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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Same reason YouTube wanted to pull the Blender videos. Very popular content that's freely licensed costs them money. Hosting isn't free. We need more distributed platforms where everyone who views the content can help serve it to their neighbours as well.

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Stripe just cut off Bitchute, so distributed platforms are facing some clear hostility from Silicon Valley insiders.

Decentralization is great for disrupting existing incumbents, and has the added benefit of creating an opportunity for a company to re-centralize the culture. GitHub is a great example of this, as are the many attempts to chip away at email

GitHub is a great example of decentralization? In what way? I view GitHub as a centralized service.

> has the added benefit of creating an opportunity for a company to re-centralize the culture

silicon valley and stripe don't live in a bubble separate from the rest of the world. The credit card processing rules against file sharing sites like Bitchute were imposed by visa et al several years ago. They sent out a notice to everyone years ago.. I remember reading it. It really is out of stripe's hands if stripe wants to stay in business.

If you want to start a company like that you can't use credit cards. They have to use bitcoin, etc. These were the rules years before Bitchute even wrote the first line of their code.

Bitchute is also primarily far right wing/white power vloggers and conspiracy believers. That's probably a second reason that they would get cut off by an established player. They would really need to diversify their user base to become more palatable.

>Same reason YouTube wanted to pull the Blender videos.

What? Blender was a victim to The Algorithm, not to some nefarious plot by YouTube to rid itself of the billions upon billions of free and unmonetised videos currently hosted on its platform.

That doesn't make it any better for YouTube.

Of course it does, don't be ridiculous. The difference between a faceless, directionless algorithm miscategorising videos and performing actions without direct oversight from a human being, and an underhanded (and, frankly, nonsensical) plot to rid the site of one particular set of videos out of the literally billions and billions of free videos that already exist on the site is palpably obvious.

The difference is certainly worth knowing, but it doesn't affect the situation one bit for anyone who wants to watch those videos but can't.

It does effect the people who want to watch those videos, because once the humans at youtube are alerted about the problem, the videos are put back up, as in the case of the blender videos. But if it was an intentional human takedown, the videos wouldn't be put back up.

It also has implications on the future of all other videos. If it's actually an intentional plan to take down free videos, then that means we can expect the people who made this decision on blender to continue their plan and take down other free videos. But if it's an algorithm mistake, we don't expect it to become more widespread, and hopefully the algorithm will be tweaked so that it will actually become less widespread.

This thread is about a company (500px) intentionally taking down free content for business purposes to make more money. Saying that youtube is doing the same thing is false.

> once the humans at youtube are alerted about the problem, the videos are put back up, as in the case of the blender videos. But if it was an intentional human takedown, the videos wouldn't be put back up.

It could also have been an intentional trial balloon, to test the waters to see how much they can get away with. Politicians do that kind of thing all the time.

So you're saying that it was an intentional thing, and not just a bug? PhasmaFelis was agreeing that it was just a bug, and that's what I was replying to.

I'm saying that it very well could have been intentional, yes. Not in the sense of somebody at Google targeting Blender specifically (that's possible but seems very unlikely), but in the sense of somebody at Google trying to see how far they can push forced monetisation through algorithmic coercion.

I don't think we have enough information to say for certain what really happened.

> I don't think we have enough information to say for certain what really happened.

https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende... has been updated. (and you are correct.)

I thought it was because blender refused to allow ads on their videos? Was it something else?

It was something else but it took a while for them to figure it out because even the Google support staff were hopelessly confused.

https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...

The latest update indicates that in fact they do have to agree to monetize their videos.

>The Algorithm

speak: YouTube.

How come Khan Academy are allowed on YouTube then?

Perhaps they allowed monetization?

Google funds KA (https://www.google.org/our-work/education/khan-academy/).

Also, most KA videos have views in the thousands (usually less than 10k).

Most Blender videos have views in the tens/hundreds of thousands.

(Also I would like to point out that I don't think anyone at Google had an evil plan to delete Blender, it was probably "The Computer".)

The Computer is Google's most valuable employee.

I am not up to times, what are the Blender videos?

From mid last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17338700

Blender is a 3D model tool and they have a lot of free video content showing users how to use the software. YouTube wanted to monetize the content but Blender repeatedly said no. YouTube then wanted them off the platform and Blender moved themselves to PeerTube.

The story has a bit more nuance than that but that's a simplified run down.

To be specific: YouTube blocked all of Blender's videos, globally, and only restored them after Blender published a blog post on it and moved to PeerTube.

... While also silently pushing their "service agreement" across the table. That agreement explicitly enables ads from which Google takes 45% of the revenue. [0]

[0] http://download.blender.org/institute/Contract%20between%20G...

Google takes 45% of the revenue that they go out and get for you while they cover 100% of all expenses... Not the worst deal I've heard of. Seems like a better deal than app stores that take 30% of the revenue that you go out and get yourself.

... Is this reply for real? This is absurd and disingenuous. Google is one of those 30% app stores. Google/Youtube also absolutely does not cover 100% of the expenses and certainly doesn't "go out and get for you" the revenue. Google/Youtube doesn't pay anybody shit for creating the content that populates their network. Google should be on its knees thanking these content creators, not clubbing the altruistic creators of free software over the head with their insidious racket. This must be what it's like talking to Apple fanboys about paying double for overpriced garbage hardware.

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