The article touches on the importance of YouTube’s discovery a bit but doesn’t do justice to just how strong it can be.
Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.
From the article:
> “If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to self-host your content in the future.”
Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure they promote their other web assets to diversify.
Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be your #2 priority.
There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo, Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.
YouTube owns more than discovery too: they own relationship between viewers and producers.
Most of the YouTube channels I follow have no external means to notify me about new videos. If I were to stop using YouTube, they were banned, or YouTube subscriptions stopped working the same, they would have no way to actually contact me about new content, and they’d lose me.
Effectively YouTube owns the relationship between the creators and I. This can be changed, CGPGrey has been building a mailing list for this reason, but it takes a lot of painstaking deliberate action to achieve. Migrating to a new platform alone is insufficient.
This is a natural extension of any platform geared for the general public as creators, because managing all that for someone in one place provides real benefit to the user. It's just as you note that benefit comes with loss of control.
It's really no different than anything else in life. People hire contractors to do larger home repairs, and the contractors contact and subcontract other specialty workers as needed (drywall, woodworking, plumbing, electrical) for things they can't cover themselves. As the homeowner, unless you make an effort to know who these people are, you won't know who they are and may not know what their company is. The benefit is that you don't need to know any of it and can just let the contractor coordinate it all for you.
Youtube is just like that contractor, except instead of a local guy that cares about your business it's a giant multinational which is hard to get to care if they screw something up for you because you're one of many millions of other customers.
The parallels of you can handle all this coordination youtube offers with more control are obvious. Either hire someone to do it all for you or handle it yourself if you want control, because no matter what platform you go to that handles it for you, chances are it will exhibit some or all of the problems that Youtube has, or even new ones.
I would really like a recommendation engine that I own and control.
It would know what I read and watch. It would find new stuff for me, dedupe it, listen to my feedback,and learn from its mistakes. It would work with all kinds of media, not just youtube or HN.
And it would all be private. I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.
As a computer program, this is probably not feasible. While in theory you are possibly capable of writing the algorithms for your own recommendation engine using whatever ML tools are popular today, the issue you'd have is data. YouTube's recommendation algorithm effectively only works because it's capable of aggregating millions of users behavior to feed into their own system. Getting that data personally would be very difficult both because YouTube doesn't want to enable competitors, and because consumers would be extra freaked out to find out about some random engineer outside of YT getting their watch history.
As a non-program, you can always depend on the means that humans have used for content discovery since time immemorial: word of mouth.
This is maybe a tangent, but do these ML-powered recommendation algorithms actually, like, work well for people?
I use both YouTube and Netflix pretty extensively. These companies are both held up as ML success stories. But, at least in my personal experience, they suck! My front-page feeds consist of (1) content that the platform knows I have already seen because IT IS IN MY WATCH HISTORY, (2) content that is trivially related, like by having the the same channel/director/actors, and (3) random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on.
It's not that the content isn't out there -- I'm able to find stuff I like through "big spreadsheet of all the Netflix movies" websites, online recommendations from humans, and YouTube channel crossovers/cameos. But I've never had that magical "the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself" experience that every ML engineer I've ever spoken to seems to be convinced their systems achieve.
Are all ML engineers mindless drones with exactly average movie preferences, or am I some kind of incomprehensible weirdo?
So true. The thing I find bizarre about youtube is how bad not only their recommendations but their search is. This is a Google company but somehow if I search for a specific episode in a specific series (eg one episode in a game walkthrough or whatever) it can't get the ranking right?
I also still don't understand why yt recommendations are as poor as they are. I've tried taking the time to try removing certain things from the "recommendation history" (or whatever they call it), flag recommendations I'm not interested in etc and it does improve things a bit but still it recommends things I would never watch in a million years (eg right now I have 4 Joe Rogan recommendations on my homepage even though I've literally never watched any of his things and have zero interest in ever doing so, and click on every one and say not interested etc, for a while it was obsessed with trying to get me to watch MMA content even though I can't bear watching other people hurt each other).
And the whole issue of recommending videos where it knows I've watched the whole thing, I just don't even know where to start.
On search, I wonder if this is deliberate; if they gave you exactly what you want as the top result, you'd click that one and not look any further. But by having to scroll past a few other videos, maybe you'll see another one or two that you also decide to click on, resulting in more overall views.
This is a different strategy to Google web search, where the monetisation occurs on the search results page (via ads there) rather than on click-throughs, so there isn't an incentive to try and get you to click several tangentially related links.
> random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on
if you regret clicking on it, that means you did click on it and the recommendation did it's job; remember that the job of the recommendation engine is not (directly) to suggest content you'll like, it's to suggest content that will get you to click. Ideally those goals would be aligned, but not necessarily. YouTube is simply incentivised (via ad revenue) to get you to click on as many videos as possible.
At least in my case, it's not that I'm constantly clicking on things that it turns out I dislike. Rather, it's that the few times I have clicked on a recommendation (because hey, maybe they know something I don't, maybe Sonic the Hedgehog actually is a good suggestion for people who liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), I've regretted it.
Right, but my point is that from YouTube's perspective it doesn't "matter" if you like or dislike the video, if they can get you to click. And clearly this strategy works on some people, or they wouldn't be doing it.
So while it may not be overly successful on you (i.e. you only click occasionally), if it works on a significant portion of people it could still be a successful strategy overall.
Sometimes you click even when you don't want to. For example on youtube on ipad it's very difficult to click on the vertical three-dot hamburger icon on a video (that you need to use to tell them you're not interested in a video) without clicking on the video by mistake. The hitbox on that icon is all wrong.
Open Data is a thing, I can imagine some PeerTube instances would publicly share their data (anonymously etc), in order to build open recommendation systems.
Personally, I would gladly donate my (anonymous etc) data for this noble goal.
Open data + federated learning (somewhat ironically a Google invention) could help with this, but it has a long way to go, and a lot of opportunities for incumbents to fight back.
Except that youtube’s recommendation engine It terrible and getting worse. I am on youtube all the time and all it ever recommends is things I already subscribe to.
And it seems to be steering further into things I have already watched.
Data offers diminishing returns, and at sufficient quantity introduces vetting and validity problems --- see Amazon's reviews crisis or fake Yelp reviews, as examples.
Well just for me I don't care what's trending so don't need the feed of other people's views. But absolutely needing a feed of new posts might be problem.
That's really missing the point. Recommendation engines are a lot more dumb than you are thinking. They don't understand the content at all. They only know that thousands of users that watched the same videos as you in the past also watched this other new video, so you might like it as well.
A recommendation engine that works solely based on your own watch history would require a totally different approach using algorithms that are years/decades/forever away from existing.
It does make sense that the job is simpler with everyone's history and inputs, if you can keep PII out of it. Are there any good references on recommendation aggregation algorithms?
Here's a simple proposal that keeps everyone's stuff anonymous and allows a rec service to pay bills.
Distribute the pool of everyone's watch histories/prefs/etc using IPFS, which is a DHT with static names and some storage. User clients put the share data into IPFS and register into a public pool. The client remembers their own hash. Rec services (there can be multiple) pull everyone's sets periodically and aggregate/indexe them. Users can then retrieve a batch of new recs by sending a small fee to the service of their choice along with their hash and the server will place some new recs into their bucket. If the recs are not suitable, they can try another service.
If I send you links to 2-3 rare videos and you view them, I can probably uniquely identify you (or restrict the list of potential users to ~5 users then recognize you based on other videos you would have watched). I then have access to your full video watching history.
Even without this, I could just check videos you shared on Twitter, follow the same process, and have a decent chance of identifying you.
Anonymization is very very hard. Maybe federated learning is more promising here, keeping all your data privately stored on your own devices.
> That's really missing the point. Recommendation engines are a lot more dumb than you are thinking. They don't understand the content at all.
I think you're the one underestimating modern recommender systems, especially the ones built by advanced teams in big tech companies.
They absolutely use content features. Among other advantages, this counters the cold start problem (how will you learn about a new video if it doesn't get recommended to anyone).
Have you ever seen the torrent of garbage that is new posts on e.g. Reddit or Imgur? You only see decent posts on the ‘front page’ because some people sift through that and filter out teenagers' low-effort attempts.
YouTube has hours of video uploaded every minute. A non-centralized, context-less recommendation system would mean that you are offered those crap videos together with ones that are the standard for ‘good’ now. Just get into the long tail on any search results and see if you want those.
A non-monopolized video discovery would be splendid, only who knows how to achieve that. Perhaps it would be more realistic to do the recommendations based on the numbers of ‘retweets’ in federated networks—in a more ‘social’ style instead of views (dunno if PeerTube already offers that). Also, an open system will be incessantly gamed.
You might agree: "thought and discussion termination isn’t cool," right? I hope you aim to live up to your own principles. Maybe you meant to say something else to the human being on the other end of the line.
Oh, some people say I'm an insatiable monster. I appreciate that you have taken the time to reply. If you are really here for a discussion, I'll have one. I do care about what you say and don't say (and I'll prove it to you). I do ask quite a bit of those in power (https://philosopher.life/#Power).
I know what you mean, if this is what you mean. YouTube has become so laser-focused that it's become ridiculous. I watch videos and get suggested similar videos. Eventually I'm only watching one type of video.
>I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.
This is another thing that bothers me. Being guilt-tripped for not watching an ad, or being a Patreon subscriber, or YouTube Red subscriber. Even if I don't watch ads or pay a fee I am, me, this individual is valuable just for who I am. My data, my habits are valuable to Google just as much as it is for me to pay a fee or to watch ads.
Google is not the person who created the content you are consuming. That person or group of people gets nothing from viewers who "don't watch ads or pay a fee."
> And it would all be private. I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.
Some portions of a personalized, cross-service recommendation engine are a lot more viable if centralized (e.g. any scraping/indexing, and plausibly the personalization itself). Supposing such a service had no intention of you ever personally being the product, what would they have to do in order for you to still be comfortable handing that data over to them?
How much of the general public is going to be capable to set up and maintain a server in their basement? To challenge YouTube, targetting just the programming crowd isn't going to be sufficient.
I guess if you sell a pre-constructed device, that could work. There would be other issues (you have to spend money on hardware, potentially have to get it shipped, may not be able to get access to the device at all based on your region, keeping it always on and accessible, etc).
That‘s why you plug your twitter and maybe other socials (mailing list as well I guess, though less usual) at every possible opportunity. It‘s incredibly important to cultivate the relationship with your audience.
In the event that you have to change platform for whatever reason, you still have a line of communication.
The first "big" band I ever saw go multi-channel to connect with fans was Dave Matthews Band [1] In March of 2009, the band went from a blog-looking thing [2] that collected email addresses to putting every social channel front and center. [3]
By November 2010, they had iTunes Ping, Twitter, an iPhone app, Facebook, Myspace, the bassist's twitter feed all being pushed in huge tiles.
At the time this was extraordinary, since many artists did not have a handle on social at all and definitely were not pushing people "away" from direct connection like this.
I believe the idea was to allow many platforms to get between you and your fans/followers, but to allow the fans to choose which platform that would be.
As the OP suggests, this can be a lot of work.
[1] Coran Capshaw, the band's manager created an early dial-up ISP company in Charlottesville that went on to become MusicToday. was responsible for major tech advances in live entertainment
> The first "big" band I ever saw go multi-channel to connect with fans was Dave Matthews Band
Judged.
However, on a more serious note, I new people who were -very- attached to bands/musicians based on interactions they had on MySpace and LiveJournal.
One problem with any online exposure in the modern web is that the bar from 'unknown' to 'trolls flooding your inbox' is pretty low. I do wonder however whether small time performers wind up trapped by this: When they are first growing they probably can't pick the ideal "Social Media" person, which may limit certain exposure and opportunities.
You don’t know the half of it. I ran a DMB blog and large online community. It was where I did a lot of my first web programming. :|
Whatever you think of their music, DMB and their fans pioneered a bunch of areas.
One of the most forward decisions by the band was to allow online distribution of their live recordings.
Being mainstream at that point meant it pushed torrenting of the live shows into the workflows of many people who wouldn’t have otherwise have been exposed to the tech.
It also drew the hackers of sorts to their scene who would illicitly capture and record IEM streams, mix them with mic recordings then combine them with stealth monopod videos to release bootleg copies of entire shows.
Only the Radiohead fans came close to the amount of enthusiasm in the DMB scene back then.
That said—if I could go back I’d pick Radiohead to follow.
Twitter has the same problem as YouTube. Email is a federated open source protocol and far superior as way of securing your fan base. It's probably a great idea for content providers to self-host a website with their videos on it as well.
I agree generally, but most people I know barely ever check their personal emails, pretty much just enough to sign up for twitter/instagram/snapchat/whatever's popular now.
Ok, then it makes sense. That age group is still considered very young adults, and most are still studying and not even exposed to full time jobs yet. As soon as you receive important emails from banks etc you start checking your personal e-mail regularly.
That works for very niche streamers/creators. Maybe with an older audience as well. If your a streamer on twitch or YouTube chances are your audience isn‘t older than 30. I personally don‘t really use email for actual communication. Twitter is pretty much perfect to communicate to an audience. Yes it isn‘t federated but at least you‘re using a bunch of different platforms to diversify risk.
Generally I would advise new content creators to be present on every possible platform.
I don't use Twitter but I tried it a few years back. It's hard to follow relevant content if half of what you see are people's re-tweets. With e-mail I can easily sift through and find what is relevant to me.
I disagree somewhat - well, I think simply backing up content is insufficient but if you diversify your platform now and manage to snag a significant number of viewers then you should be good. Shared platforms like DLive (a la pewdiepie fame and others) or watchnebula.com is one way to do this and can be very strong for topically related subjects - independent platforms like Dropout.tv are also an option but you're either hoping to win the bandwidth vs. advertiser cost balance or going to need to charge for access - both of which can lower your subscriber rate.
I think it's hard to make a fully independent platform so I think topical ones are a better option - but YouTube is really in a position of power due to the network effect. As long as they don't shoot themselves in the foot with controversy and banning then they should be able to easily hold onto their position - everything challenging them has an uphill battle.
Yes, unless you crosspost to Instagram or Facebook and tell people in your videos about all three. Or is that frowned upon at YouTube and/or monitored if you have a high viewership channel?
> Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.
Arguably, entire political movements; the far right and conspiracy vlogosphere relies on constantly being advertised for free to new suckers through youtube recommendations.
We've seen a massive movement for companies to post warnings or alerts stating facts might not back up certain content on social media in the last year or so. Fact Checkers they're called.
Can we at least get youtube to put up a banner saying "no it's impossible to defy the laws of physics and build a unlimited energy machine with a few magnets a microwave and a multimeter?"
The problem is that, in my experience, the most nefarious of these disinformation videos are those who are the most plausible and skirt reality enough to be complicated to debunk in a simple sentence.
If you seriously believe that the Earth is flat or that lizard people control the world, then frankly a Youtube disclaimer won't really change anything.
It's in French but basically it's one of these videos against the banking system that simplify and caricature the situation to the point of meaninglessness. Coming up with a proper fact-check for something like that would be incredibly difficult, and I'm sure extremely controversial.
It would also take a lot of time and money to get economists and physicists to weigh in on these videos. That's how these conspiracy theories manage to remain relevant in the first place: overwhelm the opposition with thousands upon thousands of hours of content, and claim that they take things out of context or that they don't get it if they don't bother to sink months of their lives watching all that garbage.
That's something I have noticed as well and it's concerning - the vast amount of fringe/conspiracy/right wing content that's showing up on things like Peertube. it's like the unhinged days of Usenet again in many ways.
Edit: And I've noticed the downvotes, yet what I have said is still accurate. It is true that Gab moved to mastodon, for example, and there is evidence of their mindset spreading to other properties in the Fediverse.
If you have something that's "just like youtube, but we don't delete your stuff" it shouldn't be surprising that the vast amount of content is stuff that was deleted from youtube
I think this effect becomes a strategic defensive moat for established social media websites. Anybody who tries to compete with established players will find that their earliest adopters are the most unsavory sort, banned by other sites looking for a new home. This is the more insidious side of 'network effects.'
This was exactly my point and I am disappointed to see that I was downvoted for saying so. I am still surprised at just how swiftly Gab, for example, spread into the Fediverse.
Some of the early adopters are definitely unsavory, yet that content is what new users are going to see. Peertube/etc are still too small to protect against it, I fear.
Early online worlds were (often, not always), academics and techies. Even that was often hard going to generate larger appeal. Facebook was Literally Harvard.
Random malcontents have an even higher social hill to climb.
An elite founding cohort tends to regress to the mean. An unsavory cohort ... tends to further radicalise or collapse entirely.
Fandom/hobby groups are more sustainable and often avoid pathological evolution, but rarely seem to develop mass appeal.
And all this before adding financial or business pressures.
These services benefit from offering the viewer what they want.
I'm very cynical about any attempts to curb this. I suspect these services will go for stuff that they know, through A/B testing and whatnot, won't affect their bottom line.
Let's say they show particularly harmful and scientifically 'banana-shit' videos, but with a disclaimer in a sidebar that the content in question is 'disputed'.
I imagine viewers are much more drawn to the content and will filter out the sidebar because 1) they don't notice, 2) they don't care because it's just a sidebar, or at worst 3) the libs are trying to make us be okay with homos/feminist/etc.
A provider of said content could defend their 'wokeness', a consumer could just ignore the sidebar or use it to point out how 'the libs' control things.
Meanwhile the rest of us, if we get past the partisanship, are left wondering how such few actors got to decide on so many societally-relevant topics. Surely we've progressed beyond having to deal with feudal lords?
I'm with you, except I kind of love those videos. The plywood fabri-cobbled infinite energy pendulum that will be generating boundless power "just as soon as I get the friction down" always looks so cool! The enviable commitment to craftsmanship of the backyard free energy crank ends up producing beautiful, relatable work.
It might be inadvertent scam but a lot of these people passionately believe in their ideas. A lot of the time they’re not selling anything and it couldnt be categorized as scam. It’s wishful thinking for all I care
some really seem like true believers. I'm trying to find the one I'm thinking of because you're right: the search results are overwhelmingly people trying to get you off the site. The casual enthusiast having fun tinkering in the garage is fine by me; it's keeping them out of trouble and a better hobby than, say, boating. But like you I abhor the ruthless exploiter selling you a dream because having to work for a living is garbage. Whether that's the drop shipping get rich quick person, or the "buy my zero point generator" guy.
Sorry, I have to disappoint. I know at least one person IRL who believes a number of pretty weird things. Know him since school. Almost freaked me out when he told me he builds a cloudbuster for his backyard to protect against chemtrails.
There's something to be said for the average person being ideologically incoherent from my perspective, for the same reason I probably seem likewise ideologically incoherent to them!
There's a tonne of people that genuinely buy in to this stuff.
All you need is some vague sense that all the "experts" are either dumber than you, or part of some big conspiracy.
Then because of that you don't even try to understand the work of those that came before you and hey presto! You're on your way to slowly rediscovering the laws of thermodynamics on your own - and until you do (if you ever do) you'll believe all sorts of wacky shit might be possible.
Seeing how inaccurate other aspects of youtube moderation are, I puzzled why anybody would want youtube to attempt this. It would inevitably end up flagging videos of kittens when their shitty autocaption system thinks "purr" means "zero point energy".
That sounds like a lot of work. Can scanning software really do that effectively and fairly without a lot of false positives? Suppose for example you post a video debunking wacky anti-gravity claims, and the AI flags it because of keywords. You'll need to appeal, waste a lot of time, and maybe eventually it'll get straightened out, but the friction will be a disincentive to even produce your content at all.
More to the point, where are the far-left analogues that get a shout out from the POTUS and have ambassadors likely to get elected to Congress in a few months?
Anti vax is very, very common across environmental/hippy leftist circles. Same thing for anti GMO FUD. Qanon is pretty uniquely dumb I agree, but I guess russiagate and the extreme "russians are everywhere" paranoia exhibited from some has some parallels. Yes, it's not (at all) as bad as Qanon, but go on twitter and you will see tons of borderline psychotic people accusing everyone of being a russian bot or spreading crazy conspiracy theories about a huge Russian total take over conspiracy that make 9/11 conspiracy theorists look sane in comparison.
> borderline psychotic people accusing everyone of being a russian bot
That at least I think it a little explainable. I'm often checking different news sources about a story from Google news, and if the comment section at the bottom of foxnews.com is anything to go by, it's extremely hard to tell what see from what you would expect a Russion bot to do to stir discontent apart from trolling and/or blind ignorance of what the article was about.
In some ways believing in bots is a bit of an uplifting story. That's a person that doesn't believe their fellow citizens could actually be as disdainful and hurtful to each other as appears readily apparent. It's real tempting to buy into that sometimes.
>> That's a person that doesn't believe their fellow citizens could actually be as disdainful and hurtful to each other as appears readily apparent. It's real tempting to buy into that sometimes.
hmmm I feel the same way I happen upon an opinion piece from the NYTimes, or a clip from MSDNC, or any of the other "the sky is falling and the fascists are at the door to destroy democracy" stories running in any mainstream news of today...
Well, you probably should, to some degree. It's obvious that the media of both sides of the spectrum have lost most of their ability to be nuanced and see the valid points of the other side, just as a lot of the people most active politically have.
The more you believe the other side is comprised of evil racist fascists, or evil pedophile fascists, the harder it is to give any of they opinions due consideration. It's probably not random that fascist shows up as an accusation by both sides.
The only thing that I think has worked to give me a somewhat fair accounting of an event over the last 6-12 months is to use Google news, and specifically seek out how both sides of the spectrum represent an event (that means seeking out the foxnews.com article most the time, but sometimes foxnews is the main one and I seek out how it's represented elsewhere). Often it's like reading high-school essays about that are about the same book but focused on entirely different themes of the plot. I generally have to synthesize my own accounting from them while weighting accordingly based on the news and the source.
- "Sex differences like career preferences taught by society and have no biological basis"
- "There's no scientific basis for race"
These positions are so entrenched that disagreeing with them publicly is to risk your career. But they're also the product of ignorance. In the world of biology, the opposite positions of these are fairly uncontroversial views. (see [1] for an example of the first)
They go by many names, but there is a Strong undercurrent of "Capitalism Bad we must have socialism" crowd on the far left that hate individual freedoms and rights and prefer Group rights and entitlements. That promote equality of outcome not equality of opportunity. That reject merit and instead want to define people based on dynamics of intersectionality.
>>AntiVax - Flat Earth
To Attribute them only to far right tells me you do not really understand these groups. They are not left or right politically, especially anti-vax for which many have far-left economic and social positions
I think the story was the owner of said pizza joint had underaged pictures on one of his social media profiles and was using the place to arrange Epstein trips. Bill Clinton was a visitor to the island where these arragements happened. Hilary Clinton broke the law and setup a private email server that was hacked.
There is a movie on netflix about Epstein the island.
This is a news story about a series of events. It is not the same as a political ideology.
No, you are libeling a completely innocent pizza joint owner. Please stop. Someone fell for those false storied and shot up the place, and fortunately no one was killed. The made-up "Pizzagate" story has nothing to do with the very real Epstein crimes (and Donald Trump had a closer and longer association with Epstein than Bill Clinton). Young girls were abused on Epstein's island. They were not abused in the basement of a pizza place, as the original story went; it didn't even have a basement, as the gunman who was all set to rescue the nonexistent victims discovered.
To recount a fact, in this case a false allegation while noting it was false ("I think the story was"), to the best of your ability, especially without malice, is not libel.
The hacked emails pointed to the pizza joint. The social media profile of the owner did have inappropiate images and support for groups who support inappropriate relationships.
Someone thinking girls were locked in the basement and deciding to storm the place is a sign of a mental health issue. But his actions doesn't make the known facts false.
1) The place has no basement
2) He did not have in appropriate pictures
3) The "Emails" where all about going to have pizza and some turd burger made a connection to something that wasn't there"
4) that's all on netflix too
2) He did have them on his social media profile and he was in support of a group that wanted more man/kid relationships. This wasn't part of the movie but I remember this going down on reddit.
Folks with this "naive" political ideology are shooting at people and kicking peoples head on the streets. Many innocent have died in the riots, much more have lost their business to looting.
I don't see conservatives having a hard time condemning the pizza place shooter or any other similar act, but I see a lot of leftists rationalism and even denying altogether the bad actions of their bad people. They even cheer their bad actors on.
I love how your comment is grayed out with a child comment saying they never heard rhetoric like that in their leftist circles.
At this point I can only assume ill intent, since we are bombarded daily with rhetoric likening any action by the POTUS and his admin to something nazist.
I've spent significant amounts of time in left-wing circles and I've never seen anyone say anything close to that. Perhaps there are a few people on the extreme fringes who think so – you can always find one or two nutcases – but they don't represent anything near the mainstream.
CNN promotes BLM/Antifa (the rioters, not just the peaceful protesters). Both groups say on their website that they are Marxist organisations and want to destroy capitalism and the Nuclear family. CNN supporting such a goal is inherently far left.
I don't know if they do this for ideological reasons, or if the outrage machine makes them a lot of money. My guess would be the latter.
I do too, but CNN are clearly turning a blind eye to the organisations behind the cause. I will actually ascribe this to most major networks, not just CNN.
They really do not say it at all, never mind literally. The twitter poster is using quotes "", but what they quote is never said. And the speaker specifically is arguing against calling Trump anything, and says we should speak back against policies and stop with name calling.
That Tweet is a misquote though. He said "he may be responsible for many more deaths" rather than "he may have killed". Very big difference. And he certainly never said that "Trump is literally worse than Hitler". Considering he brings up climate change immediately afterwards it seems he mostly means Trump's persistent war on anything that will slow this down, which will (and already is) causing major problems. A comparison with Mao's incompetence isn't complete inaccurate actually. I do agree it's not helpful, and comparisons to Hitler and Stalin are certainly wildly inappropriate.
But some random guy saying something silly and offensive in one (live?) interview is still not the same as a set of very specific completely baseless allegations in the right-wing conspiracies theories.
I've certainly seen people say that, but never seriously. Of course someone will now claim that all the Qanon stuff is just joking, like Alex Jones said that libelling the Sandy Hook survivors was "entertainment".
I don't know anything about this, so I can't comment. But sex trafficking and cover-ups do happen; see: Jimmy Savile, Catholic church, Epstein, Bill Cosby, etc.
From a very quick search it seems that the police didn't take several cases serious, and were at the very least rather lax in their attitude. In other words, there's at least an actual crime and at least some smoke. It's not something invented from nothing.
And this is the real danger of this sort of politicized conspiracy bullshit: now this is automatically seen as "politically motivated" instead of actually looking at the matter at hand. People who spread pizzagate-esque conspiracy theories or enable them are very much harming the anti-paedophilia efforts.
You're correct about the antivax folks, but I do think flat earth is largely a right-leaning phenomenon. That aside...
> equality of outcome not equality of opportunity
Equality of opportunity is no greater thing to cherish. Opportunity comes from circumstance, and therefore this equates to wishing for equality in circumstances. Boiling this down to its fundamentals, this would mean important life decisions like whether to have children (and how many), what kind of hobbies and preferences people have, etc., would be left to the whims of balancing acts by the state.
I'm not sure why it has to be one of those. I mean maybe slightly an idiot because what he is saying is likely not good for him politically, but not entirely wrong. You make it sound like the USPS doesn't have any issues.
The USPS is not supposed to be a profitable business, any more than the Army or the State Department or the prison system is. It is a Constitutionally-sanctioned organization, operating under the premise that universal mail delivery is a valid government concern.
To the extent the USPS "has issues," as you put it, it is because Congress has consistently set them up to fail. Congress is free to shut down the USPS or kneecap it if they want, but the executive is not. Certainly not to serve their own corrupt purposes.
Just something else to add to the list of things Republicans would scream bloody murder about if a Democratic president were doing it.
The far left ecosystem doesn't work in anything like the same way, and doesn't get the push from youtube, but if you want a boogeyman we can agree on the actual Trotskyite SWP (Socialist Workers Party) have a habit of ruining any left-wing movement they get allowed into. Plus, like a lot of close knit social groups, companies and institutions, a sexual assault scandal ("Comrade Delta").
You won't see them recommended on Youtube. I think there are a few "tankies" out there though who also annoy the mainstream left. Named after people who supported the Soviet tanks suppressing revolt in Hungary.
Israel/Palestine politics has a big risk of going from getting outraged about things that actually happened to things that didn't, plus conflating the faults of the government and military of Israel with blame on all Jewish people (which is antisemitic).
Not gonna throw my hat into the ring with my own opinion... but isn’t this totally off-topic?
We’re talking about YouTube being used as a platform for spreading misinformation/conspiracies/etc. and you’re talking about sexualisation of children on Netflix and are clearly jumping at the opportunity to share your political opinions, and also personally attack and accuse another commenter.
Have your political opinions, I won’t address them, but jesus christ don’t be such an ass about it by attacking people in unrelated discussions.
Edit: I’ll also add that the original commenter was deliberately vague (didn’t mention “Trump” or specific political groups, for example) to avoid controversy and you come in attempting to bulldoze that by mentioning BLM.
> How do you feel about the oversexualization of children in such Netflix programs such as Cuties. Are you willing to defend the most innocent and vulnerable of society? I highly doubt it.
I've seen that go by on Twitter and am not impressed .. should I call for it to be cancelled?
(Mind you, a stock feminist answer might be that the Netflix series is just a representation of a whole rotten child beauty pageant culture which in turn derives from the sexist adult beauty pageant culture, and that nobody should be sexualised without their consent - which cannot appropriately be given by people who are underage.)
> and that nobody should be sexualised without their consent - which cannot appropriately be given by people who are underage
Except that we expect parents to be stewards for our children and give consent on their behalf, except in cases where we've decided that parents cannot be trusted to do so and we outlaw that activity for children (sex, alcohol, etc), or that consent does not fully convey the situation (a parent forcing an unwilling child to get a haircut is not viewed the same as a child forcing an unwilling child to play a full contact sport which is also not viewed the same as a parent forcing a child to get into a fistfight on the street).
Where do parents sexualizing their children for television fall into this? I dunno. If they were doing it for an individual that came over and paid in person, we'd have some real probing questions, but it's okay when it's on TV for a national audience?
I'm sorry but this comment is both wildly off-topic and needlessly inflammatory, suggesting the OP is fine with the over-sexualisation of children? Come on. We're two steps away from reciting QAnon posts here.
But in an attempt to bring things vaguely back on topic: I'm actually curious to know if left-wing movements have been aided by YouTube and to what extent. Its effect on the right is very well documented but on the left I've tended to see the outrage on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook more.
Being a lefty I would say no not really (GMO and anti-vaxxers are on both sides), that being said ... I believe the left has really turned the heat up on cancel culture, and that has had a massive impact on discourse.
Not to get too far down a rabbit hole here but the OP was referring to the "far left", which certainly doesn't own the mass media. If anything, centrists own the mass media.
Generally when American Trump/Republican supporters (I won't say right wingers, because I'm sure there's a large portion of conservatives who are not represented by the current corrupt administration) refer to the "far left" they mean the center and regular left. Their personal overton window is just so skewed that they think anything left of Trump is extremist.
I’ve seen couple anecdotes that Japanese artists and amateur musicians get better view counts on Nico Nico Douga(Japanese clone of 2010s YouTube - also inspiration for Chinese Bilibili), despite obviously having far less active users, so I think it’s possible that trying to gain audiences within YouTube could be not as important as perceived, especially the purpose of doing so isn’t to gain more affiliate fees.
A good example to show how much discoverability is important.
Check Blender's Peertube [1] and compare to their Youtube Channel [2]. At the time of writing the latest video is a week old and has 27K views on YouTube while a measly 28 views on PeerTube.
Those figures alone show that it's not even worth to keep an instance up and running for this. I doubt it even counts as an insurance policy against Google shenanigans, you are likely to lose all viewership if your channel goes kaput anyway.
The only way this can possibly be successful for anyone is if they make huge investments in marketing and that carries a risk that even then it may never pay back. YouTube just provides immense value through discovery. You may not like it but there's no denying.
"None of my videos have ever gotten a large number of views, and none are monetized, so I might as well copy them to a PeerTube instance I control."
As we know, there is a growing history of unexpected changes or even phase-outs of services/features that were once considered fixtures provided by Google.
There is nothing I am aware of that says a user could/should not simultaneously 1. keeps backups of her work on physcial media in her possession (as well "in the cloud"), 2. host her work on YouTube or some similarly commercial service, and 3. self-host her work on PeerTube. The decision to diversify should not matter whether the videos have significant views or not.
If both services are free, do you have to "move" from service X to service Y, or can you can just "copy" (mirror).
As a video creator, who in the world would go to all of the effort to create a video, upload it to youtube, and then delete every single piece of the original content in their possession leaving the final in YT as the only surviving copy? WHO? IDIOTS.
People who have limited storage resources? One of the wonderful things about making content for YouTube is its low barrier to entry, and that probably includes a lot of people using their mom's hand-me-down MacBook Air. Maybe people who haven't been bitten by significant data loss before? Sure, it usually only takes once, but maybe that would be their first time? Lots of young people on that platform that are probably really used to everything just kind of automatically being backed up in a cloud somewhere.
Someone not having your level of prudence and understanding in their MO doesn't mean they're idiots. Did you learn everything you know by reading the docs and best practices recommendations and acting accordingly, or did it take a couple of stinging mistakes to bring you to where you are? Your attitude is the stuff that nightmare bosses/parents/teachers/mentors are made of. Mellow out.
Dustin, from Smarter Every Day, has millions of subscribes and keeps his backup copies on old hard drives loosely placed into plastic containers. He also causally tosses them around.
I think it's not that someone intentionally does that, it's that daily creators or those that make large quantities of videos simply run out of space or get overwhelmed by how much storage is needed over time.
There are many videos by creators chronicling the solutions they've had to contrive to preserve their records and the cost/time tradeoffs they've made to continue creating while saving their archives.
Video files are large, so you usually have to store them on some kind of external disk. And it's very possible to lose an external disk. If videos are your livelihood then I imagine you're going to be a lot more disciplined than that but there are plenty of hobbyist vloggers out there.
I manage petabytes of storage of media content. While this content is not mine, I'm just saying I'm fully aware of the size of video content. My personal video archive is in the hundreds of TBs. I have put forth the effort to save my content in multiple formats aw well as locally, offsite, and in the cloud. I'm saving RAW content. Most "YouTubers" are producing MP4 video content which is tiny compared to RAW. If I can do it, they can too. I guarantee YouTubers making money are making way more money than I am.
I'm gonna go ahead and assume that to someone who manages petabytes of video content, the importance of backing up video content is more obvious than it is to, say, a non-technical person with a hobby toy unboxing channel. If it was indeed knowledge that is as common and obvious as your attitude suggests, then you probably wouldn't be making any money at all.
Perhaps it's a matter of tone not coming across well through text, but you seem to be bizarrely angry at people on YouTube in general, even more so if they don't back up their video files.
You misread that. My guarantee is if a YouTuber is making any money, they are making more than I do. That implies that I am not making any money on my video that I am storing, yet I still back it up properly.
I have over 160k+ subscribers. What you say is correct and something I've known for years. Build your own platform and hope others will follow you wherever you go. YouTube is a temporary marketing platform at the moment but there are still huge amounts of potential. I have no faith in it's long term stability though.
My flow for watching youtube has been to subscribe and sign up for email alerts (the bell). When I had some time to watch, I'd scan my youtube alerts email folder for items of interest. It was efficient and would quickly leave me with a queue of videos.
I don't even know what the alert bell is for now. If I look at notifications its full of "recommendations". If I go to my subscriptions its random items from all my subscriptions regardless of "the bell".
> Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority
Is it though?
I don’t make videos, but if I did it wouldn’t be as “my job”, it would be because I had information to share.
My favorite YouTube videos and channels aren’t “personalities” being “influencers”.
I guess I just don’t measure success in “popularity”. I don’t think my number one goal would be to get to people, it would be to contribute something useful to a couple people that could use that info.
I would value a good and reliable search feature over the highest possible user base, but this is all just me. I am aware there are people that need the attention / viewership more than I do.
If you count on ad revenue in any way, getting subscriptions matters. This is true even for channels that wouldn’t be categorized as (scare quotes) “influencers”. Your subscriber count directly affects your ability to turn each new video into more views and therefore more ad revenue.
Maybe relying on Google to share -or- arbitrarily decide not to share money that they get in from their massive advertising machine with you... isn’t a good business model?
Being censorship-proof is INFINITELY more important than "Multimillion dollar businesses" done on censorable platforms which invariably will become evil (not if but when).
I remember the internet before google - when you would search for anything there would be like a 25% chance that a given search result would be a porn site targeted for random keywords. Google has done a great job figuring out content curation at scale. A competitor for any of their services would need a suite of hard-to-implement features to be viable, including discoverability and content filtration. Are there any good open source solutions to solve these problems? Bonus points if they’ve been proven at scale
Years ago (and I think this was actually Google Video, and not YouTube) I was helping a customer who had trouble playing videos on the internet. I think it was one of those "it sometimes stops after a minute or so" problems. I fixed the problem with flash player and to test it I went video.google.com and clicked on a random video on the frontpage without paying much attention to what it was, and continued working on the next laptop while keeping half an eye on the video.
This is how I learned about R. Budd Dwyer killing himself on live TV in 1987, as the video was the recording of him shooting himself in the head.
I think a lot of people underestimate the kind of challenges YouTube faces at their scale.
It probably is, but afaik you can't see videos from random creators on your peertube instance. You have to subscribe to them to get a feed of their videos.
Just checked out the main site - on top of trending is a seven-second clip of a headless woman showing off her cleaveage. Remember when YouTube had to fix that problem?
>An embedded PeerTube video comes with a warning, because when you watch one of these videos using the web player, you may also be serving that video to other audience members watching it at the same time.
This is something the distributed video people don't seem to entirely understand. Look at how many copyright disputes happen on YouTube - not actual piracy, just disputes. Now imagine every dispute was resolved by sending DMCA takedown notices or subpoenas to individual users who happened to have the misfortune of watching a particular PeerTube video someone didn't like.
Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim. Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers. So you need some sort of mechanism to ensure people who provide you the video don't have an IP address to trace, which immediately puts you in all sorts of hard UX problems that the wave of encrypted P2P software from a decade and a half ago never really figured out.
Is your position that centralized services can out survive distributed ones? Because user IP's are less observable? The past 25 years of cyber/cypherpunk software and legal battles say otherwise. Decentralized solutions outlive centralized ones not because there is "no one to shut down" it's because there's too many people to shut down. Enforcement processes don't scale, especially when it comes to speech.
>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed
A more compelling argument:
>>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.
>
>
>Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.
>
>Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.
You're thinking about this from a pirate's point of view: "they can't sue all of us", and that's entirely correct. But it's also not what I'm worried about. People who know they're breaking the law and don't give a shit will take steps to protect themselves from legal prosecution. People who just see "oh hey free movies" will wind up using insecure services that get them lawsuits. This is what happened with people who used Gnutella and KaZaA back in the 2000s, or people who pirated fake porn from Strike 3 Holdings, or people who use Popcorn Time now. The more accessible an infringing service is, the more likely people will get legal nastygrams in the mail.
Imagine you're an average Internet user, you follow, say, a YouTuber that reviews movies. They say that their latest review isn't on YouTube, but on their website. You go there, watch the review, laugh, and move on with your life. But then you get a nastygram in the mail a week later. Turns out that particular YouTuber didn't have great copyright hygiene, and used an unlicensed music clip. Them moving it to PeerTube means that instead of their video getting taken down, the copyright holder has to sue the swarm - and they do. You get caught in that dragnet, and now you have a nice fat $10,000+ settlement you have to pay for watching a video, because PeerTube puts you in the chain of copyright liability.
>You're thinking about this from a pirate's point of view
I'm thinking about it from a cost / enforcement point of view.
PGP survived outright, explicit ban by the most powerful government with some of the most powerful cryptanalysis agencies in the world at the time not because "a company hid people's IPs". Your argument is: some users will be attacked for using applications for which lawyers have cheap attack costs/enforcement. It does not follow that, some agents being unable to survive their strategy results in an alternative strategy dominating.
Let's be real: legal systems that have the power to demand IP records subpoenas also have the power to demand logging, so you're argument that white-market companies can somehow provide anonymity, or shielding from culpability, to users doesn't hold water. One might interpret the outcome of the PGP battle happened because of some advanced concept like free-speech rights but the unavoidable reality is, attackers have limited resources and if the benefit is less than the attack costs, the attack won't survive.
these days people get music from spotify ($$) and similar services, not from torrents ($free). I'd say centralized won.
When I did torrent, I would frequently get warnings from content owners by way of my ISP, so at least identification of offenders seems to have scaled. They didn't take me to court personally, but some other end users were compelled to settle, and even the threat of punitive measures should be enough to discourage many others. So overall I don't agree with your characterizations.
>these days people get music from spotify ($$) and similar services, not from torrents ($free). I'd say centralized won.
My point is less about what content delivery systems are most prevalent at the present moment, more so about which are more survivable. Protocols and physical media outlive centralized content delivery because they are more fault tolerant. One doesn't need the commercial and technical apparatus of Amazon Inc to pick up a physical book and read it. The market trades convenience for future performance default.
It wouldn't matter if your IP is observable or not. It is not illegal in the US to download material even if you know the uploader did not have the rights to it. But uploading/sharing as in the case of peertube is illegal if the uploader did not have the rights
Source for this? I've heard it said a number of times but haven't looked into it. It makes sense, but I know many countries have laws about possession too.
"Copyright" means the rights holder has the following exclusive rights.
The right to reproduce and make copies of an original work;
The right to prepare derivative works based on the original work;
The right to distribute copies to the public by sale or another form of transfer, such as rental or lending;
The right to publicly perform the work;
The right to publicly display the work, and
The right to perform sound recordings publicly through digital audio transmission.
Someone uploading a file, or downloading a file on a peer to peer website that also involves uploading a file is violating a number of these rights. Downloading a file(not on a peer to peer site) is not a violation of any of these exclusive rights. This is analogous to an unauthorized public screening of a movie. The the person who displayed the movie without permission is infringing on the rights holder's copyright, the people who are watching are not.
The uploading (in a peer to peer sense) I've always found interesting. Because most of the time, a casual downloader who doesn't seed, but only uploads for the duration of their download, would actually upload very little. How much do they need to upload to be in violation of copyright? Does any part of the upload need to be convertable into part of the original work?
For instance, let's say the bittorrent protocol was altered such that instead of pieces, you're assigned random bits to upload that are never enough to be assembled into any part of the original file in human watchable form. Have you actually violated copyright if you upload some of these bits?
Eg what if you uploaded a single bit (a 1 or a 0). Clearly not in violation. How many bits do you need to upload to be in violation?
The RIAA has unsuccessfully tried to claim that "making available(for download)" is infringement. So there would need to be some amount of actual uploading to prove this as a civil case.
But even if you only seed while downloading it is likely even the relatively small amount uploaded would meet the legal requirement, the law does not require that you distributed a full copy of a particular work. Ultimately whether a specific amount would be enough would come down to the judge or jury.
I am really curious what would happen if a case like this ever made it to court. Copyright law was designed when copying was a difficult and intentional act; how that computers are ubiquitous, that is very much no longer the case.
Sure, there have been lots of successful lawsuits against BitTorrent users, but the level of sophistication involved with using BitTorrent in the traditional way is high enough that it's pretty clear it's being used intentionally. But if you showed a jury what the purported infringement consisted of with a PeerTube video (clicking play on a video in a webpage, something that almost all of us do every day)... do you think they would convict?
If that ever did make it to court, and someone did end up losing a suit after playing a video, I would hope it'd make the news and that we'd get new legislation that reflects the reality of the internet today.
Copyright is a strict liability tort. That means considerations of intent or knowledge don't matter. The legal arguments for taking down a sophisticated BitTorrent piracy operation map one-to-one with suing individual PeerTube users.
There is a legal defense called "innocent infringement", but it's very limited. You have to be in a situation where it wouldn't be possible or reasonable to know about the copyright status of a work, not just be ignorant of the law. As an example of how fragile this is, merely putting the words "All Rights Reserved" on a work will generally prohibit defendants from using this defense. It also only disclaims statutory damages down to about $200, if the judge is okay with that. If the plaintiff can convince a court that you caused more than that in actual damages, then this defense won't do much, if at all.
In 2015 in Germany, popcorn time users received ~$1000 fines. The use is similar to peertube, many users were not aware these files were shared with other users as well but they were still in violation of the law.
>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim.
In Germany at least as of a few years ago it was exceedingly common for people who seeded torrents of movies/tv shows etc to receive copyright infringement notices which were sent out on mass, which is why pretty much everyone used a VPN.
Not sure what exactly the legal situation was but I think they simply relied on third party services who would host/scan for copyright infringement, colllect a ton of IPs, then go to a court, and thus you pretty easily circumvent any individual issues because you just do it in bulk.
Don't burn me at the stake... but what if we could solve user liability with DRM? Hear me out:
What if all video was encrypted with DRM by default, and viewers/peers only shared DRM-encrypted data? This would still enable the biggest benefit of PeerTube: viewer/peer bandwidth sharing. But now we've (arguably) reduced the scope of 'publishing' -- for the purpose of legal liability -- to only those PeerTube instances that provide the DRM key. That is, just sharing the encrypted video data no longer carries the legal significance of 'publishing' it, because the data is useless without the key. Wield the media companies' own DRM as a legal shield to limit user liability.
Now to be clear, I'm not an attorney, so I'm not making any kind of legal claim, or saying that this is an argument that a court would find convincing. But I think there's a chance this could work out because I'm pretty sure this strategy where the DRM key is more protected than the video data is utilized in the video distribution industry today, and considered to be an ok solution.
If DRM is used, the encryption key itself becomes the unit of publishing. How keys are distributed between instances is not limited at all, maybe by default the key is shared with all the other instances in its federation. Also, now instances have an instant way to "unpublish" a video in case of DMCA: just stop sharing the key. And since no users share the key with each other, even if they are unaware of their instance taking down a video that they watched and are still sharing it, downloading peers still won't be able to view it.
This idea isn't perfect of course. All viewers would still need to connect to a central/federated instance to get the key, but compared to sharing the actual video data this is much more reasonable to scale. Also, getting access to DRM itself is still pretty centralized today, so it might take significant effort to implement.
DRM is unnecessary - what you're describing sounds like a variation on FreeNet, MUTE, WASTE etc. Contributory liability would still be present if movie companies could prove you were distributing encrypted copies of their films. The main problem I would foresee is swarm security. If you're sharing your videos out to a wide audience, then the encryption isn't going to help. Your adversary isn't a passive deep packet inspection filter, it's copyright owners joining a swarm through normal means in order to IP addresses of people who are distributing content.
The no-sharing-keys property isn't useful either. Presumably someone is going to want to archive PeerTube content (P2P swarms tend to archive poorly), which means modifying PeerTube or a browser to scrape keys. If an archivist can do this, so can a copyright enforcement bot.
What you would really want is something more akin to Tor, where both ends of each peer connection don't know who each other are. The way this works is by using multiple layers of encryption, so each link in the chain just knows where to send which packets of nonsense. You can do this today, actually, but BitTorrent-over-Tor is heavily discouraged as speeds are slow even at low hop counts. There's also the problem of accidentally leaking your own IP address over Tor. This is why, for example, most VPNs ship browser extensions that disable P2P features such as WebRTC.
To have the DMCA safe harbor you have to submit a form at the copyright office and follow certain procedures. It's not automatic the way copyright itself is.
The DMCA does not allow you to disclaim liability for your own infringement. It only covers specific kinds of contributory liability that other people do using your online service that you do not have actual knowledge of. This is fragile enough that having human curators prevents you from using your safe harbor for anything they touch. (See Mavrix v. LiveJournal)
Remember a lot of people try these options because they post or watch controversial content. Now what happens when dissidents, or anti-dissidents, whatever all share their IPs with the world.
The privacy scare that Snowden brought to our attention is kind of abstract--"someday a different regime may use this data against me". But some lunatic who tracks you down because of an ideological dispute is a very real and physical threat.
> Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers.
For what it's worth:
France tried suing people using bittorrent to download illegally with the Hadopi law from 2009 to 2020 (it was ruled unconstitutional in May, because of a lack of judiciary oversight).
It cost between 5 to 10M€ every year, and resulted in only 87k€ in fines total. So not a huge success.
In America, we had a company whose business model was to make fake porn, upload it to BitTorrent, and then sue anyone in the swarm. It actually worked for a while - the only illegal part of this is that they lied about uploading the content to get around implied license arguments. (That and the fact that they made their lawyer drink himself to death, but that's not material to the scam.) There's other companies clogging up court dockets with similar infringement lawsuits against John Does to get access to expedited discovery. This shit is profitable enough that any video sharing service needs to either avoid legal liability for it's users or find a way to prevent copyright holders from gathering evidence from them.
Does it matter for the video sharing sites in the US? DMCA gives them a pretty good format - immediate block and forward the notice to the uploader and they're free of pretty much any responsibility.
Any CDN is bound to run into thousands of such issues, and yet they survive. What is the difference between tracing a video to a CDN and to a user? In fact, the former should be more straightforward to prosecute, as CDN’s IP is CDN’s, while a physical person is likely to share an IP with others behind the same router, no?
You're entirely correct, and that's why the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure exists. It's the only way to disclaim contributory liability for copyright infringement as an online service.
An individual user watching a PeerTube video would not be able to do the same thing. The DMCA only protects against infringement liability that other people cause. If you watch an infringing upload, well, that's your liability.
Interesting. I also wonder how would the exact video can be detected, if the viewer serves it to other viewers over encrypted channel.
Edit: besides traffic being (hopefully) encrypted; let’s say someone files a takedown for video page X—if I am viewing a video from page X, and stream comes from peer A, how does a third party arrives at a conclusion that the stream coming from peer A corresponds to page X (presumably required in order to sue the physical person behind A)?
Encryption is useless in open peer-to-peer networks if you can join the swarm. Everyone in that swarm will fall over themselves to hand out legally-compromising evidence of their infringement. The idea is that "Peer A" in this scenario is actually a copyright enforcement bot logging evidence that you are sending it the infringing content. This is how BitTorrent copyright enforcement works.
In my example peer A is serving the video to me; a conclusion that I am serving the stream anywhere would be unwarranted and must be easy to debunk in court.
You have it backwards. You're Peer A in the example. The copyright owner joins the swarm, pretending to be a normal peer, and starts downloading the file from participants to prove that an infringement occurred.
This works because most P2P systems have a way to enforce that swarm participants contribute upload bandwidth, which also puts them at risk of a copyright lawsuit. PeerTube specifically uses WebTorrent, a WebRTC-tunneled version of BitTorrent, so it has tit-for-tat rules. Someone using a modified download-only client in the swarm will get a terribly slow experience unless the swarm is absolutely massive.
Well then, there’s still a major difference from BitTorrent: the fact that as soon as I stop watching and close the tab, the video is gone from my system and I’m no longer “distributing” it.
When I’m watching a video for the first time, I have no way of knowing it’s infringing. Once I’m finished—subpoena all you want; all I’ve got to do is remember to not watch that particular video ever again.
I could be in trouble if I’m seeding the video on purpose, presumably if I’m its creator.
Which on balance could actually be more reasonable than status quo: I reckon %CORP% would be compelled to do their homework before going after some poor individual. If it turns out to be a frivolous lawsuit and the work is fully original, that’d actually backfire—something they clearly don’t have to fear with their shotgun automated DMCA takedowns and overly zealous detection algorithms.
The stakes are higher for producers, but a legitimate creator confident in their work may well prefer that to the uncertainty and constant fear that %PLATFORM% mistakes your original work for something random and pulls the rug from under you.
I think there’s a parallel to be drawn between YouTube and Amazon. Apparently, the latter is leaking legitimate sellers and becomes a haven to fly-by-night shady sellers due to its ease of setup but unpredictable enforcement[0]. Not unimaginable YouTube will trend the same way—remain the platform for algorithm-favored provocative, controversial, hateful videos that tread the line of legality, and lose authentic artists.
Or, alternatively, you just stay connected to a VPN when you browse the web, and stop worrying about this aspect. (yes, I know, VPNs are not the silver bullet they are advertised to be, but in this particular case they are helpful).
Probably because it's quite a personal thing, which can be used for port scanning, ddos, geolocation and other stuff. Also anyone can monitor p2p activity: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/
Exposures vary based on network config and other factors, but this study by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada talks about specific data acquired via IP address.
This is a illuminating read. I think the example drives it home.
---------
For example, the IP address of one individual Wikipedia contributor revealed that the person has:
1. Edited hundreds of pages on Wikipedia about television shows, both North American and international. The interest in TV shows was extensive and specific, but the details are not included here for privacy reasons;
2. Edited dozens of pages on Wikipedia related to history topics;
3. Participated in a discussion board about a television channel; and
4. Visited a site devoted to sexual preferences following an online search for a specific type of person.
What if the video on how to patch an extremely vulnerable router? I could be pretty sure that anyone watching that video was susceptible to this exploit at that time.
for as long as that IP is pointing to your machine someone can perform analytics and scanning, subject you to manipulated packets and can track down your most recent activities as depicted by server caches, even spoofing a server you use often thus pwning you....
most people dont get this level of attention but you dont want it unless you like the thrill of cyberwar
Client-server apps like YouTube reveal your IP to the server (Google).
Peer-to-peer apps reveal your IP to any other peer in the network (anyone seeding, anyone else downloading, and anyone who wants to monitor by pretending to be a downloader).
You would probably want to limit the number of people who can see it. It may be of interest to some groups to set-up peer servers to gain partial control and knowledge of the users and system
I think Google, as an entity, has a lot more power to collect a lot more data about everyone else in the world and do something with it than my neighbor sniffing my IP address when I visit a singular Peertube Instance.
Getting "doxxed" by someone on a social media platform can have much more impactful real-world consequences than Google showing you more relevant ads thanks to knowing that you watched a video titled "the most reliable power tools".
Well, when I use youtube I am giving Google permission to use my data in a way described in their TOS. If they break those terms, I have recourse (e.g. lawsuit, legislation, bad PR, etc.)
> do something with it than my neighbor sniffing my IP address when I visit a singular Peertube Instance.
You're minimizing the risk of Peertube from _anyone in the world_ seeing my IP address to "a neighbor" in order to make your argument. Anyway, using Peertube, there is no TOS, no recourse, no privacy.
> You're minimizing the risk of Peertube from _anyone in the world_ seeing my IP address to "a neighbor" in order to make your argument.
Use a VPN with Peertube if that is your concern. Problem solved.
> Anyway, using Peertube, there is no TOS, no recourse, no privacy.
Just the mere fact that most of your traffic goes thru Google for search, videos, Google Analytics everywhere on 99% of websites out of the Google realm, makes my privacy a lot less meaningful when I know a single company has access to all of that info and that precise company can leak that data to every government out there asking for it without letting me know.
By the way, has any individual sued Google for anything and won when it came to anything related to breach of privacy? Just the fact that it's extremely hard to prove that Google and nobody else leaked your information makes the possibility of legal action very remote to say the least.
I found one YouTube creator who moved his videos to Vimeo on Demand and then to Prime Video Direct. I think you can choose to require viewers pay for your video, or have them included for free for Prime members, where the pay is $.06 / hour of viewing (it used to be $.15 / hour).
Anyway, it's an interesting alternative for content creators, as long as their videos are high quality. The pay is certainly much better than YouTube, so I have a lot of sympathy for this route. Plus it's like YouTube Premium in that there are no ads.
I'm not sure if Amazon will actively promote these videos, so I suspect YouTube remains king for discovery.
What kind of money is that for the space? Assuming a 10 minute video where you want to make $100 you need 100k views. $100 / $.006 per hour = 16667 hours. 16667 hours * 6 10 minute views per hour = 100000.
Incidentally, Cloudflare Stream charges the same rates for serving video ($1 per 1000 minutes).
Any idea what kind of money a YouTuber would make off 100k views? Does something like Cloudflare's offering make a suitable backup where they could eat the cost of serving video temporarily if YouTube kicks them off?
I think it's a really hard problem because serving video is so expensive. YouTube must be a huge money pit.
Oh yeah. My bad. I got my degree in math from Verizon. Getting paid $1000 per 100k views sounds ok.
On the paying side I'd hate to end up on the hook for a video that goes viral and gets a million views.
Keep in mind that Cloudflare is making a profit on that and Amazon, Google probably have lower costs than Cloudflare. Still, it has to be a huge money pit to host that stuff.
Streaming video is hard and expensive, I think that's why there's very little serious competition to Youtube.
You not only have the network effects of social media ("everybody is on Youtube") but you also have to host and stream petabytes of data and still manage to turn a profit.
Now if on top of all of that you want to do it with decentralized technologies it become even harder to reach the same level of quality. Anybody who's attempted to download some niche torrent from a few years ago knows that the success rate tends to be very low. Meanwhile you can still watch the holiday video of some Polish family in Italy in 2011 on Youtube, even if it only has like 20 views.
I want a decentralized, peer-to-peer internet but when you face the technical and financial realities you realize that it really doesn't add up, IMO. You need huge economies of scale to make it work.
Or alternatively you need to convince people that things like web search, video streaming and email hosting are actually worth paying for. Good luck.
Interestingly, part of the problem is that people have switched to smaller and portable devices like laptop, tablets and phones, and away from desktop computers. Desktop computers are not constrained as much by energy consumption problems, can usually have more storage at the same price point, and can persistently connect to reliable internet.
In other words, and ironically, the physical deanchoring of compute devices has made it harder for virtually decentralized video sharing to take off.
True, and also IPv4 and mass-NATing everything by default was an other factor IMO. If you've been coding some network application over the past 3 decades you basically have to assume that most of your users are going to run it behind a NAT. That creates a world of issues for anything p2p.
I wonder if the situation would've been different had something like IPv6 been adopted much earlier. Then even end users might have integrated the idea that their devices would remain accessible remotely once connected to the internet. That would have made it harder for ISPs to sell these connections where basically nothing but HTTP(S) makes it through.
On the other hand, wifi routers could do this. Plug in a USB external hard drive, fiddle with some software, boom. (Asus includes a remote accessible file storage; other options are possible with 3rd party firmware, etc)
Can I encode video to one format, like webm, and only serve this format without reendocing specifically for a client? Force all clients to watch only in resolutions in which the file is available on disk? It would deduct CPU/GPU time and only need to get storage and network, which isn't that expensive. I have a few dedicated kimsufi servers that are under-utilized.
Not sure what you mean with reencoding for each client? AFAIK no major streaming does this realtime. They reencode the content once from source into a number of bitrates and formats, put the result on a CDN and then use DASH/HLS/Smooth so clients can dynamically fetch and switch between them based on a manifest.
If you do not do DRM you can probably get away with only using HLS or DASH and three or so bitrates/qualities. 480p, 720p and source perhaps?
That might double your storage req and the one time encode effort, but running costs are the same (if not less because people will consume less bandwidth).
Can't edit my comment for some reason, but I just wanted to correct myself in that just-in-time encoding is a thing that exists and is being used. Only lately has it been in significant use for non-live content though. The standard practice is still what I outlined above.
You can. But now most of your clients will burn battery because they don't have hardware VP8, VP9 or AV1 decoding (yet). IIUC these are the only video codecs supported by WebM and they have very little hardware support. Of course this problem exists for any particular codec that you chose it is either nonfree, inefficient or not universally supported.
And after that some of your clients will have terrible buffering because your video file is too large. Other clients will have a 4k TV and your file will be too small. Unless your bandwidth is very cheap you will also spend more money sending your 1080 video to phones with a 720p screen.
So yes you can. But there is a reason that every serious video service has multiple codecs, every client has a different ideal video file and by getting close to that you will provide a better experience.
My point is that any one encode won't be sufficient. WebM is actually probably one of the better options for a single encoding. But any single choice of codec and parameters will be insufficient to provide a top-tier user experience.
That was my usual experience too, however, I think the article site is hosting their own. e.g. if you click from that article to a sample peertube embed, https://battlepenguin.com/tech/video/upgrading-the-ssd-on-an..., it played instantly for me. Fastest I have ever seen PeerTube work, just as fast as YouTube actually. I didn't know that was possible! So it does appear that hosting your own videos allows for instant streaming on PeerTube, no buffering!
Author here. I host on a dedicated server in Germany; 64GB of ram and a recent generation processor. It costs less than all my crappy Vultr/DigitalOcean nodes, so I moved a ton of stuff to it.
You do need a decent VM or dedicated server for PeerTube, but they're not that expensive if you shop around. I pay ~€60 a month.
Hey. It's really neat. Would you be willing to share any insight you have?
I don't know much about PeerTube. I assume your server is along the lines of an anchor / primary peer that guarantees there's always 1 seed. Is that right? If so, is there a way to turn off the peer-to-peer capabilities and to use it like a more traditional video hosting platform?
> It makes more sense for someone just starting out to host their own content, than a creator who is entrenched in the YouTube world.
I've thought about that concept for (literally) at least 2 years and I've always wanted to build a how-to website that helps creators do what they can to mitigate the risks of being de-platformed, etc.. Have you thought at all about ways to use YouTube to externalize costs initially, but with a plan to eventually migrate premium users to a platform where you'd get a better business relationship? I think Linus Tech Tips has the right idea with FloatPlane where they cater to creators that are already popular and help them syphon those creators' premium users away from YouTube.
Do you think there's any way a completely new creator could start out with extremely low ongoing costs? ~€60 a month is too expensive for high school kids and I think that's about the only age where you'd (possibly) have a chance to start capturing the market in terms of mindshare. Even by then, it might be too late. A lot of really young kids have YouTube channels and are already captured by Google. By the time they're in high school they've already got a half decade of "investment" into YouTube.
I'm not sure if you can turn off the P2P aspect. You'll have to check the PeerTube documentation. When you connect to a PeerTube server, you start streaming from that server, but host to other viewers from your browser using WebTorrent and WebRTC relays to get past NAT.
Alex Gleeson is working on affordable paid hosting for Pleroma+Soapbox (and ActivityPub platform like PeerTube, except for twitter/fb style text posts). Maybe that can be applied to PeerTube as well? I'm sure someone must be working on lower cost hosted PeerTube somewhere..
For say the high school student, a little bit of coding knowledge can be used to automate video uploads and metadata. That student can use a public PeerTube server, or one of the paid ones, and if you have uploads scripted in place, it makes it easy to move/re-host that content.
For revenue, once you get large enough, there may be ways to build integrations between a PeerTube server and Patreon, Librepay or other such platforms.
Why use PeerTube at all if you can just stream directly from server? In theory, more viewers = more bandwidth, but it doesn't seem to work that well in practice.
Maybe it depends on the peers near you and when you watch. I tried to play a video on the OP's website, it played immediately at 1080p without any stutter.
> It’s 2020 and YouTube, as well as the rest of big tech, is continuing to remove content they don’t agree with from their platforms.
Bold of these folks to assume their little self-hosted hard disk will outlive YouTube. When an individual is in charge of keeping some resource online, it's a matter of when it disappears not if. I don't care how controversial your content is, it's more likely to be accessible by me in 10 years if you put it on YouTube versus your torrent or personal website.
Author is not making a statement regarding longevity of storage. It sounds like the issue is more around Google's behaviors emphasizing profitability above all else and removal of content that doesn't fit neatly into their commercial narratives.
Google may have the technically superior implementation but they're straight up amoral. To some people that may be a worse problem than how long their personal hard drive will last.
Yes, the website and its database are resilient. Torrents are less likely to be struck down by a singular authority like YouTube but on the other hand it suffers from the same problem as personal websites. Almost every torrent posted to tpb over the years, if you tried to download now, would have zero seeders. It's the same thing with IPFS. None of these P2P solutions will ever be like S3.
I have a feeling that once IPFS and torrents become more popular on anonymous networks like I2P, the copyright mafia will have a real problem trying to shut that down.
Right now the speeds are pretty bad (20 KB/s average 100KB/s for "fast" torrents), but with more users, that can drastically change. If 400KB/s becomes the average, watching 720p on a peertube instance on I2P will be possible without lag. At 800KB/s 1080p becomes possible without lag. https://stream.twitch.tv/encoding/
Downloading content like the most recent Jeopardy is where torrents shine. Also recent blockbuster movies and AAA games. Torrents can be faster than a CDN in these cases, because they are popular content. Try to download Jeopardy from Feb 29, 2014, good luck if anyone's seeding that. But I'm sure NBC's paid streaming service has that episode if you want it.
How does the non-profit select content to preserve? Can I just upload anything I want, 10 hour dashcams, and so long as it's not illegal it stays up? What is the criteria for exclusion and how is it better than YouTube's?
I only know of one "YouTuber" with a considerable amount of subscribers [0] who is uploading all of his content to PeerTube and wants to eventually move there exclusively.
But the children might learn to make naughty chemicals, can't let that happen.
In all seriousness, nearly every major chemistry youtuber that I have seen has had several videos struck for seemingly pointless issues. There are many many videos showing poor technique and potentially extremely dangerous synthesis - those remain up. I don't understand the criteria behind it in this domain.
I don't know of any in the west, but in Japan and China (though youtube being banned helps) there are other popular video sites, for example NicoNico in Japan and YouKu in China.
There is an ongoing crowdfunding campaign, to finance peertube's ongoing development. One of their goals for this year is discovery, with global search.
Ah, thank you, I had missed it. It is quite unfortunate that they don't have an RSS feed on that website. I just tried setting up https://kill-the-newsletter.com/, we'll see how that goes...
Unfortunately, I cannot share the generated feed here, as it's too similar to the inbox address.
discovery is really a function of having all the content, so yes you cannot assail the function of having all the content until you have a significant amount of content.
Maybe let creators follow and / or like each others videos, channels and use that to make semi-curated recommendations. The biggest issue with YouTube, etc. is the recommendations kind of suck and do a bad job of following my mood. If I'm watching tech stuff, I want more tech recommendations. If I'm watching news bloopers, I want other comedy themed stuff.
There's a ton of potential in re-discovering curation given how terrible the web has gotten in general, so I think a type of decentralized, creator driven curation would be pretty cool.
It irks me to no end that stuff I watch on YouTube shows up in the articles/news in Google Assistant screen... The stuff I watch isn't necessarily the news I want to read.
Discovery is often the big challenge with any federated, or even fully decentralized system. There are solutions out there of varying effectiveness. (Vague recollection makes me think of SearX - decentralized search engine - as one such option, but not sure if I'm remembering that correctly.)
anecdotally youtube seems to have aggressively increased the number of ads just in the last few weeks or so
i see ads on almost all videos i watch now, there are two ads before the video (the first one i can’t skip at all, the second i can sometimes skip after a few seconds), and then some videos have more ads at different points in the actual video that show up out of nowhere.
and then there’s the search ads that take up the entire mobile interface plus ads beneath the video
given i’ve mostly been using youtube for recipes lately and skip around the video a lot the experience is like being forced watching 30 seconds of ads for every 5 minutes of content.
YouTube Premium is by far the best $10/month that I spend. Zero ads on YouTube and creators get a share of that, which is typically more $ than they would get from ads.
I also pay for premium, since it includes Google Play Music, though they're shutting that down in favor of YouTube Music... which kind of sucks, because I prefer the UX of Google Play Music, and really liked how well their "Station" lists were compared to other services.
Yet another google service I use shuttered in favor of something worse for me.
About half my TV watching is via YouTube on my ShieldTV box for channels I watch regularly. I got sick of the ads and willing to pay to support what I watch and listen to.
I am hoping tha Bitchute and others become more popular, as I really don't like what's happening to the platform in general.
FYI and for anyone reading this, Bitchute is not P2P or decentralized at all. 100% of its requests are served from data center IPs in Kansas. It's a fraud.
I just tend to like differing styles of music together... it takes time to find new content/music/artists/albums, let alone curating playlists... I don't like listening to the same songs all the time.
I have a massive music collection, and sometimes I'll pull up a specific album or artist... but mostly prefer the streaming options were others' time are used to curate the play lists.
I kind of wish that independent streaming services weren't effectively crushed. I miss DJ curated content with fewer commercials.
They also have a phone app that supports caching for offline listening and once you rate at least 75 songs higher than 6 out of 10 you can have your own stream composed of your favorites.
If your concern is for supporting content creators, and if you have any reservations about the intrusiveness of adtrackers -- and also maybe you'd like to conserve your system resources when you browse the web -- wouldn't it make much more sense to support the content creators you enjoy directly through Patreon and use an adblocker instead?
You're positing that YouTube itself provides no value, but I strongly disagree with that. I find YouTube to be very pleasant to use, I have found a lot of great stuff through their discovery algorithm, and obviously the bandwidth and storage itself isn't free. I think it's worth paying for. Separately from that, I also support several creators on Patreon directly.
And yes, I use an ad blocker. You'd be crazy not to.
No, I was not positing that YouTube itself provides no value -- I was responding to a comment that asserted their reason for subscribing to YouTube Premium was to support content creators. I suggested an alternative.
Personally, I do not disagree that YouTube is worth paying for. But I have reservations because I believe their parent company (Google) already profits tremendously in morally objectionable ways. Thus, I try to avoid giving them my business as much as possible.
Unfortunately, the reality is Google (and YouTube) are practically impossible to compete with in all things data.
To play devil's advocate: you say you use adblocker (I assume you use it on sites other than YouTube) -- but why? Because the modern web is practically unbearable without it? But is there not an implicit contract when you visit a website and consume their bandwidth, that you view the ads? Are you not, in effect, stealing? Sure, advertisers don't have the right to your attention, but don't the content creators have the right to your financial support?
What about the countless clickbait channels whose content you immediately regret clicking upon viewing? What about the ones that prey on the short attention span of kids and thrive on YouTube's recommendation algorithm putting them in an endless sequence of generic content? You can't get your time or money back, even if you despised the content.
> What about all the one-off bicycle/car maintenance videos I watch? Or a cool animation someone linked me? Or that music video from my favorite band?
They don't get paid! Unless, you'd like them to. :) I think it makes more sense to use adblock and deliberately give your time or money to the creators whose content you truly value. If it was a one-off video that you derived personal value from, toss them a couple bucks (Paypal, a month of Patreon) or temporarily turn off your adblock and watch a video of theirs.
If they have no outlets for you to directly give them money, it's highly likely that they don't see YouTube as a means to make money.
EDIT: Also, if it's a video from your favorite band -- dude, buy some merch already!
> They don't get paid! Unless, you'd like them to. :) I think it makes more sense to use adblock and deliberately give your time or money to the creators whose content you truly value. If it was a one-off video that you derived personal value from, toss them a couple bucks (Paypal, a month of Patreon) or temporarily turn off your adblock and watch a video of theirs.
This would be much more reasonable if there were a frictionless way to do it. Nobody is going to take 5 minutes out of their day after each little video to support the content creator. If there was a button I could use to support them built-in to Youtube? Sure!
> If they have no outlets for you to directly give them money, it's highly likely that they don't see YouTube as a means to make money.
Or perhaps they make money from YouTube via ad impressions.
> EDIT: Also, if it's a video from your favorite band -- dude, buy some merch already!
Somehow I knew it'd get picked apart if I used the word "favorite." Obviously I've got plenty of merch! And still I'd like to support them when I listen to their music - even if minusculely.
> This would be much more reasonable if there were a frictionless way to do it. Nobody is going to take 5 minutes out of their day after each little video to support the content creator. If there was a button I could use to support them built-in to Youtube? Sure!
I didn't know this before today, but apparently there is such a feature called "Applause." Although, I personally have not seen it anywhere, so not sure if it's opt-in for Youtube creators, and perhaps it is not fully rolled out yet. This does seem like it could be a good way to directly express support for Youtubers: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9632365
> Somehow I knew it'd get picked apart if I used the word "favorite." Obviously I've got plenty of merch! And still I'd like to support them when I listen to their music - even if minusculely.
Admittedly, I knew you were just giving an example and I took a cheap shot. :) Couldn't resist.
You can use an adblocker and still pay for premium.
In the beginning I mostly did it to get rid of iOS YouTube ads. Now I just keep it to support channels as well. Not everyone has a patreon and I don‘t want to pay every channel membership.
The family premium plan is really fairly priced I feel like.
I'm never going to do this. I want to pay content creators but I don't want to do it so much I'm going to go through some random bespoke Patreon flow, figure out how much I value this guy, and set that up.
If I have to click a button O(n) times for n people I like, I'm just not going to do it.
Patreon reportedly takes 5%. Youtube Premium takes 45% according to [1]. But it's also a very different model, where patreon requires that you signup for a specific channel, and youtube distributes your money based on watch time. So in theory Youtube's model is better for small creators without a large community. Another way to see it is that youtube provides you with discoverability while Patreon does not, usually creators will have Patreon in addition to Youtube where they get discovered and sell their Patreon.
Youtube also has a subscription similar to Patreon, available only to larger creators and they take 30% off that, according to [2]. While this seems high compared to Patreon it's actually lower than Twitch that takes 50% off subscriptions.
Twitch also offer a bit system that is like a tip, and has a lower percentage.
Another datapoint is OnlyFans, used mostly for porn and takes 60%.
IMO the platforms are very distinct and their offers are fairly different. It's not a fair comparison.
It makes sense for Youtube to take a big share of the money given that they have to host and stream the videos but how can OnlyFans justify to get an even bigger share? Aren't they effectively Patreon for (mostly) porn? If there's so much money to make in this sector why isn't there more competition?
Their USP may be that they navigate the problem of payment providers etc. Getting money for porn and weed is notoriously hard because very few of the intermediary participants are willing to play along if that's the use case.
Because good platforms that allow adult content are in very short supply, so they can charge a premium. To a certain extent, they MUST charge a premium because being in the adult industry makes everyone else charge YOU more also. None of the normal payment processors or advertisers will touch you, etc.
I won't give youtube my money until they do something about the overabuse of copyright claims to steal monetization from legitimate users. Until then Nebula and Patreon get my money.
Great, so only a handful of content creators you know to follow get anything and the creators of all the one-off videos you watch and benefit from get nothing.
Why do they get nothing? If you find value in their one-off videos, throw them a couple bucks. If they don't have a Paypal, Patreon, Liberapay, etc -- just watch a video of theirs with adblock temporarily disabled.
I don't know if I agree. I like showing that revenue models that are not ad-based can be viable. Maybe we can break the ad-supported business model that has destroyed the web by showing there are alternatives.
This would seem to be contingent on paying businesses that don't rely on ad-based revenue models. Rather than paying a company on top of their ad-based revenue.
Afterall, it might be the case that non ad-based revenue is only viable once you've secured enough ad-based revenue. I hope that isn't the case though.
I work for a programmatic advertisement company. It’s a big name in the space. Whenever someone shares their screen during a meeting I pay special attention to their browser. Every single one of my colleagues runs some kind of ad blocker. Some run multiple. Many run additional browser extensions that block trackers and cookies and otherwise improve privacy.
I go even further and run a VPN with pihole as its DNS server.
Ads are easy to block these days. Why not block for free instead of spraying cash here and there?
I guess for moral reasons. For YouTube and most websites, the 'Quid Pro Quo' for using the service is supporting them via ads, or in certain circumstances like YT, via a monthly subscription.
YT Premium money going towards Google is part of the service contract - they provide the website, storage, bandwidth[0], recommendations, etc. I don't think Google sees adblock as the end of the world, given they don't ban or even try to curtail blockers (really because mobile ad viewership is rising over desktop), but in general they expect you to either pay them or watch ads for access to the website.
To be clear, I don't think using adblock is immortal - just that I personally like it when services offer a subscription that remove ads.
YouTube doesn’t need your support, but creators do. Many offer a more direct way to funnel donations than via ads on YouTube, ie Patreon, merch, Twitch subs, etc.
Haha, right? I pretty much did a similar thing in uni. I think I might have paid like $100 over seven years of uni for textbooks. I've figured out when to go on Caltrain for free, too.
There are lots of life hacks to not spend money. I used to think it was my responsibility to pay, but honestly, if I can get away with it, why would I?
> "OK, then we'll offer the option to pay a small fee to support the content creators and not have to deal with ads."
To offer a counterpoint, if you're trying to protect your privacy, signing into Google to watch Youtube videos is probably not the right way to do it. Google isn't offering any guarantees that Youtube Premium data isn't used exactly the same way that any other data would be. They're still building a profile on you, and your recommendations are still tailored based on that profile.
This is also one of the big issues I have with online newspaper accounts. Part of the reason I'm blocking ads and trackers is because I don't want newspapers to track me either. I don't want somebody to be monitoring what I read. Logging into an account is counterproductive to that goal, so at best I'm going to give them money for an account and then never use it.
I pay for a Youtube Premium account at the moment, precisely because I wanted to signal that I would pay for content. But none of that subscription money is actually going to creators I watch because I never log into it. I'm just throwing money at Google for basically no reason.
Adblocking is a better option than Youtube Premium not just from a UX perspective or monetary perspective, but also if you care about privacy, because it means you can handle all of your account stuff through local RSS feeds and NewPipe on mobile, which is a significant win in the fight to stop Google from putting me into a box.
In the old times, I could just pass at the newsstand while walking to the bakery at the start of my morning, drop a few coins, pick a paper or magazine and its done ... nobody would know what parts of the paper I read, for how log I focus on particular paragraphs, which pictures grab my attention, etc. neither will the newspaper owner know who I am, keep a history of what I am reading or follow me around my other shopping to add information to my profile.
Anonymous micropayments would be a excellent approach here. AFAIK Bitcoin never intended to solve this particular problem, maybe GNU Taler may work here (better yet: it's a payment system using Euros, Dollars, etc. not a wildly-floating new currency/asset).
You can always use Patreon, Subscribestar, Librepay, Paypal subscriptions, etc etc.. if your favorite creator supports them.
You can also go to their website and buy t-shirts, coffee cups and other merch. If you're a creator and want funds from people who block ads, promote your merch.
Agree, but my solution is to donate to them on Patreon and block ads on YouTube. I do like the idea of Youtube Premium but they're still tracking me regardless.
> You can get the exact same thing with ad blockers.
Even better because you can prevent google from tracking every single video you watch and linking this information into your IRL details through the payment info.
Paying Youtube for privacy is nonsense. You need to send Google more information and log in your account to get rid of the ads and then google will track the videos you watch, link this information to your real life name, CC number, phone, billing address, etc. and then allow advertisers to use this information to push you more ads on other Google services.
Just use a good ad blocker, Firefox Multi-account Containers (forcing YT to only open in a dedicated container) and Cookie AutoDelete (despite the name it handles LocalStorage too). When you close the last Youtube tab, your tracks will be erased and the next one will get a clean one -- but, for sake of mental sanity, never click on any of that trashy first page videos :)
You can actually turn off video tracking in YouTube. And the experience completely sucks. It doesn't remember what you have and haven't watched. You can't even resume a video on a different day or device.
The experience stinks because Youtube makes it stink. NewPipe handles video resuming, downloading, subscriptions, RSS feeds, pulling multiple videos from different services into the same viewer/manager, and they're currently looking into options to do syncing between devices/clients by doing automatic data exports and imports and pushing them into Syncthing.
All while being (imo) easier to use and (objectively) less resource intensive than the official Youtube client.
It is possible to build good video clients/services without sacrificing people's privacy. The reason Google's tracking is essential for stuff like video resume is because Google integrated those features into their tracking systems from day one, and now they don't know how to separate them.
Another example here -- if I turn off search & web tracking in my Google account, Google loses the ability to save locations in Google maps on my phone. They never considered that they could just save my locations locally and not send them to the cloud.
Google is being honest when they say they can't do stuff like auto-resume without tracking me, but they're being dishonest when they give the reason they can't do it. It's not because privacy and convenience are so impossible to reconcile, it's because (being charitable) Google engineers and managers don't have the first clue how to build a service that even tries to reconcile those ideas.
The less charitable possibility is that Google deliberately makes their services terrible when privacy options are enabled to reinforce the idea in people's minds that it's impossible to have both privacy and convenience. But while I don't assume the best of Google, I still lean towards blaming incompetence over maliciousness.
> You can actually turn off video tracking in YouTube. And the experience completely sucks. It doesn't remember what you have and haven't watched. You can't even resume a video on a different day or device.
But how can we be sure that Google is not storing, using, or keeping this information? If disabling tracking has the same (apparent) effect of not letting it grab the information, I prefer the later. At least I can help them to not "accidentally" track me ;-)
This may sound too pessimistic, but I lost all confidence and respect for these companies.
I like to think about this as not being transactional. Rather, I like to think about this as funding the creation of additional content.
Regarding funding Google, I like the discoverability that they provide, and the infrastructure that delivers the content. I continue to delight in the value that I get from the YouTube recommendation algorithm. I have discovered content that I would have likely never found in the past - it expands my horizons.
Of course, YMMV, and you are certainly entitled to make your own choices here. I thought that I'd share my perspective for others who may find it valuable.
All the Youtubers I am subscribed to have sponsors which is arguably not a representative sample size but still means that I can feel good about blocking YouTube's terrible ads on their videos.
I would say that it's fair to call them bigger channels (as they are not niche 50k subscribers ones), but I think you'd still be surprised by their size, some more technical ones will have sponsorships by Chinese electronics makers (JLC PCB, taobao, banggood, etc...) while being at around 300k subscribers which is not that much in the modern YouTube.
Most is too strong, but a fair number of the ones I watch do. The creator is upfront about the sponsorship so it is clear. Generally this means a big announcement and then future videos show the product. Wd40 sponsors several that I watch, and following the sponsorship the channel was careful to point out they were using Wd40 for whatever. (in most cases the video would have been about them using something before like wd40 before the sponsorship, but the what may have been hard to tell)
How much of my premium subscription money would go to creators? That's an honest question. Google doesn't give even a vague hint as to what proportion of the fee is rev-shared. I suspect it is rather less than what I would like, especially since Youtube Premium includes their music service which I have zero interest in.
Due to this uncertainty I prefer to support creators I watch via Patreon.
Those ads support the people who created the videos; if you don't subscribe to ads "as a concept", then that's even more a reason to buy youtube premium--the content creators are losing out by your adblockers, not youtube
You don't have to. However if you support them they get enough money to make it worthwhile to do more. Some of the bigger ones make enough money that producing videos you like is their day job, if you don't pay them (ads count) then they will have to find a new job.
Only some. One of my favorite channels isn't sponsored at all, and is ad free.
I use Ublock on Safari as my only extension and it always worked great but, as of about a month ago, most of the time now I have to hit Disable Extensions, then reload the page, in order to watch a video. If I don't, I just get a black screen soon as the page loads (not the entire screen, just where the video should be). Every several videos, with Ublock enabled, it lets me watch it like normal while blocking ads.
NewPipe [0] is great for this. I watch youtube videos very occasionally, so I'm not going to shell out $10 for this.
It does break sometimes, though, as Youtube changes their website on purpose to thwart NewPipe and youtube-dl, that both parse the website (which, incidentally, is a great way to spur innovation for a generic website parser).
Another option is ublock origin on Firefox mobile.
As the other comment mentionned it's not on the play store and it's very important to get the app from vanced.app since there are tons of phishing websites pretending to be the official vanced website
It's not available on the app store, and installing it used to be a two step process because it needed micro-g and SAI. They've streamlined it now with an installer app called Vanced Manager. Vanced.app
And you get to download stuff to your phone and listen with the screen turned off. YouTube has a lot of good, quirky stuff you don't find on, say, Spotify.
It is a bummer they've turned up the commercials - but then again, paying makes for a potentialy healthier ecosystem.
I use YouTube so much paying just to get rid of the "new video commercial" was a no-brainer.
Totally agree with quirky music options. One thing that really pisses me off is I make lists of my favorite music videos/live recordings. When I go back to them, some have been removed for copyright or whatever reason and I can no longer see the name of the original video. Then I don't know which videos I'm missing. This fact alone turns me off from curating my music on YouTube. If they at least kept the name of the video I could look for an alternative or something.
On a different note, does anybody know if the stream is cut down to audio only when the screen is turned off? Or if there is anyway to get an audio-only stream? Streaming video when I'm off WiFi and I just want to listen to audio seems wasteful.
Anecdotally, I've tested this by having a network monitor traffic throughput and once a video is playing audio only, there is a noticeable drop in throughput which goes back up when you pull the video back up. Tested this a while ago so hopefully it's stayed like that.
Yes ads have increased. I wish they would keep the ad time proportionate to the length of the video. For example, a 3-minute clip would keep it to maybe 15 seconds of ads and only one interruption. For 30 minutes, an ad every 10 minutes might be tolerable.
It really bothers me how YouTube updated the mobile UI so that ads can now change the size of the player window to take up most of the vertical space and can require more than one tap just to get back to the video/comments.
What really grinds my gears about the ad experience on mobile is how some ads will take over the comment section as well. Meaning that if you were reading a comment or a comment thread, the entire context is lost when an add pops up over it.
Once the ad is over you have to re-enter the comments, scroll back down to where you were, enter the chain, scroll down to where you were reading...
It's a torturous flow, but I suspect the "engagement" metrics look great on their dashboard. I can imagine a product manager somewhere is getting a raise after doubling user interaction with a single feature
If you are watching on a browser, ublock origin fixes that
If on android, you can download newpipe (first download and install f-droid, a "google play for free/open source", and then download newpipe from there)
Newpipe is good. But not good for discovery and the subscribed page is a disaster.
I use Firefox on Android, plus two addons: Ublock Origin, and also UltraWideo to fix the aspect ratio and fit the video to my screen. This way I get the same experience as on my computer. The only downside is using picture-in-picture is a little tricky. You can always send the url to Newpipe if you need more control.
Yes, there are more ads. I watch sometimes on mobile and have seen the increase. Seems to have synced up with restrictions placed on people during the virus outbreak. I assume there are a lot more Youtube hours watched recently.
I'll be finally setting up that Pi Hole server for my wireless network when I have a chance. It's obnoxious right now and I have no interest in giving Google money to make them go away.
> anecdotally youtube seems to have aggressively increased the number of ads just in the last few weeks or so
Yes. I've noticed that almost every video I've watched I have to sit through two ads (first 15 seconds, second I can stop after 5ish) first. And if the video is long enough I get the ads at the bottom of the video and sometimes one or two more video ads.
I get it, it's free, but at some point it won't be worth the frustration.
If you want an ad-free mobile experience, I recommend 'YouTube Vanced'. I used it for years now, it's basically the YouTube app minus the ads, so you can still use the discovery feature if you'd like.
I'm not sure if the original YT app allows this, but i'm able to minimize videos while it's playing or shut off my phone while listening to a video, which I recall you had to pay premium for
I've noticed this too. If there's one thing that'll get me to kick my YouTube addiction, it'll be the increased ads. If it gets any worse, I think I'd rather read a book or just go to sleep earlier -- not a bad thing, really.
is that YouTube's fault? I thought content owners were in charge of deciding whether and how much to monetize. Recipes are some of the most over monetized content on the web, YouTube or not. Most recipe sites are totally unusable on a phone.
Is the premise here that the author wants to move away from YouTube because YouTube removes racist or violent promoting, or fake news posts? If PeerTube doesnt block these videos, then I rather stick with YouTube.
PeerTube effectively doesn't block anything... It's just a piece of software. PeerTubes can connect to other instances of PeerTube or other fediverse servers like Mastodon... and those other servers will likely block a server posting harmful content. But they can't take down a PeerTube posting harmful content, that'd be up to the hosting provider.
Does anyone else thing this is a terrible name? Reading the topic, I immediately went to peertube.org/.com/.net to check it out. Turns out it's really just software for self hosting your own videos.
Some of those are federated with eachother and you can upload to them and your videos are stored on the instance. You do not need to run your own instance but obviously it can be helpful.
I can only ever see a large company like Amazon or Facebook try to take on Youtube sucesfully.
They have the server capacity/capability and have more than enough capital to try and incentivise creators across if they think the venture is worth it, which it probably isn't.
Yeah, I recall College Humor attributing the deceptive FB stats as something that hurt their focus on what was important to stay alive come to think of it.
This is a complete aside, but what are some examples of other acquisitions that have lived on as well as Youtube after they were bought? I mean, there is of course that time when Apple was taken over by Next. What are some other standout acquisition survivals?
I have been looking for a good video aggregator website. Something like digg, but for videos. Most of the videos would naturally link to youtube, which is fine, but they could just as easily link to peertube, vimeo, self-hosted, etc. This would solve a number of problems:
1. Better (or at least a different) way of discovering. I'm a pretty heavy YouTube watcher, but my recommendations are bland and full of reruns. It knows what I've been interested in the past but I find them tiresome. It does a terrible job of recommending new things that I might find interesting. It needs to take more chances.
2. As many have already said, there are plenty of ways to host a video but none of them have good discoverability. If there was a good video aggregator site, it would help to begin diversifying this aspect. Even better, it could be successful even without convincing content creators to use it directly, because much of the content could still just link to YouTube.
Does such a site exist? One that I've found is browsing lobste.rs' [video] tag, or HN for the youtube.com domain, but that's not really the same.
If you like PeerTube please check out LBRY, too. It goes a step further and is even more decentralized and doesn't rely on server instances like the one you have setup.
Once peertube starts using distributed storage and goes onto I2P or other anonymous networks, I think paid services can kiss their asses bye bye. Good on battlepenguin to join the movement.
i've tried using peerTube a couple times, but the discovery system is totally broken
even if you setup the main language to english a bunch of other languages keep poping up on top on every search
the only reason youtube is so good now is because is tied with google, thus making the search/discovery process fully efficient and am sorry my friends, thats exactly what am looking for
I don't understand why (other than Stallman religious reasons) you would go through the effort of hosting a PeerTube instance when you could just serve a static video file and call it a day
You are missing an important link here, peertube does P2P ON DEMAND. You "CAN" disable it and you are out of the p2p scene. Dont know why people here seem to equate peertube=p2p=insecure.
I don't equate p2p with insecure but what's the point of turning it off? If you do that aren't you better off just hosting some basic HTML/CSS/JS to serve your videos directly from your self-hosted website without bothering with PeerTube?
Maybe I'm missing the point but I though the advantage of PeerTube was using P2P file sharing to cut down on the huge amount of bandwidth necessary for video streaming.
You can disable it client-side if you, the viewer, don't want your ip visible to the peers.
As it's opt-out, most people won't do it, so the host can still reap the benefit of the p2p system.
Aside from that, another goal of peertube is the ability to federate instances together so that a search on one site can return results from all federated ones. The hope is to build a decentralised, federated youtube competitor.
Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.
From the article:
> “If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to self-host your content in the future.”
Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure they promote their other web assets to diversify.
Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be your #2 priority.
There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo, Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.