All: please let's try to avoid repeating the generic discussion about how being on someone else's platform leaves you vulnerable to someone else. It's not wrong, of course, but it's been repeated for many years and won't lead to fresh conversation.
The goal on HN is curious conversation. Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.
The easiest way to do this is to respond to the specific new information in an article. As a nudge in that direction, I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases).
You don't only have to react to the specific new information in an article. Whimsical tangents and reactions are also ok. Just ask yourself if it's expected or unexpected [4], and prefer the unexpected.
I appreciate all of your work but I think that you are wrong with this comment... I think that talking about leaving platforms that have monopolies can spur innovation.
For sure there are important and interesting questions there. I'm not asking people not to talk about those!—just to do it in a way that isn't just repeating what always gets said. Otherwise there's a power-law dropoff in information transfer...like telling the same joke or repeating the same word over and over.
There's nothing wrong with repetition per se. There is pleasure in it—it's just a different kind than the pleasure of curiosity. The problem is that we can't have both pleasures at the same time, and HN is a site for curiosity.
This is one of those moderation calls that seems arbitrary and obscure until you take literally that we're trying to optimize for just one thing, and then it follows rather straightforwardly.
(It's really a sweet spot to have only one thing to optimize for—one gets to have fun being radical about following it to all its counterintuitive consequences.)
I agree with your action. Letting more curious and fresh comments get buried under the more predictable and repetitive ones would be a disservice to the site visitors.
at any rate to me it doesn't look that they are leaving youtube to get out from under google's oppressive thumb, but rather that they are trying to get more of the money by having their own distribution channel that serves their committed fans, and then release to youtube later for the less engaged user.
although I guess it is also a smart thing to still have something open if youtube suddenly decides to screw you over by algorithm.
(This is a stub reply so I can collapse the various comments responding to this, so as not to distract too much from the rest of the thread. Sorry, non-JS users.)
> It's not wrong, of course, but it's been repeated for many years and won't lead to fresh conversation.
Assumes there are no new readers on HN and that everyone reads almost everything and nothing needs repeating. Also it's very 'no noobies' as if anyone who is anyone should know the ropes already. And that is not the case.
And I've mentioned this before a few times so I will repeat. Why don't you have in your profile that you are a moderator? How would someone new to HN know why you are saying what you are saying and why you have the right to pin what you say at the top?
To me, HN is not hostile toward new users. But part of what makes HN HN is it discourages behaviors new users might bring from elsewhere on the internet when those behaviors are disharmonious with the norms of the HN community. This is how new users acculturate into HN. Or how new users discover HN might not be for them. Or what might stay the determination that it is or isn’t.
HN hasn’t been turning into Reddit for a long while because sometimes the moderators make comments like this and the community goes “Okay” because they value the community and can see the moderator’s point and those matter more than typing something easy to type because it is all over Twitter.
More seriously, if HN’s moderation conflicts with your deeply held principles, HN might not be for you. Like any social media that makes someone unhappy, a voluntary break, temporary or complete, may be warranted.
HN is not going to suddenly become a democracy or collective. Moderation is a big part of what makes HN HN.
But you never present how that’s a problem. You’d be succumbing to the ancient forum pastime of hypothetical rules/scenarios lawyering where you confuse the ability to invent a scenario (someone not knowing dang is a mod for 60seconds and that’s worth worrying about for unsaid reason) with the need to change the forum.
This equivalent of "RTFM" is a hostile percept for communication, as it implies that it is right to hide or obfuscate relevant information so that the speaker has less of a job to do when producing clear speech.
There are benefits to "RTFM". They may involve making sure there are shared assumptions during speech that allow further speech to be economized equitably between speaker and receiver. They may involve the internalization of the structure of a model so that they it be applied fluently in some practical setting. Your suggestion fails to satisfy either condition as the cost is either inequitable, or the benefit is irrelevant.
Putting a tag that says "moderator" next to a username is such a cheap quality of life improvement that even if what you claim is true, it really shouldn't be the job of the audience to figure anything out in the first place, as by comparison, it looks like a strong disfavor.
Things can be made endlessly complicated, or absolutely simple. So it's better to lean towards simplicity as one can converge towards minimal confusion.
Oh I don't agree. I think there are downsides to putting a 'mod' tag beside usernames, quite strong downsides actually, in addition to the upside that you guys are correctly noting. It's a tradeoff. I'm glad that I listened to my intuition 7 years ago (ack) when I became responsible for HN, and chose to trust the way things had always functioned here.
It would change the feeling in the community. It would introduce barriers in communication that would make it harder to relate. It would fuck with the psychology of both moderators and non-moderators, the same way that uniforms do. It would turn the mods into abstractions/roles rather than human beings. It would infect HN with that priggish approach to authority which appeals to the smallminded and depresses creativity. It would signal lack of trust. It would demoralize any moderator who didn't have the soul of a meter maid.
I've seen a lot of otherwise reasonable threads get bogged down by "lowest common denominator" replies, especially ones that don't require reading the article and could really be posted in any thread matching the right keywords. Such comments are *really* easy to make and frequently do "well" in that they attract votes and comments, drowning out the rest of the discussion. Do you have ideas on how to combat this? Obviously moderator intervention would help, but it's not possible to be everywhere, especially in the first couple minutes of a post when the temptation to leave a lazy comment and the cost to the overall direction of discussion from such a comment is the greatest.
I do have an idea. It requires human intervention but there's no reason the humans have to be official moderators. My idea is to build software support for users (probably a subset of trusted users) to downweight generic subthreads the same way moderators currently do. In the meantime, if anyone notices such a thread they can simulate the same effect by emailing hn@ycombinator.com about it.
We already have software support for a subset of trusted users to do things like add years to titles. (If anyone wants to be incorporated into that set, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.) That was an experiment and it's worked out really well. I want to extend it and this is on the list of possible extensions.
"I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases)."
that feels super gross, I love mostly passively reading HN, but manipulation like that because basically it sounds like you don't want to see stuff you've seen before ...
If you love reading HN, then you love the HN that includes us downweighting generic subthreads, because we've been doing that for years.
'Manipulation' and 'moderation' and 'curation' and so on refer to the same thing, just with different emotional valences. We're not trying to be manipulative per se, but it takes human attention to prevent the system from falling into its failure modes.
It would be wonderful (especially for us!) if community action plus software were all that was neeeded for an optimal solution, but sadly they're just not. There needs to be a third component: humans who pay attention to the site as a whole and jiggle it so it doesn't degenerate. That's what we mean by moderation.
When that third, human component is working well, it fades into the background and creates an impression that the system is regulating itself. That's a sort of paradise mode. But then when moderation shows up intrusively (as in my comment above), some readers feel like we're interfering with the system that exists. Actually we're already part of the system that exists, and if we weren't doing what we do, the whole system would be very different.
>Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.
How downvotes encourage that? I mean it can be abused and is abused for bullying opinions that some people do not want to hear.
There are some interesting opinions reflecting exactly this "Curiosity likes diffs" that get downvoted and how it encourages to write something interesting if it will be invisible and become deleted anyway just because it's not in the trend or too different.
Or if I get downvoted for stating the facts I observe. In theory it should sparkle curiosity! Not shutting up the facts using downvotes. Once I've experienced getting downvoted for stating the facts it's not really encouraging to say what I think is really there.
Can we remove downvotes and leave only upvotes? Or can we limit downvotes to some degree so at least somewhere in the end of the threat you can still read them. I mean
at leat let me read those downvoted opinions, it's not too comfortable to read almost white on white and it's annoying.
May be we can put a red line in the end of the thread and put some comments beyond that line to let know those have been downvoted a lot. But let me read those, at least we can learn why they have been downvoted.
I appreciate your work. Indeed HN is a unique place and supports curiosity to some good degree. I just wish it to encourage it more and I think people need some more safety for this.
I observe that if people want to say what they really think they just create temporary account just to express that specific opinion because new accounts are protected from downvotes as I understand. This observation should be worrying I think if we wish to encourage "diffs" and "unexpected".
For now I've learned that saying something really different here would get downvotes and this is not what I wish to learn here.
I wish to explore concepts that I am not sure are correct and I wish get answers helping me to explore them. Not downvotes that tell me mostly nothing about the concept.
Sorry, but I'm not clear on what downvotes have to do with this. Are you responding to what I said about downweighting? That just means that we lower the subthread's position on the page.
Downvotes hide your opinion if people do not like it.
It's not encouraging to write something different if it will be invisible/deleted anyway.
And if it's not because it wasn't accurate or good but because some people simply trying to shut up some facts/opinions then it's not encouraging to say something really different
This leads to say standard things that you 'know' will be supported.
> temporarily muting users who send messages that are identical to a message that has been sent to the channel before
We already check for strict duplicates but that's so strict a test that basically no post passes it. What would be needed is software to group the repetitive posts into equivalence classes but exempt the posts that are on the same topics but add some original twist. That seems hard for software! even with modern AI. I'd love to be proven wrong though. If anyone wants to take a crack at it, the data is all public.
Lolll. Dang is literally cringe. Signed up to reply to him, the message has been moved or deleted loll, so nevermind. Also not sure he realizes that nowadays half the "hn'ers" are just simple redditor; he keeps implying hners are somehow elite lol. Dog we are redditors, you live in your own world dang.
"As a nudge in that direction, I've...downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases)." - dang, master of HN
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
Honestly it's sad how people on this website are okay with this Maoist nonsense, considering how brutally they attack trends like censorship and political correctness.
I follow CGP Grey’s stuff and it’s been interesting and instructive to see how he diversified.
* His Youtube channel is his main platform
* However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there
* He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex
* The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts
* He had a second podcast, hello internet, currently on hiatus. If ever something went catastrophically wrong with youtube this could be reactivated via the feed
* He has a large email list which he uses to reach people directly and drive traffic to videos if people request these updates
* He is also prominent on twitter etc and maintains secondary youtube channels, useful if main one taken down
* He runs a large subreddit for his following
So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)
Still faces a youtube risk but it would take a an earthquake across platforms to truly wreck his income streams.
As someone who runs an online business and follows him it’s been impressive to watch how diversified he has made his comms channels.
CGP Grey is strange, so to say. He effectively abandoned Hello Internet. They once mentioned that they have 900K subs. Grey fully controlled HI, and it was way more popular than Cortex. If he wants to diversify so much abandoning project like this just doesn’t make sense.
Also he has no basic decency to announce cancelation and left Tims hanging, for many of whom it was the podcast.
HI ending was kinda expected. CGP Grey seems to be a guy who is trying to minimize his personal public presence and the show was going from general internet culture discussions between two creators to Brady the Interviewing Genius trying to get Grey the Reclusive Weirdo to say something interesting. That dynamic is obviously not sustainable.
Compare that with Cortex where Gray can talk productivity systems and his unanswered love for Apple all day long. Endless content there, as you can never overthink it too much.
I've watched both Grey's and Haran's videos since their early years on YouTube, and I'd be curious to know what the story is behind the disappearance of their podcast. It seemed like an odd development to me in view of how engaged they both appeared to be with their audience.
I know that Haran eventually posted a brief comment on Reddit acknowledging the hiatus, but it struck me as a strangely subdued way to announce the end of a regular series that had been very successful for several years.
I think especially for podcasters in recent years there have been some.... issues with community management.
I would say in particular lots of these people started doing "community slacks/discords" and then they realized that being able to produce podcast episodes doesn't make you a good community manager.
There's been specific drama with Relay and people around that extended universe as well, so lots of podcast hosts in that space are basically done with fan interaction.
I'm being a bit glib but I totally get it. If you have the choice to just walk away from dealing with CM stuff then it's a pretty nice proposition.
I enjoyed HI but the community on Reddit always seemed super weird to me. People just competing over who’s most in on the joke and endless posts “Brady would love this...” I can imagine it being tiresome to try to “manage” that. Other podcast communities don’t seem to suffer from same kind of super fans as much.
This might explain why the disappearance was a surprise to me. I never paid much attention to the Subreddit, other than checking to see why there had been an unannounced absence of new episodes for several months.
I remember that both the hosts encouraged audience engagement in different ways — several episodes featured long discussions about topics on the Subreddit, and they solicited audience participation in various projects.
> I think especially for podcasters in recent years there have been some.... issues with community management.
A show that I listen to skipped a week during the early stages of the pandemic. I was concerned that one of the hosts was ill / possibly dying. It was some planned thing, like a vacation or something. A little notice would have been nice.
Sure, these are strangers and my emotional investment is a bit like teen girls crying when they saw the Beatles play: “Really?”. But I love the show and would have missed it, so I was anxious about its (possible) demise.
> A show that I listen to skipped a week during the early stages of the pandemic. I was concerned that one of the hosts was ill / possibly dying. It was some planned thing, like a vacation or something. A little notice would have been nice.
I’d imagine it can be a real grind, endlessly producing a podcast week after week. If it’s anything more than walking up to a mic and talking stream of consciousness, the prep work must take hours.
Most podcasters have other jobs. On one hand, I’m surprised that we don’t see people taking a seasonal approach, to give themselves a break, recharge, and maybe put in work writing and researching in the down time. On the other, it seems so many are afraid to walk away, even temporarily, for fear of losing an audience.
Serious question: why? So an episode doesn't show up in your feed one week. I doubt I would even notice in the first place, much less jump to being concerned about the hosts' health or much less jump to feeling put out by the lack of warning.
The difference is exactly that you wouldn't notice and the other person would. There's a difference between a recurring piece of media being a drop in the bucket and having a specific thing you look forward to watching or listening to every week. If one week you're waiting for it to drop and it's mysteriously absent you might suspect something is wrong.
I liked Hello Internet as much as anyone, but I don't think creators really owe fans anything. Also, you shouldn't be too surprised. Brady and Gray talked about if they ever ended HI, Gray probably wouldn't announce that it was over to anyone.
Sure, content creators don't necessarily owe more content to fans, but it's a two way street. In my opinion content creators should more or less clearly state if something is on hiatus (or ended, or whatever) rather than leaving it ambiguous, at least in the case of a regularly recurring kind of content. It's a simple but effective gesture to keep fans's trust.
Slight tangent but podcasting is an interesting counterpoint. Right now the business is pretty distributed. There's no youtube for podcasts although Apple is easily number one. There is now an absolute street fight between Apple and Spotify with Google, Amazon and some other wannabes fighting to own the walled garden. And crazy consolidation for creator tools and monetization. It'll be interesting to see if a "winner" emerges or if the space stays open.
From my own point of view, I've entirely abandoned and forgotten about the existence of 3 podcasts that went Spotify only. The app on both iOS and windows is a terrible implementation of podcasts, appears broken and is lacking tons of features.
I have a podcast app (Overcast) which I use for everything, and nothing that I can't subscribe to in that will ever get my ears.
All other podcast networks still use Apple for discovery, so the situation isn't that far from how Youtube still is essential for creators to be discovered.
Spotify is the first serious challenger, but so far the only ones to go Spotify exclusive as the really big ones that are paid handsomely to do it.
I dunno, it’s his and Brady’s to do with as they wish. There’s a financial penalty to letting it lay fallow, but that’s their choice to make.
They stopped it right when the pandemic hit. That messed up podcast advertising for a while, and also the usual stuff they talked about.
Meanwhile they both have other projects and may have decided their time or energy was better spent elsewhere. Who knows?
A little unusual not to say anything but hey, they end episodes without goodbye so not a giant surprise. And Brady has said they’re on a break and on good terms so it isn’t totally secret either.
I enjoyed it while it was around and wish them well, but I don’t think they owe us anything. I subbed to Goodbye Internet to give a small incentive to them restarting, and that’s it.
But to my larger point, it is still an asset. If the community atrophies 40% while they’re gone...it’s still 60% of a great asset.
But he already burned a lot of good will by doing it so glib. For example, I don’t click “like” on his videos anymore, and I’m not subscribing to his paid director’s commentary. It only applies to Grey, we all know it’s not Brady’s fault.
Brady put out a short blog post on the status of Hello Internet about 5 months ago. I felt a bit betrayed as an avid listener that they so suddenly and without any notice for several months stopped putting out episodes, but at least this blog seems to indicate that they simply have their focuses elsewhere for now.
He's probably quite wealthy and established already. It doesn't strike me as strange that he might burn out on some projects and not feel as motivated to continue as someone with no online profile.
That would involve confronting the end of the podcast, which is the sort of emotional thing that people typically procrastinate on.
It's hard for us to visualize since having such an audience sounds like a responsibility we'd take seriously. But to Grey it's just a small income stream on the side. He doesn't have an actual relationship with the members of the audience, even if the audience might believe otherwise.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that considering the change of perspective is an interesting exercise.
> However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there
Did he break that down publicly or do you get your info from elsewhere? I've always been curious to know what a typical high profile youtuber income flow looks like, and how much they're really tied to Youtube.
The thing I've heard is "1,000 views = $1". I don't know how true that is anymore but it's my metric.
Mark Brown, of Game Maker's Toolkit, puts out vids on Youtube that get a couple hundred thousand views (1 or 2 vids a month). So he could theoretically get a couple hundred from those. But his Patreon following nets him a couple thousand a month ($11k!)
When you have niche content you can end up getting way more per subscriber if people feel your content is worth it.
Youtube ad rates seem really high for the personal finance dudes. Graham Stephan and Andre Jikh come to mind.
I think that genre allows for showing those scammy get rich quick motivational guru type ads, which pay well. Everyone else has to be sponsored by ExpressVPN and CuriosityStream.
Just a guess knowing how low Youtube ad rates are and how Grey has mentioned he switched over his income from ad sponsorships to patreon. And Patreon income is public.
> So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)
Not really.
There is some kind of "channel" redundancy but no "revenue streams" diversification outside ads and patreon.
Without actually paying for content, one can usually find:
- google ads, low effort low reward
- brand sponsorships, high effort, fixed reward
- patreon subscriptions, high effort high reward
- tips and super chats and twitch
- sometimes brave BAT rewards
Something to understand, for those who might have just seen some youtube videos of him being goofy, is that he's an actor. The guy on camera doing stupid stuff is a stage persona. It's an intentionally cultivated image and media persona to get as many video views as possible.
I sort of see him as one possible aspect of the low/medium budget TV production stuff which is common in his home city, Vancouver BC. People who've met and worked with him in person report that he's a much more normal, calm, rational individual off screen.
I won't judge him for being goofy on camera because it's hard to make a living as a working actor. For every person who gets a job in a vancouver-produced TV drama that might last 2 or 3 seasons, there's dozens more people who are working as restaurant servers while trying to get their big break.
I wonder how many potential views he loses due to his gurning? I've never watched any of his videos despite YT constantly recommending them to me because I've got a personal rule about never clicking on a thumbnail that has a picture of someone pulling a face or which has a clickbait title.
I agree with your principles but I'm not strong enough to stick to them. I just installed the addon YouTube Clickbait Remover, which uncapitalizes titles and replaces thumbnails with a frame from the video.
You are in a tiny minority of users. If this didn't work they wouldn't do it.
If I can be honest nobody wants the high maintenance viewer with personal rules about this and that little thing anyway. It's exhausting and they definitely use adblock haha
You're getting a lot of flak for this, but I agree with you and stand by this principle. I have certainly missed out on good content – in the case of LTT, I had some friends convince me it was worth it and they were, of course, right.
But on the other hand, I've saved myself many hours of having clicked through a stupid face thumbnail to some bland algorithmic HeyGuysWhatsUpThisIs-type crap.
LTT actually A/B tested this and found out that pulling a face with the item in front + grabby title WAY outperformed the alternative.
Which is crap, but that's the world we live in. They do excellent content nevertheless. LTT and MKBHD are the only two tech review style Youtubers I bother following. They get to the point, know their shit and speak calmly.
Some people will stick to watching because of the content, others will actually click on them because of the thumbnails. As they explained (and I'm sure his is the most cited one), it's a simple numbers game. Min-maxing Youtube, so to speak. Or growth hacking, to put it in hip startup crowd terminology.
I mean the HC community and YC companies have no qualms about discussing and promoting the best practices for a good landing page, every time someone comes in to promote their product there will be unsolicited advice about that. It's the same thing, but instead of saying "you should put caps in your title and have an expressive face in the thumbnail" it'll be about the content on the landing page like "you need a screenshot".
I find enough of their videos to be informative enough that I continue to watch those that I think would interest me. I've become a regular for the their TechLinked channel as I find it entertaining as well as informative but their longer videos and unboxing videos I'll cherry pick: I'll watch reviews of products I'm interested in but I tend to skip the extravagant/outlandish builds they do as I find them pointless since I wont be doing anything like that myself.
TIL the word "gurn". Never once heard it before and even just now autocorrect tried to insist it was "turn". The description is indeed apt for what I see in a lot of thumbnails.
Linus learned all of this over the years, and optimized it over time. He's great at it now, but was pretty rough at first -- but he was never an actor, he was a geek that loved technology. He worked for a large computer reseller that gave him lots of resources when he was starting.
He actually built this in spite of all the production resources that Vancouver has to offer, and is more a "growth hacker" than actor I'd say.
I think comedian might be a more accurate way to describe him. "Actor" somewhat implies deception which I'm sure is not what is intended by the GP. Interestingly, in French comédien means "actor", while they have a different word for the newer English definition of comedian: humoriste. In any case, the point is who he is on screen is a character that he has developed. There's nothing at all wrong with that. In fact, such characters are usually celebrated!
Linus Tech Tips is essentially the "Top Gear of Tech" - it's over the top, hammed up, but eminently watchable and there are plenty of nuggets of useful information.
I was an avid reader of tech magazines, LTT has replaced them for me. Partly because those magazines' budgets have kept on being reduced year after year, and the quality has dipped, but also because of the quality of those "nuggets" that you mention.
In French we say "veille technologique" which seems to coincide with "technology intelligence" in English, but it's a lot less intense: I just like knowing what's out there, keep informed, and LTT's format is just that: highly digestible updates on storage technology, network infrastructure, hardware and everything tech.
It's more watchable than Top Gear for me. Maybe LTT employs better actors but in any case I believe in its candid elements more. On Top Gear it's completely obvious it's all scripted but we're expected to believe it's not. I find it very annoying and quite uncomfortable to watch.
They did Lampshade[1] the supposed scripting in an episode of Grand Tour[2]. They've got a huge crew and lots of stuff, so going over borders is a huge hassle without extensive preparation. Basically it needs to be scripted to some point to work at all.
People watch videos largely for entertainment, even when the subject matter is a review of computer hardware or advice concerning technology. For pure informational value, a written format with occasional short illustrative video clips is usually more useful.
I think every successful youtuber has a cultivated stage persona because that's more entertaining than just watching an everyday person talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes.
You can in fact watch a professional chemist talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes on a pretty successful YouTube channel, but he's definitely going to be using his larger-than-life stage persona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui_wOiUDPvM .
Do you mean that he's an actor in the sense that he's acting while on camera, or that he's an actor in the sense that his aspirations from the start have been the actual profession and art of acting, but he just failed to get into it and this stuff is his backup? I get the impression that you mean the latter, but it seems far more likely that it's the former. Not that it's unlikely he didn't at some point try and get into film, but he's been in tech sales and reviews from before he ever would have had a real go at failing to get into acting gigs.
I didn't mean so much that he's a person who tried and didn't get a part on a Vancouver-produced TV show, but that his video production efforts are part of the whole general Vancouver and Toronto "hollywood north" industry scene of people who act, do camera work, set decoration, costume, cinematography, sound, rigging, grips, etc.
From an outsider's perspective it looks like a "roll your own" using some of the existing knowledge base, talent pool and resources that exist floating around in the Vancouver video production industry... Undoubtedly some of what he's done in the past 3-4 years with a serious studio, cameras, editing, sound and lighting would be more difficult if he were not in Vancouver, but were in some location with much fewer constantly ongoing video productions (random example: Portland).
I never really thought of it that way, but I suppose you're probably right to some extent. Though I'd wager you could achieve similar technical/artistic results with a decent local college that has an arts program or an engineering school. I always thought it was a suprising success, because he's actually located quite a distance from Vancouver proper, in kind of a suburb called Langley. As a local, I've been there about once, but there have been locals that have made there way onto bigger productions like Silicon Valley. It would be too far for me to realistically work there even if I had a car, not that they're knocking at my door, but surely some of their staff have attended schools quite a distance from there.
As a person in the Vancouver area: a lot of the film industry is out in east Burnaby, the industrial area of New West/Poco/Coquitlam, Surrey and the Fraser Valley for access to lower cost warehouse space, for sound stages/sets, and parking spaces... I don't know precisely where the Linus studios are but I wouldn't be surprised if they're in the industrial area near the south side of the golden ears bridge.
Oh, I forgot about those areas. Used to work in South Burnaby and there was definitely some filming happening there. I guess I normally think of North Shore studios, and areas more directly around Van, but certainly you'll save money going further out. Forgot about the Coquitlam areas as well, with such places as the well-known mental hospital. In east-van now, so as is tradition, I assume nowhere else exists ;)
This article is a little on the surface level, but it's true.
People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air.
Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole thing. There either needs to be some neutrality, competition or youtubers need to organize somehow... unionize even. Trying to have a relationship with audiences that doesn't run through youtube won't work for most channels... even ones with millions of views.
I always expected a porn company to come in and compete with youtube at some point. They have the infrastructure. I've also been surprised at how restricted youtube manage to be, and still succeed... just the skin censorship if nothing else.
It's just incredibly hard to compete with Youtube. In a way that's Google's greatest achievement: they convinced everybody that they're entitled to host and stream 4K videos forever not only for free, but the creators get a share of the ad revenue despite fronting none of the hosting costs. It's an incredibly good deal. The amount of infrastructure and human resources required to merely keep a system like Youtube running is mind boggling.
That makes people reasonably annoyed when Youtube decides to semi-arbitrarily pull the plug on a channel, but it also means that competition is very hard. If a competitor decides to start charging for hosting or streaming, they're doomed to be niche.
Hard to say for sure, since YT uses shared Google infrastructure, and effectively cost of some things can’t be calculated. (Basically it’s much cheaper than you or me can do ourselves).
But from what I understand, they burned money for many years and only very few years ago became profitable. But in some sense YT doesn’t really have to be profitable - for Google it’s more important to prop search itself, then to make money on YT.
Please everyone don’t forget google search positioning too. This is massive. Google have pushed YouTube into their search for a long time, basically building YouTube doing it. That brought insane traffic to YouTube videos and makes YouTube the place for videos.
THIS is the antitrust of google, and where authorities should strike them. They built a video platform and destroyed others using their 90% market power in another market.
How are you so sure the videos are at the top of Google results because they're artificially pushing YouTube and not just because that's where the relevant/popular videos are?
Actually I find Google video search is still the best place to find non-YouTube videos. Of course YouTube dominates if the content is there, but when it's not, Google is still great at returning relevant results on tons of other sites.
The thing with the resource sharing is that it's peanuts compared to what youtubers earn off of other sources of income; sponsorship and product placement deals (which I'm sure is a thorn in Youtube's eye, unless they get a slice of that cake), Patreon is a really big one, and merchandise sales. I'm sure that Youtube ad revenue is in 4th place with regards to income for youtubes, especially since the 'adpocalypse' wherein advertisers pulled out of youtube and stronghanded them into a strict demonetization practice.
Anyway that said, there's enough competition for youtube to ensure that these channels don't have to die; it's just discoverability that is the issue. Youtube does not have exclusive rights to any video uploaded (although I'm sure they have negotiated exclusivity contracts with some), so anyone is free to mirror their uploads elsewhere, just in case. I'm sure there's software out there that makes cross-posting videos easy.
This is also the reason why every potential 5 minute read time blog post is turned into a 30 minute monotonous video.
Monetising. Youtube does it automatically, with a blog you need to manage the ads yourself and the audience is a lot smaller.
There is also a generational gap at some point. To me, it seems that 20-somethings turn to Youtube for every issue (phone setup, toilet clogged whatever) instead of looking for a text resource.
That content protocol is called HTTP and the service discovery protocol is called DNS. I know that it's a bit cliche to say that these days, but acquiring a domain name (either directly from a TLD registrar or indirectly through e.g. a DynDNS provider) and pointing it at a webhost is what allows content publishers to "mint" their very own globally unique URLs. Any consumers that are equipped with a suitable user agent can then plug that URL into their browser and view that publisher's content.
Now let's be serious, there are numerous barriers that stand in the way of "normal" users that want to escape the evil platforms. Why not direct our ire at the real problem: Why Johnny Still Can't Host a Website!
And if we fix that, perhaps we can move on to Why Johnny Can't Get Any Visitors (Because Google Won't Index It) and Why Johnny's Visitors Don't Receive His Updates (Because Google and Mozilla Killed RSS).
While I agree with you I think that most of the described effects do only exist because the way the internet works is centralized, and humans have to remember domains which they aren't very good at.
...otherwise the most googled term would not be facebook, just to click on the facebook.com link.
If there would be something like decentralized trackers (similar to the torrent architecture) you could have lots and lots of specialized communities that provide meta information about those websites and urls.
This would also allow different sources of traffic and updates if the discovery aspect of similar semantic content would be provided by something like a tagging system or a search field.
Humans don't have to remember domain names (and email addresses and URLs) because we have address books, contact lists, and bookmarks. We do have to recognize domains (and email addresses etc) when we see them, but that doesn't seem to present any issues in the real world.
Domains are absolutely everywhere in modern life: business cards, restaurant menus, outdoor advertising signage, and even in people's conversations with each other. People do, in general, understand how to use domain names.
Of course I do agree with your overall point that we need better protocols for content discovery, but I just don't think that domain names themselves are a stumbling block here.
You are basically describing IPFS. Content-based addressing instead of location-based addressing. Allowing content to be decoupled from any single hosting platform
a good story about floatplane: i signed up pretty much as soon as it was announced, then i forgot about it and also forgot my password.
i was billed -very little- for a while then i opened a support ticket to have my account restored, since i had been billed for a while i at least wanted to watch some content.
but apparently something in the backend had changed and they plainly refunded me from the time i had my last login (iirc) and then they allowed me to re-signup.
it's been nice because i had then been able to re-signup and also recover some money that were pretty much lost, and i wasn't expecting that nor asking for it.
The problem with Floatplane is that new creators who have ideas and skills but aren’t publishing elsewhere online (e.g., because they dislike the ad-driven model and don’t want their videos to appear alongside junk content) have nothing in terms of online optics that they could put into the application form—so they’d have to either support the likes of YouTube first by publishing there, or be capable of running their own site. I wish Floatplane charged a moderate fee upfront rather than having the vetting/review flow (which could still be an option for those who can’t afford the fee).
That’d be a great feature compared to the majority of platforms. The big question would be whether they force recommendations from other channels elsewhere on the page or at the end of a video.
I think that's a great decision. Many people like to complain about Youtube and its policies and its algorithms but it's simply very hard to compete with it. Its offering is really unparalleled.
Hopefully these creators will manage to carve enough of a niche to create healthy competition, especially with a business model that doesn't rely entirely on ad revenue. It's going to be very hard though, making money from video hosting is a very difficult thing to do.
>It’s the same as the old Apple saying: if you’re serious about software, you have to make hardware.
The actual quote, "people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware," is from Alan Kay, when he was speaking at a seminar in 1982 called Creative Think. Andy Hertzfeld was in attendance and took notes. When Hertzfeld got back to his office at Apple, he summarized the notes on one page and handed out to his team members. Kay was later hired as an Apple Fellow in 1984.
This is my view too. I'm hopeful that eventually some combination of technologies that already exist (peer-to-peer sharing, tor, blockchain, homomorphic encryption, maybe even wireless mesh networking) will evolve into a decentralised hosting and delivery system that everyone will use.
I'm woefully uninformed to speculate about how feasible this might be though, so it remains just a hope for me.
Peertube is an alternative. You usually host your own instance (or if someone is generous, they can five you some space) and it is fully decentralized. It uses ActivityPub and works with p2p. Recently they introsuced livestreaming and cross-instance search.
Thanks for mentioning PeerTube — I've been keeping an eye on it for a while now. It has some of the features I noted, including one I didn't but should have; it's open source.
I think PeerTube or systems like it have a lot promise — particularly if more estblished channels on YouTube, and other media producers, were to start to promote them as alternative methods for accessing their output.
I spent some time a while back trying to build the “Shopify for Video streams” where creators could have a custom hosted channel that enables them to monetize however they’d like! Ultimately I didn’t do a great job of marketing it, but if anyone’s interested in giving it a spin for their channel feel free to fill out the beta interest form here: https://yourchannel.rreichel.dev
I think there's definitely a need for this and have thought about building something similar myself. I think one thing that is crucial which I don't see mentioned in any of your pricing plans is the ability to self host. You could dockerize your application and make it super easy for creators to set it up on their own infra. Otherwise they still have a large platform risk, they've just shifted it from youtube to your company.
Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier. The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large and seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon.
What is sad is that you see youtubers talking in code on videos, not saying words, self censoring because youtube's detection is so good, videos get demonetised instantly. This is also why most people have seen an Ad in a video for PIA or surfshark or worse, raid shadow legends.
That's the reality. I can't speak for other youtubers, but I have an audio DSP plugin called BitShiftGain. It does exact offsets of 6dB, because doing that alters the exponent and only the exponent of the floating point word without touching the mantissa, making it lossless if you had headroom for the adjustment (for instance, if you can go up without clipping, you can go up and down losslessly)
On YouTube I have to call it 'wordlength shift gain' because YouTube thinks I'm saying 'bitch'. And I don't know, maybe that would increase my YouTube discovery at some times when they're leaning more in the direction of provocation-for-engagement, but that's not the kind of channel I do, so I self-edit.
I don't find it sad so much as it's simply a step into the future: awareness means understanding what the algorithms will make of you. Fail to grasp that and you get caught in the gears. I also openly talk about how I allow YouTube to run ads even though I'm a uBlock Origin guy myself and encourage people to adblock likewise: I assume that if I balk YouTube on this, or fail to pretend that I'm after what meager revenue YouTube promises, that I'll be eventually punished for it. So, I keep up appearances, 'cos it's a key platform for me.
I'm currently watching the Linus Media Group playlist on how they make money and why they make clickbaity thumbnails, with interest. I could probably put some words into my thumbnails and construct them better. I earnestly believe Google is good enough to automate discovery of whether people are doing these things, and reward/punish them algorithmically based on whether they're in compliance, so I am probably blocking myself from discoverability by failing to include text on thumbnails even without a single Googler making a human decision on the matter. I don't know whether I need to make faces too: it's an experiment I could try if I felt like it. Gurning for dollars :)
> Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier.
You support creators by giving them money. In return for supporting a creator you get video content in return. Floatplane as a platform for the most part doesn't dictate what that content is other than it being in the format of a video.
LTT themselves have actually been moving away from pushing videos early to Floatplane and more towards giving unique video content on Floatplane such as behind the scenes videos.
You run into issues with promising videos early to only part of your community. For example when you have review embargos and want to make drop a video at the same time as every other YouTuber,
> The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large
It isn't that crazy really. Unlike YouTube which streams most of it's video for free and has to recover that cost via ads, every person streaming on Floatplane has paid money to stream that content.
Floatplane has been scaling slowly which has allowed them to stay on baremetal instead of going to the cloud. They don't need a lot of the advantages the cloud has, such as the ability to scale on demand. This isn't your normal unicorn startup from silicon valley that needs hyper growth to attract more investors for an eventual IPO or buyout.
Linus and Luke are putting their own money into it because they want to have a fallback incase YouTube pulls the plug on them. They are not taking lots of investment to try and build a YouTube competitor.
Their costs are actually really reasonable. They have a much better profit sharing model with other creators than YouTube does. They recognize that they have a base line cost for a given creator, that is the cost of storing the video and processing it for example. Then they have a cost per user of that content. This may have changed but their model was recover that base line cost from the subscriptions and then take a much lower cut afterwards. So from a creators point of view you get more value as your scale the number of users from your community on the site.
> seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon.
Eh, maybe. It does however let them focus very much on that video aspect and provide users with a solid experience dedicated to videos. I imagine over time they will add more features to Floatplane that help differentiate it.
I guess for youtube content, this is sometimes needed, but again feels like a lot of effort for limited return. The cloud is one thing, but engineering costs, support etc must eat into profits.
I think from a support point of view, this is where merch sales are actually great, everyone gets something, even if it means that people charge $70 + shipping for a hoodie with a print.
I can’t help but wonder why services like Vimeo don’t come up more often when getting off of YouTube? It seems like Vimeo offers similar functionality already. Is there something about it that I’m missing / is it just not cool for content creators?
I think the problem is that once you get to a certain volume of content it becomes eye wateringly expensive on Vimeo. Louis Rossmann explained this in a couple of his videos (I never bookmarked them). Even if he were to push just his repair videos (i.e. not including his opinion pieces) he'd fall into into a whole other universe of cost.
Vimeo hosts the storage on google cloud. It pays 100x what youtube does for storage. The same for bandwidth, hosts on Fastly. Pays 100x+ there too for cdn compared to youtube.
Surely the issue is that Vimeo doesn't have Google's adtech behemoth behind it, so either the creator or the audience has to pay for hosting, rather than it being paid for by advertising.
Peertube seems perhaps a more credible competitor in that sense, by making hosting cheaper. As long as the creators can fund themselves with Patreon, merchandise or whatever else.
I think the key issue is being able to fail over to another video site if for some reason YouTube decides you're no longer the kind of creator they want. For Rossmann I think whatever ad-revenue he gets is pocket money (and I believe it's not a lot in the great scheme of things), he already has a functioning business that's revenue generating.
Also what guarantees are there when you come along and upload 10+ TB of archive footage to Peertube the network decides that's far too much? Their creator sign up page has an instance filter for "At Least 50GB" (which is quaint). And sure when you get the results back many instances say "Unlimited" storage, but there's "unlimited" and "get lost".
Vimeo's much bigger in the film festival scene, for example. It's one of the primary ways films are submitted to small-to-mid festivals. It has a whole infrastructure for that - e.g., I upload my film once and then can manage submissions to different festivals from there - and if you're not in that industry you wouldn't ever see that functionality.
DRM Free movie downloads, also it supports better quality video. Though those are things that work because they do not have the same kind of customers/creators as YouTube in general.
You're right, but that misses the point of the exodus from Youtube, people aren't leaving over DRM or video quality. They are leaving because the precarious relationship with a capricious overlord. Their livelyhoods are in somebody elses hands.
This isn't even remotely related to Vimeo or YouTube. If you're talking about movies legitimately published by the rights owners not being DRM'd on Vimeo, then there's nothing stopping the studio from uploading a DRM-free version to YouTube as well. IF you're talking about piracy simply because Vimeo doesn't have Content ID, then that's also just a failure of Vimeo and/or the studios not really caring about 480p streams with relatively few views.
No I was talking about video on demand, if you try pretty much any other service for it none of them allows creators to upload drm free files for the user to download. Sure you can upload a file "drm free" to YouTube but it is not download able and there is put drm on them.
This is of course something that is unrelated to the greater discussion in this post, but it have been something I have found different on vimeo compared to elsewherein the past.
You continue to, willfully, argue a point nobody cares about.
Nobody cares about Venmo, it’s a crappy YouTube. The issue is creating content on big techs platform and the danger it entails.
Independent short films, animation, motion graphics - this is what Vimeo is associated with and the image they have cultivated of their brand.
You'll find other types of content, but Vimeo is not try to compete with YouTube's content scope. You won't find 'How to unblock your kitchen sink with baking soda' on Vimeo, or 'Learn Javascript in 60 mins', but you'll find these (and dozens more) on YouTube.
There's not much value add. Youtube is all about reach. It has 1000x the reach of vimeo. Once you've solved your reach issue, the most cost effective is to build your own platform (or white label something) and collect more revenue.
This discoverability on vimeo is poor to terrible.
Youtube feeds me a diet of videos that are hard to turn off, spanning literal decades and with some really weird stuff thrown in (and based on the comments, others have same experience - I'll be on a 10 year old video with positive comments from a day ago).
A common youtube quote:
No one: I want to see five year old archery videos
Youtube: Here, try this
I did not even know that Linus had his own site. Fantastic. I won’t be watching his videos on Youtube anymore! Hopefully, everyone I watch will have their own websites, so that I don’t have to visit Youtube.
LTT fan here. Just a couple words of warning about using LTT as a source of serious tech information.
He had something along the lines of a “best laptops for typing” video without mentioning the Thinkpad.
He continuously promoted Razer laptops without mentioning that they had an internal 50% failure rate of their own Razer laptops. (Thanks for keeping it real during a WAN Show, Luke.)
I still watch LTT as entertainment for some reason, but come on Linus. I have major respect for your biz acumen, but you can do better for your audience.
Partially due to his recommendations, I once recommended a Razer to an exec above me, he eventually had to do a credit card charge back after it started to bend all on its own. Not a good look. Lesson learned.
If only there was some kind of really simple syndication so I didn’t have to visit 40 different sites to check if my favorite video creators have released anything new.
This sort of dumb sarcasm is soooo annoying for a billion reasons:
- Every major website where RSS would be useful (except Facebook. Twitter needs RSS like we need the plague), _has it!_ RSS support is ubiquitous
- There are carbon-copy clones of google reader. I use one every day (well, twice a week cuz I don't depend on reading RSS). You can just subscribe
- For really tricky stuff, you can wire together some stuff with, like, Zapier. It's annoying but way easier than it would be 10 years ago (cuz even then loads of random stuff didn't have feeds)
This is the most annoying kind of nostalgia. Not because it's wishing for an old world that never existed, but because it's implying that the current world doesn't _still have all of this stuff_. At least whining about XMPP has some merit.
The first statement is, sadly, no longer true today. Far too many times after a redesign, RSS feeds that were useful and functional just disappear. Sometimes they're redirected to a new feed location that doesn't have all the content the old feed did, or just has headlines instead of headlines and teasers.
And many new sites never test RSS functionality, so if there is a feed, it just shows posts tagged 'feed' or something like that.
Now if only we had some sort of... protocol... that would allow for us to exchange text based documents from different "servers" that each individual content creator is able to control and interlink with other "servers" via some kind of address based referencing system embedded in those documents. That would allow us to discover content and decentralize from platforms like Youtube...
Fun fact for those who watch videos by creators who haven't moved off of YouTube yet: YouTube channels expose RSS feeds of uploads and you can watch videos directly without ads via youtube-dl automatically using MPV[1].
Youtube will restrict your IP if you do this enough. I can't say I lost too much value when it happened, but it's been obnoxious having to go to the main site on my mobile to answer a battery of captchas every time I want to watch a video.
You comment made me realize that if it becomes reality RSS might finally make a much needed comeback. You'll just poll various decentralized website to find updates for content you actually want. Aaaah, now you got my hopes up.
If you had told me in 2005 that'd I'd become nostalgic for Flash-ridden, PHP backed, IE6-compatibilized internet I wouldn't have believed you, and yet here we are.
Yes, but the user doesn't have control of what to subscribe to. They can't add a new RSS URL, it needs to be submitted from the creator to these services. I guess the nice thing is that for people who know RSS and have a "full featured" podcast client they can find that backend and subscribe however it isn't really the same as an RSS reader.
iTunes uses RSS for podcasts (or at least used to). It's invisible for most users though since they use the same platform for discovery and consumption.
Ally Law needed to do this. He regularly trespasses to the top of sky scrapers and other unique buildings. YouTube tried to bring him down so he started his own site. He still posts on YouTube but it was a long process to get back. If you want to see a guy living, check out Ally Law. It’s a madness.
Maybe not totally on subject here. But Cleetus McFarland is one of the people I think is starting to make his move away from YouTube, or at least, diversifying dramatically.
Merch is huge for YouTubers in a lot of ways. He's been doing solid merch for a long time.
He also has been doing his Cleetus & Cars events for a few years now and those bring in big numbers.
Last year he announced purchasing an abandoned race track. Which he opened officially this year. This past weekend he had an event and the place was packed (COVID not withstanding... it feels like in Florida, where this is all located, COVID isn't a thing). He seems to have successfully saved an abandoned race track.
In an extremely creative maneuver they had to tear up part of the race track for repairs. To help fund the repairs he sold chunks of the track in a bottle with a t-shirt and a few other merch goodies. He literally sold chunks of the track.
He's now doing Pay-per-view events, which he started last year.
I'm sure a good chunk of his income still comes from YouTube, but in a lot of ways he's seemingly finding creative ways to make his business bigger. Eventually, I anticipate that YouTube and him part ways and he starts his own platform where he can make it more of what he wants it to be.
Because they are finally learning that all it takes to destroy their business is an algorithm glitch, or having 'wrong' political views, or just falling on the wrong side of an overzealous moderator.
When you use someone else's platform you are completely dependent on the owner of the platform, and being dependent on something you don't control is a huge business risk.
Even if you keep up with what’s politically correct, your old content can become increasingly unfavorable. You can get railroaded for something you said 10 years ago that was seemingly alright at the time. I cringe at myself 10 years ago.
Youtube could easily just obliterate a channel today, for some video posted 10 years ago if they deem it bad enough. Doubt if you had your own platform you'd delete yourself for something cringe you said 10 years ago
The general "danger" of old videos comes more from people digging up what was said and causing a shitstorm because of it, rather than Youtube themselves going out of their way to delete channels because of old videos. If people want to dig through your old videos and want to cause a shitstorm, self-hosting isn't going to protect you.
I don’t like a lot of the things being done by people who get deplatformed, but honestly I think there should be protections against cutting people off. Before the internet, I never worried about not being able to use the postal service or making a phone call. But now I worry about something stupid happening that obliterates my online life because Google decides to nuke my account.
I think I agree that uploaders face more of a threat from censorious activists reviewing their old material than they do from retroactive deletion prompted by YouTube policy changes, but surely self-hosting would provide some protection, assuming the audience would be willing and able to transition to a different source?
It seems to me that hosting and payment processing companies ultimately present the greater service denial risk for uploaders with an established audience, though YouTube can definitely hamper new viewer discovery, and there is more competition (and therefore more alternatives) in hosting and payments.
Yes, but most people don't build their own server farms, don't have their own internet cable, so basically there is always some company in the middle that could easily cancel you.
Owning cable doesn't help much as this cable sooner or later needs to be connected to some router that doesn't belong to you. A better solution is to host in a country where political correctness is much weaker than in the West.
No matter what type of small business you are, relying on a single source of revenue is always a massive risk. Youtube is no different in that regard. It's a good idea to diversify if you can.
> When you use someone else's platform you are completely dependent on the owner of the platform, and being dependent on something you don't control is a huge business risk.
Being off of YouTube doesn’t make you immune to this. You can still be deplatformed by your host, domain registrar, payment processor, etc.
There are hosts out there which will host you as long as you're not breaking any laws. This is actually how things should work.
Registrars won't take away your domain just because they don't like your site. Companies will delete your personal account on their platforms without even talking to you. I can't think of any case where a domain was seized without a court order.
Circumventing payment processor censorship is one of the many purposes of cryptocurrency technology. All you have to do is accept Monero as payment. The more people that do this, the more legitimate and popular and well supported it will be.
Yes. There was an example on Hacker News of someone whose blog hosted by .in was shut down/seized because some freelance-style security project that detects malicious sites or botnets or something claimed it was evil. No notification or due process. I can't recall enough of the details to provide a link, but the individual posted on HN asking for help getting his site back, and eventually did. But what stuck out at me is that the (1) accuser was some kind of NGO (2) the site was directly taken down by the registrar (it may have been above the registrar) (3) there was no due process involved.
Apparently an organization called Shadowserver (a nonprofit security organization) claimed that the blog was part of the control system for a botnet, and the domain was transferred out of the registrant's control with no due process. They got it back, but the fact that such a thing is even possible in the first place was infuriating to me. I don't know if this is a decision that the .in TLD makes, to place trust in groups like Shadowserver (one could argue it's India's TLD and their country gets to run it how they want) but I hope to god that these kinds of "no due process" seizures are not possible with other TLDs like .com. and .dev.
Domain names ought to be property, and like any other property should be protected against arbitrary seizure by courts of law. I understand it's important to fight cybercrime and botnets and the like but there's got to be a solution that involves due process.
> Domain names ought to be property, and like any other property should be protected against arbitrary seizure by courts of law.
I completely agree. Some group saying the domain is associated with malware shouldn't be enough to cause it to be seized. They should have to actually prove it in court.
> There are hosts out there which will host you as long as you're not breaking any laws.
Yea? Or must mean those “alt right hosts”. Because the second someone ACTUALLY practices this, they’re themselves labeled as AltRight. See the problem?
> Registrars won't take away your domain just because they don't like your site. Has a domain ever been seized without a court order?
Ar15.com went down without warning, provocation, or cause because one day around the election GoDaddy made a decision to cancel them.
> Circumventing payment processor censorship is one of the many purposes of cryptocurrency technology.
That’s one option... OR... we give equal protections to anyone not breaking the law?
I understand what you mean though. Since they are usually smaller hosts, they aren't used by big name companies and eventually acquire a reputation for hosting only offensive content.
> one day around the election GoDaddy made a decision to cancel them
Huh. How could they just do that? It eventually went back up right?
Do you have more examples?
> we give equal protections to anyone not breaking the law?
They were successfully censored from the internet for quite some time. I believe they were only available through the onion. They must've burned through like two dozens of domains at this point.
Changing info at the registrar would have fixed this, they would probably have only lasted a few minutes w/o DDOS but it's not like cloudflare singlehandedly banished them from the internet. I mean, they sort of did due to the lack of protection, but it's not like cloudflare has the keys to the entire internet; just their ddos service.
Sure, I'm not saying that they are the only people responsible. The thing is that everyone has the same mindset to the point where it seems almost like a coordinated effort. And Cloudflare's CEO admitted that the purpose behind their actions was to kick them off the internet.
> Wow that's extremely fucked up. He's right, nobody should have that power. If they do have that power, we should take it away from them.
I agree. We should make the government use its monopoly on force to take freedoms away from people we disagree with. How dare a company decide with whom it does business and under what terms?
Domain name registrars aren't normal companies. They're more like a government institution. The government can't refuse to recognize the fact I own my house just because they don't like my political opinions. Why should it be any different with internet domain names?
It's not about agreement or disagreement, it's about monopolies.
I am fine if the government takes away the freedom of corporations to grow arbitrarily large.
I am also fine with the government making corporations choose between the ability to grow arbitrarily large and the ability to kick off users without due process.
There's no need to take any freedoms away from normal-size companies.
I agree, it is easier to replace a single part if you don't put your whole presence into one single monolith.
It also helps that many other companies offer the benefit of being able to reach an actual human in case something goes wrong, which is something that is basically impossible with anything Google.
All of the examples you listed are easily recovered from and don’t cause a complete disconnect from your audience in the same way YouTube deplatforming does.
From Amazon sellers to YouTubers to high ranking apps to prominent social media profiles, I’m in awe of how much value sits at the whim of some platform which usually won’t even have a person to talk with on the other end.
The same can be said for anyone working in the offline entertainment sector. People get blacklisted from Hollywood for upsetting powerful individuals (Weinstein destroyed a lot of careers this way, for a most recent example, before he was sent to prison.)
Generally speaking, any industry where your revenue relies on marketing, promotion, or access to exclusive collaboration and distribution networks is going to have this property.
If you've made it really big, you can try to mitigate risk by doing your own marketing, or owning your own share of the distribution channel. For all the B-list actors, though, the economics of that aren't very favourable.
You've described the internet in a nutshell. Computers make it possible to make money off the long tail, that would have otherwise languished in obscurity.
The alternatives are either a return to syndication, or a transition to some kind of non-market public cultural utility for distributing and promoting my cat videos. Or, we remain in what currently seems to be a local maximum, where distribution and marketing is cheap, but not so cheap that most content creators are doing it themselves.
Apparently, in the case of Parler, believing that you should allow users to post any legal content without moderation. (I know they didn't lose their domain, but the effect of being denied hosting is functionally the same.)
Isn't AWS's claim that parlar was hosting illegal content?
Regardless, they signed a contract detailing what they could and could not host on aws. They broke it. Its not like they were unaware of the requirements. Moral of the story, if you promise X, dont promise someone else Y if X and Y conflict. You are going to be breaking your word ine way or another.
> Isn't AWS's claim that parlar was hosting illegal content?
No, it wa, IIRC, that Parler wasn't meeting obligations under the ToS for dealing with content prohibited under the ToS when they were notified of that content, and were failing to do so for an extended period of time demonstrating either persistent unwillingness or fundamental incapacity to fulfill their obligations.
Some of the content banned by the ToSay may also have been illegal, but that wasn't the issue, and neither was the simple fact of hosting the problem content.
The article was from last year. It does not say when they will move and there is no update saying they have already moved. If they have not already moved they will be shortly. Other articles say they will be using AWS in 2021.
Regardless, from the sound of it Twitter was working with Amazon on this integration. This means Amazon knew Twitter was at least planning on migrating. If Amazon was serious about being consistent they should have told Twitter right there and then that they would not be allowed on AWS since they violate AWS' terms of services in the same way Parler does.
The problem, as I understand it was not the posting of legal content but the fact it wasn't moderated meant there was borderline stuff, calls for specific people to be killed etc, that were the key factor in them losing hosting.
I think they have an active policy of taking them down, even if it is inefficient. Not that it should let them off the hook for that content being left up. However Parler could solve their hosting problem the same way Facebook do, which is to own their own hardware.
Youtube disabled monetization on COVID-19 videos last year. (has been reenabled) This lead some Youtubers to using alternate words for that because the automated system could target your video.
Generally extreme ones. You can be politically on the right and espouse views such as "lower taxes, smaller government, less regulation" but spilling over into racism is what would be termed "wrong". The right are not at risk of being deplatformed,the racist right is.
That is a very narrow view. Take, for example, transgenders in women's sport. Do they have an unfair biological advantage over natural women? Are you a transphobe if you think so? Should you be cancelled and deplatformed if you think so?
With so many potentially offensible groups, and with offense definition shifting so often, are you sure that something totally ok now won't deplatform you in 5 years?
The narrow view is the intention I think. They want to “allow right wing views” as long as they are the milk toast “well we just disagree about how much money the government should get, the acceptable options are A LOT and MORE”. When it really gets into it, totally reasonable positions that one side just doesn’t want to hear suddenly become “racist” or “extreme”.
And to the latter part - no. No one ever thinks their views will be the wrong ones. This lack of foresight seems to be a recent thing in my opinion.
That is a very popular topic among the far right. I guess that is just a completely random coincidence, and nothing at all to do with it being hateful.
I understand your point. I am not for or against here, I am providing context.
Yes it is a slippery slope argument, however it is almost unique to the United States due to free speech being enshrined in the constitution. Elsewhere free speech come with the caveat "don't be a dick", so you can say what you want e.g trans women should not compete in women's sport, but abusing trans women athletes is not acceptable.and yes societies views could change and even your inoccous statement could become a problem, but if social views have changed shouldn't you reasses your own views?
Also good internet hygiene would resolve this issue. delete your tweets every so often, comments etc. Nothing good ever came from resurrecting a 5year old tweet.
Well it's not just don't be a dick, it's also "think of the consequence at every level" !
So if for instance in France I wanted to say "it's important to discuss the possibility the holocaust was an american manipulation", I m not a dick, maybe it s true it s important to discuss it, but you still have to shut the fuck up and think very deeply abt why you think that has to be said.
Most places free speech is defended, just challenged more. For instance the guy who dared say "for me, Islam is a stupid religion", got challenged in court for years but eventually prevailed: you can express your opinion of a religion. Just be sure that had to be said, cause it s gonna get expensive.
I have never seen somebody cancelled for an opinion similar to "Transgender women have an inherent advantage in women's sports due to the biological advantage of their body producing testosterone." I have seen people disagree with this opinion, but never call it immoral or transphobic.
What I _have_ seen people get (correctly) called a transphobe for is the opinion "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are men."
> I have never seen somebody cancelled for an opinion similar to "Transgender women have an inherent advantage in women's sports due to the biological advantage of their body producing testosterone."
So should a human born as a woman who happens to naturally have higher testosterone than is typical in other women, be excluded from women's sport? Of course not.
> "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are men."
Really? That's offensive? The reason they have higher testosterone is because they are men. That doesn't mean we should stand in their way of living however they want, or demean them in any way. But we should not have to lie about their biological constitution as being the reason we deem it unfair. It's not their level of testosterone that makes it unfair, it's because they come by that level of testosterone by way of being a man... if a woman naturally has the same level of testosterone, it would be fair and she shouldn't be excluded.
Maybe the answer is just doing away with all gender based distinctions, have no sports leagues separated on the basis of gender at all. Of course, that has its own problems.
Yes, intentionally misgendering a trans person is offensive and transphobic???
> The reason they have higher testosterone is because they are men.
This is needlessyly pedantic. My comment doesn't include the detail of _why_ they have increased testortorone because it is obvious.
Really, what I meant to express was something like "because their biological sex is male" but writing that is awkward and the most obvious/common interpretation of "because they are men" is transphobic.
> "because their biological sex is male" but writing that is awkward and the most obvious/common interpretation of "because they are men" is transphobic.
Disagree. "Trans women are men", in a similar vein to using he/his to refer to trans women, is a tactic used by bigots to indicate that they believe trans women are not "real women" and should be universally treated by society as men.
When writing my comment I don't want to have to insert several sentences explaining the nuance that I understand and respect the gender of trans women, but that this is one of those rare cases where we might need to treat them as their biological sex, because that is what determines things about their physical body, and their physical body is what matters right now. As such, I intentionally avoid vague phrases commonly used by transphobes today.
Fair enough, but the reason they are being excluded from women's sport is because they are not seen as truly women. If they were indistinguishable from women, there would be no way to exclude them without excluding all women. So as soon as we have this discussion, we have to admit there is a difference between a transgender woman and a woman.
It may be a bit clumsy to refer to them as men, but that is actually the basis of why they are being excluded, because of their "man-ness". That's the underlying reason. I don't think it's transphobic to discuss that openly or to invent an explanation relying on "testosterone".
> So as soon as we have this discussion, we have to admit there is a difference between a transgender woman and a woman.
No we don't. If the criteria to compete is "you can have high testosterone or testicles but not both", that's not drawing a line between transgender women and cis women.
Sure, any biological woman can participate. And if everyone is cool with it, weaker biological men can participate too if they're not capable of competing in the male divisions. Maybe we need a third league for non-binary biology, or with divisions by level of proficiency rather than paying any attention to biological sex at all.
What about someone with breasts, genitals, and other traits of a woman, but also the muscles and testosterone of a man? (I believe the common term for people like this is "intersex".) I think most people would agree they are a women, but also almost all people making the "trans women should play men's sports" argument would also think this person should play men's sports.
That's because the actual dividing line is a biological advantage. For cisgendered people this line is relatively cleanly drawn along gender, which leads to the names "men's sports" and "women's sports". However, there are groups of people for which this doesn't apply. Using it as an opportunity to call trans women men is needlessly insensitive in my opinion.
I don't know of any woman has ever been denied entry to woman's sport because she has too much muscular development. Think of the Williams sisters in tennis for example.
As for being insensitive to call someone a "man", i think you're conflating gender and biological sex. When someone is excluded from women's sport because they are not a woman, it's because of their biological background, not because of their avowed gender.
> I don't know of any woman has ever been denied entry to woman's sport because she has too much muscular development. Think of the Williams sisters in tennis for example.
Sorry, I shouldn't have used a bad hypothetical about muscles and should have just explicitly said "intersex people". Regardless, here's a page that documents examples of what I mean, including in high-profile events like the Olympics:
I would like to especially draw attention to this case:
> In 1986, Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño was dismissed and publicly shamed after failing a chromosomal test. She fought the ruling against her, arguing that she could not have a competitive advantage because her intersex variation resulted in her having no functional testosterone. Two years later, the IAAF gave Martínez-Patiño the green light to compete again.
Note how although she has traits unambiguously associated with the male biological sex, she was still allowed to compete as a women, and as a matter of fact the argument she made was that those traits did not give her an advantage.
The point I am trying to make is that the lines in sports are not as cleanly drawn between "men" and "women" as commonly assumed. There are people who are almost universally accepted as cis women banned from women's sports for reasons similar to arguments made about trans athletes. Humans just generally do not fit easily into binary categories when looked at as a whole.
EDIT: Actually, I think this page makes my point even cleaner, without the associated baggage of "well intersex people are partially men":
> In 2011 the International Association of Athletics Federations (now World Athletics), and IOC released statements restricting the eligibility of female athletes with high testosterone, whether through hyperandrogenism, or as a result of a disorder of sex development (DSD).
These people are unambiguously women, both by gender and biological sex, and are excluded from women's sports.
</EDIT>
> As for being insensitive to call someone a "man", i think you're conflating gender and biological sex.
That is basically exactly my point. I understand, at this point, that you are referring to biological sex. However, the word "man" can refer to either, and _usually_ refers to gender. Therefore, using the term with no clarification can easily accidentally mislead people into thinking you intend the opposite interpretation that you do. It's not a big deal, but it's worth avoiding in my opinion.
Assumed that we were talking about biological men, who identify as female in gender, competing in women's sport. If we're talking about biologically non-binary individuals, it is indeed a difficult conversation about how to be equitable with them and still respect everyone's sense of fair play. Since they are not biologically male or female, the correct thing to do might be to create a third division instead of trying to force them into one of the existing options.
There is no shame in being of non-binary biology, so why do we only have competitive divisions for men and women when that doesn't properly accommodate the spectrum of people who actually exist?
While some provisions have previously been made for people who are not biologically female to compete in woman's sport, it is not particularly scalable. There will be continual difficulty deciding when it is appropriate to admit someone or not -- deciding biological sex in the vast majority of cases is much simpler. And if a person who isn't clearly biologically-female does dominate in a woman's division, the natural response will be to say that they have an unfair advantage and don't really belong; it's not obvious how to avoid that catch-22.
> Assumed that we were talking about biological men, who identify as female in gender, competing in women's sport. If we're talking about biologically non-binary individuals, it is indeed a difficult conversation about how to be equitable with them and still respect everyone's sense of fair play.
Re-read my above edit about hyperandrogenous women. These are biological women who simply have a medical condition that makes their body produce more hormones than normal, and major sports organizations like the IOC have banned them.
My point is that insisting we draw the lines across biological sex results in special cases like that, because the actual group of people we are trying to exclude is those with a certain biological advantage, and that group does not match up exactly with "biological men".
> And if a person who isn't clearly biologically-female does dominate in a woman's division, the natural response will be to say that they have an unfair advantage and don't really belong; it's not obvious how to avoid that catch-22.
Here's my answer: stop pretending they are "(biological) women's sports" and actually define the rules in relation to what you are trying to prevent (ex: set a max testosterone level). This instantly closes all loopholes because it directly addresses the problem rather than attempts to indirectly address it via the imprecise measurement of bio sex.
At least at the top level, this entirely solves the problem in my opinion. A bigger problem I don't have an immediate solution for is lower level of competition - it is obviously unrealistic to expect someone to get a testosterone test to play intermural basketball at their local high school.
I guess with that specific statement it would depend on context. In a civil discussion it would be fine, however if you posted it on a trans athletes forum it would be offensive. You have sought out someone who would likely be offended in order to make that statement. As part of a debate etc it is a perfectly fine statement to debate/discuss.
These are thorny issues, and for the record I do want everyone to live a happy and productive life as free from injustice as possible. But from my perspective the accusations of racism, transphobia, and sexism are thrown around way too loosely today, without the attention to context that you recommend. Even when the context is inappropriate and the language is inflammatory, it may just be socially inept rather than hate filled malice.
>So should a human born as a woman who happens to naturally have higher testosterone than is typical in other women, be excluded from women's sport? Of course not.
Should women who inject testosterone be banned from sports?
By and large such treatments are seen as cheating. Like Lance Armstrong oxygenating his blood before a race etc. Personally as long as it's a level playing field I'd say people should be allowed to do whatever they want. The only problem is that once you allow it, people who don't want to do it, feel compelled so they can participate.
> What I _have_ seen people get (correctly) called a transphobe for is the opinion "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are men."
Arguing that women should be excluded from women's sport is untenable. The respectful position isn't "trans women are a special type of women where they get the pronoun but none of the privileges". It is "you're a woman".
I disagree. What about a situation where a cisgendered man prefers having sex with people that also have dicks? Typically, we would call this person gay, which we interpret as "men who have sex with men". However, this person would want to have sex with cis men and trans women, not because they're transphobic, but because their preference is based on the person's physical body.
My point with the example is that there are rare cases where treating everyone (including trans people) as their biological sex is warranted because we are talking about situations where their sex explicitly matters (i.e. usually something related to their physical body).
As to whether or not it makes sense in sports? I don't know, I haven't put much thought into it. But I don't think arguing either perspective is inherently transphobic or disrespectful.
Playing sport is not some radical edge case, nor is there anything to think about. Women can compete in women's sport.
"Transgender women should not be in women's sports" is transphobic no matter what logic follows it. It is society not treating women as women. Adding a "because they are men" or not on the end doesn't change the level of transphobia much, the meaty part is the "no, I've decided you can't be treated as a women and you get no say" part.
We are talking about body, not mind. Transgender women are women with a biological man body (otherwise we wouldn’t have this conversation.) So it is unfair for women with biological women body. The whole point of separating biological women of biological men in sports is to prevent that.
It is sport. The strong/fit win and the weak lose. It was never meant to be fair with respect to physical ability.
If we start from the premise that it is transphobic to say "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are men." then it is pretty clear that "Transgender women should not be in women's sports because they are biological men." is also transphobic. Otherwise we could end online transphobia with a couple of sed scripts in a chrome extension.
I think perhaps you're getting tripped up by the English language, which is understandable because it's annoyingly vague in this context.
The words male/female can refer to either gender or biological sex.
Gender means what you likely already think it does.
Biological sex is what genitalia someone has (or more generally for animals as a whole whether you produce sperm or eggs). I'm not a huge fan of this term because it kinda seems to imply transgenderism is "non-biological" but it's the most commonly understood term so I use it begrudgingly.
"Trans women are men" is most obviously interpreted as a transphobic statement about gender.
"Trans women are biological men" is just a fact and is in no way transphobic.
> Otherwise we could end online transphobia with a couple of sed scripts in a chrome extension.
Words have meaning outside of analyzing their dictionary definitions or a single sentence at a time. Sed scripts cannot account for context, intent, etc. Similarly, whether or not some speech is transphobic is dependent on these factors too.
It is patently absurd to argue that you can accept someone as a woman and not accept it is obvious that they are feminine enough to compete in women's sports.
I don't think I'm the one getting tripped up here. That is just a lot of pretend complexity to justify transphobic beliefs. It just being "facts" that determine your personal social beliefs is exactly the same sort of scientific appeal to justify bigotry that inclusive movements have been fighting for a generation.
If you believe someone's genitals determine how they should be treated socially, you are being transphobic. I personally think that is a stupid standard, but that is the standard that has been set for transphobia.
> If you believe someone's genitals determine how they should be treated socially, you are being transphobic. I personally think that is a stupid standard, but that is the standard that has been set for transphobia.
I cannot tell if you're trolling or just intentionally ignoring all the related nuance. You must understand there are some circumstances when it is acceptable to acknowledge that a trans women has a bio male body.
According to this "trans women should always be treated as women in ANY context" opinion what is a doctor to do when a trans women gets prostate cancer? "Sorry, that's a man-only disease, and you're a woman, so it's impossible you have it"???
I'm not trolling, I'm pointing out the obvious - you are espousing mildly transphobic principles and you should reassess your framework until it makes sense.
Someone with a prostate having prostate cancer and needing treatment has an obvious, involuntary, cause and the person is presumably voluntarily cooperative in being treated.
Thinking that it is even possibly reasonable to exclude a woman from playing womans sport because you don't believe they are womanly enough, regardless of their beliefs, is blatant transphobia. And the long pseudo-science "not men but kinda men" justification is the sort of thing bigots tried to deploy against gays, religious minorities and women in the past. That should stop. If someone is a women, and we can treat them like women, we should treat them like a woman. Ditto how humans should be treated like humans.
Come on, I can easily construct a scenario where it isn't voluntary from the trans woman and is between two people, as a matter of fact I already did:
> What about a situation where a cisgendered man prefers having sex with people that also have dicks? Typically, we would call this person gay, which we interpret as "men who have sex with men". However, this person would want to have sex with cis men and trans women, not because they're transphobic, but because their preference is based on the person's physical body.
What are you going to say when this person declines sex with a trans women? Is that transphobia? Should they be forced to lie about why they're declining the sex? Is wanting to have sex with people with the same genitalia as you transphobic?
> Thinking that it is even possibly reasonable to exclude a woman from playing womans sport because you don't believe they are womanly enough, regardless of their beliefs, is blatant transphobia.
This is just projecting reasoning onto me that I've never espoused. I never made the claim it's because I "don't believe they are womanly enough". The reason is that certain people have a biological advantage that others do not. The name "women's sports" is somewhat unfortunate because the goal is not to separate women from men, but actually to separate the people with that advantage from those who without.
> And the long pseudo-science "not men but kinda men" justification is the sort of thing bigots tried to deploy against gays, religious minorities and women in the past.
Again, this is refuting a point I never made. Trans men are men with a bio woman body, and vice versa for trans women. That isn't pseudo-science, it's the literal dictionary definition of what a trans person is.
Even not working for free for someone "against racism" (and/or beign a little religious) is enough these days, like when some people try to cancel Chris Pratt for not doing a fundraising for Biden.
Personally, I think the way to end centralization is to introduce enough viable options that are willing to cohabitate and even cooperate. These viable alternatives can't be interested in total dominance and probably need to have agreements that allow transfer of content and data. Personally hosted sites backed by centrally maintained software is a logical choice if you can optimize for the lack of bandwidth sharing economy. If my hypothesis is true, then this is the tide turning in video sharing, though the tide may be a long tide.
There's a fundamental tension between competition/choice and low friction. On the internet it seems like whatever has the lowest friction wins.
Examples...
People hate the fact that there are so many paid streaming services now, they just want one, that has everything and pay about $15 a month for it.
People don't and won't switch away from twitch.tv, mixer tried to compete by poaching two of the biggest streamers in the world, their own audiences wouldn't follow them from twitch to mixer.
Honestly I find them sometimes not promoting it enough.
Granted, they probably shouldn't give it any favoritism... but often I'll google for a video clip and have to refine search to just show me youtube results as i don't want to deal with some beast of another site.
We are still a very long way from distributed discovery.
Back in the day at Demon Internet (well known 90s UK ISP)
every customer got a free 10MB of webspace - barely any of them used it.
But it should have been how we all hosted our blogs and our videos. And it would solve a multitude of social media issues.
If Facebook and youtube did not host its hard to see how they could compile trustable usage stats (#) and so hard to see how we could all find out we must watch Gangnam Style. Similar problems seem to hover over crypto-currencies.
Edit: some random thoughts
- DNS: In a world of individual producers, curated aggregation still has value as it provides a quality / interest gate. A TV channel implies curation, a review guide the same. Perhaps it is no coincidence Marvel has found its footing in a world where choice is infinite and curation zero. Every TV show hopes to land a few million dedicated fans.
- Social media companies basically have zero curation (this is weirdly tending towards including Amazon who are dumbing down curation in marketplace)
- Our natural curation signals are usually based around proximity (geography, recommendation, similarity). These fall apart where the same DNS hosts nazis and nannies. Especially where recommendations are controlled by (one?) algorithm.
- If enough viewing moves off YouTube (not merely the bits over pipes, it off the influence of the algorithm) then these other effects might start to show through.
- But even if we could gather reliable distributed usage stats (book publishers managed it for decades), distributed discovery becomes a strange animal. A dumb algorithm that recommends what is the most watched video in the world, followed by the second, would have some strange chaotic behaviour but would at least have twin virtues of simple and transparent. Start adding in anything else (here is my past history, make a recommendation, or here is my aspirational set of people (my twitter follow list is watching) or just show me what Barry Norman recommends, all of these can be made transparent - and open to a cottage industry of discovery algorithms.
- This cottage industry fascinates me - it's like the other industries I expected to exist but don't (decent job search, dis-intermediated real estate). Duck Duck Go seems the model here - there is likely to be a (regulated?) split in discovery - much like railways or phone lines - where the underlying monopoly bit (we scraping) gets hived off and everyone can access it at common fees - and the add on bits, the start of distributed discovery - appears as a more competitive market. And one hopes a less behaviour driven one (I am still wanting to know the revenue difference between Google storing my every move and returning what it thinks I want and Duck Duck Go just using the context of my query - and returning what I asked for.
- But hopefully after a Cambrian explosion of companies offering discovery - not just search or for videos and entertainment but even shopping (as Amazon hits the same split the Google inevitably will), after all that, we are still a long way from where I hope we can get.
- Everything online should treat me as a citizen, as even a patient - where do no harm is the first principle. If we live in an internet where my individual best interests are the legal and cultural norm, as professions are supposed to be, then we enter a totally different equation. We are all exploited online now, and the discussions are about harm reduction. But that's not the real end goal. Making sure quacks don't charge too much for the snake oil is not what made medicine work.
(#) ignoring facebook lying to advertisers etc etc
I was just thinking the other day that a lot of us in the 90s chose our ISPs based on how much web space was provided by the ISP, how many news groups the ISP gave access to, number of included email addresses, etc.
Even the first broadband providers I used offered web space. I can't remember when it stopped being a thing.
Trust me, you are unusual if you used the webspace. (Admittedly it was a marketing comparator - if you did not offer it you lost potential customers,) I cannot remember the numbers but vanishingly few people used it once and even less were regular uploaders. Even the power users (like my colleagues) would upload a nights photos from their digital cameras. At some point they must have moved to flicker et al.
Why wouldn't you? It's becoming increasingly clear that you cannot trust your web presence (and by extension, your business) to one or two social media companies ... though that should have been obvious in hindsight.
And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email.
I share the scepticism about the ability of startups to disrupt away the network effects that underlie these quasi-monopolies, but it does seem to me as though decentralisation is the logical and desirable end-point.
How and when that point could be reached though, I couldn't say.
> And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email.
My take is this: whenever I see a startup being described as "disrupting" some market, I interpret it in the other sense of the word: disruption, as in the effect of a disruptor, a fictional energy weapon used predominantly by the main villains of Star Trek franchise, Klingons and Romulans.
It seems really weird that BBC would do a story on these alternates to youtube, mention them, and then not link to them.
I watch Linus Tech Tips so I've heard of floatplane but I haven't heard of the others mentioned. Even one of the three links in the article just goes to another site called tubefilter which itself doesn't link to this nebula thing. It took me ten minutes to find the site because I had to read the articles trying to see if they linked to https://watchnebula.com/ (admittedly, that link doesn't really do a great job of selling the product either)
What is the point of doing stories about other web sites without linking to them?
The BBC is publicly funded and for years was very strict about no advertising or product placement in their output (which has relaxed somewhat in recent years but it’s still there) so perhaps it’s because they don’t want the article to be seen as “newsvertising” (is there a special term for this?)
Because they are finally learning that existing on someone else's platform sucks. Much better to get your own domain which is actually property registered to your name and can't be taken away from you because you offended some advertiser.
>Because they are finally learning that existing on someone else's platform sucks. Much better to get your own domain [...]
A lot of people already know they're the less powerful economic actor on Youtube platform. Regardless, people upload videos to Youtube instead of their own domain because of tradeoffs.
For unknown creators with no audience, Youtube doesn't suck (in comparison to hosting videos on personal domain) because:
(1) you don't have the money to pay for variable hosting bandwidth costs
(2) you don't have any business relationships with advertisers to monetize which helps with (1)
(3) you have no network effect platform recommending your videos (e.g. repair smartphones and drones) to audiences of like-minded channels such as Linus Tech Tips -- which helps with (2)
There is a timeline that creators can't avoid to build financial/platform independence and leverage. Today, Linus can realistically host videos on his Floatplane alternative because he already used Youtube to build his 13 million subscribers. He also already built his own advertiser relationships to embed native ads with him as spokesperson outside of Youtube pre-roll and mid-rolls. In contrast, it's quite a different challenge for him to start in 2008 with his own Floatplane.com domain and build an audience of 13 million outside of Youtube.
I got a subscription to Curiosity Stream with Nebula bundled in. While Curiosity Stream has original content, as far as I can tell all of the Nebula stuff is also available on YouTube. So as a Nebula customer the only real benefit is watching content without ads. This is well and good, but ads aside, Youtube is simply a more convenient platform. There's less outright garbage on Nebula, and that's a good thing because the search function and categories are hit and miss. Compared to Youtube, the keyboard controls are janky and there are no comments (arguably more of a feature than a shortcoming), so no real way to engage with the content creators.
Having said that I think I paid under $20 for a year's subscription for the bundle. At this rate it's cheap enough to be worthwhile even if you only watch a few hours of content per month. And I do hope these folks can make Nebula's business model work, there's some worthwhile stuff in there.
There are completely original series that are not on YouTube at all: game shows hosted by Tom Scott and Sam from Wendover, some car-testing series (pre-Covid) that I'm not into, a zoomer discovering pop culture from 90s/early 00s, some interviews, a giant history series on the fall of Berlin, and plenty of one-off videos from individual creators that are not on YouTube (example: "PornHub's surprising carbon footprint" would never go good on YouTube).
Then there's usually an additional few scenes on videos you'll find on YouTube.
I also have a CuriosityStream + Nebula bundle, but I rarely watch anything on CS. I can't point my finger into anything particular I don't like about its content, I just don't watch it that much.
I can recall that certain channels have (or at least had) exclusive content on Nebula, but it indeed appears to be worth while considering I am paying more for spotify and netflix.
Nebula and CuriosityStream have some sort of cross-promotion sponsorship deal going on but I think they're completely separate services and it's only Nebula that has like, youtubers on it.
yeah, like so many ISVs build their software on top of Windows and slowly losing market share when Microsoft decided to get into their space like the Office suite.
i remember using Lotus 123 on my dad's laptop. Lotus was the king at the time and Microsoft kill them slowly. if i'm not mistaking Microsoft with hold Win32 api or something that make Microsoft's own Office software run faster.
This is what Amazon is doing now, find a product that sells well and they will start selling it, cheaper than you and probably prioritising their own product listing over yours.
Apple have been doing it with Apps since the iPhone started, first it was jailbreak apps and then any app became fairgame.
Discoverability provided by someone else's platform is a very big boon, however.
Having one's own website is a luxury for the big man, the little man aspiring to be big one day has no choice but to kneel for “what he calls his “benevolent overlord””.
The difference is that podcasters are typically hosting their own files anyway, handling their own advertising (possibly through networks), and the platforms are just discovery mechanisms. Whereas YouTube is taking care of the more expensive hosting, the advertising, and the discovery--for better or worse.
Could you still use YouTube for hosting with embedded videos and then switch to self hosted if YouTube kicked you off? Would embedding videos mean you can't monetise them?
> There is no algorithm, they're going to be served everything you make.
I am not sure how is this (lack of) feature mentioned as an advantage over youtube. Afaict there's certainly a video tab on the yt channel that displays videos sorted with time uploaded (and probably is modifiable). I understand that the point must be that people may want to not see the recommended videos, but don't most such visitors directly visit the yt channel. At least I use it like that.
I don't know if it's a bug or intentional, but I have absolutely had cases where the thing you're talking about (Subscriptions) either refuses to show me a new vid from a channel I'm subscribed to, or refuses to notify me when a new video is out, despite having asked to be notified.
I'm a big user of the Subscriptions tab (283 subs, probably more than half from creators that stopped posting), and I've had no issues with lost videos. Well, unless they got temporarily delisted due to an illegitimate copyright claim.
(How do I know? Because most creators I follow will mention their last video.)
Limited experience with the bell, since I only did that for one channel, which I'm also a Patreon for. (Chrontendo: I usually watch the episode early and then listen to it again when it's public.) But 100% success rate with that notification thus far.
I didn't mean to imply this was frequent behaviour, as it's not. My point is more that I can understand Youtube channels wanting to have more control over their distribution and ensuring people who want to watch their content are aware of it, because sometimes Youtube won't make them aware.
I have seen a case where a video from a channel I'm subscribed to did not appear in my Subscriptions feed, and only appeared when going directly to the channel. From reading the comments I wasn't the only person this happened to. Though I can't see whether this was a bug on Youtube's end, or one of its endless tweakings to "the algorithm".
Are there opensource product/apps/website that allow distributing media to multiple outlets at once? Like uploading to YouTube, peertube, daily motion, vimeo and others from one interface as well as managing and responding to the comments left on them?
I could develop something myself but it would be way better if someone already put the effort into it. Also because I suck at UI and would probably wrote a CLI for it, which probably doesn't mesh with content creators.
I think the question us hackers should think about is not about how do you beat youtube? But how do you make it irrelevant. Twitch was one answer. TikTok is another.
Because when you have business that brings money you do not let the somebody else control it to the point that they can kill it next day just because they can.
One of the reasons why my backends are based on self sufficient architecture that I can move to any arbitrary VM / dedicated server in no time. There is no cloudy dependent stuff in my stack at all.
Funnily I'm subscribed to Corridor Digital and Nebula. These were the first things I thought about when I saw the headline. And now I know where Luke from LTT went and why despite "not working at LTT anymore", Linus seemed to have a good relationship with Luke whenever he appeared.
>"We refuse to be an accidental vehicle for right-wing, neo-Nazi propaganda. And it's really easy for fringe platforms to turn into that if you leave the doors open," he says.
Kudos where it's due for fighting fascism and all that jazz, but it does raise a pretty large concern: where do people draw the line for this stuff? A private platform like that can ultimately decide which videos they want to accept and which they want to reject, which really defeats the purpose of making your own platform in the first place. It doesn't matter if there's no content aggregation algos, since everyone consumes a homogeneous slurry of videos. Instead of preventing gatekeeping in the first place, they just changed who can open the gate.
I don't think I'll ever be very interested in a platform like Nebula, and I'm really only tangentially interested in Floatplane. YouTube will always be a dominant market because it's free and offers a functional user experience. Even if half of the people watching YouTube videos got a Nebula subscription, they're still going to be using YouTube alongside it. As long as that YouTube audience exists, people will continue to capitalize it. As long as the two platforms compete, they'll be in a constant struggle for power over their viewers. It's the definition of a lose-lose situation.
it wasn’t that long ago that it would be unusual for somebody to publish all of their videos on YouTube rather than their own site, And when he did it was to save money/performance, not for the network effects of the platform.
I wonder if there's a businessmodel for selling self-hosted video streaming solutions for this kind of content creators. Would be a fun product to build if nothing else.
Hosting the videos is not the issue but discovery. Not being on youtube might work for big channels but even they probably get a large % of their views from searches/recommendations.
Hosting the videos is definitely an issue. The cost for distributing a single FHD video with a million views is staggering. YT benefits from Google infrastructure to do it “for free”.
If they don't want to end up on islands that nobody ever visits then they better start thinking about getting together and starting cooperatives or non-profits to host and list themselves.
I wonder if there could be a good business in building “deplatforming” type content websites for people with large audiences who want to decouple from centralized platforms.
I feel there should be a legal principle that services as large as Google, that essentially have a monopoly in such a field could be legally ruled a service of public interest, and held to certain standards and essentially be told by governments how they be run.
How to escape this fate? Do not become a big monopoly.
We live in an age where various resources that are essentially indispensable public resources are provided by private, for-profit companies at their own whims and the law should recognize that.
Even non-profit services such as Wikipedia of course have the power to influence and steer the world to a degree that no non-democratically elected organization should have.
I'm going to need you to think very carefully about how much you trust the government to protect the public interest when it comes to dictating how a media platform operates.
The government is unlikely to be able to dictate algorithm changes, but reacting to and forcing favorable behaviors to the current regime to be preserved is certainly within their power.
There's a difference between ensuring competition and effectively nationalizing a company's business practices because they happen to be successful. Declaring Google search results a "public space" is the latter and leads us down a pretty obvious path as to what's actually going to happen with that.
If we wanted to encourage competition it would be an idea to start thinking more carefully about which bits of infrastructure should be in competition: i.e. stop letting social media companys buy out other social media companies (there's no reason Facebook should've been allowed to acquire WhatsApp given that they also had Messenger), and maybe require Google to run Chrome as an open-source project to prevent them vertically integrating the experience of "web browsing" under related technologies.
This can, and probably should include, public funding for alternative open-source products under the foundation model for different web technologies and vital services.
You need bigger systemic change for that. Under neoliberal capitalism the optimal theoretical end state of any (for profit) corporation is to own absolutely everything and be the last one standing. It‘s just the nature of a corporation.
Hyperbole, yes. But you get the point.
It just so happens that big tech firms have a shot of actually achieving it.
There are many ways to have inbound traffic visit your site.
If you are reliant on search terms, I can understand, but otherwise, Google does not have control over your domain name resolving to your server’s IP address.
I run a 4chan archive, fireden.net, I don't archive /b/ and my #1 reason I need to take down things is because of child porn, to the point that I honestly think about why i still run it anymore.
Yes, there are points in time when posters have attempted to post child pornography there, but it gets taken down swiftly and gets reported to moderators as swiftly as its posted.
Your "epicentre" of child pornography on the Internet is Facebook, not 4chan.[1]
8chan being dropped showed well how cancel culture works, and how in the court of public opinion one is found guilty not on evidence, but on sensationalist news articles that outright lie, sitting free from the pains of perjury and cross-examination.
I have not once in my life seen this child pornography or far-right content on 8chan that these news articles claimed infested it; one would have to be very lucky for the former to see it before a moderator removed it, and for the latter one would have to specifically browse niche boards that have very little activity compared to the big boards, which are simply about video games, lolcat image macros, and dating advice.
Have you ever seen child pornography on 8chan or 4chan? have you ever browsed them?
8chan had the infamous /loli/ , it was dedicated entirely to child pornography. The only rule was it had to be 3D rendered or drawn/painted as opposed to photographic/video.
So not child pornography by the legal definition of U.S.A. law and most other jurisdictions.
By your definition of child pornography, i.r.c., and Mangadex also feature child pornography, as well as Google search results and most mainstream pornography websites.
Your comment for some reason reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Personal websites were a given there was a major urge to have your own website. Whether you had your own domain name or a Geocities type of page you just had to have one.
On dialup people tended to be more independent you jumped on the Internet then jumped off to preserve your precious 60 hours/month (and to allow your landline phone to get calls). That time offline was used learning about things and you couldn't Google every little thing.
I was much more into the fundamentals of the computer itself more than the stuff you could see on it. Making boot disks, adjusting settings in Windows, discovering Linux, learning HTML, sending lots of email, some IRC. The Internet grew in complexity and usefulness, and always on cable got cheaper but early on the computer itself was my main focus.
Now it seems as if a computer is simply a conduit to watch YouTube videos. It seems like people are realizing they need to be more independent.
The first video I tried to download was the first South Park Short on dialup. It took around 6 or 8 hours. This was in 1997/98. The next year I got cable and it was super fast like a couple of minutes.
Technically you do own the domain, although the registry and most registrars retain the right to revoke it based on their abuse policies; There are enterprise-grade registrars that have contracts without these provisions (like CSC Global[0], which Disney uses[1]) if you'd like to remove this risk.
It's impossible to be completely impervious to all threats, but for your domain name there are some options that may help. For instance there are domains sold outside the reach of specific jurisdictions[1] and there are blockchain dns efforts as well[2].
Tell that to the people who have be completely de-platformed over the last few years.
Everyone agrees that most, if not all, of them are horrible people, but it is totally possible to lose your domain name if no one will provide registrations and such services to you.
This isn't just about a personal website though. This is Linus Tech Tips (with a staff of about 20 people) building his own platform for delivering content as the article points out.
That's a considerable development effort and probably out of reach for youtube creators who are large enough to make a living and depend on youtube, but not large enough to justify that kind of investment.
Linus Media Group has 32 employees [1] with 7 massive YouTube channels.
As the article pointed out they also have other tech YouTubers releasing content of Floatplane, not just their own channels.
Seeing how many channels are randomly getting nuked by false copyright strikes, shadowbans, account termations, it makes sense that they want to move off YouTube. However as a consumer, there's just so many services/websites competing for my limited attention that if they're completely off YouTube, I doubt I'd ever watch them again -- especially if there's a paywall -- I'd just watch someone else the YT algorithm recommends.
so now what? Instead of millions of channels competing on one very good and easily accessible site, designed to show videos, they will compete on a much larger scale, with far bulkier channels on a site that displays other things as well. The punchline is that both sites are controlled by the same company. I can predict that exactly nothing will be gained by this, except the flooding of internet by many more videos.
Define “very good”
You mean we get more websites? Oh my god! What if the internet has too many websites! Whatever will we do?!
If only we had a way to crawl websites and make them into some kind of list for searching, like some kind of engine for search.
you misunderstood me. a quick google search reveals that YouTube uses 15% of internet traffic. You suggest getting rid of YouTube and putting 15% extra workload onto google. you think that won't be an issue?
as for the "very good" part, yes, youtube is extremely successful at aggregating and displaying useful videos. It is also extremely good at searching through its library and displaying individual users useful videos. Google is far less effective at this, of course. Also, replacing channels with individual websites will vastly increase the internet traffic, not just a minor surge.
I disagree on youtube being very good at its job, however that is a very subjective assessment.
I think as it stands now, you are correct, but I believe these sites will give rise to more decentralized video sharing infrastructure as people slowly see the need to control their own destinies.
The goal on HN is curious conversation. Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.
The easiest way to do this is to respond to the specific new information in an article. As a nudge in that direction, I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases).
You don't only have to react to the specific new information in an article. Whimsical tangents and reactions are also ok. Just ask yourself if it's expected or unexpected [4], and prefer the unexpected.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...