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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

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amelius

Oh noooo...

"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Yeah right.

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"For free" isn't a part of that.

I wonder if the bandwidth even costs Google anything any more. Certainly they have peering agreements with any large ISP already. And they need some sort of egress to balance all the data collection they're doing from a bazillion Android devices and Chrome instances.

Not only peering agreements but 70%-90% [0] is directly served from your ISPs data center. google sends your ISP the server but rackspace, power and network is provided by the ISP.

[0] https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en

At this point they are closer to keeping our information hostage than making it universally accessible.

All of the videos are still accessible on youtube.com though?

Not very universal, if you ask me.

Universal in terms of people being able to access it for free, not that they can access it in any way they'd want to. You might disagree which how they used the word but that's what they mean.

But you can’t access them for free, you have to give up your privacy. And if you don’t have a device powerful enough to display YouTube’s bloated website, you can’t access them at all.

99.9% of people on the planet don't care about your first point, as being monetarily free is free enough, to them. Only in techie HN circles does anyone actually care about online privacy (which, for something like YouTube, is inconsequential, really; it's not like they have your government or criminal data or anything like that).

For your second point, most people who have phones can access YouTube, devices are not as weak as you think.

You really don't get what privacy is about.

Oh I get it, I and most people simply don't care.

Name a thing that's free. Usually, you have to give up something to access it. In the simplest case, attention.

With enough mental gymnastics, you can remove the word free from vocabularies.

Exactly! Everyone clearly understands that "free" means free of charge.

If you went to a lemonade stand that said "Free Lemonade" and they had a guy standing next to it who drew a picture of you picking up a lemonade, that wouldn't make the lemonade not free. If you decided that lemonade was not free because someone drew a picture of you, then sure, but you can walk that all the way to having no things that are free.

I'm a shameless pirate but YouTube is not a charity

Youtube videos regularly get removed or made private. I have a collection of Saved videos with a fair amount of videos now marked private so I can no longer view them, nor can I see what the video even was. Entire channels have been nuked before. Only option is to keep your own local copy if you really want to keep something.

any idea why some videos get marked as private? I too have experienced this, but only for a few videos, and I thought it was the video creator who marked them as private. but are you saying that it is actually YouTube who does this?

I also assume it is the video creator that does this, but the point is it is out of your control. Creators can revoke access to videos at any time, so if you really want to save it you need your own copy.

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