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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of Google and I don't have a lot of respect for the YouTube selection algorithm. However this culture of expecting Google to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.

There is an unwritten social contract here. Google is willing to host and organise a vast number of videos because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then Google won't host the videos, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy YouTube in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).

If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if Google's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use YouTube - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make PeerTube work or investigate the long list of alternative video platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms .

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As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month, possibly more, to run a YouTube channel without.

Why is running ads the _only_ choice? Why can't a creator opt to pay to host videos on their channel with limitations? $10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.

As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: I use Freetube. Please use it until abusive adverts and practices aren't a thing anymore.

If you're just using YouTube for hosting - there's other ways to pay for that, Vimeo comes to mind.

What about if you're using YouTube as a hosting platform and viewer acquisition channel, but not as a monetization channel?

Then you'd have to pay for viewer acquisition part and no way in hell you're getting that kind of a platform with creators paying for development/hosting without advertising.

There are plenty of third-party video hosts out there that let you do this. Wistia, Vimeo, etc.

I know, and neither of them are the second biggest search engine in the world and have _all_ the traffic and viewers.

You'd need to pay based on traffic too not just video total. And have a system in place to add payment if your videos became hits. Would really curtail amateur uploads.

Conceivably an option for professionals with business models but hard to see it being a default for a service that wants traction.

In fairness to Google, costs to host video would scale with viewers. Unless creators are willing to pay increasingly excessive costs as their viewerbass grows (which I doubt) some kind of per-viewer cost (like ads) needs to be charged.

There's no guarantee creators can collect as much income without Google either. Google has proven they can get way more income from ads than pretty much everyone else, and even bug channels with sponsorships still derive a very large income portion from Google ads (based on what I've heard from LinusTechTips videos)

Then how are Vimeo doing it? They're fixed price.

The cost to serve the video file is much lower than what Google says it costs. Moving a terabyte of data is quite cheap to do, yet GCP, AWS and ilk continue to have eye-wateringly high data usage pricing.

> Then how are Vimeo doing it? They're fixed price.

They limit you to 2TB per month of bandwidth:

* https://vimeo.com/upgrade-plan

If a video goes viral and you shoot past that you'll probably get a call from them.

You also have a finite amount of storage space available with them, which depends on the account tier you're at: no infinite storage like with Youtube. (And with 4K video nowadays, that can be burned through quickly.)

In this scenario you’d also have to pay for bandwidth since that’s the variable cost here. The more views you get, the more you pay. And obviously you wouldn’t get any money from YouTube for views since they aren’t making money from your videos.

Genuinely curious, would you still go for it?

> In this scenario you’d also have to pay for bandwidth since that’s the variable cost here.

For Google? You think Google get a monthly bill for their bandwidth?

Most of Google, AWS and ilks traffic is moved over settlement free peering and fixed cost infrastructure: https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/level-3-seals-...

Whether 100TB or 1500TB of data are delivered to one ISP at one peering point in a given month has minimal effect, that 10Gbps, 100Gbps or larger port is a fixed cost that will exist regardless of traffic.

Precisely. I used to rent dedicated servers in the early 2000s that gave me such options.

I noticed my very old Youtube videos have degraded in quality. I'd rather pay monthly then be surprised to find out important videos I trusted to Google have been effectively destroyed.

Do you have any evidence for that claim? Do you have the original sources to compare to? Can you provide examples? Genuinely curious.

What do you think of something like nebula?

Yea, i also wonder how people feel about Nebula [1] as an alternative;

It seems the problem is, with YouTubes monopoly, other services have almost no chance to succeed because of the "Network Effect"...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_(streaming_service)

It's not the second biggest search engine in the world :(

As a youtube premium subscriber... since I'm already paying let me set my home screen only to my subscriptions.

Also let me opt-out of the algoritm.

You can opt out of the algorithm by choosing to pause and clear your watch history, you won't have a feed, can only view your subscriptions

+1. I have done this. It works well.

I watch videos from my subscriptions in reverse chronological order and that’s it.

> hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month

$100 wouldn't even cover the storage mate. Let's say you've got 2 thousand hours of content (smallest amount that qualifies for "thousands")

At 2k resolution, that'd be around 30TB And you'll want to preprocess it to 1080p, 720p, 480p, so add another 15tb for the other resolutions.

And YouTube supports 4k, so if you're shooting at that resolution, you can add another 50tb on top.

Purely storage you're already looking at a ~$2500 monthly bill.

And then you're gonna have to host and serve it to hundreds of thousands of viewers, the bandwidth cost is gonna be astronomical. Every 100 hours of streamed content is gonna be another ~$100 on top. With a 15 minute video, that'd be 400 views.

And I significantly rounded down on every calculation as this is napkin math. If you'd use AWS S3 pricing for storage and egress you can safely double my dollar numbers.

I’m sure you’re right but how does Google afford to do it then? Do they have methods to drastically lower those costs? $2500 per month for each creator seems like it wouldn’t be a business worth running.

There are very, very few YouTube creators that actually have thousands of hours of video.

Even if it's a vtuber/live streamer they'd still have to publish ~6 hours every day for a full year to get to 2 thousand hours

It's pretty much the peak of the iceberg

I think your pricing is quite a little bloated. Having said that, nobody can even in a lifetime produce thousands of hours of valuable content. But the fact that it's free to do so has content creators dump all their crap on youtube instead of being forced to cut it down to actually valuable 1% of it.

That seems like someone has some extremely comfortable margins, $2,500/month could buy me ~50TB of hard disk space at consumer prices. I'm sure that sort of estimate is undercalling the complexity of a storage operation, but nonetheless - there'd have to be some discounts to be found. If nothing else, Backblaze claims to be able to store that much for $300/month.

$100/month for 50TB probably isn't feasible but start compromising on resolution and something could be made to work.

To get 50TB usable storage you're gonna need at least 100TB, otherwise everything will go down once a single disk fails until you've restored the raid.

Unless you want to be completely capped and unable to ever publish again you're gonna have to add at least a few TB (+10TB, 120TB total) and then you'll need a secondary storage for backup, so another 60 TB, 180TB total

At $320 per 16TB disk that can handle being active 24/7 (actually only ~14 TB usable, but let's ignore that) you're left with $3750 at the very least, ignoring that you'll have to continuously replace them, electricity is also pretty expensive with HDDs. House them in a server etc

You too are wildly off with your math, as I'm literally flooring every calculation. Realistic estimates by a professional are gonna be _way_ higher, especially because this kind of storage doesn't have the iops to serve video to multiple consumers. It'd be at best a NAS that can serve to maybe 2-4 ppl at a time

> ...as I'm literally flooring every calculation.

But your calculations are for a different problem. You're not solving for "what is the best I can do for $100". You're solving for "what do I need to clone Google's infrastructure for thousands of hours of video footage".

Eg, you doubled the amount of storage space to avoid rebuilding RAIDs when a disk goes down. There is an obvious alternative - don't do that, let the RAID go down and rebuild it while eating the downtime. That sort of thing isn't a big deal for discount video hosting. Maybe even force people to keep their own backups.

I'm adressing the original comment (by movedx) of giving channels on YouTube the ability to disable ads and let the channel provider/creator eat the cost instead.

So yes, I'm basing my calculations on YouTubes service. What you're imagining is obviously an option for individuals that only want to serve to few individuals at a time, but is entirely offtopic to what was proposed here

I think if you reread the comment you'll find that movedx didn't propose what you think he proposed. At no point did he suggest what you seem to be cost-estimating.

He suggested $100/month for 300 videos and noted that he was experienced in content creating.

> As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month, possibly more, to run a YouTube channel without.

Literally the the first paragraph

That is two sentences, but his post has a few more and those two don't say quite what you're interpreting them as. He didn't say that he expected YouTube to host all his content for $100/month. There are two separate ideas - one presenting credentials and the other was saying that he'd be happy to pay for hosting if he could avoid ads - but not that he'd expect to be hosting thousands of hours at YouTube quality for $100/month.

He didn't actually say or imply what you think he did. In fact a later part of the comment ("10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.") clarifies that he meant what he wrote and it is something quite different to what you're picking out.

Okay, let's go with that. It's still very few views just for egress, as mentioned: with a 15min video that's something like 400 views on one video.

My point from the beginning was that $100/month is not enough to host a successful channel on YouTube. You absolutely can do it on vimeo, self hosted jellyfin or similar. Plenty of options around. It just get extremely expensive if you're serving content to hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers.

You can probably start at $10/month with a hetzner shared instance and 1tb storage and unmetered 1 Gigabit Ethernet. Gonna be fine for ~2 simultaneous viewers

I only addressed the storage first because his idea was so far outside of a realistic price. Storage cost is a rounding error on the invoice if you're serving videos to consumers with views as a semi successful YouTube channel gets

> You can probably start at $10/month with a hetzner shared instance and 1tb storage and unmetered 1 Gigabit Ethernet. Gonna be fine for ~2 simultaneous viewers

I think that is still overcooking it. Peertube has a FAQ on the subject [0], going off that it's probably achievable to have 1,000 concurrent users at ~$50/month+storage. Not commercially advisable, it is pretty obvious that everyone in the game ends up going ad-supported and that makes sense to me. But YouTube could in support something like that for small channels without too much trouble. The issue here for the median channel case doesn't look like costs in the >$1,000/month range as much as foregone revenue and operational complexity. The vast majority of content creators don't get hundreds of thousands of views.

[0] https://joinpeertube.org/faq#should-i-have-a-big-server-to-r...

Especially if you can just serve 720p instead of 1080p during the "downtime".

You can get 4x22TB (60TB with RAID5) for ~120$ so for less than 250$ you get the storage with geo redundancy.

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx65/

You literally skipped the part where I said I'd be happy to be limited to a set number of videos per channel.

You also need to be happy with a limited amount of views with that scheme/ videos going private after that, because storage is literally the cheapest cost. I used that as an example how far removed you're from a realistic price estimate

"However this culture of expecting Google to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly."

"Freeloading" off a $2T company. Not really. What is really going on.

If Google was concerned about "freeloading" then they would not be encouraging people to store their data "in the cloud"; they would be encouraging them to store it on their own computers. Google wants people to upload data "for free" to Google servers. They design software and hardware to coerce people into uploading, e.g., "syncing".

It's not cool to invade peoples' privacy for profit. That is a social contract that has been broken.

Google could charge fees for storing peoples' data, these fees could cover the costs and allow for some profit, but then they would not be a $2T company. Only a relatively small number of people would pay. The Google customer is the advertiser not the uploader. Thus, this alleged "social contract" to allow Google to spy on people through their computer use, including surreptitiously sending data to Google, is motivated by greed.

That's the ugly culture.

What happens when Google stops giving unlimited cloud storage to educational institutions. This was answered yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41404530

Top comment: "If [the university computer science department's] cluster somehow ever runs out of disks, I'm happy to donate a terabytes worth, but like hell I'm giving money to big-G for cloud storage."

>this culture of expecting Google to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly

it's not ugly at all: parasites deserve their place in the ecosystem right alongside carnivores.

What I don't like is people like this who broadcast and evangelize as if google will allow it to keep happening. I'd rather it survived longer hiding under the radar.

"hey everybody I discovered a secret hack to get a free donut with your coffee!!!"... how about just keep doing it yourself, donuts for life?

That definitely seems like the least ethical response to finding a free donut loophole? Unless it's not a loophole at all, but just a marketing tactic deployed by the coffeemaker.

Full donut disclosure.

you are responding to a comment that started by justifying parasitism. To make an effective counter argument along the lines you've chosen, you need to address that part of the comment and explain why parasites in nature don't "deserve" to exist, or at least show that they are also unethical. That is/ought to be something easy to prove, right?

Responding to a comment does not imply that one disagrees with the entirety or any part of said comment and does not necessitate crafting an effective counter argument. In fact, I am not making an argument as to parasitism, parasites, or their right to exist at all.

The closest thing I am making to an argument is that, as a human, if you find what you believe to be a bug in a system and you choose to exploit the bug repeatedly for your own gain while keeping it a secret to yourself, this is, in fact, the least ethical choice you, as a human, can make. (More ethical choices include: not telling anyone but walking away and never exploiting the bug again, telling the system maintainers about the bug confidentially, exposing the bug publicly, etc...)

And I guess, in some way, my response is implying that wanting other humans to make the least ethical choice in these sorts of situations and displaying animosity towards those who make a more ethical choice is a little bit strange.

> the least ethical choice you, as a human, can make

you assigned me "human", but I identify as a parasite

i follow the laws of logic, and if the logic of the system gives me a donut, I will take the donut. if the logic changes and i don't get a donut, i will not complain. It is not unethical to follow the logic of the system.

now, as to you as a human, are you saying that you have never downloaded a youtube video to a file on your disk?

No, I am not saying anything like that. I think we must be talking past eachother here.

I had a lot more sympathy for this argument a few years ago, but lately Google does enough short-term thinking all by itself that it seems fine to just take what you can get for as long as it does something that happens to be useful to you, amidst all the stuff it does that is useful only to itself.

Just be prepared for the good times to end at any moment.

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

Sounds like they can't really complain if someone took that information and made it universally accessible :)

That level of analysis is on par with arguing for robbing someone's house because they believe that social welfare is a good idea. To influence the world in a positive way (for yourself or others) it is necessary to look a little deeper into how to make situations sustainable.

"sustainable" while making the board $20bn quarterly profit, of course.

Google can stop making the official experience terrible any time it wants. Until then they deserve nothing. Poor poor abused google definitely on the bottom of this abusive relationship.

> There is an unwritten social contract here.

Is this the same unwritten social contract which means we shouldn't use a mute button on ads? After all, the TV company gets paid to send ads to us, and muting those ads means less ad effectiveness.

Don't use the toilet during an ad break either.

Nor use the +15 seconds functionality on video recorder playback to skip ads.

You can see how the social contract for my entire life include the option to avoid ads, and even with 'freeloaders', the broadcast TV business model worked.

YouTube started long after Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. ("the Betamax case") established time shifting as an allowed practice in the US. Their business model, based on any implied social contract, must therefore include that possibility, eg, that people may watch content via downloaders.

They could respond by, for example, placing ads directly in the downloaded video steam. This would mean less profit, but no social contract requires customers to keep a company profitable.

And it would be odd indeed if broadcast TV had a more effective business model in the face of freeloaders than online video.

Do you think that any significant number of users are circumventing advertisements on YouTube?

No one has the right to control my client just because I visited their server. If Google doesn't want my client, they can easily block me.

Acting like people running custom clients are thieves or something is ridiculous.

Fortunately, YouTure offers the premium account for a small price I gladly pay. I want YouTube to be around, and I don't want it to turn to trash in a desperate attempt to turn a profit.

This also frees me from any qualms about using alternative clients, which are superior in certain situations.

Google itself is the leech and parasite. It has embedded itself into private correspondence, discovery of internet resources, and a ton of other things, going as far as vacuuming up offline credit card transactions to spy on people. Google and honor do not belong in the same sentence.

Hosting videos costs a lot of money and alternatives to Youtube will see only limited success as long as Google can subsidize the service with the money from the massive spy machine.

Causing maximum drain of resources for Google while providing as little as possible for their spy machine is the ethical choice. Let them bleed. Youtube is the largest obstacle to honest businesses that provide video hosting and viewing in exchange for money - instead of making money from spying on users in ways they are unable to fully comprehend and consent to.

But there is more content than there are people who can watch it. What do you think happens when the production curve grows way past the consumption curve?

Genuinely curios. What happens?

Google will be forced to delete unviewed content more frequently, or start charging for hosting video. The latter of which would probably help reduce the amount of garbage content on YouTube.

A lot of garbage content on youtube is exactly because of google’s offered incentive to get users to produce more content. I wouldn’t be upset if clickbait garbage gets archived away.

. There is an unwritten social contract here

It's not a contract though, its a dictatorship (which they have the right to do) but it's been getting worse and worse for the consumer, and is just another loss leader until who have consumers trapped and then start charging, abusing, etc... I'm with you in spirit, but google is not a good participant in this agreement as of late.

The social contract was to show ads. Gathering people's data even on websites they don't even own was not the social contract. Google broke the contract and to suggest otherwise is gaslightling. Google can either start blindly showing context-relevant ads with no tracking or they can eat the loss from those willing to use free services.

It’s not ads, it’s tracking and profiling to better manipulate you

…by showing you more ads.

Don’t be torn. They could have offloaded the hosting using P2P tech, but they prefer to silo the world’s video library. Google is the parasitical leech.

Hey, you want a monopoly on information while at the same time operating the largest ad network in the world?

Then don't complain if people block your stupid ads and count yourself lucky that the government didn't split your megacorp into several tiny companies

The only morally wrong thing here is NOT blocking Google's ads

Why doesn't the government split the megacorp into several tiny companies? All this collusion between these otherwise unrelated companies is only good for Google.

People always say this but what is the practical way this would come into effect? Unless the intention is to simply kill either YouTube or Google, or both, how do you separate out YouTube in a way that is meaningfully "breaking up" with Google but that the separate entity could afford?

There already was a time when Youtube was its own company. Google bought it. Maybe they didn't do great on their own but it was also ~2005 and things are very different now.

Yes but before Google bought it, it was a money incinerator.

Because breaking companies up seems to be more theatre and less useful outcomes. People call for it freely and usually don't have a theory of how it will actually help. And nobody seems to bring up evidence from past corporate breakups beyond "we did it ergo it was good" (which is suspicious logic).

On paper it looks something like a choice between one company with one shareholder or two companies with ... the same shareholder. It isn't clear what has really changed; the company was only ever a legal fiction anyway. If there were incentives to collude then they haven't gone away.

YouTube is similar to a free museum where the gift shop as the only source of revenue. How does the museum handle people who deliberately show up without money and exit via the main entrance?

From a business perspective the building is a shop. Anyone without money is provably there to just wander around looking at things. Doing this a lot is weird, especially given that 99% of visitors buy a coffee or a pencil to keep the museum going.

From a user perspective it’s a museum — the whole point is to wander around looking at things! Should it be required that you buy something, or at least be forced to exit through the gift shop?

The gift shop clerks analyse museum CCTV footage, as well as information obtained from your license plate and credit card (where you live, what you purchase) to better organise their gift shop, your local supermarket and the news you receive; in a way that’s more alluring to you so they can better organise your behaviour to purchase and think as desired.

Google just hosting the data is exactly what I want. Making them a monolith gives them too much leverage.

All we need is hosted APIs and frontend frameworks to wrap content as the user desires.

Charge API users for their bandwidth.

I don’t want Google also deciding what to boost to help them gobble up more human agency.

Reduce redundancy by making HR its own thing.

At the end of the day Google’s core engineering competency is load balancing date center use. The rest is behavioral economics research influenced gamification of our agency

Exactly. But I would like to take it a step further -- anytime you visit a page anywhere on the internet, there is an unwritten social contract that you will not block ads or trackers. For this reason, adblock in itself is unethical and basically equivalent to piracy. Additionally, actors like Mozilla who build tracker-blocking tech into their browsers should be held accountable for encouraging this disgusting behavior.

Don't like the ads? Don't visit the site then. Simple as that.

That argument MAYBE worked 25 years ago when ads genuinely paid for hosting costs and nothing else.

But now it's intellectually dishonest at best. We're not serving static images with hyperlinks anymore, either, but full-blown malware that tracks people against their will.

So who's really being unethical here? The amoral ***** who write this malware "because it's their job", or the people who are simply trying to protect their privacy from being raped?

> But now it's intellectually dishonest at best. We're not serving static images with hyperlinks anymore, either, but full-blown malware that tracks people against their will.

> So who's really being unethical here? The amoral *** who write this malware "because it's their job", or the people who are simply trying to protect themselves?

No one is forcing you to visit sites with "malware", you are equally as free to visit an alternative site that doesn't have ads or trackers. And call it what you will, that "malware" is essential for the web as we know it to survive. How else will Google be able to maintain the monopoly on video hosting if they can't harvest and profit off the data off freeloading users?

Also, for YouTube there is a simple solution: it's called YouTube Premium. You see no ads and you get great perks to boot. And Google promises to respect your privacy so long as you use YouTube Premium.

> Also, for YouTube there is a simple solution: it's called YouTube Premium. You see no ads

I mean, only a Google search will reveal there's people still getting ads despite using YouTube Premium.

When I started visiting resources on the internet there was an oft-written (and occasionally enforced!) social contract that the internet was not to be used for advertising at all. I personally never agreed for those terms to change so I'll continue to configure my enduser clients as I wish. (I do sometimes consume ads--sometimes they're good content.)

No, the burden is on you. The web is public by default. If you join it and think there is a burden on your visitors to pay you by viewing some bullshit that you serve them from some megacorporation who sells their identity, you are the one being unethical.

This is classic "big corporations are bad". Simply put, the internet would be dead if it were not for megacorporations as you call them, like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Google have provided an invaluable source of information all for free. The least you can do is watch some ads and let them harvest your data.

> This is classic "big corporations are bad". Simply put, the internet would be dead if it were not for megacorporations as you call them, like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Source?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com