djaro

I would disagree about it not being "easy". Learning a language certainly takes time and effort, but the fact that even the dumbest people in society can speak fluently, that literal toddlers learn languages, shows that it's far from difficult.

It just requires turning your rational mind off, immersing yourself in the language and trusting things will work out, something which more rational/analytic people tend to struggle with. It's telling that children from non-English countries naturally become completely fluent in English by just playing video games and watching YouTube videos, while adults will struggle for years to reach conversational fluency in their second language.

Yeah, B1 is not even nearly fluent, on my B1 exam Spanish I had to roleplay with the examinator going to a store to return something after buying the wrong item. This is like, bare minimum of functioning.

I cannot imagine living in a country for over a year and not taking the effort to lesrn the language.

This is very obvious any time you try to create exhaustive lists of something.

For example, for every country in the world, I would recognize it and say, yeah, thats a country.

But if I had to write all ~200 countries into a list, I would probably miss quite a few.

Or, if you gave me names of all US presidents, I would for each of them go, oh yeah, thats a president. But ask me "name all the presidents", I wouldnt get further than 10.

Its very true for humans as well. For example, if you ask someone to "name 100 historical figures", they will have a very difficult time. But there are of course hundreds of historical figures people woukd recognize. People who manage to do this still tend to fall into sequences so, i.e., naming all the presidents of America or emperors of Rome. But the broader the category, the more difficult it is to come up with examples.

The strongest endorsement for PeerTube is that it cannot sustain creators and thus will only either 1) freeboot off of platforms that do or 2) be flooded by low effort slop?

I think this is the only way for new platforms to ever rise in this space.

A video sharing website is not a social media platform, it's a streaming platform. The real competitors to YouTube are not PeerTube or whatever, it's Netflix and HBO.

This is why Nebula also managed to find a niche and be relatively successful: the issue is not ads or a monthly subscription or something, the only problem is: people want to watch high-quality content. Find a way to get them high-quality content. If you cannot do that, everything else is meaningless. In Nebula's case, even a few high-profile YouTubers in the same niche uploading exclusives on a platform is better than a thousand nobodies uploading low effort content.

The problem with this is that creating the content you watch costs a lot of money and labor.

As a user I would see a grocery store where everything is free as an advantage... utill the products inevitably run out and no food supplier is willing to stock the shelves for free.

Sponsorships are definitely the highest if a youtuber actively engages in them, ad revenue vs patreon depends highly on if you have i.e. a small but highly active fanbase of core fans, versus a wider more general audience that you entertain a bit.

I think people should be more aware of the perverse incentive of YouTubers saying, "my guaranteed source of income is very little and unstable guys, I need you to also subscribe to my patreon" where - could YouTubers perhaps have a reason to act like their ad revenue is very little? In my experience, while ad revenue isn't great, for any decent-size YouTuber its still enough to live on and in any case it always stays a significant income stream.

If YouTube becomes a quarantine for high-quality content, then it will also become a quarantine for viewers.

the fundamental issue a lot of people here don't seem to get is that high quality videos that people want to watch are expensive to create. Besides the huge amount of high-skill labor, there's also just production costs, software, equipment, upkeep, etc.

At the very least, ignoring all other costs, a single person making good videos somewhat regularly is a full-time job. People who make entertainment also need to eat and pay rent, the money has to come from somewhere.

I think the problem is that the "act" of a lot of streamers and content creators is that they are relatable, in the sense that, part of watching a video game streamer is the appeal of, he's just a guy like me playing games in his bedroom. The problem is that this is all an act, or kayfabe as they would call it in wrestling. But it's an act so good that unlike wrestling, which everyone knows is fake, most people that are not at least adjacent to the content industry genuinely have no idea.

Yeah, I think a lot of people on Hackernews fall into the "advertising never worked on me" or "I'm too smart for propaganda" camp.

Clickbait is not just big red arrows and "OMG" in the title. It certainly can be, for some demographics. For other demographics, clickbait can be a video titled "The Theorem That Changed Math Forever" and a blurred out formula in the thumbnail.

If you ever saw a video and just instantly had the urge of, "I have to see this", you successfully got clickbaited. If you dislike constant sound effects and transitions and just want to see someone speak - a lot of adult audiences feel the same way, which is why many big channels deliberately produce content in that way. It's still a similarly skilled editor who probably could make overproduced content if they wanted to - they're just making the choice to make the video more relaxed.

Well, do you want a platform people watch videos on, or a platform people simply upload videos to, never to be seen?

This is just a great example of people who aren't in content creation fundamentally not understanding the ecosystem.

This isn't about "over-produced thumbnail-bait". This is about all high-quality media.

You mention Rick Beato. Do you really think Rick Beato sits down behind his laptop to edit his own videos? He has nearly 6 million subscribers and produces around 10 long-form videos per month. He has at the very least an editor (probably full-time) and a thumbnail designer (part-time), and I assume also a manager who sets up brand deals and contacts musicians for his interviews. He also records his videos on expensive cameras inside his well-lit studio, which also isn't cheap. It's very difficult to tell how much YouTube channels generate but I wouldn't be surprised if the Rick Beato channel is at this point a >$20K/month operation.

Edit: Also, do you really think Rick Beato making "The Secret Weapon Behind Dr Dre" or "The Real Reason Music is Getting Worse" is not clickbait? It's just clickbait, but for people like you. Part of good advertising is making people feel like they're not even being sold anything.

It's not about people "trying to make money", it's about viewers wanting to see high quality videos.

High quality videos just cost a lot of money and labor to produce. There is simply no way around this. Any platform which doesn't let creators monetize effectively will be stuck with what people produce in their free time. Which will essentially always be worse, because the competitors will have creators with actual budgets and time to work.

The problem is that big creators have many subscribers, because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch.

If a channel has 100 subscribers - (except if it's a brand new channel) - it's because people saw the videos and decided, no, I don't want to see this, I'm not going to subscribe.

Put all of those people on a platform together, you will just end up with a platform with more creators than viewers.

The problem is that all of those accounts that don't earn money don't earn money because they get no views, because they make videos no one wants to watch. I don't know the exact statistics but a simple Google search says that 3% of videos on YouTube get 95% of the views. Remove the top 3% of creators, you remove 95% of views.

The top channels get all the views because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch, and they're monetized because making such content is really, really expensive.

The problem is that beyond creators with "hollywood-like budgets", even just making 1 good video a week is a full-time job. Most creators are not looking to get rich or get massive returns, they just want to survive and pay rent. Which means any channel of any value has to be able to generate at least few thousand dollars month.

About as likely as opening a grocery store where people can pay through voluntary donations.

I'm a professional YouTuber. The problem with a "donation" system is that, unlike something like tweets or even blog posts which are either free or low-cost to produce, high-quality video is really. expensive. to produce. And people just will not pay if they don't have to.

A good 20-minute video can easily cost 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor to produce. That is, a whole week of labor. And that's not counting expensive equipment, software, licenses, etc.

I cannot run a business on people deciding to give me money for nothing out of the goodness of their heart. And I am still a one-person business, imagine having 5 full time employees. Even YouTubers with millions of subscribers and mature audiences with disposable income often struggle to clear like $5K/month on Patreon. Which, for a multi-person business, is simply not enough. Meanwhile, that same creator might be pulling $20K/month through ads and a similar amount through sponsorships.

YouTube is more similar to Netflix and HBO than Twitter or Reddit. Yes, in theory anyone can upload to YouTube, but the majority of content that is actually watched is at this point produced by full-time creators, some of which are solo self-employed while others are at this point running whole media production companies. And those are the people you need to make a service succeed.

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.

I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor.

I have a pretty small channel (~100K subscribers) with no employees and relatively low upkeep costs (a few hundred dollars a month), and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.

Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them. You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.

And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. And the difference between a million views and a hundred is 10,000x. You cannot create a platform without big users.

I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch. Otherwise it's just dead in the water.

The problem is that not all parents are "concerned parents" and children dont deserve to be taken advantage of by trillion dollar corporations for the crime of having bad parents.

Some writers like Martial were pretty much writing mildly entertaining commentary, not much different to social media now.

Its not a war because children arent combatants. It's instead a one sided slaughter where Meta and Google are destroying the minds of a whole generation of children who cannot and cannot be expected to defend themselves against the claws of trillion dollar corporations, all in the name of profit.

One individual cannot meaningfully fight back. The only way forward is through collective action and legislation, just like what was done to the Tobacco industry a few decades ago.

As far as I can tell .gov.nl is only used for pages aimed at i.e. expats and businesses. Most services dutch people use simply have a .nl page like the digital id or filing taxes.

It exists, but the vast majority of government services dont use it (i.e. taxes are just done through belastingdienst.nl).

I think theres some real use cases in the household department. I would love an AI that I just tell my nutrition goals (I want to eat X calories, Y protein, Z fiber, hit all vitamins) and it just generates a full meal plan for me each day. Like, I go to the store and it made the complete shopping list for me. And automatically updates the rest of the day if I tell it I skipped a meal or ate a snack.

Yes, as a society we can collectively decide what companies should and shouldn't do. It's called living in a society with rules and regulations.

> Every single games company faced with this issue is now going to change the terms of service to note that the $70 "includes free two year subscription, paid up front!", and if the lawyers get pissy about that they'll sell two versions: one that is $0, but doesnt work until you sign up for the $70 per month subscription.

So if you make it illegal for companies to lie and say they are selling you a game, only to then take it away, they will instead... be honest and tell you how long the game will be supported? Great!

All of these freedoms would only kick in after the developer shuts down official servers, after which the product is discontinued and not generating income anyway.

It wouldn't affect game developers at all, the only change would be that they have to upload the server file's code when they decide to stop supporting the game, so that players can continue it themselves.

Games in general are a very difficult thing to preserve because of how they are often "on-going" things rather than definitive objects like books or films. Minecraft has gone through 27 major version updates, most of which having had in the range of 3-10 sub-versions. So that's potentially ~100 versions, just for Java edition. Should all of those be archived? Or just the final version, when it one day arrives? At this point, the Minecraft from 2014 and from 2026 are completely different games. And at least for Minecraft, there's mostly just stuff added. What about games in which major features regularly get removed, like Fortnite? There, the "last" version will lack many of the games most famous attributes.

Maybe we should just accept that big online games are more like cultural happenings than media objects. In the future, you simply might not be able to play Fortnite, in the same way you can never visit Woodstock again. It's just something you had to be at.

Yes, because children deserve to simultaneously not be under constant surveillance by their parents but still be protected from bad actors. Hence we should collectively, as a society, protect them.

Not all children have active parents. I do not believe those children deserve to be taken advantage of or hurt simply because they happen to have bad parents.

The "laziness" argument doesnt work if the people being lazy (parents) are not the people being hurt (children)

Also, if the government arrests you for making a post, the issue is them arresting you, not your post not being anonymous.

Like, criticizing the government shouldnt just be possible because you can hide behind a fake name. It should be legal with your face name and address attached to it as well