Emperor G built a beautiful walled city, inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. A year later, Big G banned blue houses. If you didn't like the rules, you were more than welcome to build your house outside the city and paint it whatever color you like.
Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city is so beautiful and provides for their every need. In the coming years, people who want to paint their house blue badly enough to leave paradise are heavily scrutinized and eventually considered outcasts.
Over the years, more and more colors are slowly banned, one by one. People start to notice and complain once their favorite color is outlawed. But decades have passed since Emperor G's generous invitation. Entire generations have lived, died, and raised children inside the city. No one knows how to navigate the wilderness anymore. And even if they could, why would they want to? Thorns and weeds have overgrown the wasteland; it's much safer to stay inside the city walls. Besides, it's cozy and we have everything we need in here.
In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship?
Some random guys built a beautiful walled city inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. Before the walled city, almost everyone was homeless, and the few people who had houses were rickety and constantly needed upkeep. (Before YouTube, most people couldn't do video sharing, and tech-savvy people could but it was more complicated)
Five years later, the random guys realized they had spent themselves into oblivion building the city. Thankfully, the Emperor, G, came along and offered to bail them out provided he could run the city. G didn't want to charge people money to live in the city, but did need to make money somehow, so he began allowing people to run home businesses and made profit off business taxes.
Years after that, lots of people were running home businesses. Some of them were running legally and ethically odious home businesses. Two things happened: First, all the customers from outside the city said they really didn't want to keep buying from Emperor G's city unless he took action to shut down the shady businesses. Second, Emperor G didn't like that he was being associated with those businesses. So he suggested that in the near future, zoning laws would change to prohibit running home businesses in some categories. In the metaphor, this is Google and advertisers beginning to demonetize certain for-profit YouTube channels without banning anyone.
Some business and some residents owners expressed concern about the new zoning laws (especially those affected!), but most of them, and certainly most visitors, didn't because they had the effect of weeding out some undesirable elements and beautifying the city.
Then, like three years after that, a bunch of white supremacists (and some people who aren't white supremacists, but who frequently say things that are debatably white supremacist, and also, some people who aren't even those people, but pal around with them a lot and really do their best to appeal to white supremacist audiences) colonized a big wing of the town. Some of them were running businesses and so they ran into zoning law problems as before, but most were just living there. Emperor G started an HOA to exclude those people, since many others in the city were tired of the general nuisance. I think the metaphor here should be clear.
Like most HOAs, it wasn't especially fair (and it caught up some of the neighbors of the people listed above) and so even if you agree with the decisions in principle you probably still have a lot to complain about.
Now, as even more years go by, Emperor G is starting to make really silly calls through the HOA, like banning certain colours of paint on houses. People are really starting to get irritated with this. Some of the people kicked out in the previous wave or zoned out of business in the first wave are seeing "told you so", but most residents of the town don't see the connection because it's possible to support HOAs or zoning laws while disagreeing with specific stuff that they ban. That's this thread and what's being discussed here. In fact, most people do support the HOA and the zoning laws!
Some people talk about leaving the city for the wilderness, or just missing the wilderness. Today, about the same number of people have wilderness skills as had them before, and the good news is there's more avenues than ever before to learn wilderness skills and get supplies out there. So you absolutely could leave the wilderness. However, most people still prefer the city despite its flaws, because in the same way that it takes less effort to prepare food than it does to grow it from scratch, the city allows people to focus on the things that matter to them rather than reinventing all of civilization from scratch. Besides, all the white supremacists that got kicked out of the city are still out there screaming, and sometimes you just want to go through your day without being screamed at.
Authoritarian Censors always have a boogeyman to point to that justifies their censorship
Your white supremacists boogeyman is just a over blown justification for massive dictatorial censorship of the internet in general and you tube more specifically
I have no respect for anyone that wants to hide behind this narrative in support of the wide and sweeping censorship of millions of hours of contents
//as a side not, HOA's and Zoning laws are also Authoritarian, as a libertarian and supporter of individual freedom I do not support censorship, nor HOA's nor Zoning laws
It'd be real nice if we could make an expeditionary force and start setting up more cities outside, to continue the analogy. At the moment, most groups wanting to leave the city contain too many undesirables, but eventually there'll be enough critical mass. What does that look like? At first - an ecosystem of services, packaged together, rather than piecemeal. Firefox, duckduckgo, an open calendar. I don't think it means linux per say, but maybe a privacy-focused android distro and an overlay for windows. The OS doesn't matter as much anymore.
The solution to alternative communities having too many 'undesirables' is pretty simple; you focus on a specific niche/field that YouTube or whatever doesn't do well, then build up from there.
That's how Twitch took off. Started off being gaming focused, became a bit more open to other content later on. Same with Discord compared to say, Reddit or Twitter or Slack or what not.
The reason most alternatives attract the wrong audience/don't reach critical mass is because their marketing is always focused on the freedom of speech/privacy/whatever angle. That's attractive to a certain audience (those who are being censored more often on existing platforms), but not to the general public.
So you aim your new privacy/decentralised/free speech focused platform at gamers or sports fans or software engineers or what not, and then slowly open it up to the general public/all topics. Like how Facebook started out being aimed specifically at college students.
I disagree. Everything described above applies to the Microsoft Windows monopoly. The monopoly was shaken by the web, then by mobile in general, but lots of traditional businesses are still locked into the Windows stack. Non technical businesses in particular are locked into MS Office.
Given that the world basically shrugged and let MS keep their stranglehold over the enterprise market, I don't expect Google to be treated any differently.
> In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship?
I mean... no?
I think it's useful to have a separate concept for actual censorship (government-mandated), and just "someone built a really great way to connect to a bunch of users, that didn't exist 20 years ago, but now isn't letting you use it". I'm not saying it's not problematic (or that it is), just that it's different in a meaningful way and therefore bad to conflate.
As for how much of a monopoly YouTube really is - it's clearly a huge aggregator that's gotten almost all "user watching video" engagement. Except other niches have been discussed here (e.g. porn), and they seem to be doing fine. So I don't think it's inevitable that YouTube is the only service that can exist.
This works in a non monopolized system. If you live in a large city with many different stores, and you get banned for one of them for wearing a blue shirt, that doesn't matter too much.
If you live in a remote city with one wallmart and no other stores, and wallmart bans you, that's a problem.
Yes, there are alternatives, but 97% of the market is definitely a monopoly.
This is a good point. I've been hearing "deplatforming" as the word for what's happening and that seems more accurate than censoring. In part because if we call this censoring and then later the government actually does strictly ban this content - what do we call that?
Government-mandated or capitalism-mandated? What's the meaningful difference?
Well, maybe, historically, many governments have proven time and time again a meaningful capability to not simply turn Evil for many decades, centuries even. For corporations it seems utterly inevitable; they either grow and become evil, or they don't grow and die. Which happens over the span of one or two decades at the most.
Clearly, we should prefer government censorship, if anything. ...
While Google created that walled city, they also destroyed every other city into a pile of rubble after tapping into endless resources from a completely unrelated industry. YouTube had an unfair advantage over just about any other company trying to build something similar.
Google is famous for making things free until they are not, than your screwed. I like when they arbitrarily change rules about SEO, AMP's and such. Don't want to play by the new rules? No problem, you and your company will be thrown onto the scrap heap.
The more this metaphor is fleshed out the more it sounds like it's referring to civilization in general and how ancient cities/city-states actually operated (to some level of similarity).
Build a city, invite people in, tax them and rule them, and destroy or absorb every rival you can get away with. Have technology or resources your competitor doesn't have? Sucks to be them.
I guess I'm not that surprised that even though we can collectively build better systems for ourselves after time and lots of understanding where the alternatives lead us, our nature shows itself in various other areas.
Many of the of the same pundits supporting censorship on Google search and Youtube used to be extremely critical of Walmart's business practices. This isn't about principles.
Ah, but we do know how to navigate the wilderness. You see, we built this city. We built it on ARP and IP. And we can build it again - next time with better foundations.
The gatekeepers underestimate how long tastemakers are willing to go without them to discourage long-term bad behaviour.
My only regret is that I did not contribute to building DuckDuckGo.
The problem isn't you and me, the problem is "the most".
In my time, we all hung out on IRC (well, some still do, but mostly for technical stuff). But IRC was like ARP and IP, you needed to set some parameters, enter a server address (that you had to look up in a paper magazone or had to ask a friend for it), you had to join a channel, that you had to find first (listing all channels was useless on larger ircnets), and then you could chat. ...and you had to be online to receive messages, which was a problem back then with dialup connections.
Then came "social networks" (myspace, facebook,...), where all you needed to know was "myspace.com", and they offered objectively "more" than irc (chat messages were recorded even if you were offline, photos, profile pages,...), and people started using those. So if you wanted to chat with friends, you had to make an account there. And most people slowly migrated to myspace, and then facebook, and so on.
Anyone can build a website, set up video streaming, buy virtual machines for video hosting, etc. But if "all of your friends" (97%(?) of video watchers) open up youtube, and search for videos there, and your video is not there, it's the same if you were alone on an empty irc channel with two other users on the irc server.
Greed. Humanity has always been driven by greed, but the hope was that it would recognize and overcome this sin and get to the next level. This hasn't happened. I have a weird feeling that humanity (or rather this civilization that started about 10k years b.c.) has just missed the critical point when it needed to take off. The greed was too heavy and we've started losing altitude. In practice, losing altitude manifests as the raising temperatures: the only way to solve this problem is to overcome greed.
A lesson that's impossible to follow when all the land is already owned, unless everyone gets the ability to create a full fledged ISP in their basement.
> In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship?
Reminds me of the retort to libertarian/anti-big-government goals: "Lots of things become a government"
You forgot the part about how Emperor G would come and burn your house to the ground if you tried to build outside the city because building houses was his idea.
But wait, they didn't invent building houses. But Arbiter W lives in the walled city and the Emperor gives him gifts. Arbiter W considers Emperor G to be the person who owns the idea of building houses, and Aribter W is the one that sent the arsons out to your place, so you are now shit out of luck with a burning house.
I'm sorry, this just flew over my head. What is this analogy about? Is Google DoS'ing third party websites? Deranking them? Suing for patent infringement? Who's W?
And if you built a really nice house and people saw leaving the city to join your new house community. The G would just buy your house and move everyone in the walled city.
Emperor G will use his massive power to influence the elections of the Gods, only allows those sympathetic to the Emperor's goals a voice to talk to the people in the city
One effective way to protest this would be to report videos by high-profile companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google itself.
Take a few minutes to look for a video about Azure or AWS or GCP, or a video of a presentation at a conference around such things, and report it as Inappropriate content citing the relevant terms of service.
Be very careful only to report content that conforms to the above description — the point here is to show YouTube where they're wrong by forcing them into direct confrontation with their own vested interests.
Bonus irony points will be conceded to correctly flagging a Google Project Zero video, or a YouTube security team video, as in violation of the terms of service as stated.
Again, please do not do this indiscriminately. Use your judgement on how to create the maximum exposure of stupidity through honest and careful judgement of what obviously should be permitted and yet does not comply with the rules as stated today.
EDIT: Per commenters below — if you behave improperly and report a ton of videos inappropriately, you very well could get your account banned. If you're worried about this, report one video only. Be selective, use your single vote, and then move on.
> Bonus irony points will be conceded to correctly flagging a Google Project Zero video, or a YouTube security team video, as in violation of the terms of service as stated.
Without reading the ToS too carefully, I'm all but certain academic and industry-leading security work is deliberately carved out. Clearly this rule is designed to disallow liability concerns like a viral "how to see someone else's snapchats!" video, etc...
In the case of the linked tweet, it seems to have also hit a legitimate-seeming-if-not-industry-leading security source as a false positive. And that's bad, and a reason to oppose this policy in general.
But treating this as an "Ah hah! Hypocrisy!" kind of thing is missing the point and not going to help anyone. You know what they're trying to do.
Sadly, this is the moment where the terms of service that do permit such work would have been precisely what we need to counter the direction of the entire post. I hope you or someone are able to discover it and cite it here. (I couldn’t manage to find the terms from my device, but that’s likely more my device’s fault than any. I’ll try again later if I remember, but it might be too late for today’s comment.)
This will be ineffective. Google whitelists many channels by large organizations and they are sheltered from any such reports. If 200k reports came in on the next Microsoft video posted, someone at YouTube might notice, but the video would never be taken down. You should read (as should everyone else) Eric Schmidt's book 'A New Digital Age'. In it he lies out his view. Basically (and obviously this is my perspective, this is the meaning not the language he uses to sell it), because Google is rich, they are Better. The teeming masses of the unwashed must be yolked by their betters. Left to their own devices, the public would destroy themselves and it is the responsibility of Google and other gigacorps to create culture in order to preserve civilization.
> because Google is rich, they are Better. The teeming masses of the unwashed must be yolked by their betters. Left to their own devices, the public would destroy themselves and it is the responsibility of Google and other gigacorps to create culture in order to preserve civilization
(probably an unpopular opinion, but...) sounds like neoliberalism
I can say from experience this does not work at scale. YouTube has allowed large public accounts to be in blatant violation of the terms of service. They are selectively enforced.
This reminds me of the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia. They protested against the Communist regime by reporting to the it its own violations of its laws and agreements. It was a brilliant way of unveiling the lies of their government. Somehow, this approach is very similar.
You can make it a PR issue. Go through reporting and if the videos clearly violate TOS and aren't taken down, point out the double standard to the activist press.
can you clarify which options to click on? I dont see a label that best fits this complaint. there are options like terrorism/child abuse/offensive content, etc.
There's a lot of bad content on the Internet, and a lot of people wanted to ban it. And the free speech absolutists said, that's a slippery slope. Once you start restricting speech beyond whatever is illegal, there will be no end to the demands to ban certain content.
And a lot of us said, slippery slopes are silly arguments. All we're asking is to ban overt racism and calls to violence. We can evaluate these things individually on their own terms.
I don't think this changes the idea that the slippery slope is a silly argument.
Aren't we evaluating these things on their own terms now? It's definitely possible to have a YouTube that is harsh on calls to violence but allows cyber-security instructionals.
We're not sliding down the slope just yet. We took a step too low and need to climb back up.
edit:
I should not have used "we" above, since only Alphabet controls the platform.
To clarify, I don't think this is the natural end of a "slippery slope" from removing hateful/violent videos from YouTube.
This was not an inevitability of moderation. It is possible to have a "YouTube" that takes down violent content and leaves educational material up.
If it makes them money and no one in power objects, it stays up (see harassment of Carlos Maza). If it jeopardizes those in power or YouTube's bottom line, it comes down.
A slippery slope is only a fallacy if you can't demonstrate a downward slide. Once you can demonstrate that slide, the issue needs to be taken more seriously. I believe that over the last two years, we have seen a dramatic increase in censorship from the most powerful companies in the world. I'm not even sure that our governments have the will or power to stop them at this point.
Every other HN discussion I've seen about YouTube banning content lately has been full of people insisting that because Google moderates their content at all, they are morally obliged to use their powers to police the politics of the nation. That's not so much a slippery slope as it is a slippery cliff face. Probably the only reason this one is different is because they're going after something HN regulars care about.
It is possible to have a Youtube like this. Its also possible to have a Youtube that allows porn, or a Youtube that exclusively hosts videos from large media companies because its too risky to allow random people to upload any of these things.
All of these are possibilities. Some of them are more likely than others. But you want to know the least likely possibility? The one with chances so unrealistically impossible that it practically will not happen? Its the possibility that Moderation will land on the point in the Gray Area that you believe is Fair.
Why is that? Its because everyone's point is different, and its insanely difficult to even define that point during day-to-day enforcement. So, Youtube, serving millions of users, having thousands of humans and millions of lines of code running enforcement, will continually become more conservative. Someone is outraged? Ban it. An advertiser is outraged? Oh damn, make a policy. Making a policy is easy. Reverting is is very difficult. At its very foundations this is why the world gets more and more conservative over time.
This is why freedom of speech is such an important thing. The first, best option is to find a gray area that is perfect for everyone... which is impossible. The second best option is to allow anything. Anything is better than nothing, and its also probably better than the conservative, whitewashed world that we're headed toward.
But, then again; they can run their platform however they want. And most people think they should ban violence... and self-harm... and suicide... and directions for making explosives... and hacking? Well, maybe there is somewhere they should stop. No one ever said it was easy. Or that allowing everything is the right move for them. But, the reality is, if they keep changing the rules, then the rules will eventually slide toward gross conservatism. That's the future of the platform. And next decade, a new platform will replace them, and the same thing will happen to them. Freedom of speech isn't necessary in private platforms like this; generally speaking, given enough time, the markets will take care of it.
> I don't think this changes the idea that the slippery slope is a silly argument.
Why? "slippery slope" holds when each change makes it easier to enact further change in the same direction, and that seems to be the case here. "censor CP" + "censor porn" is an easier sell than the original "censor CP" step was, thanks to infrastructure already being in place. Adding copyright on top of that was easier still. And then violent content, and then aid to terrorism, and then politics we don't like, and gun repair videos, and ammo reloading, and...
Now we're at "hacking instructions", which is a hell of a way down that slope.
> We're not sliding down the slope just yet. We took a step too low and need to climb back up.
Perhaps we're running down the slope and not sliding, but that doesn't increase the chance we're about to turn around.
> We took a step too low and need to climb back up
This is not going to happen; we will keep sliding. We are not the ones doing the stepping, because we do not control the platform. What we can do is persuade people to use distributed and/or federated alternatives.
> All we're asking is to ban overt racism and calls to violence
I agree that it's reasonable to ban "calls to violence", but the "overt racism " part is extremely subjective. Why is racism worse than hacking? I, based on my own principles, think racism is 'worse' than hacking, but most people's principles are completely different from mine, and I think a considerable part of the population thinks that hacking is morally "worse" than racism, even if they don't realize that they think that.
Different people might have different views about whether "racism is worse than hacking," but that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and concede that everyone is entitled to their own views. Explicitly racist policy still exists, and racism became socially unacceptable in the first world only very recently (in historical terms). But the fight against racist policy has partially succeeded in changing the world, and racism no longer falls within the Overton window.
Almost everyone agrees that there should be some room for objectionable and offensive content, but 'the worst' content must be censored and criminalised. There is very little consensus on where to draw the line. Banning hacking videos (if that's an accurate description of what occurs in practice) crosses the line for me, but at the same time, hackers don't need YouTube to share videos.
It is almost as if the founding fathers gave a lot of thought and consideration to the first amendment. Maybe we shouldn't willy nilly stomp all over it.
Of course they have a point. It just takes getting burned a few times before people learn why “you do you even when I don’t like you” is an important philosophy.
We become accustomed to restrictions when they’re not against us. The MPAA is a censorship cartel. But most people couldn’t be bothered to give a shit and those that do are happy for it. Who cares if movies forcefeed sexual negativity as long as it means little Timmy will never see tits?
Eh, I think there is a difference, and it should be obvious, which is why it should be discernible. There is something to learn from hacking videos. The people tend to put them up "in good faith", a critical component of my argument.
Hate speech, calls for racial violence and other overtly harmful speech with no redeeming value, lesson, or skillset are discernible from videos about skills that could be used for good or bad.
A video about how to shoot accurately under pressure isn't bad. A video about how to take cover and kill as many people as you can in a church when the revolution begins is harmful.
Showing unpatched vulns that have been reported in IoT devices, or teaching about discovering web vulnerabilities, is good. Publishing a specific zero-day with no warning to the vendor in a way that would compromise many peoples' PII or banking data should be banned.
I’m in that boat. I thought the slippery slope argument was just fear mongering. How embarrassing. Last I heard anti GMO content is to be banned. Bizarre.
At this point I don’t know why “slippery slope” is called a logical fallacy when so much experience has proved otherwise.
Would you then agree that any communist leaning YouTube channel is by definition a "call to violence", since communist movements have resulted in deaths of 110 million people in 20th century? And therefore the channel must be shut down.
Rejecting that 'definition' does not imply the truth of any slippery slope argument. I think it's easy to distinguish between communist leaning YouTube channels, and communist leaning YouTube channels that contain explicit calls to violence. A 'slippery slope' argument assumes the opposite: that once we accept that some content is prohibited, we cannot avoid the conclusion that all content is prohibitable by an arbitrary censor.
these seem fairly unrelated, honestly. They could have just as easily left the bad content in and still moved on removing videos on circumventing device/computer security. The bad content removal isn't a precedent that allowed for the removal of videos that affect their (and their peers') bottom line: they had that capacity from the onset.
As terrible as it may be (I haven't seen what is being removed to say), it is their site and their rules. So it then falls upon the users to decide if another site that will provide security bypassing videos is worth it to go to.
Right. Most "free speech absolutists" are only absolutists when it comes to viewpoint neutrality, not when it comes to issues like incitement, false advertising, or defamation.
And frankly, a lot of people who loudly proclaim their love of free speech aren't even close to being absolutists in that sense; they'll talk up the marketplace of ideas and the importance of rational discourse as long as they're under threat, then suddenly lose interest in the issue when restrictions are applied to the outgroup.
Except YouTube hasn't even banned overt racism and calls to violence. You can still find plenty of it on the platform. Once a channel is large enough, there's effectively nothing you can do short of copyright infringement to get banned.
'Slippery slope' is an illogical way to argue things. There are better arguments against censorship, most notably: There is no cogent argument in favor of censorship. It's that simple. People don't like simple truth, but really, that's their problem. The fact of the matter is, there is exactly 1 person who can control the impact of any expression - the audience. No one else can do it. When the audience wishes to abdicate their responsibility to determine their response, and wish to pawn it off on the creator or anyone else, they have abandoned civilization.
Does this mean that all the reverse engineering videos, con talks, prof of exploit demos, CTF walkthroughs', and fuzzing tutorials will be removed? What about videos showing me how to use tools like Twistlock? Will they be exempt, but videos about burp be banned?
What constitutes a "secure" computer system?
Side note, I guess its time to fire up youtube-dl. Are there any channels that need to be archived? I normally just watch what comes up in a search, not anyone in particular.
Exploiting a buffer overflow in sprintf was a lab assignment in my computer architecture course, iirc I had to watch a few youtube videos to really understand what I needed to do (my TA wasn't particularly helpful).
Not to go all slippery slope, but are BosnianBill and the Lock Picking Lawyer next?
I'm not going to be able to take a look for a few days, but I'd be grateful if someone made sure that most of the Defcon talks were archived or mirrored somewhere.
Please use tubeup [1] to backup at risk videos to the Internet Archive. It uses youtube-dl on the backend for retrieving content, subtitles, etc, and will properly set metadata for the item in the archive. The content will be darked if there’s an issue serving it, and the IA staff and storage system will throttle you if necessary (which will bubble up as s3 timeouts).
DEFCON, CCC, and other infosec groups need to move to peertube ASAP.
Someone suggested federating with the PeerTube network to the people maintaining the backend for https://media.ccc.de , but there doesn't seem to have been a decision on that yet.
I think ippsec recently set up a mirror for himself where you can download all of his videos, but his videos on youtube are tremendous help on my way to OSCP. He does walkthroughs of boxes hosted on hackthebox shortly after they retire.
It's a shame to see this type of content at risk of being blacklisted.
I've been trying to argue for awhile that if the major public venues become privately moderated that it would have a chilling effect on free speech. I continually get the rhetoric that free speech only applies to the government (it doesn't; the First Amendment only applies to the government but the ideal of free speech is a universal human right) and that censorship is something only the government can do (also not true for the same reason).
This is not a new concept. In 1859, John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty that the tyranny of the majority and the de facto censorship that they can create is just as if not far more dangerous to actual liberty than government control.
If we have laws for common carriers, and laws like network neutrality, then there must also be laws protecting the right of the people to participate in public discourse even when the venue is privately held. It is vital to the existence of a free state!
Better perhaps, but what's your proposed path to implementing that? Is it achievable, and what eggs get broken in the course of cooking that omelette?
One huge roadblock I can see is that you would need to address the question of what would replace privately held platforms? If the suggested replacement is something the government operates, you now have to address how that conflicts with the overall neoliberal philosophy of government that we've been operating under for the past couple of decades that precludes the notion of such a thing being operated in that manner. So now we're looking at quite a lot of smashed eggs.
Whereas the former suggestion is something that has, at first glance, a reasonably straightforward path to implementation via legislation, and related precedent to boot. It's easier to make a targeted override of a behavior that is an inherent part of the system under which it emerged, than it is to overhaul the entire system to correct that particular behavior.
That's an extremely difficult problem given the speed at which social media changes and the slowness of legal changes. Look at the explosion of Discord. Also, social media isn't a commodity service. What happens if YouTube is broken up? Facebook? Instagram? Twitter?
It seems safer to also require that any platform that offers free, open access to social media style content not show any bias towards that content unless it is otherwise illegal. If you want to pretend to be a public venue, you've got to have the responsibility of keeping a public venue.
Economies of scale and network effects mean that government (or comparable entity) will have to go out of their way to foster competition way beyond what the market will bear. How can we make this happen?
to participate in public discourse even when the venue is privately held
So if I come to your house, to your birthday party, and I start teaching people (or just talking) about torture, scams, rape techniques, differences of classes/races/whatever, etc. or simply teaching kids how to hack an ATM, will you be OK with it? Would you ask me to leave?
Edit: saying all of that possibly while arguing that "it's just educational" even when it may or may not be the real reason.
There are thousands of hours of excellent cybersecurity content hosted on YouTube. The possibility of losing this wealth of information and history is shocking to me.
Time to start the archive effort. And to finally appreciate what so many other communities have gone through when they've found themselves on the wrong side of one of the internet behemoths. I feel naive.
Shocking indeed. Imagine if this thinking was applied to other classes of content. Banning game emulator videos. Banning piracy videos. Banning unauthorized iphone repair videos.
- Many convention talks are really good and are too many to list
- OWASP
- zseano
- hackerone
- Bugcrowd (Jason Haddix's stuff is a pretty important pillar)
- OWASP
- DarkOperator
- Absolute AppSec
- KacperSzureEN
- PwnFunction
- LiveOverflow
There are a ton more, these are just ones I've been watching in the past 6 months or so.
The "solution" is choosing your priorities and being willing to make sacrifices, which, in my experience, many people are not willing to do.
"I don't want to be on a censorious megacorporate platform." Great! You can do this, you'll just have to be on the #2 platform rather than the #1 platform, and there won't be as many "free" tools & services. "What?? How can you suggest I abandon the #1 platform? I need all those free tools and services + the exposure of the #1 platform!" :shrug: OK, in that case "free tools and services" & "exposure" are higher priorities to you than user respect, privacy, free expression etc., and you're making the right choice to stay on youtube.
It feels a lot like people want to have their cake and eat it too.
Our (as users) only negotiating leverage with a provider like google is willingness to leave their platforms. If you're are not willing to do that, all this hand-wringing and complaining is just wasted breath as google has ~0 incentive to take your complaints seriously.
I think the truth here is that saying "Just use another platform" isn't taking into account reality.
Let's say for a moment that Google isn't evil (hypothetical, I know) and that you want a Facebook alternative. Google themselves tried to make one - and failed spectacularly.
If Google can't make a Facebook alternative, what chance does anyone else have? In what way does a #2 platform ever even approach Facebook while FB can just purchase them or otherwise stop them before a critical mass of users switch?
I'm very free market, but this is a clear monopoly and social media sites seemingly requires new rules that didn't exist for telecoms.
Youtube updating its policy to ban videos they have already monetized from, while the creators get nothing. Youtube is a monopoly. Creators need to get off YT, and onto something else if it exists.
Herein lies the problem.. Most creators/uploaders know on some level that YT is a toxic monopoly and would be happy to jump ship. Granted some more than others, but I've never observed any sense of loyalty towards the platform - it's just where everyone goes to share and watch videos.
However, switching to vimeo/DTube/flixxo/etc means less views and smaller paychecks. Why would content creators in the same amount of effort for less recognition & money? Nothing will change until alternative services solve the problem of monetization & audience size.
Thus a chicken-vs-egg situation where viewers don't want to switch because their favorite uploaders are on YT, uploaders don't want to switch because all their viewers are on YT, and competitors can't convince investors to bankroll them without higher user counts. Meanwhile, the Big G/YT monolith keeps chugging along with thousands of employees and billions of dollars behind it, becoming more deeply entrenched every year. What's the solution?
What stops creators from uploading to both? Sure, they miss out on some revenue when people watch their video on Vimeo rather than YouTube. But once they are getting a significant portion of their views on another platform, that would likely mean the alternative platform is popular enough to offer reasonable compensation to creators and they can eventually stop sharing content on YouTube.
I'm glad you brought this up. This was the exact question I had a few years ago, when I began developing my idea for a solution.
What I considered to be the best approach is to break apart the idea of hosting content and sharing content with your audience in the same place. If you can share in one place and host in another, then switching content hosts ceases to be a problem; You can transfer your content to a different host while preserving the space in which you share, losing no audience or traction in the process.
I'm currently in the process of launching this platform, called MyNexus. If you'd like to learn more, or know anyone searching for a solution to these problems, my email is yaniv@mynexus.io.
There are alternatives. For years I've been following content creators who upload their content to multiple services because they saw the writing on the wall.
> Creators need to get off YT, and onto something else if it exists.
It does now! I'm currently in the process of launching a content-host agnostic platform for creators.
Basically, MyNexus is a platform to share content with your audience, highlight your preferred avenues for support (eg. Patreon or PayPal), and run promotions (whether your own products or sponsorships).
MyNexus doesn't host any of the content itself. You can still upload your videos to Youtube, Vimeo, Peertube, or any other service. Need to shift to a different platform later? No problem. Simply edit your post and your entire content catalogue is preserved without any inconvenience to your audience.
If you're interested in learning more, email me at yaniv@mynexus.io.
> Creators need to get off YT, and onto something else if it exists.
The most common response to this is that a YouTube alternative can't exist because Google operates it at a loss (unverifiable), so anyone who tries to compete will fail.
The YouTube business model also aligns perfectly with Google's strengths: Advertising, data storage, search, etc. So even if it is profitable, it would still be extremely difficult for anyone else to make money in the same market.
> The YouTube business model also aligns perfectly with Google's strengths:
The things people want an alternative for are central to YouTube’s business model, so an alternative that would have any chance of not duplicating the problems would not be trying to duplicate that business model.
One alternative would be a basic creator-pays model which provides the option for creators to require viewer payment for some or all content with a cut of viewer payment received going to the platfrom as well as all of the creator payment going that way.
Creators can host their own content with their own sponsorship and advertising agreements on their own domain and pay their own bandwidth bill.
YouTube was born in an era of a half dozen different non-standard codecs. Now H.264/MP4 works on everything from TVs to watches.
The reality is that most content on YouTube isn’t even worth the bandwidth it costs to get it to people. Most creators are just looking for a handout for creating mindless nonsense.
Readit News
Only most people don't leave - blue is just one color and they weren't very interested in it anyway. Besides, the city is so beautiful and provides for their every need. In the coming years, people who want to paint their house blue badly enough to leave paradise are heavily scrutinized and eventually considered outcasts.
Over the years, more and more colors are slowly banned, one by one. People start to notice and complain once their favorite color is outlawed. But decades have passed since Emperor G's generous invitation. Entire generations have lived, died, and raised children inside the city. No one knows how to navigate the wilderness anymore. And even if they could, why would they want to? Thorns and weeds have overgrown the wasteland; it's much safer to stay inside the city walls. Besides, it's cozy and we have everything we need in here.
In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship?
Some random guys built a beautiful walled city inviting everyone in, encouraging them to paint their houses whatever color they like. Before the walled city, almost everyone was homeless, and the few people who had houses were rickety and constantly needed upkeep. (Before YouTube, most people couldn't do video sharing, and tech-savvy people could but it was more complicated)
Five years later, the random guys realized they had spent themselves into oblivion building the city. Thankfully, the Emperor, G, came along and offered to bail them out provided he could run the city. G didn't want to charge people money to live in the city, but did need to make money somehow, so he began allowing people to run home businesses and made profit off business taxes.
Years after that, lots of people were running home businesses. Some of them were running legally and ethically odious home businesses. Two things happened: First, all the customers from outside the city said they really didn't want to keep buying from Emperor G's city unless he took action to shut down the shady businesses. Second, Emperor G didn't like that he was being associated with those businesses. So he suggested that in the near future, zoning laws would change to prohibit running home businesses in some categories. In the metaphor, this is Google and advertisers beginning to demonetize certain for-profit YouTube channels without banning anyone.
Some business and some residents owners expressed concern about the new zoning laws (especially those affected!), but most of them, and certainly most visitors, didn't because they had the effect of weeding out some undesirable elements and beautifying the city.
Then, like three years after that, a bunch of white supremacists (and some people who aren't white supremacists, but who frequently say things that are debatably white supremacist, and also, some people who aren't even those people, but pal around with them a lot and really do their best to appeal to white supremacist audiences) colonized a big wing of the town. Some of them were running businesses and so they ran into zoning law problems as before, but most were just living there. Emperor G started an HOA to exclude those people, since many others in the city were tired of the general nuisance. I think the metaphor here should be clear.
Like most HOAs, it wasn't especially fair (and it caught up some of the neighbors of the people listed above) and so even if you agree with the decisions in principle you probably still have a lot to complain about.
Now, as even more years go by, Emperor G is starting to make really silly calls through the HOA, like banning certain colours of paint on houses. People are really starting to get irritated with this. Some of the people kicked out in the previous wave or zoned out of business in the first wave are seeing "told you so", but most residents of the town don't see the connection because it's possible to support HOAs or zoning laws while disagreeing with specific stuff that they ban. That's this thread and what's being discussed here. In fact, most people do support the HOA and the zoning laws!
Some people talk about leaving the city for the wilderness, or just missing the wilderness. Today, about the same number of people have wilderness skills as had them before, and the good news is there's more avenues than ever before to learn wilderness skills and get supplies out there. So you absolutely could leave the wilderness. However, most people still prefer the city despite its flaws, because in the same way that it takes less effort to prepare food than it does to grow it from scratch, the city allows people to focus on the things that matter to them rather than reinventing all of civilization from scratch. Besides, all the white supremacists that got kicked out of the city are still out there screaming, and sometimes you just want to go through your day without being screamed at.
Your white supremacists boogeyman is just a over blown justification for massive dictatorial censorship of the internet in general and you tube more specifically
I have no respect for anyone that wants to hide behind this narrative in support of the wide and sweeping censorship of millions of hours of contents
//as a side not, HOA's and Zoning laws are also Authoritarian, as a libertarian and supporter of individual freedom I do not support censorship, nor HOA's nor Zoning laws
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That's how Twitch took off. Started off being gaming focused, became a bit more open to other content later on. Same with Discord compared to say, Reddit or Twitter or Slack or what not.
The reason most alternatives attract the wrong audience/don't reach critical mass is because their marketing is always focused on the freedom of speech/privacy/whatever angle. That's attractive to a certain audience (those who are being censored more often on existing platforms), but not to the general public.
So you aim your new privacy/decentralised/free speech focused platform at gamers or sports fans or software engineers or what not, and then slowly open it up to the general public/all topics. Like how Facebook started out being aimed specifically at college students.
I disagree. Everything described above applies to the Microsoft Windows monopoly. The monopoly was shaken by the web, then by mobile in general, but lots of traditional businesses are still locked into the Windows stack. Non technical businesses in particular are locked into MS Office.
Given that the world basically shrugged and let MS keep their stranglehold over the enterprise market, I don't expect Google to be treated any differently.
I mean... no?
I think it's useful to have a separate concept for actual censorship (government-mandated), and just "someone built a really great way to connect to a bunch of users, that didn't exist 20 years ago, but now isn't letting you use it". I'm not saying it's not problematic (or that it is), just that it's different in a meaningful way and therefore bad to conflate.
As for how much of a monopoly YouTube really is - it's clearly a huge aggregator that's gotten almost all "user watching video" engagement. Except other niches have been discussed here (e.g. porn), and they seem to be doing fine. So I don't think it's inevitable that YouTube is the only service that can exist.
If you live in a remote city with one wallmart and no other stores, and wallmart bans you, that's a problem.
Yes, there are alternatives, but 97% of the market is definitely a monopoly.
Also, you're free to leave the country if you don't like what it is censoring.
Well, maybe, historically, many governments have proven time and time again a meaningful capability to not simply turn Evil for many decades, centuries even. For corporations it seems utterly inevitable; they either grow and become evil, or they don't grow and die. Which happens over the span of one or two decades at the most.
Clearly, we should prefer government censorship, if anything. ...
Google is famous for making things free until they are not, than your screwed. I like when they arbitrarily change rules about SEO, AMP's and such. Don't want to play by the new rules? No problem, you and your company will be thrown onto the scrap heap.
Build a city, invite people in, tax them and rule them, and destroy or absorb every rival you can get away with. Have technology or resources your competitor doesn't have? Sucks to be them.
I guess I'm not that surprised that even though we can collectively build better systems for ourselves after time and lots of understanding where the alternatives lead us, our nature shows itself in various other areas.
The gatekeepers underestimate how long tastemakers are willing to go without them to discourage long-term bad behaviour.
My only regret is that I did not contribute to building DuckDuckGo.
In my time, we all hung out on IRC (well, some still do, but mostly for technical stuff). But IRC was like ARP and IP, you needed to set some parameters, enter a server address (that you had to look up in a paper magazone or had to ask a friend for it), you had to join a channel, that you had to find first (listing all channels was useless on larger ircnets), and then you could chat. ...and you had to be online to receive messages, which was a problem back then with dialup connections.
Then came "social networks" (myspace, facebook,...), where all you needed to know was "myspace.com", and they offered objectively "more" than irc (chat messages were recorded even if you were offline, photos, profile pages,...), and people started using those. So if you wanted to chat with friends, you had to make an account there. And most people slowly migrated to myspace, and then facebook, and so on.
Anyone can build a website, set up video streaming, buy virtual machines for video hosting, etc. But if "all of your friends" (97%(?) of video watchers) open up youtube, and search for videos there, and your video is not there, it's the same if you were alone on an empty irc channel with two other users on the irc server.
The problem is, Emperor G sells the only map to the Internet, and they're not shown on it.
(Disclosure: I work for Google)
This is, in effect, the same Modus Operandi that resulted in the Opium Wars - addict a populace to "free" some thing and bankrupt them intellectually.
Reminds me of the retort to libertarian/anti-big-government goals: "Lots of things become a government"
But wait, they didn't invent building houses. But Arbiter W lives in the walled city and the Emperor gives him gifts. Arbiter W considers Emperor G to be the person who owns the idea of building houses, and Aribter W is the one that sent the arsons out to your place, so you are now shit out of luck with a burning house.
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If he keeps allowing blue houses the few people who want blue houses are happy but the Gods may become angered.
Given this, Emperor G's staff of highly paid lawyers have suggested cutting off the degenerates who want blue houses.
Are we still talking about computer security tutorials? I'm not aware of any federal law prohibiting those.
Take a few minutes to look for a video about Azure or AWS or GCP, or a video of a presentation at a conference around such things, and report it as Inappropriate content citing the relevant terms of service.
Be very careful only to report content that conforms to the above description — the point here is to show YouTube where they're wrong by forcing them into direct confrontation with their own vested interests.
Bonus irony points will be conceded to correctly flagging a Google Project Zero video, or a YouTube security team video, as in violation of the terms of service as stated.
Again, please do not do this indiscriminately. Use your judgement on how to create the maximum exposure of stupidity through honest and careful judgement of what obviously should be permitted and yet does not comply with the rules as stated today.
EDIT: Per commenters below — if you behave improperly and report a ton of videos inappropriately, you very well could get your account banned. If you're worried about this, report one video only. Be selective, use your single vote, and then move on.
Without reading the ToS too carefully, I'm all but certain academic and industry-leading security work is deliberately carved out. Clearly this rule is designed to disallow liability concerns like a viral "how to see someone else's snapchats!" video, etc...
In the case of the linked tweet, it seems to have also hit a legitimate-seeming-if-not-industry-leading security source as a false positive. And that's bad, and a reason to oppose this policy in general.
But treating this as an "Ah hah! Hypocrisy!" kind of thing is missing the point and not going to help anyone. You know what they're trying to do.
Yes. You need to keep a good balance in your social credit.
Compounded by the fact that it was posted by username 'gambiting'.
I dont give a fuck about my google account anymore.
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(probably an unpopular opinion, but...) sounds like neoliberalism
And a lot of us said, slippery slopes are silly arguments. All we're asking is to ban overt racism and calls to violence. We can evaluate these things individually on their own terms.
It may turn out the absolutists had a point.
Aren't we evaluating these things on their own terms now? It's definitely possible to have a YouTube that is harsh on calls to violence but allows cyber-security instructionals.
We're not sliding down the slope just yet. We took a step too low and need to climb back up.
edit:
I should not have used "we" above, since only Alphabet controls the platform.
To clarify, I don't think this is the natural end of a "slippery slope" from removing hateful/violent videos from YouTube.
This was not an inevitability of moderation. It is possible to have a "YouTube" that takes down violent content and leaves educational material up.
If it makes them money and no one in power objects, it stays up (see harassment of Carlos Maza). If it jeopardizes those in power or YouTube's bottom line, it comes down.
Moderation is not to blame. Profit motive is.
All of these are possibilities. Some of them are more likely than others. But you want to know the least likely possibility? The one with chances so unrealistically impossible that it practically will not happen? Its the possibility that Moderation will land on the point in the Gray Area that you believe is Fair.
Why is that? Its because everyone's point is different, and its insanely difficult to even define that point during day-to-day enforcement. So, Youtube, serving millions of users, having thousands of humans and millions of lines of code running enforcement, will continually become more conservative. Someone is outraged? Ban it. An advertiser is outraged? Oh damn, make a policy. Making a policy is easy. Reverting is is very difficult. At its very foundations this is why the world gets more and more conservative over time.
This is why freedom of speech is such an important thing. The first, best option is to find a gray area that is perfect for everyone... which is impossible. The second best option is to allow anything. Anything is better than nothing, and its also probably better than the conservative, whitewashed world that we're headed toward.
But, then again; they can run their platform however they want. And most people think they should ban violence... and self-harm... and suicide... and directions for making explosives... and hacking? Well, maybe there is somewhere they should stop. No one ever said it was easy. Or that allowing everything is the right move for them. But, the reality is, if they keep changing the rules, then the rules will eventually slide toward gross conservatism. That's the future of the platform. And next decade, a new platform will replace them, and the same thing will happen to them. Freedom of speech isn't necessary in private platforms like this; generally speaking, given enough time, the markets will take care of it.
Why? "slippery slope" holds when each change makes it easier to enact further change in the same direction, and that seems to be the case here. "censor CP" + "censor porn" is an easier sell than the original "censor CP" step was, thanks to infrastructure already being in place. Adding copyright on top of that was easier still. And then violent content, and then aid to terrorism, and then politics we don't like, and gun repair videos, and ammo reloading, and...
Now we're at "hacking instructions", which is a hell of a way down that slope.
> We're not sliding down the slope just yet. We took a step too low and need to climb back up.
Perhaps we're running down the slope and not sliding, but that doesn't increase the chance we're about to turn around.
This is not going to happen; we will keep sliding. We are not the ones doing the stepping, because we do not control the platform. What we can do is persuade people to use distributed and/or federated alternatives.
I agree that it's reasonable to ban "calls to violence", but the "overt racism " part is extremely subjective. Why is racism worse than hacking? I, based on my own principles, think racism is 'worse' than hacking, but most people's principles are completely different from mine, and I think a considerable part of the population thinks that hacking is morally "worse" than racism, even if they don't realize that they think that.
Almost everyone agrees that there should be some room for objectionable and offensive content, but 'the worst' content must be censored and criminalised. There is very little consensus on where to draw the line. Banning hacking videos (if that's an accurate description of what occurs in practice) crosses the line for me, but at the same time, hackers don't need YouTube to share videos.
It is almost as if the founding fathers gave a lot of thought and consideration to the first amendment. Maybe we shouldn't willy nilly stomp all over it.
Of course they have a point. It just takes getting burned a few times before people learn why “you do you even when I don’t like you” is an important philosophy.
We become accustomed to restrictions when they’re not against us. The MPAA is a censorship cartel. But most people couldn’t be bothered to give a shit and those that do are happy for it. Who cares if movies forcefeed sexual negativity as long as it means little Timmy will never see tits?
Hate speech, calls for racial violence and other overtly harmful speech with no redeeming value, lesson, or skillset are discernible from videos about skills that could be used for good or bad.
A video about how to shoot accurately under pressure isn't bad. A video about how to take cover and kill as many people as you can in a church when the revolution begins is harmful.
Showing unpatched vulns that have been reported in IoT devices, or teaching about discovering web vulnerabilities, is good. Publishing a specific zero-day with no warning to the vendor in a way that would compromise many peoples' PII or banking data should be banned.
At this point I don’t know why “slippery slope” is called a logical fallacy when so much experience has proved otherwise.
He’s just wrong
Would you then agree that any communist leaning YouTube channel is by definition a "call to violence", since communist movements have resulted in deaths of 110 million people in 20th century? And therefore the channel must be shut down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
No? Don't agree? Well now you see why slippery slope is not a silly argument.
As terrible as it may be (I haven't seen what is being removed to say), it is their site and their rules. So it then falls upon the users to decide if another site that will provide security bypassing videos is worth it to go to.
And frankly, a lot of people who loudly proclaim their love of free speech aren't even close to being absolutists in that sense; they'll talk up the marketplace of ideas and the importance of rational discourse as long as they're under threat, then suddenly lose interest in the issue when restrictions are applied to the outgroup.
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Side note, I guess its time to fire up youtube-dl. Are there any channels that need to be archived? I normally just watch what comes up in a search, not anyone in particular.
Not to go all slippery slope, but are BosnianBill and the Lock Picking Lawyer next?
https://media.ccc.de/
DEFCON, CCC, and other infosec groups need to move to peertube ASAP.
[1] https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup
https://github.com/voc/voctoweb/issues/342
&
'LiveOverflow'
It's a shame to see this type of content at risk of being blacklisted.
This is not a new concept. In 1859, John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty that the tyranny of the majority and the de facto censorship that they can create is just as if not far more dangerous to actual liberty than government control.
If we have laws for common carriers, and laws like network neutrality, then there must also be laws protecting the right of the people to participate in public discourse even when the venue is privately held. It is vital to the existence of a free state!
One huge roadblock I can see is that you would need to address the question of what would replace privately held platforms? If the suggested replacement is something the government operates, you now have to address how that conflicts with the overall neoliberal philosophy of government that we've been operating under for the past couple of decades that precludes the notion of such a thing being operated in that manner. So now we're looking at quite a lot of smashed eggs.
Whereas the former suggestion is something that has, at first glance, a reasonably straightforward path to implementation via legislation, and related precedent to boot. It's easier to make a targeted override of a behavior that is an inherent part of the system under which it emerged, than it is to overhaul the entire system to correct that particular behavior.
It seems safer to also require that any platform that offers free, open access to social media style content not show any bias towards that content unless it is otherwise illegal. If you want to pretend to be a public venue, you've got to have the responsibility of keeping a public venue.
So if I come to your house, to your birthday party, and I start teaching people (or just talking) about torture, scams, rape techniques, differences of classes/races/whatever, etc. or simply teaching kids how to hack an ATM, will you be OK with it? Would you ask me to leave?
Edit: saying all of that possibly while arguing that "it's just educational" even when it may or may not be the real reason.
Time to start the archive effort. And to finally appreciate what so many other communities have gone through when they've found themselves on the wrong side of one of the internet behemoths. I feel naive.
'IppSec' has around 100 CTF walkthroughs.
'Open SecurityTraining' has ~200 tutorial vids on topics like reverse engineering and malware analysis.
Edit: added a few more.
There are a ton more, these are just ones I've been watching in the past 6 months or so.
"I don't want to be on a censorious megacorporate platform." Great! You can do this, you'll just have to be on the #2 platform rather than the #1 platform, and there won't be as many "free" tools & services. "What?? How can you suggest I abandon the #1 platform? I need all those free tools and services + the exposure of the #1 platform!" :shrug: OK, in that case "free tools and services" & "exposure" are higher priorities to you than user respect, privacy, free expression etc., and you're making the right choice to stay on youtube.
It feels a lot like people want to have their cake and eat it too.
Our (as users) only negotiating leverage with a provider like google is willingness to leave their platforms. If you're are not willing to do that, all this hand-wringing and complaining is just wasted breath as google has ~0 incentive to take your complaints seriously.
Let's say for a moment that Google isn't evil (hypothetical, I know) and that you want a Facebook alternative. Google themselves tried to make one - and failed spectacularly.
If Google can't make a Facebook alternative, what chance does anyone else have? In what way does a #2 platform ever even approach Facebook while FB can just purchase them or otherwise stop them before a critical mass of users switch?
I'm very free market, but this is a clear monopoly and social media sites seemingly requires new rules that didn't exist for telecoms.
Herein lies the problem.. Most creators/uploaders know on some level that YT is a toxic monopoly and would be happy to jump ship. Granted some more than others, but I've never observed any sense of loyalty towards the platform - it's just where everyone goes to share and watch videos.
However, switching to vimeo/DTube/flixxo/etc means less views and smaller paychecks. Why would content creators in the same amount of effort for less recognition & money? Nothing will change until alternative services solve the problem of monetization & audience size.
Thus a chicken-vs-egg situation where viewers don't want to switch because their favorite uploaders are on YT, uploaders don't want to switch because all their viewers are on YT, and competitors can't convince investors to bankroll them without higher user counts. Meanwhile, the Big G/YT monolith keeps chugging along with thousands of employees and billions of dollars behind it, becoming more deeply entrenched every year. What's the solution?
What I considered to be the best approach is to break apart the idea of hosting content and sharing content with your audience in the same place. If you can share in one place and host in another, then switching content hosts ceases to be a problem; You can transfer your content to a different host while preserving the space in which you share, losing no audience or traction in the process.
I'm currently in the process of launching this platform, called MyNexus. If you'd like to learn more, or know anyone searching for a solution to these problems, my email is yaniv@mynexus.io.
Bitchute: https://www.dailymotion.com/us
Dailymotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/us
PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org/
Thanks to BearsAreCool for pointing it out.
EDIT: Update, they aren't even real full movies. They're just baits that tell you to click some link in the description.
Need to get some big names on platforms like this, or create a new channel/new star/from this.
It does now! I'm currently in the process of launching a content-host agnostic platform for creators.
Basically, MyNexus is a platform to share content with your audience, highlight your preferred avenues for support (eg. Patreon or PayPal), and run promotions (whether your own products or sponsorships).
MyNexus doesn't host any of the content itself. You can still upload your videos to Youtube, Vimeo, Peertube, or any other service. Need to shift to a different platform later? No problem. Simply edit your post and your entire content catalogue is preserved without any inconvenience to your audience.
If you're interested in learning more, email me at yaniv@mynexus.io.
The most common response to this is that a YouTube alternative can't exist because Google operates it at a loss (unverifiable), so anyone who tries to compete will fail.
The YouTube business model also aligns perfectly with Google's strengths: Advertising, data storage, search, etc. So even if it is profitable, it would still be extremely difficult for anyone else to make money in the same market.
The things people want an alternative for are central to YouTube’s business model, so an alternative that would have any chance of not duplicating the problems would not be trying to duplicate that business model.
One alternative would be a basic creator-pays model which provides the option for creators to require viewer payment for some or all content with a cut of viewer payment received going to the platfrom as well as all of the creator payment going that way.
It doesn't.
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YouTube was born in an era of a half dozen different non-standard codecs. Now H.264/MP4 works on everything from TVs to watches.
The reality is that most content on YouTube isn’t even worth the bandwidth it costs to get it to people. Most creators are just looking for a handout for creating mindless nonsense.