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Comment by gizajob | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to build your own YouTube, but hosting video content on your own website is a pretty simple proposition nowadays.

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It's not a simple proposition for someone who is aggressively deplatformed.

You depend on other companies to exist on the internet and these companies don't have to do business with you. At minimum, you need a domain, you need a place to put your servers, and you need an ISP. For a business to not fail, you also need a way to earn revenue. Each one of these is a pressure point.

While these platforms are in effect the contemporary town hall, the same thing would occur if I went into the real-world Town Hall and started shouting my mouth off with speech that was offensive to 50+% of the population. I would have the right, however, to stand outside the town hall and carry on saying whatever I liked. If I was inciting hatred or violence, the people outside would also become annoyed and I'd be spoken to and told to stop, generally by someone in uniform.

This is a non-sequitur. Ethical concerns are orthogonal to the difficulty of the undertaking.

Can you enlighten me what that means?

I mean, there exist hundreds of pirate TV/Movie streaming websites with huge catalogs that manage to serve HD video streaming to scores of people at once.

If they can do it while being constantly hounded by publishers and DRM enforcers who have unlimited money and drive to strike them down, a random smart group of people can do it too.

Yeah but how do you create engagement without addictive algos?

Host stuff people want but can't get anywhere else.

People don't know what they "want". I'm pretty sure people are not actively searching for influencers...they are "recommended"/shoved on their screen.

Kind of like how I think about things like TikTok in general, nobody would actually pay for that, they just use it because it's free.

He'll need to work that out for himself too, given those expensive algos have also been provided free of charge.

By allowing all kinds of nastiness? I would pay for that service a lot, just let me to watch anything with no censorship and copyright issues and from any country.

That's a good point, why don't Russia/NK/Iran/etc allow people to cheaply watch content owned by companies based in unfriendly (i.e. USA) countries?

I think "cheaply" word is kind of extra in your question.

Of course they do this for more convinceable lying to all their population. Of course any civilized country should block that kind of super-nasty resource, with jailing all their creators if possible.

I'm not actually sure what site you're referring to but I think you missed the point I was making.

The comment I was originally replying to was saying they'd pay for a service that had no censorship so ideally such a service would charge so "cheaply" is kind of a requirement in my question as there needs to be a cost.

Of course, taking content down for "copyright infringement" is a form of censorship (one often require by law but censorship nonetheless).

Already been done (Russia did just that with allofmp3.com back in the 2000s). It invited a lot of WTO drama until the site was sued out of existence.

> In August 2007, Denis Kvasov, head of the company which owned AllofMP3.com, was acquitted of all charges stemming from copyright infringement prosecution

I've never heard of allofmp3.com [1] but it doesn't sound like it was sued out of existence as all of the Russia court cases went in favor of their citizens (what a surprise!). Instead anybody outside of Russia was successfully prosecuted or payment processors "illegally"[2] stopped working with them.

I guess if Russia actually withdrawals from the WTO [3] we might see a return of allofmp3.com then. Although you probably have to buy using some form of cryptocurrency. Probably won't be that hard to convince people to use bitcoin atms to watch the Avengers for 2$.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllOfMP3

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20070823070406/http://eng.cnews....

[3]: https://www.iisd.org/articles/news/russia-plans-exit-world-t...

I imagine this can be manipulated by other accounts to drive traffic. He can say something controversial and then it goes viral on the big platforms. Then he could have a watermark of his website on the clip so people know where to go to see him.

Until Google Delist your website from Search, HyperScaler and Mid Tier Hosting refuse to host you.

Given Google lists Nazi content and heaven knows what else, do you have any examples of people like Tate whose websites they've delisted?

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