vaguely related fields talking about scientific papers. Disagreeing with them seems like a fair play, deplatforming them seems actually damaging. If I can't listen to people with PhDs to learn about academic papers because everything is interconnected then something has gone rather off the rails.
The disinformation I saw turned into accidental deaths. By attempting to treate the virus with alcohol, horse tranquilisers, and more. And those deaths are verified.
People weren't listening to PhDs getting banned. They were listening to influencers get banned.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
On the contrary, for the overwhelming majority of children you're absolutely right, they didn't have serious risk from COVID-19, which makes your question a good one, not a rhetorical one.
Regardless, herd immunity was not a serious possibility at any point (given the high Rº and lack of a vaccine that could prevent transmission), which, considering this was known very early on makes your question, again, a good one not a rhetorical one, despite your intent.
Finally, regardless of herd immunity, at risk individuals would still require vaccination, which makes the herd immunity as a goal, again, irrelevant, which is where I started. It's a nice by-product.
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.
You got it backwards: the vaccines specifically targeted only the spike protein, while natural infection created different antibodies against all parts of the virus.
Novavax COVID-19 vaccine never targeted specifically the spike protein, and instead focused on boosting the creation of various different antibodies. It is also the least effective.
The current breed of mRNA vaccines targets the spike protein, and the TRIM21 gene. Some of them also attack the S protein directly.
All of them work to boost various antibodies. The "targets" are in addition. By targeting the spike protein, the attack hits the RNA of the virus, not just the protein. The entire cellular structure of the virus breaks down. The same with TRIM21 targets.
The bodies natural defences never targeted the spike protein, and instead focuses on the N-layer, not "all parts of the virus". These natural defences rarely manage to cause the viral cell to decay, they tend to work by slowing reproduction instead.
Novavax's vaccine was also spike-protein-only, the difference between theirs and the mRNA ones was they created it artificially in moths then extracted it for the vaccine instead of generating inside the human body.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
" ... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
> 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.
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.
In my opinion that's a better argument against the usefulness of a supreme court than it is a justification for allowing leeway in censorship.
The justice is claiming that said illegal content cannot be described or identified in law, that it must be up to a judge to make that call. Such a system is insane to those being ruled by it - we can't know if we are breaking the law, but at any time a judge could decide of their own accord that we are.
We must live under a system of laws that can be comprehensible enough for a reasonable person to be able to tell when they cross the line and are likely breaking the law.
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.
> 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)
> 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
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?
> 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?
>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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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??
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?
* 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> It's plainly true that less masking, less isolation, and less vaccination leads to increased risk of death or injury to Covid.
When you say this is plainly true, how do you back that up exactly? I am unaware of any control tests that would prove out those claims with high certainty.
Our vaccine tests done during the pandemic also not focused on risk of death or injury, they were focused on the frequency of participants notifying of symptoms.
> 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.
I don't see it as over intellectualizing. To claim something is not true requires knowing what is true. We still can't make such claims on many of the pandemic issues, but in the middle of it we absolutely couldn't make such claims.
We also can't make an assumption that a claim being false directly leads to deaths. I can make plenty of false claims that would have absolutely no impact on anything, to say such claims must have led to deaths is ridiculous.
> When you say this is plainly true, how do you back that up exactly? I am unaware of any control tests that would prove out those claims with high certainty.
Well... they exist. All the covid vaccines were tried against placebo, and I mean true placebo as in saline. But even if you're distrustful of that it's just common sense.
I don't want to get the flu. Okay, the less people I'm around the lower the chance I have of getting the flu.
When I was immunocompromised during cancer treatment I greatly limited the amount of people I'm in contact with because that obviously lowers your risk of contracting an illness.
Again it's just not... rocket science.
If I say "you don't need to wear seat belts" and then that results in a bunch of people not wearing seat belts, then there's gonna be a lot more brains on the interstate.
Well... we know seat belts are effective. We know isolation is effective. We know vaccines are effective. So put two and two together. After a certain point it feels like being contrarian for the sake of it.
And, as an aside, most people are truly unbelievably bad at risk-assessment. People can't get it to click in their head that doing risky thing doesn't mean bad things will happen to them.
You can party, ignore all the vaccines, have people spit in your mouth, whatever - and be perfectly fine. Everything in life is risk analysis. I'm not saying that not getting a vaccine or not following guidelines will kill you. But it will increase your risk.
But you, your family, hell, everyone you know, might be perfectly fine. Or they might end up like that guy I knew in highschool who died at 20 MPH because he wasn't wearing a seat belt. It's all risk analysis.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Guns are not safe. No matter what you do, accidents will happen.
By that reasoning, nothing is safe. Not a useful statement.
Guns are certainly safer than e.g. cars - you control everything about your gun, but have no control over the environment you drive in.
> I don’t think Youtube is the place to look for education, and neither does youtube apparently.
Then you're horribly wrong of course. Youtube just hosts videos, which are a medium like any other. There's no reason why some piece of information couldn't be encoded in a video instead of in a book.
> It’d be pretty bad if someone watched youtube videos and thought they could handle guns safely and ended up hurt.
This is different from learning from literally any other source how?
It's worth mentioning that gun safety rules are super simple and obviously correct, so there's nothing to get wrong anyways:
#1 Treat all guns as if they are always loaded.
#2 Never let the muzzle cover anything that you are not willing to destroy.
#3 Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target and you have made the decision to shoot.
#4 Be sure of your target and what lies beyond it.
There's more to it of course, but these go a long way.
This is an objectively false statement. There are just four simple safety rules that prevent all unintentional gun injuries, _even if you violate some of the rules some of the time_.
> I don’t think Youtube is the place to look for education
I'm in 30s and have learned probably about as much from Youtube as I did from my entire schooling.
> There are just four simple safety rules that prevent all unintentional gun injuries, even if you violate some of the rules some of the time.
Rules don’t prevent accidents. Trying your best to always follow the rules helps to prevent accidents.
I agree with GP: where guns exist and humans interact with them, accidents will occasionally happen.
Humans are imperfect. Some people who know the four rules that you are referring to and who try their best to always follow them will still experience accidents.
I own multiple guns, including a machine gun. No matter what I do, there is risk inherent in my decision to be a gun owner.
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.
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
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
> 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).
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.
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).
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> ... 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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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).
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
> 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?
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).
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...".
> 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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 naïve 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to Premium and pay ever-increasing prices [1][2][3] so that Google can track you better with you always being logged into an account with payment information attached. While still being exposed to ads for VPNs, cryptocurrency, scams [4], and more.
Also sign yourself up for googles database of ‘people who will actually pay money if we annoy them enough’ meaning you’ll be a target demographic for future premium services
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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 €5/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)
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).
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
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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:
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).
I'd be more than happy to get the 10€/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.
But if you're following 30 channels, would you be happy to give out 300€/month? There's just not enough people willing to do that to make it sustainable for creators.
I wouldn't give 300€/month, but I could set a monthly budget that I am comfortable with (let's say 50€/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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
* 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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 €124 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.
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.
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 -
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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”.
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).
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have had various ways of testing things over the years, too, and like I said, they're not doing a good job. They don't employ experts, they just project expertise to an uninformed audience.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…).
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.
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
I have to imagine that YouTube also has massive storage requirements that are a non-trivial portion of Google’s storage costs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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
What then is the distinction between YouTube and a newspaper?
In your analogy, YouTube is the paperboy and the video producer is the newspaper.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Why would you volunteer your time to a for-profit company?
Probably because they enjoy it. Same reason you and I contribute to a social media service operated by a for-profit company.
> 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.
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.
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#
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.
You need moderation for more than legality though, otherwise you can't have open forums like this, that aren't total cesspits.
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."
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.
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.
Please don't post deliberately false information on HN.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
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.
i find it hard to believe there is any content on YT platform that they are unaware of.
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?
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.
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.
automated correlation-based scoring derived from labeled training data, would be the standard rubric
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
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. § 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/StopBadware_...
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).
> 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”
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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'.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
>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.
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.
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
> 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.
As opposed to the US? Like sending infected elderly people to elderly homes to infect more people?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
I don't like the president, but I don't remember seeing him say to take chloroquine phosphate tablets. I definitely heard him say that he though hydroxychloroquine might me a possible treatment, presumably referring to hydroxychloroquine sulfate tablets.
More importantly though, the then (and unfortunately now) president isn't a doctor and didn't directly tell people to take it. If a person heard that and decided to eat a bottle of pills meant for a fish tank, I don't know who we could lay blame on other than the person that made that choice.
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
> A BBC team tracking coronavirus misinformation has found links to assaults, arsons and deaths. And experts say the potential for indirect harm caused by rumours, conspiracy theories and bad health information could be much bigger.
The claims in the article, which is notably from very early in the pandemic, are focused mainly on looting, rioting, etc.
There are also stories of people poisoning themselves with household cleaners that they believed to be doses of hydroxychloroquine sulfate.
I'm not sure how that's relevant though, they were dosing themselves with household chemicals based on what they heard from the then (and unfortunately now) president who notably has no medical background.
If a person says advil is useful for headaches and someone is harmed when they take a whole bottle, I wouldn't blame the first person for that decision and I definitely wouldn't begin to say speech should have been censored to avoid it.
I think an administration that was happy to spread disinformation and cast doubt on vaccination had an outsized impact. YT ain’t the problem.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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/10.1101/2022.02.27.22271579v... 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
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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/article-p1621...
>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.
Russia's official propaganda technique [0], is about spewing falsehoods, because the truth does not keep coming back up. Lie enough, and people do give up.
Hitler and Goebbels did effectively make use of a ministry dedicated to spewing out as many falsehoods as they could, and it very effectively controlled the flow and acceptance of information in Nazi Germany.
Pol Pot and his Little Red Book empowered the Khmer Rouge, and actively buried the truth to the point where people assisted the regime to become one of the most bloody in all of history.
As Orwell warned us, because he lived through Soviet Russia and their propaganda machine, the truth does not survive when there are those dedicated to twisting it or hiding it to fit their purpose.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
> 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.
> 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=%22Truth+com...
Indeed. In the ages pre-algorithmic social media and pre-generative AI I would agree that about truth. Now I'm not so sure.
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.
> Covid disinformation got people killed.
If they trust bad medical advice on YouTube and die, it's their problem.
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.
> YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube.
YouTube censoring videos people want to see will also hurt YouTube.
I don't think that is so certain - or a viable alternative would be competing with them.
Evidently not very much.
> 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?
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.
I mean, ok. Everything is connected to everything else, true enough. That seems a bit vague. Do you have a specific example to illustrate what you are talking about? Because the 'disinformation' that I saw being banned was typically people with PhDs in vaguely related fields talking about scientific papers. Disagreeing with them seems like a fair play, deplatforming them seems actually damaging. If I can't listen to people with PhDs to learn about academic papers because everything is interconnected then something has gone rather off the rails.
The disinformation I saw turned into accidental deaths. By attempting to treate the virus with alcohol, horse tranquilisers, and more. And those deaths are verified.
People weren't listening to PhDs getting banned. They were listening to influencers get banned.
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.
> 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.
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
I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with GP, but I would imagine they would argue that an overweight kid is not "otherwise healthy children."
And I would argue that lives have value even when people have preexisting medical conditions.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Nobody suggested anything of that sort in this entire thread.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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!
Then why did we ask small kids to be vaccinated for COVID when they had no serious risk of anything? Rhetorical question, of course.
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.
On the contrary, for the overwhelming majority of children you're absolutely right, they didn't have serious risk from COVID-19, which makes your question a good one, not a rhetorical one.
Regardless, herd immunity was not a serious possibility at any point (given the high Rº and lack of a vaccine that could prevent transmission), which, considering this was known very early on makes your question, again, a good one not a rhetorical one, despite your intent.
Finally, regardless of herd immunity, at risk individuals would still require vaccination, which makes the herd immunity as a goal, again, irrelevant, which is where I started. It's a nice by-product.
Even more, why did we REQUIRE them to be vaccinated for COVID.
> Then why did we ask small kids to be vaccinated for COVID when they had no serious risk of anything?
Think of the children ... :-)
> Herd immunity can only be achieved if a sufficiently large part of the population is vaccinated.
...or getting infected, of course.
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/PIIS0140-6...
But somehow the vaccines catch up on the strains before they come out?
They attack different things in the virus. Often multiple things at once. Which really should not be surprising.
You got it backwards: the vaccines specifically targeted only the spike protein, while natural infection created different antibodies against all parts of the virus.
Novavax COVID-19 vaccine never targeted specifically the spike protein, and instead focused on boosting the creation of various different antibodies. It is also the least effective.
The current breed of mRNA vaccines targets the spike protein, and the TRIM21 gene. Some of them also attack the S protein directly.
All of them work to boost various antibodies. The "targets" are in addition. By targeting the spike protein, the attack hits the RNA of the virus, not just the protein. The entire cellular structure of the virus breaks down. The same with TRIM21 targets.
The bodies natural defences never targeted the spike protein, and instead focuses on the N-layer, not "all parts of the virus". These natural defences rarely manage to cause the viral cell to decay, they tend to work by slowing reproduction instead.
Novavax's vaccine was also spike-protein-only, the difference between theirs and the mRNA ones was they created it artificially in moths then extracted it for the vaccine instead of generating inside the human body.
sadly getting infected just means the virus will nuke your immune system (not to mention your endothelium)
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once you normalize vague enforcement around "problematic" content, the net just keeps widening
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.
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.
" ... 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
>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.
> 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.
>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
In my opinion that's a better argument against the usefulness of a supreme court than it is a justification for allowing leeway in censorship.
The justice is claiming that said illegal content cannot be described or identified in law, that it must be up to a judge to make that call. Such a system is insane to those being ruled by it - we can't know if we are breaking the law, but at any time a judge could decide of their own accord that we are.
We must live under a system of laws that can be comprehensible enough for a reasonable person to be able to tell when they cross the line and are likely breaking the law.
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.
> 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)
Being in favor of CSAM on YouTube would definitely be an extremist opinion in nearly all societies and cultures, I believe.
> 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
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?
> 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?
>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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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??
UK's predator network was also built to protect kids but in the end is only used for copyright infringement
If you replace "Covid" with "child porn" or "animal cruelty" or "anti-semitism" you'll see how bad this argument is.
Those 3 are not even comparable to each other...
Oh you don't think a plague that killed over 7 million people rates w/ animal cruelty?
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?
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.
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.
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/S258979182...
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
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)
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://www.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.
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.
> 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
> all the content removal around Covid
What are you referring to?
read this report:
"The White House Covid Censorship Machine"
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115561/documents/...
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.
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
> 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?
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.
> It's plainly true that less masking, less isolation, and less vaccination leads to increased risk of death or injury to Covid.
When you say this is plainly true, how do you back that up exactly? I am unaware of any control tests that would prove out those claims with high certainty.
Our vaccine tests done during the pandemic also not focused on risk of death or injury, they were focused on the frequency of participants notifying of symptoms.
> 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.
I don't see it as over intellectualizing. To claim something is not true requires knowing what is true. We still can't make such claims on many of the pandemic issues, but in the middle of it we absolutely couldn't make such claims.
We also can't make an assumption that a claim being false directly leads to deaths. I can make plenty of false claims that would have absolutely no impact on anything, to say such claims must have led to deaths is ridiculous.
> When you say this is plainly true, how do you back that up exactly? I am unaware of any control tests that would prove out those claims with high certainty.
Well... they exist. All the covid vaccines were tried against placebo, and I mean true placebo as in saline. But even if you're distrustful of that it's just common sense.
I don't want to get the flu. Okay, the less people I'm around the lower the chance I have of getting the flu.
When I was immunocompromised during cancer treatment I greatly limited the amount of people I'm in contact with because that obviously lowers your risk of contracting an illness.
Again it's just not... rocket science.
If I say "you don't need to wear seat belts" and then that results in a bunch of people not wearing seat belts, then there's gonna be a lot more brains on the interstate.
Well... we know seat belts are effective. We know isolation is effective. We know vaccines are effective. So put two and two together. After a certain point it feels like being contrarian for the sake of it.
And, as an aside, most people are truly unbelievably bad at risk-assessment. People can't get it to click in their head that doing risky thing doesn't mean bad things will happen to them.
You can party, ignore all the vaccines, have people spit in your mouth, whatever - and be perfectly fine. Everything in life is risk analysis. I'm not saying that not getting a vaccine or not following guidelines will kill you. But it will increase your risk.
But you, your family, hell, everyone you know, might be perfectly fine. Or they might end up like that guy I knew in highschool who died at 20 MPH because he wasn't wearing a seat belt. It's all risk analysis.
"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.
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.
> 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.
saaaave the children!!!1
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?
> 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...
> 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.
Gemini doesn't need his video as train data, google can just torrent any content and use it as training data, just like facebook.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> Guns are not safe. No matter what you do, accidents will happen.
By that reasoning, nothing is safe. Not a useful statement.
Guns are certainly safer than e.g. cars - you control everything about your gun, but have no control over the environment you drive in.
> I don’t think Youtube is the place to look for education, and neither does youtube apparently.
Then you're horribly wrong of course. Youtube just hosts videos, which are a medium like any other. There's no reason why some piece of information couldn't be encoded in a video instead of in a book.
> It’d be pretty bad if someone watched youtube videos and thought they could handle guns safely and ended up hurt.
This is different from learning from literally any other source how?
It's worth mentioning that gun safety rules are super simple and obviously correct, so there's nothing to get wrong anyways:
#1 Treat all guns as if they are always loaded.
#2 Never let the muzzle cover anything that you are not willing to destroy.
#3 Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target and you have made the decision to shoot.
#4 Be sure of your target and what lies beyond it.
There's more to it of course, but these go a long way.
> No matter what you do, accidents will happen.
This is an objectively false statement. There are just four simple safety rules that prevent all unintentional gun injuries, _even if you violate some of the rules some of the time_.
> I don’t think Youtube is the place to look for education
I'm in 30s and have learned probably about as much from Youtube as I did from my entire schooling.
> There are just four simple safety rules that prevent all unintentional gun injuries, even if you violate some of the rules some of the time.
Rules don’t prevent accidents. Trying your best to always follow the rules helps to prevent accidents.
I agree with GP: where guns exist and humans interact with them, accidents will occasionally happen.
Humans are imperfect. Some people who know the four rules that you are referring to and who try their best to always follow them will still experience accidents.
I own multiple guns, including a machine gun. No matter what I do, there is risk inherent in my decision to be a gun owner.
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.
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
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?
And break the big tech monopolies is also... ok?
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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).
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/
> 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!
> 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...
> 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).
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.
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).
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/
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
How will federation solve monetisation?
value for value. https://value4value.info/
or ad rolls, who knows. monetization isn't my wheelhouse.
podcasts have been doing this since the inception.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> except that you never have to see the low quality stuff which doesn't interest you.
This has not been my experience.
> ... 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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
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.
> 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?
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).
> I really wonder where the internet goes in this age.
Self-hosting? (Whoops!)
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...
Isn't the competitor TikTok?
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).
> 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.
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.
Unfortunately, the generalized "brainrot content and distribution" market is massive and contains many competitors.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
How does Google's "AI" distinguish between small or large creators?
Or some smaller platform that doesn't even have google's resources.
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.
Yes but as i said two posts ago, those firms are not famous for their competence, they mostly carpet bomb everything.
> L-whateverthefuck
LM
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.
I was thinking Lawyer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...".
> 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).
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
It will become harder to ignore the possible retaliation Google can make against your/your family’s Google accounts.
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.
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.
takeout.google.com backs up watch history, google maps locations (probably)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I installed e/os on my phone the other day and haven't encountered any serious drawbacks yet.
If you care enough, back up your data - they have to hand it to you.
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.
YouTube is the only thing I use a Google account for. If they "retaliate", I can probably just open another one.
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.
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.
Might be better to just de-Google yourself. If google is isolated to just one feature, then it's not a big deal.
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.
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.
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 naïve 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.
uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome seems to be working really well for me. Check out your filter lists and maybe tick a few boxes.
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.
Are you using uBlock Origin on Firefox?
You don't have videos stop playing after exactly 1 minute ?
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.
There is a way to watch the video anyways, on YT with just 2 clicks.
Cooking at home is considered harmful according to restaurant owners.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
Subscribe to Premium and pay ever-increasing prices [1][2][3] so that Google can track you better with you always being logged into an account with payment information attached. While still being exposed to ads for VPNs, cryptocurrency, scams [4], and more.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41626035
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36807803
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33279998
[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298054
Also sign yourself up for googles database of ‘people who will actually pay money if we annoy them enough’ meaning you’ll be a target demographic for future premium services
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.
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.
> I feel the outrage against the free YT, the free Spotify, and probably other services is misplaced
No, it's not misplaced.
- https://consumerrights.wiki/YouTube
- https://consumerrights.wiki/Spotify
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.
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.
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.
Refreshing works for me, for now at least.
You can use piped.
https://github.com/TeamPiped/documentation/blob/main/content...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By then we will have real-time AI detectors to identify and remove ads. Begun, the LLM ad wars have.
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.
Already use sponsor block to stop the meat flavoured AI promoting shitty VPNs in the middle of their streams.
Sponsor Block add-on works well for this, but entirely dependent on ads being at fixed time in the video.
Future versions could id the start and end frames of the ad and thus be able to detect the segment anywhere in the video.
I appreciate it isn't brilliant. I use it as a fallback.
The video they made does not encourage piracy, but even if it did it seems bizarre to flag that as "Dangerous or Harmful Content."
Dangerous and Harmful to googles bottom line.
> 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…
I mean, there is a risk that the feds would come down on you if you're not careful. ;)
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.
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 €5/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)
> Pair everything to a €5/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).
And just in case it isn't clear, "Arr!" is a traditional pirate exclamation.
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
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.
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.
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
> Watchlistarr: syncs your Plex Watchlist with Overseerr.
Overseerr already supports syncing your plex watchlist out of the box.
Yes, my mistake. I havent personally tried it out yet. It syncs with Sonarr and Radarr. So more of an alternative to Overseerr.
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.
Streisand effect at work
Not sure, but my guess would be the -arr suite self hosted media server software.
https://wiki.servarr.com/
"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.
>If you want youtube (or any other platform) to not suck...pay for it.
Like Netflix and Amazon Videos?
Like Netflix and Amazon Videos?
People can't share their content on Netflix and Amazon without becoming a professional movie producer.
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.
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.
What you are describing is called "ad-subsidized", you pay less than the full cost and get ads to cover the difference.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it’s an anticompetitive tactic, but we refuse to update our antitrust laws for the internet era.
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.
> 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.
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.
Related Mastodon post: https://mastodon.social/@geerlingguy/114632312304389965
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.
Federated video platform PeerTube[0] can be a good alternative.
[0] https://joinpeertube.org/
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of this BS
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/facebook-flags-l...
That makes even less sense, sounds like they made some jump from - "oh we've got to get the hacker community off Facebook, they're a risk"
"hackers are all Linux enthusiasts"
...
"Let's just ban Linux talk to get rid of the hacker community, we don't need that nerd talk on here anyway, it doesn't sell any ads"
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.
This also happens in the retro gaming scene... some Russian wannabe rapper keeps saying he owns the final fantasy music.
The problem is that for some strange reason there is no punishment for malicious/false copyright claims.
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.)
Laws that are not enforced are merely suggestions.
There are literally dozens of successful legal actions against people illicitly making copyright claims on YouTube.
Yes there is.
https://www.simkins.com/news/court-acts-to-prevent-malicious...
Because it’s less impactful for google to mindlessly accept potentially fraudulent claims then it is to risk ignoring a legitimate one.
Wow. Jeff is one of my favorite creators. Google has come a long way from "don't be evil"...
That's not meant to apply to Google, it's actually a warning for its users - "Do No Evil (we are watching you)".
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
And how is teaching installing a self hosted service "evil"?
By this time we should assume Google's motto is "do be evil"
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."
“Who knew open source software could be so subversive?”
Me — I knew that. Power to the people.
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.
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.
There is PeerTube. Some interesting creators are mirroring their videos to e.g. makertube.net
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Point 1 is a plain lie. Point 2 is a misunderstanding of how markets work.
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.
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.
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
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.
Something similar happened a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30886834
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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).
I'd be more than happy to get the 10€/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.
But if you're following 30 channels, would you be happy to give out 300€/month? There's just not enough people willing to do that to make it sustainable for creators.
I wouldn't give 300€/month, but I could set a monthly budget that I am comfortable with (let's say 50€/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...
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.
Youtube is on my case about adblockers again too.
I guess I'm setting up a download solution this weekend.
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.
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.
Not a bad experience at all compared to ads.
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?
I think no video is better than one that starts with ad. At least for long term mental health.
> 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.
* 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.
> 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
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.)
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is slightly more hassle as you'd have to download and upload...but Loom is great. Easy to edit your video.
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.
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 €124 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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
It's very harmful for youtube's business model indeed
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.
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?
It's illegal? Under what laws I wonder?
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.
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>"!
I mostly hear it sarcastically nowadays.
> 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.
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.
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...
What word with a suffix that rhymes with car?
What exactly is he talking about?
Arr as in pirate.lots of tools that support piracy end with that suffix like sonarr etc
I'm guessing the '*arr' suite of collection-management tools
Embrace, extend, and extingui...
> 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”.
See other comments (Servarr, etc.), I was out of the loop as well.
It's harmful alright. To Google's revenue.
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
They're really starting to build the case for self-hosting videos through Peertube
@geerlingguy
https://web.archive.org/web/20240531142901/https://www.youtu...
Google needs to be broken up.
Did anyone catch what the handheld device is he's using to control the tv?
TBF watching any other media is harmful to YouTube.
I just watched this video yesterday while setting up kodi for myself
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).
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..
@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.
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/
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.
Nebula lacks comments and livestreams, so it is more like Netflix.
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.
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.
I have had various ways of testing things over the years, too, and like I said, they're not doing a good job. They don't employ experts, they just project expertise to an uninformed audience.
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/
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.
> 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
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.
Copyright maybe. Talking about normal human things like sex or dangers definitely not
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.
To my understanding COPPA is basically forcing all public media to be "child friendly"
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.
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.
> 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)?
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.
Conservatives should think of the right to personal computing with the same ideological concern they have for the right to self defense.
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.
Josh Hawley has proposed some bills to break up tech monopolies in the name of individual freedoms.
I will choose Jellyfin over YouTube every single time. Thanks YT for your content littered with ADs, but in all sincerity go fuck yourself.
What does rhymes with "car"
https://wiki.servarr.com/
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It used to be this magical place where you could find anything, and now it's an algorithmic swamp of recycled trends
"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.
> Maybe it's time for someone to make a mastodon equivalent for youtube.
Plenty of people have set up unsuccessful YouTube equivalents too.
Yeah, harmful to their revenue.
Fuck YouTube
This is a good chance to suggest viable alternatives? TIA.
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...
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!
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.
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.
Would you mind sharing the videos that helped music click? Thank you!
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.
Those are alternatives for youtube _consumers_ but none of those are replacements for _producers_ on youtube.
I want edutainment. Nowhere has anywhere close to the level of content as YouTube when it comes to that.
> 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.
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...
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?
That’s the one
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt15028452/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
There is a sequel, but I haven’t watched it yet
just over the 10 year mark, but i enjoyed "east side sushi". nice feel-good movie.
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.
Youtube Alternatives :
https://odysee.com
Bitchute
Rumble
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.
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...
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.
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.
Wish I could find a front-end like an invidious for Rumble/Bitchute. The ads they serve are shittier than YouTube.
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.
Nebula, NicoVideo, Dailymotion.
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.
Vimeo and self-hosting are two alternatives. Are they realistic alternatives? That's another question.
PeerTube is nice, and you can self-host an instance that can mirror your favorite channels.
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.
Download videos from YouTube to Jellyfin or Plex.
Yeah, there's no real alternative to YouTube for most people.
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.
AMEN
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.
“you own nothing and you will be happy”
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.
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...
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?
... or accessing the web without one of the web engines from the whatng cartel.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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, n° 301843 on interoperability.
> https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/ceta/id/CETATEXT000019216315/
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.
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.
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.
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.
These community guidelines are rules made by YouTube and apply globally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
does bandaid help for broken arm or cancer?
Censorship makes things worse, by entrenching different group - it's just that you like that one.
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.
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.