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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

I think this is completely wrong approach. We as a community should stop giving G/YT our traffic if their stuff does not please us instead of making an effort to give them more traffic.

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Sign me up, i want youtube to be killed dead!!!! Youtube is cool but google jumps in and just ruins your experience. They asked me 4 time before to adjust my name and i chose my current username....4 times. Now, for the last two weeks i have been getting this pop again but now i must apparently sign up for G+, when i try and comment, guess what that fu popup again, i cannot comment unless i join G+.I have been just closing the window and saying, "O well that saves me some time wasting at least." Google is now as arrogant as Microsoft was and don't care about what the consumer wants but where they want to push you. I will never use G+, Google will save themselves the distraction by shutting down that crap, but they so blinded by facebook that they losing sight of the actual power they have.

They got this idea in their head that they need to create the complete identity for users to target ads better. This idea came about when the press and pundits where saying that facebook was so valuable because of realnames and user identity. The issue is that it's been proven that you can build a profile from a person's search history, even Target can predict if you are pregnant. So why waste time with this shit, anger your users and destroy your brands value?

So all you have to do is start a tech company that does this. When Google knock on your doors, with literally one and half billion dollars of Google stock, you have to say "No".

Would you do that? Could you blame anyone else for doing that?

I couldn't do it, but Snapchat's CEO turned down a cool $3 billion.

It can be done.

>Snapchat's CEO turned down a cool $3 billion

Because word is he's getting offers for over $4 billion

And next week somebody will post that Apple offers $5 billion.

Thanks for mentioning about the company. I've never heard about it until now. Surprisingly enough I had to look at Wikipedia to know what they do and further details. Their website currently gives no clue about anything they do but a new product called "Stories", which for newcomers like me means zilch.

Youtube is a social product and Google+ is a (vastly better) social product. Of course Google is merging them. Google has multiple social services and merges them together. You have multiple Google accounts and... oh. You... don't merge them together. In fact you fight it every day for years. No kidding that at this point, by the time the change has stopped giving you leeway that you're frustrated your protest has stacked up to nothing.

In fact if you merge your Google accounts your protest isn't lost either. Your protest has been and is nothing. It's just in your head. Merge your Google accounts and use Google's social product or don't. If you wanted to protest Google why didn't you just stop using it? Or stop using it now?

I use incognito mode to use anything Google. You log in with your chosen identity and aren't nagged about merging any others.

This is unreasonable. YT isn't going to disappear. Did myspace? No.

The fact that YT provides an API is plenty to reface it. You should view this website as another from of protest. Which of there have been plenty of protests in recent.

It's not wrong, just a different one.

... wait, MySpace is still around?

Not really. The brand is, but it's a completely different service now.

You can log in with your Facebook account now. Tells you pretty much all you need to know.

I wouldn't say it's completely different. It certainly is positioned in a completely different way but one can still log in and view their old pages and content.

Yes. And thanks for that. There are older bands that still have their music on myspace and nowhere else.

YT isn't going to disappear. Did myspace?

Yes...?

Not literally, but in many other ways they absolutely fell off a cliff.

YT could disappear, but you'd have to pour a _lot_ of money into it.

Isn't that exactly what Google tried before giving in and buying YouTube?

... Are you saying we should buy YouTube?

Existing in a vacuum != existence in reality.

But then you find yourself up against their network effects and more often than not, it goes absolutely nowhere. If you just want a nicer YouTube, step 1 is at least experimenting within the confines of the existing one. Otherwise you'd need to worry about all of the infrastructure and accepting video uploads, encoding, etc. Unless you're on a crusade against Google/YouTube, this is absolutely the sane way of starting out.

Where would you host the videos? The amount of traffic they see, and the amount of videos they store is incredible. For example:

http://9to5google.com/2013/11/11/netflix-and-youtube-account...

Self-host. YouTube produces massive amounts of traffic because it has so many videos. But if you divide all that traffic to small independent operators then the amounts would be far more manageable.

Once you are self-hosting you could alleviate any potential bandwidth issues with a CDN such as CloudFlare/Akamai and/or by using P2P protocols such as BitTorrent.

A bit rough, but yeah. The 3rd world is not yet ready to do this much video, because of mobile data prices. Let's stick to the awesome plain text solutions & low bandwidth media for now. (Canvas, cached SVGs, bluetooth & wifi, etc...) If we stick to text and backwards compatible media we can solve all internet problems by tying phones to balloons.

We should aim to make rms proud, but choose MIT because that code is more easily reusable.

Yes, creativity and experiments aren't the answer. It's rejection and protest that will solve all our imaginary problems.

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