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Comment by aiscapehumanity | Hacker News Reader

Overbearing youtube, 10 years from now if it's still a medium it may be a far-cry from an expressive and genuine platform (Even worse-so than it is now). How long until biohacking, and other things are blocked based on the same sensitivity triggers for the topic?

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Overbearing youtube, 10 years from now if it's still a medium it may be a far-cry from an expressive and genuine platform

Yahoo's not the place it was in its heyday. Facebook's not the place it was in its heyday. Even Google's not the place it was 10 years ago. I don't think anyone is immune. The best you can do it to make sure the trajectory is positive. Netflix isn't the place it used to be. I think that's positive, though.

How long until biohacking, and other things are blocked based on the same sensitivity triggers for the topic?

All the really cool stuff should disappear from YouTube. That's just the natural order of things. They no longer want to be edgy. They want to be fat and happy off those big establishment corporate dollars. They've positioned themselves to be the next cable. That just means they want to be the current "vast wasteland."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_and_the_Public_Inte...

The faster YouTube becomes the next cable, the better. The less time the public discourse spends squished under the pressing thumb of the corporate oligarchs, the better.

>"Be sure to hit that like button and subscribe!"

When I hear this standard YouTuber meme, I always trip hard over the dislike button and never quite make it to subscribe. :^)

They have to say it because otherwise people don't subscribe. I know some youtubers who never did it hut had to resort to saying it because their subscriber numbers where stagnating otherwise.

Then there are refreshing youtube channels like "Primitive Technology" where he never says a word and manages to end up with 9.5 million subscribers...

But you know... people CAN just be ok with their subscriber numbers stagnating a bit.

Whoring for likes/subscribes is desperate and it cheapens the hell out of your art. It may give you more likes/subscribes but there are other great things that come from artistic creation than the pitifully minimal effort required by the clicking of a button.

It isn't always about art though? If more subscribers equal more views over time which in turns equals more ad revenue, then I can't blame someone who's trying to make a living for doing something that might come across as cheap to some.

As I understand, it's not about the likes/subscribes, really, but that at subscriber count directly translated to more favorable monetization terms for the content creator. That is, they're basically internet buskers.

I need to experiment with this. I don't say that mantra and my channel is slowly growing (by about 100% a year and starting to do a hockey-stick curve, but starting from very little). I should take a minute at the end of a video (or even the beginning!) to make a case for supporting the actual channel, on the grounds of it'll help the message get out.

I can phrase it as 'like OR DISLIKE and subscribe and click the bell icon', and explain how the dislike button is the same thing (both go to 'engagement') plus a little feedback for me the creator. So you can help the channel AND try steering me away from more channel-whoring by disliking and subscribing. Hell, maybe it helps you more. Please dislike and subscribe :D

What I am worried is that a lot of the "cool stuff" is disappearing from the web. I remember back in the day (late 90's) we had CrackStore, Phrack, Fravia, DeCSS, the box.sk domains a vibrant reverse-eng. community and a lot of really cool content.

Nowadays with the USA policing a lot of that content has disappeared, and slowly people are pushed not to do new content. There are some very small efforts in some subreddits, but a lot of this is pushed to the underground, where it is difficult to find.

In fact are there any other good gathering places than some obscure subreddits?

Discord? I've had good luck with chat rooms these days.

Can anyone recommend any good obscure subreddits? I have trouble finding new content.

It depends on what you're interested in. There's virtually one for any topic.

Subreddits are weird. Because of how Reddit works, it's awful easy for the place to be governed by state actors and various coordinated brigades. So you can be there, sure, but if you're in the wrong place with information someone doesn't want seen, it won't do you a lot of good as you'll get the "oh look, 25 downvotes in a matter of seconds, someone's on point today" effect. It's REAL easy to police Reddit and enforce your agenda if you're organized and have teams of bots or sockpuppets.

Short of moving hacking tutorials to pornhub, is there anywhere out there more interested in serving our fringe cases?

archive.org ?

PeerTube!

I'm not sure if using hidden services is considered a viable solution here on HN, but it seems to to me to be the solution. Don't know any video streaming services but I assume that such sites already exist. The main selling point would be relative difficulty to take down a specific video through a legal action. I assume that youtube takedowns are either results of complaints/legal threats that they have received or a preemptive action to avoid such legal problems happening in future, i.e. their legal department assessed that the risk of such motions in future to be likely. On the other hand, considering bandwidth requirements for video streaming deanonymization of such service appears to be relatively easy, hence possibly some service centered around ipfs would be viable.

Don’t worry the hatespeech will still be there, for something to be banned it needs to do something that like 80% of politicians oppose (“hacking” videos are only useful for crime, so we must stop the kids from criming), or that causes advertisers to pull out, or if the content otherwise hits their bottom line (reporting on hate crimes, privacy, tracker blocking, etc).

Anything else is fine - you have to be either small target or get a large amount of media attention for them to enforce some semblance of their stated policies (which is why defcon and black hat videos haven’t been touched)

>an expressive and genuine platform (Even worse-so than it is now)

Yeah it already is hard enough to dig through the sea of YouTube personalities who mimic each other and start up with the YouTube-isms.

Nothing is worse when someone you follow stars doing reaction videos, rants... YouTube drama :(

I already rarely leave the handful of channels I follow. Too much garbage to dig through.

My fav part is repeatedly getting recommendations for many years old videos when something like a week’s worth of new comments is uploaded every minute ... why youtube why?

Because recommendation engines suuuck.

I've noticed older videos as well and often they're really good. Not everything new is better.

But it recommends me videos I remember seeing 5 years ago that just seems unnecessary

The point isn't to make you a more informed and well-rounded person, it's to keep you on YouTube so you see more ads. I bet "old favorites" that might make you feel nostalgic or have rewatch value (it's not a gamble, you already know it's good) makes a significant number of people stay longer.

It’s funny because YouTube preroll and midroll ads were what finally broke the camel’s back many years ago and made me install an adblocker

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