Hacker News Reader

> however, what is a reasonable alternative for a content creator who wants to publish their videos and be able to build an audience?

I think it's more instructive to look at it from the other side. What's the reasonable alternative for a video hosting service to doing this kind of policing? Remember it's not really an option to just throw video over the fence, DMCA requirements mean you have to be responsive. And thus there's a built-in incentive to cut a deal with the content owners to preemptively prevent the DMCA claims (which are expensive!) by doing this sort of automated policing.

It's true that not every host does this, but every host that doesn't do this either does it in violation of the law or eats significant overhead that needs to be recouped in some other way (i.e. by paying their content creators less! Check the author's channel, this is someone who's clearly on youtube for revenue. Would even she jump ship given that it would probably cost her money?)

Really, this isn't something Google can fix. It's a problem with the legal regime that imagines that all infringement is a bright line definition and that preemptive takedowns are the best solution.

The alternative is to responsibly scale your service. If your platform is so big that it can only be moderated by algorithms, and the algorithms don't work, then it's too big. Scale down until, at the very least, you can hire enough humans to review complaints when the algorithm does something wrong. Even better would be to have a human review every flagged violation to confirm it.

Obviously, hiring humans is expensive, and nobody is forcing them to do it, but that doesn't make it an unreasonable alternative. I consider it unreasonable to design an unethical system with the sole excuse that it makes more money that way.

So... which providers have responsibly scaled, in your opinion? All we have are tiny hosts (mostly porn) running by the seat of their pants and occasionally disappearing in a conflagration of lawsuits, and big folks like TikTok and Google and Facebook with draconian preemptive enforcement of various forms.

I think that argues strongly that the service you want to see is "unreasonable" given the regulation regime we have. You can't put this on the hosts, you'll just be disappointed. Call your representative.

To leave a ton of money on the table, and let the competition eat that space, because 0.1% of DMCA requests would be served with an overreaction?

Sorry, this is not going to make business sense. If you want a free video publishing platform that does user outreach for you, you got to pay a price; the false positives is a part of the price, alas.

That’s why we need a regulation change to make it so that you can’t outcompete by being unethical.

I don't think it's viable, but I welcome any attempts to actually imagine how such regulation might work, what would it consist of.

I definitely don’t have a general case solution. A solution for this case would be something like “a provider of video hosting services is not allowed to take down videos automatically without having a human review each request.”

The law never had that intent though, and getting it into there will most probably be impossible .

I’m not saying that we will get this outcome, just that it’s the outcome that we need. Unfortunately I agree with you that we won’t.

Easy. Put the burden of legal fees and risk of censure on a DMCA mill for false positives. This means if a host takes down content to maintain their safe harbor status, and the person can prove the copyright claim was false or frivolous, you get a cause of action to counter-sue the original claimant. Moonlight Sonata is in the public domain. The teacher's performance != anyone elses. Therefore, false, therefore it should have reprecussions for the signing attorney. If it was pre-emptive by Google without a DMCA request from an external entity, that's a different issue.

People don't get it. Perjury actually means something. When you have the blade of perjury over head, it is absolutely the case that as a human being, if you have doubt, you should be saying it, or you're misrepresenting the truth of the matter.

The level of perjury inherent to generating these claims via automated process is absurd. It is absolutely reasonable that when you have a group going around and using the legal system as a cudgel, the proper response is to return the favor.

This process should not scale at all if people would punch back. Perjury should be trivial to prove when no one even looked at the content in qustion aside from an analysis suite.

Regardless; there is always the self-hosted option.

I agree it doesn't make business sense, but it does make moral sense. And yes, this hypothetical service probably wouldn't be free.

well what kind of a monstrosity is this buisness sense then when it is strcturally incompatible with any moral whatsoever (as seems to be more or less the consensus of the first couple comments here)

Completely agreed. I'd love to see Google (and let's get Twitch in there as well, while we're at it) working with content creators to push for legal change. To me, that's what's most disappointing: Google will spend millions on lobbying to legally collect more and more information about me; but, they don't have the inclination to use their size and scale to push a significant expansion of Fair Use Doctrine (or, if they do, they certainly aren't vocal about it).

It was out of self interest of course, but, Google did just finish a decade long, costing probably hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees, battle with Oracle to fight for reasonable copyright interpretation for software developers.

This current situation on YT is the result of another multi-billion dollar legal fight with the music industry. I don't like how YT handles this either but I put most of the blame on the music industry for it.

Also remember Google Books, which was a huge (seriously, huge) project that spent years with full funding only to be killed by the publishing industry because they couldn't justify it under the notion of "fair use" we're stuck with.

you are getting to things confused here: fair use of copyrighted material, and being responsible and responsive for a quasi judical algorithmic process and its mistakes.

(remember its beethovens moonlight sonata, one of the most famous classical pieces period. i dont think you even could copyright a part of it, at least not just the sequence of notes)

> And thus there's a built-in incentive to cut a deal with the content owners to preemptively prevent the DMCA claims (which are expensive!) by doing this sort of automated policing.

How are DMCAs expensive?

You need to pay a human being at $15/hour or more to spend a few minutes to review the claim and response, on videos that on average are probably making you a dime or less in ad revenue. These companies receive a lot of DMCA claims, most of which are absolutely valid.

>I think it's more instructive to look at it from the other side.

I'm cynical, so I feel it's much more likely that a competitor will push actual change to come (be it through google self improving, or through future lawsuits challenging the current laws) than for a current monopolistic entity to finding alternatives to problems that don't inconvenience them at large.

>Remember it's not really an option to just throw video over the fence, DMCA requirements mean you have to be responsive

"Responsive" is the key word to be challenged here. I'm unsure if automating a removal at the behest of any barely or unverified account is the bare minimum "reponsiveness" required legally. The big problem that won't be resolved without someone legally challenging it is that there's no negative consequence to filing a DMCA claim. Or at least, there wasn't as recently as 4 years ago.

> what is a reasonable alternative for a content creator..?

Insurance? I'm only half kidding. No individual youtuber has the deep pockets to stir the slumbering Googlebeast enough to get it to notice and correct its mistake, but all youtubers certainly do. Conversely, perhaps there's a market for a we-only-get-paid-if-we-win lawyers to spring up here, as they have with workplace injuries and such. Youtube's resolution process may not be friendly to creators, but juries probably will be, if the creator bypasses Google and sues the party making the claim. "Sues for what?" I dunno - emotional damages? Tortious claims? They'll figure something out, I imagine.

Maybe those are silly ideas, but they're certainly less silly than waiting for Google to fix things...

Or join the youtube creators union https://fairtube.info/

I'd disagree slightly with the parent post here: the conclusion shouldn't be "get away from Google" so much as "If you have to use Google, understand what you're getting into." If you deal with unsavory people, things will go south eventually. If you deal with Google, sooner or later things like this will happen. Expect it, build it into your strategy, but don't be surprised by it.

How do you "build that into your strategy"? That is so easy to type, but unactionable. A piano teacher can't build her own streaming platform, and if she goes to a different platform she'll die in obscurity.

Concretely, what should she have done differently?

my thoughts would be:

- while building up your following on google, market your brand to your own site(s) as much as possible

- build brand an alternate streaming site(s)

- have a way to reach your followers in the event you get shut down - email list, etc. to inform your followers to switch to the alternate site

Do many people watch through embedded videos or do people watch in the YouTube app? There's a convenience in having all your videos in 1 place. I've had a couple podcasts move to Spotify only and I stopped listening even though I have a Spotify subscription.

It's that assumption of "dying in obscurity" that gives Google their damnable network effect.

If there isn't enough marketing advice out there about finding as many channels and methods as you can, I'll eat this comment with barbecue sauce.

Read up, utilize all the advice on everything except Google-owned properties, accept the lower visibility, and help neuter the algorithm beast.

Or accept that you're riding the tiger and never complain again.

> If there isn't enough marketing advice out there about finding as many channels and methods as you can, I'll eat this comment with barbecue sauce.

The advice is all there, all right. It's just that most of it is "join a platform that's NOT being used by literally everyone on the planet", which is not very effective when "literally everyone on your planet" is the "raw material" that you fish your viewers out of.

>Expect it, build it into your strategy, but don't be surprised by it.

This is kind of like saying... Expect failure, build failure into you strategy, and move blindly forward believing there is no other alternative.

I'd say it's more like:

Go ahead and build your initial business on quicksand.

Know that you'll get lots of traffic, but it might sink into the ground at any time.

Use the profits to build up a solid future property that isn't built on quicksand.

I'd say that accurately defines the entire entertainment spectrum in a nutshell. Content creator, game developer, asiring actor, etc.

Problem is few make enough money to get to your last step. And those that do can pay others to deal with the quicksand and are no longer interested in the fight to clean it up for good.

Explain this to my mom please. P50 users of the internet could not give two shits about these entities.

Yeah - agreed.

If I was a creator I’d use YouTube, but also have backed up local copies of videos. Preferably hosted elsewhere in case the channel gets in trouble too.

You have to be where the users are and YouTube is by far the best video streaming service (with the largest audience).

> what is a reasonable alternative for a content creator who wants to publish their videos and be able to build an audience?

I've noticed several tech-related content producers copying their videos over to LBRY/Odysee as a backup in case the YT algorithm decides to cancel them.

These are great solutions to keep your content if Google decides to lock you out or destroy your content; but, they aren't platforms on which you can build a content creation side of a business.

There are ways to avoid these copyright guys going after you with a truly decentralized system where node stores only a fraction of the content and there is no central place to ban content. Just like the concept of internet was DODs answer to a threat nuking communication there must be an answer to the threat of copyright trolling. I am very much waiting to a decentralized content platform to show up that is immune to content filtering abuse and much easier on the ISPs bandwidth wise than the current YT or similar sites.

> however, what is a reasonable alternative for a content creator who wants to publish their videos and be able to build an audience?

Put your videos on Youtube and PeerTube.

Does PeerTube have ads or monetization?

No. But you can advertise something in your own videos as people often do nowadays.

That is a lot harder to do, and only the most successful content creators will be able to find sponsors on their own. In addition, that is a lot of extra work for a small content creator.

... or the small content creator gets a random permanent ban for "REASON WE CAN'T TELL YOU SO YOU CAN'T GAME US", and the easy road turns out to be a dead end.

And you wind up doing the extra work anyway.

I'd honestly never heard of PeerTube so I searched it. Ah, they have a "about peertube" video! Should be great! In the first 30 seconds of the video, there were 1-3s long hiccups 4 times. Not exactly a confidence-inspiring start. After figuring out how to find more videos, I tried to play some--but, experienced more hiccups or load times from 20s to a full minute--and some just flat out didn't play at all.

I'm not saying PeerTube doesn't look like interesting tech; but this is clearly aimed at a far more tech-savvy crowd and to put it out there in response to asking for a, "reasonable alternative for a content creator who wants to publish their videos and be able to build an audience" is just totally missing the mark of what makes YouTube successful for creators and viewers alike.

> 1-3s long hiccups 4 times

PeerTube is not one single website. It is a decentralized platform, where everyone can set up their own server and it will work as a part of the whole system (like emails work). This is why it will never be owned by a single entity like Google.

You probably chose a slow server. It does not mean that the whole PeerTube is slow.

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

As stated above, I watched the promotional video from PeerTube themselves on the JoinPeertube.org website and experienced multiple hiccups in under 30s. If their own hosting isn't cutting it, what chance does anyone else have?

> You probably chose a slow server.

I didn't choose a server. I chose a video. The moment the service asks me to think about what server is hosting it is the moment I don't care enough to jump through those hoops. Never underestimate the value of a consistent experience.

Once again, I don't want to be disparaging to PeerTube--it's a cool concept and I understand the foundations behind it. But, spending 10 minutes with it earlier today made it obvious that it's not going to challenge YouTube as a content discovery platform.

Edit: Corrected the URL from "PeerTube.com" to "JoinPeertube.org" -- I typed "PeerTube.com" in haste and just assuming the URL.

> from PeerTube themselves on the PeerTube.com

PeerTube.com is not "PeerTube themselves". This is one of the servers, not the best one. This is the official PeerTube website: https://joinpeertube.org. It will show search results on many servers.

> The moment the service asks me to think about what server is hosting it is the moment I don't care enough to jump through those hoops.

You only choose your server once, like you chose Youtube once. You do not need to jump through hoops.

> If their own hosting isn't cutting it

PeerTube (actually FramaSoft) is a non-profit organization. You shouldn't expect huge resources from them. Also peertube.com is not their server AFAIK.

I corrected the URL in my post. I was on JoinPeertube.org and watched the, "What is PeerTube?" video that is embedded in that page. If I watched it again, it might not buffer at all. Maybe it was a bad moment. But I consume a lot of content on YouTube and I can't remember the last time a video buffered a single time--let alone several times in the first 30 seconds.

I'm honestly done with this ridiculous strawman about whether the video works. PeerTube is not a viable alternative to YouTube from a content creator's perspective for many reasons which I've already stated; but, I'll summarize:

1. It lacks even a tiny fraction of the distribution and discovery reach offered by YouTube.

2. It lacks the monetization features that allows YouTube to become part of a business.

3. It requires me to provide my own hosting and technical setup which is far more involved than dropping a video into your browser like you get with YouTube.

4. If I, as a consumer with no knowledge or interest in how PeerTube works, "choose the wrong server," I get a crappy experience with videos buffering for ages so I'm disinclined to continue to use the platform leading to reduced audiences on the platform and the feeling of, "doing extra work for nothing."

You can defend it all you want; but, your responses so far have been thinly veiled, "You're too stupid to get it right." I guess maybe I am; but, I'll stand behind that being the single biggest reason that PeerTube simply cannot be a platform to rival YouTube.

> 3. It requires me to provide my own hosting and technical setup

This is wrong. You choose someone's server and use it just like you use Youtube.

> "You're too stupid to get it right."

I never said or implied that. Yes, using PeerTube is slightly harder, but the benefit you get is huge. If it is not worth for you, you can give your live to Google...

> I'll stand behind that being the single biggest reason that PeerTube simply cannot be a platform to rival YouTube.

Well, I would count the greens first and then for rival, a joke. They can never share the love alphabet can share with the tube. You have to give money to take money.

The beautiful thing about technology is that anyone can do it. You feel like people are implying you're too stupid to do it, which no one will ever (or should ever) say since part of everyone's coming to terms with tech is screwing up in all the myriad ways required until you get it right.

Before YouTube, people self-hosted. That is still an option. You can drop your work product on a server, configure it to only accept requests from servers or locations you control, then link in your content til the cows come home. You may need a cache to handle higher traffic loads, but once you find a setup that works for you, you're golden.

Use Youtube for discovery all you want, but understand that someone else's computer will never be as immune to external sources of disruption and malicious bureaucracy as something you own and independently operate.

If it's important enough to become a revenue stream, it's important enough to accomodate some cap and op-ex to ensuring you have a fallback option for. The rest of the world can be relied upon, however, to want to get their licks in whenever somebody has nice things. Plan accordingly.

This is why we all can't get along and just have nice things.

>I can't remember the last time a video buffered a single time

happens quite often when trying to switch resolutions. Becuase Google wants to continually tell my 200 Mb/s connection that 480p is the optimal streaming solution, and now that is spreading to mobile as well.

> your responses so far have been thinly veiled, "You're too stupid to get it right."

I didn't get that impression at all, and I think we interpreted this thread very differently. The point wasn't that PeerTube would be the new Youtube, it would be that if you don't have terabytes of local storage to keep your videos, you can upload it to a place where DMCAs won't mean your videos being lost in the void.

No need for caustic language.