Hacker News Reader

Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

>The bigger issue I see is the desire to link everything to a phone number.

Yep, I've had my youtube account since before Google bought youtube in 2006. Just this week I noticed that I am no longer able to put URLs in the descriptions of videos I upload to youtube. I have to "verify" by giving them my phone number before any clickable URLs are allowed in descriptions. But apparently all URLs are clickable URLs. Additionally, even videos I uploaded in 2008, if I go to edit their descriptions now and I originally included a URL, I cannot submit it.

Phone number "verification" is nasty. I suppose this is the end of my almost 2 decades of using youtube to host videos.

As for email spam prevention, I've run my own mailserver with a domain since 2011. I give each service an actual unique email address and then just catch-all emails sent to my domain. It works great.

View on HN

Just to explain this a bit:

> to put URLs in the descriptions [...] Phone number "verification" is nasty

Spam is a huge problem for any large platform with free accounts, and there aren't a lot of good options to prevent it. One set of mitigations is around increasing the cost of an identity. Email addresses are infinite and free, but working phone numbers are limited and usually cost money. So gating spammer-desired activities on phone numbers makes sense from their perspective. They could get a similar effect by requiring a credit card number, but people hate that even more.

If you'd like to work around this, I'd suggest getting another number for just this. Google Voice will give you one for free, and the Burner app will do it for $5/month if you sign up via web. Or in my case, my ISP gives me a free landline number with my internet service, which is great for this sort of thing.

Jumping through hops like this is a bad idea. If you disagree with their business practices don’t use them.

Beyond the moral argument, it’s easy to be in a situation where you get locked out because you no longer have access to a temporary phone number etc.

I get your point, but I have to pick my battles. I disagree with quite a lot of business practices. If I wanted ethical purity under capitalism, in short order I'd be subsistence farming and living the grim life of a preindustrial peasant. Which would be then giving up any power I might have to change the system. That strikes me as even less ethical, however pure it might be.

Heck, if I wanted ethical purity, I wouldn't be here contributing free content to YC. But I think the net good outweighs the net harm, so here I am.

> Email addresses are infinite and free, but working phone numbers are limited and usually cost money.

In many parts of the world, getting a phone number requires recording your government ID with the carrier (and burners are illegal, though usually for the carrier not the consumer), so the calculus then becomes “to prove you’re not a spammer, give up everything about your identity that was or ever will be known”. Which, no.

(There’s a reason why Russian democracy activists are divided between a “use Signal, everybody else is dodgy as all get out” camp and a “fuck no, don’t use Signal, doxxing you will be slipping $20 to a random SIM card salesman” camp. But parts of Western Europe are the same, and some are even ahead on e.g. unavailability of anonymous stored-value cards for transport or mandating testimony against yourself wrt encrypted storage.)

Four points:

1. Despite this, spam thrives on Google.

2. What happened to using AI to fight spam? Trained and intelligent humans can discern spam without knowing identity.

3. This still won’t prevent other email providers sending spam to Gmail.

4. Safety is often used as justification for more $$$.

That 5th ammendment is great isn't it. I wish we had it.

Services that require a phone number often will not accept a VOIP or a POTS landline phone number, only mobile numbers with txt capabilities.

They also often don't even support MVNOs. E.g. Blizzard not supporting Cricket numbers for account registration

This is somewhat of a bullshit argument. Not on your part! But on those who typically use it as justification.

Because there are two independent components to such a system: {increase cost of identity} + {protect privacy of identity}

When it's offered/justified to combat spam... the implication is that the solution will deliver both promises.

In reality, the first (concept of identity) gets built, marketing/sales realizes they can abuse the hell out of it for their ends, the second (privacy protection) gets overruled at the VP/C* level, and any privacy protections are quietly never implemented.

This happens again. And again. And again.

Google is probably the best case ethical scenario here, in regards to having standards around privacy data stewardship, and even they abuse it frequently when the profit is too large to ignore.

The only reasonable takeaway is that any system that permits mass tracking is too dangerous to privacy to allow to exist, and all should be opposed.

Or, as GDPR does, render companies liable for omissions from a privacy perspective.

You're ignoring the fact that this person has had a youtube account since 2006. That should count for something.

That is another possible mitigation, but is also not a perfect one. Valuing old accounts increases the incentive to steal old accounts and to create sleeper spam accounts that you let age until you're past the bar.

Ignoring the good in pursuit of the perfect is a cause of many ills. Consider the gross loss of trust when someone who has had an account for 16 years, almost since the establishment of the platform, is treated with suspicion. Businesses owe some accountability to their customers, including free users whose data they sell.

Advertising and tracking a bigger problems than spam IMO.

The most ridiculous part of this phone-verification BS is that many companies (e.g. Twitter, Discord) let you create an account without it but will then demand a number at some point later. This only hurts real users because spammers can just switch IPs and create a new account that they can use for a while.

> Google Voice will give you one for free

And what information do you have to give Google for that number so that you can avoid giving your phone number to Google?

https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHO...

> 1. Some people do not own phones, or do not wish to provide you with their telephone number when asked. Do not require a user to provide a phone number unless it is essential, and whenever possible try to provide a fallback to accommodate these users.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

> Do not require a user to provide a phone number unless it is essential

And note that a phone number is the number for calling a telephone, not some jumped-up pager. They want a mobile number so they can send you SMS messages. I hate SMS, and I deplore it's use as a part of any kind of security protocol.

If you don't intend to speak to me, you don't need my phone number. If you do, then my (VOIP) landline will serve you fine.

> If you don't intend to speak to me, you don't need my phone number.

I would amend that just a little: If I don't intend to have you speak to me, you don't need my phone number.

> What a bunch of hypocrites.

Is "your policies must be fully consistent with any advice given in any of your open source repos" really a standard we should hold big companies to? Because if we treat open-sourcing a text file of recommendations as the company making a statement or commitment to that effect, companies will be way more limited in what they allow their engineers to make public this way. With chilling effects that go beyond semi-humorous recommendations. ("Do you really want to try to open-source this library? You know how frustrating Legal and PR can be to deal with...")

> chilling effects

I don't think that term means what you think it means.

I'm using it metaphorically here, perhaps inappropriately.

What I'm trying to say is that there is a thing that is positive and we'd like to see more of (companies releasing things as open source) and there is an adjacent thing that we are considering pushing back against (companies including things in their repos which conflict with their actions). While it should be possible to discourage only the latter, in practice the effect would spill over to the former.

I don't think we should avoid calling out companies for their bs even if that means they might avoid doing some other less shitty things.

I think calling them out is fine! If a company has a harmful policy, definitely go ahead and say so. I'm specifically objecting here to calling them out as hypocrites, for having a policy that is in conflict with advice in one of their open source repos.

I think youtube's hegemony is past; it WAS the main point to upload your videos at some point because storage and bandwidth was expensive, and on-demand video conversion difficult and resource-intensive. But nowadays anyone can host videos on a $5/month shared server, with software to handle things like video conversion.

Youtube pivoted from "just" hosting videos to a community though, to the point where you won't get any views unless you are on youtube and play by their rules and network effects.

Depends on the videos, I think if you want someone to watch your 1080p@60fps without stutter like they do on youtube anywhere in the world you need edge architecture designed for video no? If so, I'd like to know the service which can do that for $5.

For static video you pretty much just need to serve it in a format browsers support with the correct MIME types, and make sure you have enough bandwidth.

Where it gets hairy is when you want to do live streaming…

Any suggested tech stack for this? I posted a similar question to this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34384732

> tech stack

linux?

a $5 vps running any webserver and an sftp client on your phone will do.

This really doesn't work very well for a great many users.

You can have all the bandwidth in the world, but the magic that Youtube does is mainly dealing with the users' bandwidth, for example, it switches video resolution on the fly when it notices that frames are going to have to be dropped soon.

If only browsers would natively support adaptive quality video streaming. Perhaps we should ask the biggest browser vendor to implement that, surely they won't have any conflict of interest there.

No, that sort of thing only matters if you're going to have a lot of people watching the video.

Hosting isn't the important part. Discoverability is.

This severly underestimates the resources required to serve video to even small audiences.

Depends on the resolution. For short-ish clips with reasonable sizes it is not that much at all - as can be seen with the Fediverse as well as commercial social networks all having their own video hosting.

> I suppose this is the end of my almost 2 decades of using youtube to host videos.

As a user I can only hope that more people do stop using YouTube, preferrably choosing something that serves video files directly instead.

> As for email spam prevention, I've run my own mailserver with a domain since 2011. I give each service an actual unique email address and then just catch-all emails sent to my domain. It works great.

This works but only because running your own mail server is too uncommon for anyone to care about. If it was more common, the advertisers or other privacy violators would specifically check for catch-all domains and then strip the entire local part of the email for your user id.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com