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Comment by thethimble | Hacker News Reader

Sorry I have the opposite perspectives as you:

I don’t want to visit independent creators’ websites to find their content - all with different UIs, etc. YouTube gives me a clean, centralized way to access content where I know I will be able to stream 4K and view content offline. This feels massively more convenient to me than having to maintain a catalog of offline videos…

While I think we all agree that centralization of control isn’t great, the consumer gets tremendous value from centralization and this value doesn’t get talked about enough.

Finally your assertion of “this content should belong to everyone” is idealistic. Who is going to pay to store and stream this content? What about the copyright of the actual content creators?

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I think you make a good point that centralization provides a lot of value today. However, if the protocols that youtube used where open-source then it would be easier to create generic user interfaces open to all content makers. Similar to what another poster said about RSS feeds.

I think one of the deeper critiques you and several others have made is that someone still has to pay for storage and streaming. Today I am paying. I bought the additional hard disk to store this on. In addition to my time and effort to collect the files. In the future I would pay some amount each month to stream what I have if it gave me access to everyone else's (essentially staking my video files).

I don't mind paying for a good peer-to-peer service. In fact I feel that I am losing a lot more by staying with a legacy system. Hence backing up the videos I like even though I have no method of distributing them.

In my dream world where I have the energy (and time) to devote to writing software outside of work I would love to build something that satisfies this need. p2p creative content sharing which is user friendly so people can just run it and start sharing their work while also helping to distribute the work of others

Well maybe. But the YouTube "protocol" keeps changing. The problems yt-dl has are related to trying to keep up with the protocol's enormous surface area and, as we can see here, sometimes changes have to be made quickly in response to legislation.

> all with different UIs, etc.

Let me introduce you to the concept of RSS and news/feed readers: https://aboutfeeds.com/

That's fine for discovering that an artist has put out a new video, not necessarily great for actually visiting their site and figuring out how to play it.

RSS seems to have worked out quite well for audio content, viz. podcasts; there doesn't seem to be any technical reason why it wouldn't work equally well for video media.

I personally use it for video media as well. One hit on my keyboard and the RSS item opens up mpv with the video playing. Computers are built to parse text, no reason to do it by hand sifting through websites with your mouse.

Figuring out how to play (or download) a video from a website URL is exactly what youtube-dl does.

> Finally your assertion of “this content should belong to everyone” is idealistic. Who is going to pay to store and stream this content? What about the copyright of the actual content creators?

That’s ironic because YouTube beat Viacom in 2013 because “this content should belong to everyone” not us so you can’t sue YouTube go sue the users.

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