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Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

> In that case, I was happy to see my appeal granted within an hour of the strike being placed on the channel. (Nevermind the fact the video had been live for over two years at that point, with nary a problem!)

Looks like some L-(5|6|whateverthefuck) just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software.

Quick appeal grant of course, because it was more about sending a message and making people who want to talk about that kind of software think twice before the next video.

> But until that time, YouTube's AdSense revenue and vast reach is a kind of 'golden handcuff.' > > The handcuff has been a bit tarnished of late, however, with Google recently adding AI summaries to videos—which seems to indicate maybe Gemini is slurping up my content and using it in their AI models?

Balanced take towards the end (after the above quote), but yep, the writing is on the wall.

I really wonder where the internet goes in this age. The contract between third party content hosters and creators is getting squeezed, and the whole "you're the product" thing is being laid bare more and more.

Is it a given that at some point creators will stop posting their contents to platforms like YouTube? Is it even possible at this point given that YouTube garners so many eyeballs and is just so easy? Does a challenger somehow unseat YouTube because programming and underlying libraries (ffmpeg et al) becomes so easy to use that spinning up a YouTube competitor goes down to basically zero?

Seems like there needs to be a new paradigm for anyone to have a choice other than youtube. Maybe AI will enable this -- maybe "does jeff have any new videos" -> a video gets played on a screen in your house and it's NOT hosted on YouTube, but no one knows and no one cares?

View on HN

There's peertube and Pixelfed and someone was working on an activitypub version of Instagram, but really it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video.

So the next stage, ideally, would be everyone kinda sharing hosting responsibilities, and if you like a creator, you just follow them. This has the benefit of possibly caching/mirroring all the videos, too. My Fediverse server was chewing through disk, one of the reasons I shut it down - but I was following 1400 news and journalist accounts, plus my ~100 or so gang of idiots. I was nearing 1TB on disk after about 16 months on my essentially single user instance.

I exported my follows and moved to an acquaintance's server and imported, the owner doesn't even blink. Who knows what they've got going for storage.

Anyhow if you don't need to follow 1500 people, this becomes tractable. If it gets popular, someone will post how to cron the multimedia stuff to compress it as it ages, moving it to cold storage, whatever.

> There's peertube and Pixelfed and someone was working on an activitypub version of Instagram, but really it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video.

> it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video.

This is a huge problem IMO. Just like Mastodon/Bluesky (which seems to be working recently) and all these other things, the tech and experience need to be SUPER easy. I mean as-easy-or-easier than YouTube, etc for people to switch en masse.

> So the next stage, ideally, would be everyone kinda sharing hosting responsibilities, and if you like a creator, you just follow them. This has the benefit of possibly caching/mirroring all the videos, too. My Fediverse server was chewing through disk, one of the reasons I shut it down - but I was following 1400 news and journalist accounts, plus my ~100 or so gang of idiots. I was nearing 1TB on disk after about 16 months on my essentially single user instance.

Yeah the problem is people won't do this/can't be expected to do this, unless it's drop dead easy.

Really appreciate hearing about your point on the scaling curve for this tech though, clearly the tech has come really far, that sounds like much more than the average person and "only" 1TB and a single server is quite nice.

The best ever approach I have seen to this is PopcornTime. It took the world by storm (and IIRC people still use it/ it still exists in some form, they're just lower profile now), and it worked better the more people used it, because torrents (aka, the technology being a mature, perfect match for the usecase).

> I exported my follows and moved to an acquaintance's server and imported, the owner doesn't even blink. Who knows what they've got going for storage. > > Anyhow if you don't need to follow 1500 people, this becomes tractable. If it gets popular, someone will post how to cron the multimedia stuff to compress it as it ages, moving it to cold storage, whatever.

I could see this working if that acquaintance got paid for this. Tying money as an incentive to things is sometimes bad/not what you want, but having people think of computers and compute as an asset/tool for them to use is a step in the right direction IMO.

I'm not a crypto person (kind of wish I was, 10 years ago), but Filecoin was really interesting originally to me because it just made sense. The marketplace of data storage seems like something that could be easily democratized in this way (no need for the crypto bits, but the ease of payment was a legitimate use IMO).

this isn't to argue! just some clarification because i really don't copyedit/proofread well enough on HN.

> I mean as-easy-or-easier than YouTube, etc for people to switch en masse.

note: i said peertube but i meant youphptube and the fork, avideo: https://www.turnkeylinux.org/avideo

Peertube is this, if you want anonymous viewing of videos. I'm not sure about ease of setting up, i don't remember having any issues, which means i can package it for others, but IIRC turnkey linux has peertube as a container, which means any hosting provider that offers TKL it's essentially 4 clicks to launch a peertube server. Fediverse is a little rougher, but i imagine a content creator would be the one that would self-host (or have their own homeserver, but host it with a hosting provider for $50 a month or whatever), and everyone else can go to https://fediverse.party/ or whatever and find a homeserver. You don't need to run your own to participate. I was careful to suggest that more people should run their own instances, because i worry that the larger instances will get tired of adding 16TB drive sleds every year. I can't imagine what mastodon.social costs to run! this also ties in with your final point; the acquaintance is part of the value4value^ movement, so they may get donations to offset costs, but i think they have a server room on their property with a couple of racks. maybe they have solar and a sweetheart deal with their ISP - i did at one point, so i also had a server shed. still do, but i used to, too.

> Filecoin

oh that technology that made buying a used HDD/SSD risky business for a few years? Now, afaik filecoin didn't serve any useful purpose, it was just another "proof of X" where X was "i'm wasting a ton of storage space for this". ipfs et al are the ones that do distributed storage.

One thing i would add - unless you absolutely need to, and i mean really need to, never upload high-def to these sort of services. Upload your FHD/QHD/8K videos to the large hosts "for backup", mark them as unlisted, and then link to them for people to archive if they wish.

^https://value4value.info/

> this isn't to argue! just some clarification because i really don't copyedit/proofread well enough on HN.

No worries! Arguments are great if I can learn something.

> Peertube is this, if you want anonymous viewing of videos. I'm not sure about ease of setting up, i don't remember having any issues, which means i can package it for others, but IIRC turnkey linux has peertube as a container, which means any hosting provider that offers TKL it's essentially 4 clicks to launch a peertube server. Fediverse is a little rougher, but i imagine a content creator would be the one that would self-host (or have their own homeserver, but host it with a hosting provider for $50 a month or whatever), and everyone else can go to https://fediverse.party/ or whatever and find a homeserver. You don't need to run your own to participate. I was careful to suggest that more people should run their own instances, because i worry that the larger instances will get tired of adding 16TB drive sleds every year. I can't imagine what mastodon.social costs to run! this also ties in with your final point; the acquaintance is part of the value4value movement, so they may get donations to offset costs, but i think they have a server room on their property with a couple of racks. maybe they have solar and a sweetheart deal with their ISP - i did at one point, so i also had a server shed. still do, but i used to, too.

OK so my thing is that all of this is just too hard. Give me ONE program to run that does everything. I don't think that's impossible either (and no one). If the average user has to hear the word "container" or "linux", it's over. If they have to pay, it's over (probably, unless it's a TINY amount that basically just deters bots or something).

Also, most good widely-adopted consumer products NEVER mention anonymity. Maybe security or privacy, but never anonymity.

Always love me a little mitch in the comments :) HN hasn't lost it.

I guess what we really want here is PopcornTime for PeerTube. Maybe PeerTube is already this and I just don't know about it... the tech would be hard to make work seamlessly but a way to just get the ease of PopcornTime and the interface/product mindedness of YouTube.

> oh that technology that made buying a used HDD/SSD risky business for a few years? Now, afaik filecoin didn't serve any useful purpose, it was just another "proof of X" where X was "i'm wasting a ton of storage space for this". ipfs et al are the ones that do distributed storage.

But IMO this is a human problem -- it did what it was supposed to do, it made storage valuable. The problem is that when things get valuable, bad actors do things to try and steal that value. That's like thinking computers are bad because people try to steal them once they realize how valuable they are now that people can make money on the internet.

I'm not really the right person to defend Filecoin (there were also a few others, I wonder if I'm referring to the right one), but the idea of distributed payment-for-spare-disk-storage (does this fit the value4value movement?) makes a ton of sense to me.

IPFS is a technical solution IMO, it stops short of solving the other bits - i.e. motivating the actual money-for-storage exchange that makes the idea sustainable.

> One thing i would add - unless you absolutely need to, and i mean really need to, never upload high-def to these sort of services. Upload your FHD/QHD/8K videos to the large hosts "for backup", mark them as unlisted, and then link to them for people to archive if they wish.

TIL, thanks!

> Also, most good widely-adopted consumer products NEVER mention anonymity. Maybe security or privacy, but never anonymity.

i meant anonymous as in "a user can receive a link to a video and watch it without having to log in" as well as "there's a list of content on the homepage to watch" - the same way youtube works if you go via private browsing.

> OK so my thing is that all of this is just too hard. Give me ONE program to run that does everything. [...]

Right, I agree. I'm an infra sort of person so this comes naturally. But i will try to summarize it (fediverse) in a non-geeky way: A non-creator can go on any of the existing servers and get an account if they desire - this allows them to follow the content creators they enjoy, and also helps with discovery of new content. Fediverse.party is a site that will help find a server that isn't mastodon.social. oh and you mentioned apps; those exist, but you need a homeserver. most of them probably default to creating an account on mastodon.social; i guess. You don't need to be on peertube to subscribe to a creator that uses peertube to publish - that's the key, here.

i have a little bit more faith that people can ditch youtube, by navigating this "novel" platform.

Content creators may have to wait for someone who isn't as lazy as i am to promote the "N click hosting platform for your videos" where N is small. If you create content, you might have to pay, there's no real way around that if we want to ditch youtube. There is a benefit to paying, though, and it doesn't have to be a lot, you can probably use a $5 VPS (as the saying goes) to start. If some large content creator wants to move over, they probably can afford to spend more, and it won't hurt them at all. Yes, youtube hosting is free, but it comes with caveats (such as TFA, but also losing access to your account for unknown reasons, and so on). Or they can join a peertube (or whatever) and hope the host remains online.

I know you want "one app" - there's some traction https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/use-third-party-application

note: we're not content creators but we are a "host" and we pay $300/month for our racked stuff, all-in. That's not out of reach for the likes of someone like Louis Rossman, who really ought be moving off youtube; or AvE, or RedLetterMedia. It's going to take some big creators at least "simulcasting" on some other service for a while before it catches on; i just hope this catching on happens before apple, facebook, amazon (oops twitch), or microsoft start a video hosting platform with their spare disks.

Apparently your memory is better than mine; filecoin allowed one to "rent out" their unused storage. What i was thinking of was some other "proof of capacity" coin, where you didn't need a decent internet connection to mine/hold coins, just disk space. the software itself actually mined by writing hash or whatever to the disk. Copilot mentioned "burstcoin" but i've never heard of that. And filecoin apparently was based on ipfs; so i wonder if it's still going or if someone can reboot it.

it certainly didn't have good marketing campaign...

> i meant anonymous as in "a user can receive a link to a video and watch it without having to log in" as well as "there's a list of content on the homepage to watch" - the same way youtube works if you go via private browsing.

Oh yeah this is my fault, I understood your meaning but wanted to make a separate point about the average user and their very specific.

IMO the vast majority of open source projects will use that word because it is a legitimate benefit, but it's anathema to the average consumer. It just signals "this is for criminals", even if it shouldn't.

Agree it's clearly a valuable feature -- it's hard to even demonstrate the value these days. "no algorithms" or "no tracking" might work, but it's so hard to verbalize.

With regards to the F/OSS solutions like peertube and the difficulty of marketing all this stuff (filecoin with/without crypto)... There just aren't the right incentives or the right insane person hasn't come along yet.

> That's not out of reach for the likes of someone like Louis Rossman, who really ought be moving off youtube

Maybe this is a bit weird but IMO Louis has been incredibly effective in his fight for right to repair, and I would hate to sacrifice his reach for a more user-friendly platform. I agree with the idea of at least simulcasting. Maybe it's another difficulty problem.

I haven't kept up with the stuff he's doing with FUTO these days as closely, but you have to fight on the battleground you're given. Winning and moral purity are often at odds, and IMO this isn't a place where moral purity is paramount.

IMO one of the hidden lynchpins here is the default license that youtube broadcasts with. I think there's a really clear legal path to downloading a LOT of youtube if only more things were CC licensed on there (not the default YouTube license) and accessible without logging in (similar to the LinkedIn scraping case).

As I understand it, Signum (nee Burstcoin) is indeed the Proof of Capacity blockchain thingy that was using hard drives to store data with no external value. This is related to but different from to Proof of Storage schemes likes Filecoin where, IIRC, the data being stored was data of extrinsic value like PDFs or GIFs or whatever. I think that's also related to "Proof of Space-Time", meaning not only did you write the received data to disk, but you've _still_ got it written to disk.

PoC, e.g., Signum = get paid for proving that you paid for storage rather than CPU/GPU/ASIC cycles

PoS, e.g., Filecoin = get paid for renting out your storage to those willing to pay in return for storing data

Thanks for this really interesting side-thread; I have learned a lot! I've been interested in distributed storage for a long time and while I've known about PeerTube and IPFS and the Fediverse for ages I haven't really played with them personally. I go back and forth between keeping TiBs of storage online, and turning everything off as a concession to keeping my overall electricity bill in check. But in general I like the idea of letting my private machines contribute to something greater than themselves. I will have to look into the ways in which I can contribute to these projects.

A reminder that it's not anonymity in the law enforcement sense because IP addresses are akin to a pseudonym and can be tracked down.

Also, for other cases you can't expect to be anonymous unless you run script blockers. And block first party scripts for the most egregious offenders (for which their websites won't work anyway at that point I guess).

i could not think of a better term to signify "a non-logged in user" than anonymous, and i was hoping that in this sort of forum that it would be taken as ftp://anonymous@example.com:22/

You left out one of the biggest providers of high (and low) quality VOD services: porn.

My intuition is that they're only left alone because they very explicitly don't step on any content and delivery trusts' toes.

I hadn't really thought about it until I did a crawl for a round of DMCA takedowns for a friend and was surprised by how many platforms apparently use the same few CMSes. It turns out, there are some fantastic, affordable options if you want to start an independent website and VOD service beyond the corporate fray.

How will federation solve monetisation?

value for value. https://value4value.info/

or ad rolls, who knows. monetization isn't my wheelhouse.

podcasts have been doing this since the inception.

Without even the opportunity to make money, there's very little incentive for creators to spend time and effort making videos for these channels.

The reason YouTube is huge is because they invite anybody in to try to get paid for their content, and nobody else does that.

This is why most content which should be an article or even a podcast is instead posted as some guy talking in front of the camera on YouTube.

> Without even the opportunity to make money, there's very little incentive for creators to spend time and effort making videos for these channels.

YouTube had plenty of content on it before the partner program was launched, and the content was better. Some kinds of high-production value content like Wendover Productions or Tom Scott’s channel would become less common, but it would also remove the incentive for the formulaic garbage that pervades in e.g. History-related content. There are end-to-end AI content generation systems now that don’t even involve a human operator; that content wouldn’t exist without a profit motive, but maybe it would be better if it didn’t.

> This is why most content which should be an article or even a podcast is instead posted as some guy talking in front of the camera on YouTube.

That’s part of it but the viewership is also way larger on YouTube, which is also really, really good at finding audiences in a way that a smaller service like substack could never compete with.

> YouTube had plenty of content on it before the partner program was launched, and the content was better.

It's not even comparable, not by a long shot. There is an immense amount of the highest quality video content you can find on YouTube, and the trend has only accelerated in the past few years.

The ratio of good to bad content was better in the past, but that doesn't matter to the watcher. You subscribe to good stuff and get recommended good stuff. Just like it doesn't matter that all the front aisles of the super market is full of toxic slop. What matters is if the meat, dairy and vegetable section is of good quality in the back of the store.

> It's not even comparable, not by a long shot. There is an immense amount of the highest quality video content you can find on YouTube, and the trend has only accelerated in the past few years.

Both of you need to define what you mean by quality or you're going to keep talking past each other.

I agree with the person you responded to though: blind profit motive on platforms like youtube destroys quality and fills the firehose with brain melting content, even if it has professional lighting and is in 1080p.

Quality is in the eye of the beholder, but I'm not talking about video resolution or refresh rate. I'm talking about documentaries, educational, and instructional content foremost. But really it doesn't matter, because whatever your definition of high quality content is, you're going to find the best of that on YouTube and nowhere else.

> you're going to find the best of that on YouTube and nowhere else.

If the trend Jeff describes continues to worsen, I wouldn't be so sure of that.

> There is an immense amount of the highest quality video content you can find on YouTube, and the trend has only accelerated in the past few years.

This has not been my experience.

All right. Where can I find a larger library of high quality documentary, educational and instructional videos? I'm happy to pay for any service which can compare, just like I pay for YouTube Premium.

I tried Curiosity Stream and Nebula, both they couldn't compare.

> Where can I find a larger library of high quality documentary, educational and instructional videos?

The question isn’t whether or not YouTube has this content, it’s if it would have proportionally more or less of this content in the absence of a profit-sharing model. The chief problem I have with social media is that the kind of organic content I want to see was already out there before some people decided they wanted to make a career out of it; it’s just a lot harder to find now because there are professionals who know how to play to the algorithm. This works on a mass market level, and I don’t begrudge people for enjoying the content, I just personally wouldn’t call it “high quality.”

It was the same during the SEO boom in the early 2010s; the internet went from a place where novelty was a regular occurrence to one where you reflexively scroll past the first paragraph of every article because you know it doesn’t have the information you’re looking for.

Consider a supermarket. They will have aisles full of candy, sugared cereal, biscuits, chips and soda in the front. The lowest quality slop you can put in your mouth. They will also have huge freezers with low quality ready to eat meals.

But in the back they have the highest quality and variety of meat and poultry you can find anywhere, the highest quality and variety of vegetables and dairy. That's why I go to the super market. I don't care about the slop in front because I'm not looking for it. I don't care that most shoppers have their cart full of toxic ultra processed junk, because I'm just looking for the stuff for me.

It's exactly the same with YouTube, except that you never have to see the low quality stuff which doesn't interest you. If you only like good videos and subscribe to good channels, the algorithm will quickly start to only recommend high quality content. If it slips, there's a dislike button.

You just have to make a minimal effort. The algorithm actually works very well. There's a lot of content which was never available anywhere before YouTube. And yes, the ability to get paid is necessary for many creators to make their videos, which they deserve. If you're making videos that help and entertain a large public, why shouldn't you get paid for the effort and talent?

> except that you never have to see the low quality stuff which doesn't interest you.

This has not been my experience.

> ... they invite anybody in to try to get paid ...

I have over 100k views on youtube and i've received $0.00 from youtube. This is like "they invite anyone to try and pull the sword from the stone" or something.

however look from the other angle: People give their content freely to youtube, a content platform, which benefits youtube, because of this idea that "you might make it big." it's like scratch-offs.

Nearly all of the pieces to have the functional equivalent of youtube are there, even for micropayments based on viewership, adrolls, interstitial ads, "patreon-like crowd funding", i was just talking about the boring infra part. I talk about alternatives that exist now, or are alpha/beta stages, because i am hoping that someone, anyone, has the wherewithal to do something about it. I'm not a content creator except in the literal sense, maybe 100 videos on youtube, no cohesion. I have no need to spend time, talent, or treasure on hosting a VOD platform, because it would not benefit me, nor anyone i know personally. I host nextcloud, matrix, pastebin, minecraft, discord bots that remind people to take their medicine and allow them to journal about that and anything else, "wikis", subsonic (quite private). I used to meddle with video hosting, but not directly - syncthing so i could upload drone footage from my cellphone in the field, so that my friend could edit if he wanted before i publish somewhere.

read all of that as: "i've proven that this is all possible; further, i know it will scale. I will tell people about this, and someone with the spark can give it to the world, functional and shiny"

Note: youtube didn't start out paying uploaders. people uploaded because some people have a need or a desire to have other people look at them. Fame and notoriety can be narcotic. yes i know this is reductive.

I agree that they should divide compensation more fairly among creators, but what are you comparing YouTube to? What other company has a standing offer to anybody to upload their content and get paid for it?

There are plenty of competitors to YouTube for video creators: Netflix, all of cable and on-air TV, all of Hollywood, Amazon, etc. How big are your chances of getting paid for your creativity by any of these companies without being born into the right family and without performing sexual services to their representatives?

How much would you get paid by Google adwords for 100 000 visitors to your website? I doubt it would cover hosting costs. How much does Instagram or Facebook pay a user who gets 100 000 likes on their post?

YouTube (and Spotify) should distribute their pay-outs more fairly among creators, instead of making a casino/lottery system. But right now, they're the only shop which is open for everybody.

> What other company has a standing offer to anybody to upload their content and get paid for it?

my first sentence bears out that this isn't true, it's like a scratch-off ticket. i understand you spoke to this, but it's worth re-iterating. If 100k eyeballs isn't enough to earn me even a penny, then what chances does 99.9999% of "content creators" stand?

secondly, amazon pays twitch streamers. or so i hear. who knows, i said monetization isn't my wheelhouse. Nor does it have to be to suggest technical solutions to what people perceive as problems with youtube/ABC/goog

also onlyfans.

> Pixelfed

I suspect a lot of these projects are being held back by bad branding. The first time I heard the term “fediverse,” I assumed it was alluding to Facebook’s Metaverse being a project of the CIA.

Branding and marketing are so important and engineer minded people spit on them and kick it to the back of the line then wonder why their project isn't popular.

Documentation, too. I know it’s hard writing instructions with context you already have (think of the “Tell me how to make a peanut butter sandwich” demonstration), but too often I come across projects that I can’t even figure out how to run. This used to be a complete roadblock if the software was old; now you can at least use LLMs to walk you through it.

Any project that is based on network effects is doomed to failure if it can’t get this right. I think about this kind of thing a lot (and roll my eyes) when I see people on Hacker News complaining about “non-technicals” while assuming they could learn the skills that they have over the course of a weekend.

> Is it even possible at this point given that YouTube garners so many eyeballs and is just so easy?

The big problem is that someone will download your video and upload it to YouTube if you do not. Often while monetizing it until you stomp on them.

The only things that will break YouTube hegemony (spelled that hegemoney originally ... talk about a typo) are either an anti-trust action or a successful copyright infringement lawsuit from someone other than a BigCorp.

> The big problem is that someone will download your video and upload it to YouTube if you do not. Often while monetizing it until you stomp on them.

Let's automate the stomping then. If people are bothered by this and it keeps happening, then that should create demand for someone who is able to scour YouTube and sue the appropriate parties/do the appropriate reporting.

At some point, it will become enough of a problem for YouTube that they will change/have to hurt their business model that currently benefits from it.

> The only things that will break YouTube hegemony (spelled that hegemoney originally ... talk about a typo) are either an anti-trust action or a successful copyright infringement lawsuit from someone other than a BigCorp.

Really disappointed in lawyers of this age. I'm a layperson but it looks like they should have been eating out in the age of AI and with all the copyright infringement that goes on (whether you agree with copyright infringement or not). Why are there not 100 suits against these AI companies right now? Probably because it's too expensive and courts are already packed, but why let reality get in the way of a possibly really profitable venture?

I'm certainly not a great proponent of IP/copyright and all the associated moral stances, but IMO the tech is useful without that gray area -- having that stuff get properly legislated is only going to prompt retraining on safe/permissioned content, and maybe that's what SHOULD happen.

> Let's automate the stomping then. If people are bothered by this and it keeps happening, then that should create demand for someone who is able to scour YouTube and sue the appropriate parties/do the appropriate reporting.

But it's already automated. Where do you think those completely wrong DMCA claims that people complain once in a while about come from?

Ah, but IMO not for smaller creators -- and at some point, if the DMCA claims are legitimate and not being heeded in a timely manner, more litigation aimed at YouTube should be started.

This likely has bad effects for the internet as a whole (more efficient legal action can make those who abuse the system more powerful), but if it's something that needs to happen, then it should happen.

How does Google's "AI" distinguish between small or large creators?

Or some smaller platform that doesn't even have google's resources.

I think we may be discussing different things. When I talk about the DMCA machine, I mean the cottage industry of firms that make it their job to check the internet for infringement and file the appropriate claims. I'm not referring to Google's AI.

My point was that those firms currently cater to large creators/the cost only makes sense for firms with lots of IP. BUT, if it was cheaper/more accessible (and profitable to litigate in this area) then more small creators can do it, and the problem becomes more acute for large content hosters.

Yes but as i said two posts ago, those firms are not famous for their competence, they mostly carpet bomb everything.

> Quick appeal grant of course, because it was more about sending a message and making people who want to talk about that kind of software think twice before the next video.

That was talking about a previous video, not the one that is the main subject of this blog post. For the video that is the subject of this blog post, which is just about running your own software to watch media you legally own, the appeal was apparently denied.

Unfortunately, my belief is that no matter how many content creators jump ship, there will be and endless supply of replacements. The real salt in the wound is that attrition will select for the content that the platforms desire.

That's fine IMO! Content creation is a really top heavy thing anyway -- it seems like anyone can just be replaced with anyone else, but if that were true we wouldn't have such outsized discrepancies between successful creators who are able to monetize and those that can't.

It's a power law distribution. In fact, companies know this so they do sneaky stuff to keep high value creators on their platforms, have heard some stories (try to find some stuff on the Twitch vs Mixer saga).

Based on my observations over the past decade of similar stories on HN, nothing will change, the squeeze will simply continue.

It's because we only hear of incidents in isolation from each other when the giants that abuse their platforms - most often the stories are from apple, google, amazon - take something down that didn't suit their revenue streams even if it's by vague interpretations AND someone with enough of a social presence has their incident heard.

The rest of us, the unwashed users of the platform, do not hear about it or act upon it en masse. We'll occasionally see a post like this on HN or Reddit, shake our heads and call it a shame, there need to be alternatives and so on, then go right back into those platforms and forget that something happened but a few months later

Most people don't even give a fuck. And most of those who do aren't ready to do anything about it. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

> Based on my observations over the past decade of similar stories on HN, nothing will change, the squeeze will simply continue.

I do agree here, but sometimes (let's say 10% of the time? less?) the squeeze does not continue -- see Apple. Perplexity/ChatGPT vs Google search right now.

> The rest of us, the unwashed users of the platform, do not hear about it or act upon it en masse. We'll occasionally see a post like this on HN or Reddit, shake our heads and call it a shame, there need to be alternatives and so on, then go right back into those platforms and forget that something happened but a few months later

Yup, wish I could add "- posted from Chrome browser" to my own response here but I use Firefox. I'm still going to watch YouTube.

I think the thing that might bring hope is that Google/YouTube doesn't actualy own the new paradigm of AI -- I can very much imagine a world where people just ask for videos/scroll through them, and YouTube isn't the site they do it on (in fact they don't do it on a "site", per say).

But then again, that's really calling for the death/dramatic reduction of the open/surfable internet. Is that what it takes?

Publicly shame people that use platforms. Especially the kind of scum that still does it professionally.

2025 has given a great opportunity to ratchet it up a notch (outside of USA) : with Trump 2 the pretense that USA is an ally of EUrope is gone, so the decade old conclusion that US laws aren't compatible with fundamental rights (Patriot Act => Schrems 2), and therefore US infocoms are illegal — is not something that ought to be ignored any more (so far it was, out of convenience).

> I really wonder where the internet goes in this age.

Self-hosting? (Whoops!)

If only, but we know that the vast majority of people don't want to self-host, as the majority of people don't even want to make their own coffee.

In the right form (on devices they already own, with internet connections they already own, etc) self-hosting could work though...

Isn't the competitor TikTok?

Yes, sometimes -- I think TikTok's content/goals are a bit different than YouTube.

TikTok is a direct competitor to YouTube Shorts, but not YouTube as a whole -- YouTube also competes with Netflix and surprisingly paid course sites (did you know YouTube has courses?)

I don't think it's as easy as thinking TikTok will unseat YouTube. Also, I personally think TikTok's... approach is a bit hard to sustain. Just like Facebook's approach of initially showing you a feed of friends activities, but morphed into something else over time (some of that is not FB's fault, humans have certain behaviors that can be toxic all on their own).

> TikTok is a direct competitor to YouTube Shorts

That sounds odd since I recall them comparing themselves to IG shorts, and YT shorts not being a thing while TT was becoming the in social media; just an observation, more than anything else.

They are still a competitor in the sense they are with instagram actively engaged in the task of reducing people's average attention span which makes the traditional youtube format less popular.

Unfortunately, the generalized "brainrot content and distribution" market is massive and contains many competitors.

> L-whateverthefuck

If LLMs are already doing this, engineers are cooked.

I don't think this is a job that requires an LLM but if an LLM took the order, made the plan to go through the relevant data(bases|lakes|platforms) and triggered the warnings, etc. I'd be very impressed.

I was thinking Lawyer.

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