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Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations! Personally, I'm not that radical but I agree with the motives.

I don't use gmail or google docs for anything essential and have my own email address for the past 20 years anyway, but getting away from Youtube is harder. There is a lot of interesting content on Youtube, like Numberphile and 3Blue1Brown, and I wouldn't know where to find this elsewhere. I also use Youtube for its intended main purpose, listening to illegally pirated music content. I don't understand how Youtube's management have succeeded in staying outside prison so far, it seems that the laws in this area are applied extremely selectively. Anyway, you can find and listen to almost any record from any time period at any time on Youtube without paying a cent, and I haven't found a replacement for that yet either.

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> I don't understand how Youtube's management have succeeded in staying outside prison so far,

They manage this by letting the big media/music corps claim ad revenue from any video they feel like they own, no questions asked. That's how they manage to stay out of jail. I suspect Youtube is a pretty decent revenue source for these corporations.

It's pretty amazing that content creators haven't left yet; of course, the problems with copyright claims are likely to chase them wherever they go. At least they've become less dependent on Youtube's revenue, thanks to Patreon donations.

I think the problem is that most people use YouTube to find content (I’ve heard it’s the most popular search engine after Google). If you’re not on YouTube you’ll likely not be found.

It's basically impossible to tell, as a human, on YouTube which videos are sanctioned by Copyright owners and being monetized, and which are evading YouTube's Content ID systems. Clearly some are - e.g. videos where the content is horizontally flipped, or in a small box, or the audio is heavily distorted - but that's not universally true.

I always assumed that VEVO were legal and the others illegal (unless uploaded by the artist, usually for amateurs or not-so-big-time artists)

You can usually click "Show more" in the video description and see if there's any copyrighted content identified by Content ID. If there is, most likely the copyright owners are getting the ad revenue (if it's not an official channel).

Actually YouTube doesn't ask anyone who claims the revenue of someone else's video :)

I wouldn't call "not using Google" radical. We have grown used to hearing that independence on GAFAs means being "radical", even though it should probably be the norm.

I think it's ironic you're arguing it's not radical when you couldn't even have posted that comment without GAFA as ycombinator is hosted out of AWS https://www.ultratools.com/tools/ipWhoisLookupResult.

It's radical from the sheer volume of change you'd have to make to your day to day life alone.

>I also use Youtube for its intended main purpose, listening to illegally pirated music content.

Isn't the quality shit though ? It's good for discovery I guess, but if you have regular stuff that you listen often, wouldn't you be better off procuring good quality files ?

I agree that the quality is shit. It's still my main source for music. I can't be bothered to create my own playlists, and the one's in Spotify etc are always full of stuff that I really don't like.

On YouTube it's just search for genre and you're done.

> 3Blue1Brown, and I wouldn't know where to find this elsewhere

Check out LBRY (https://lbry.io). 3Blue1Brown's content is available there, along with lots of great Youtube channels. If your favorite channel isn't there yet, reach out to the creator and encourage them to sync by visiting https://lbry.io/youtube (its a one-click process and they can get paid for it). Or let me know who you'd like to see there and we'll do our best to convince them for you.

> I also use Youtube for its intended main purpose, listening to illegally pirated music content.

Can you stand the ads that are played after every other song?

I guess he uses an ad-blocker

That's avoidable too, with use of youtube-dl/mpv and such.

Youtube adverts don't work on my browser.

this is highly location dependent. Some countries see many more ads than others on Youtube.

They don't show up in my browser. (Adblockers, I suppose)

Too big to jail. Google spends million lobbying so politicians that usually held local representativs accountable look elsewhere - I mean who would want to cut off their supply of free cash. Google/Youtube also hires tens of thausands of employees, including hefty chunk in California. So those local representatives like govenors or mayors won’t mention raidin Youtube because that may mean many people out of jobs - people that voted them in the office/s in the first place. But please don’t try it at home. Unless you are a Google size or Google connections, you can be sure they will come after you. I mean they still are on Dot Com case and most likely he will be soon extradited to usa.

I can imagine that in the USA interest google stays on top, because when that spot is open and suddenly a foreign company competes for it it will be a big loss. Maybe even as far as considering it to be of national security interest.

Actually. Truly pirated content - whole movies - are removed as soon as they're found (or even before they're uploaded). Music videos - and music used by others than the publishers - get all their ad revenue to the publishers themselves, so for the music publishers it becomes a streaming platform like Spotify (plus there's links to Google Play and such in the description).

They won't sue as long as youtube pays them.

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