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Comment by timkpaine | Hacker News Reader

Without addressing any of the actual arguments..

>Any webserver will be happy to serve up .mp4 content. There are free players (JWPlayer for instance) and you are entirely free to serve up whatever you want from your own hosted service.

This echos the classic dropbox comment, "you can just do it yourself". A layperson isn't going to.

>That capricious decision can be appealed, you can take Youtube to court if you feel they have wronged you.

You can sue whoever you want, but you will lose due to lack of resources.

> Because it never was theirs in the first place

As the facebook controversies have show, people have a remarkably bad time using common sense and making rational decisions on the internet, so while you are totally correct, its silly to assume people think that way.

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As the facebook controversies have show, people have a remarkably bad time using common sense

I think the problem is that people are using "common sense", but depending on your background "common sense" can lead you to dramatically different places.

> This echos the classic dropbox comment, "you can just do it yourself". A layperson isn't going to.

Then you will have to live with being dependent on the whims of another entity. Which means you give up a lot of your freedoms.

> As the facebook controversies have show, people have a remarkably bad time using common sense and making rational decisions on the internet

This wasn't 'on the internet', this was about as IRL as it gets.

In a society you can’t live without depending on another entity, person or corporation.

We don’t have time for everything, at some point we have to outsorce work.

Did you write the OS used to start up your browser/app to type this comment?

Just because we agreed to depend on others doesn’t mean they can shit on us.

> Did you write the OS used to start up your browser/app to type this comment?

Funny, I did actually write an OS, and no it is not the one on my computer but the one that is on my computer is open source and I know I can rely on it for ever because I have that source and know how to use a compiler.

Yes, that's a conscious decision.

> Then you will have to live with being dependent on the whims of another entity. Which means you give up a lot of your freedoms.

That's the state of the vast majority of the population, who lack the system administration and/or development skills to "do it themselves."

Chiding them for not "doing it themselves" is akin to chiding someone upset about their medical bills for not reading to become their own doctor.

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