The article touches on the importance of YouTube’s discovery a bit but doesn’t do justice to just how strong it can be.
Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.
From the article:
> “If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to self-host your content in the future.”
Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure they promote their other web assets to diversify.
Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be your #2 priority.
There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo, Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.
YouTube owns more than discovery too: they own relationship between viewers and producers.
Most of the YouTube channels I follow have no external means to notify me about new videos. If I were to stop using YouTube, they were banned, or YouTube subscriptions stopped working the same, they would have no way to actually contact me about new content, and they’d lose me.
Effectively YouTube owns the relationship between the creators and I. This can be changed, CGPGrey has been building a mailing list for this reason, but it takes a lot of painstaking deliberate action to achieve. Migrating to a new platform alone is insufficient.
This is a natural extension of any platform geared for the general public as creators, because managing all that for someone in one place provides real benefit to the user. It's just as you note that benefit comes with loss of control.
It's really no different than anything else in life. People hire contractors to do larger home repairs, and the contractors contact and subcontract other specialty workers as needed (drywall, woodworking, plumbing, electrical) for things they can't cover themselves. As the homeowner, unless you make an effort to know who these people are, you won't know who they are and may not know what their company is. The benefit is that you don't need to know any of it and can just let the contractor coordinate it all for you.
Youtube is just like that contractor, except instead of a local guy that cares about your business it's a giant multinational which is hard to get to care if they screw something up for you because you're one of many millions of other customers.
The parallels of you can handle all this coordination youtube offers with more control are obvious. Either hire someone to do it all for you or handle it yourself if you want control, because no matter what platform you go to that handles it for you, chances are it will exhibit some or all of the problems that Youtube has, or even new ones.
I would really like a recommendation engine that I own and control.
It would know what I read and watch. It would find new stuff for me, dedupe it, listen to my feedback,and learn from its mistakes. It would work with all kinds of media, not just youtube or HN.
And it would all be private. I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.
That‘s why you plug your twitter and maybe other socials (mailing list as well I guess, though less usual) at every possible opportunity. It‘s incredibly important to cultivate the relationship with your audience.
In the event that you have to change platform for whatever reason, you still have a line of communication.
I disagree somewhat - well, I think simply backing up content is insufficient but if you diversify your platform now and manage to snag a significant number of viewers then you should be good. Shared platforms like DLive (a la pewdiepie fame and others) or watchnebula.com is one way to do this and can be very strong for topically related subjects - independent platforms like Dropout.tv are also an option but you're either hoping to win the bandwidth vs. advertiser cost balance or going to need to charge for access - both of which can lower your subscriber rate.
I think it's hard to make a fully independent platform so I think topical ones are a better option - but YouTube is really in a position of power due to the network effect. As long as they don't shoot themselves in the foot with controversy and banning then they should be able to easily hold onto their position - everything challenging them has an uphill battle.
Yes, unless you crosspost to Instagram or Facebook and tell people in your videos about all three. Or is that frowned upon at YouTube and/or monitored if you have a high viewership channel?
> Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.
Arguably, entire political movements; the far right and conspiracy vlogosphere relies on constantly being advertised for free to new suckers through youtube recommendations.
We've seen a massive movement for companies to post warnings or alerts stating facts might not back up certain content on social media in the last year or so. Fact Checkers they're called.
Can we at least get youtube to put up a banner saying "no it's impossible to defy the laws of physics and build a unlimited energy machine with a few magnets a microwave and a multimeter?"
I’ve seen couple anecdotes that Japanese artists and amateur musicians get better view counts on Nico Nico Douga(Japanese clone of 2010s YouTube - also inspiration for Chinese Bilibili), despite obviously having far less active users, so I think it’s possible that trying to gain audiences within YouTube could be not as important as perceived, especially the purpose of doing so isn’t to gain more affiliate fees.
A good example to show how much discoverability is important.
Check Blender's Peertube [1] and compare to their Youtube Channel [2]. At the time of writing the latest video is a week old and has 27K views on YouTube while a measly 28 views on PeerTube.
Those figures alone show that it's not even worth to keep an instance up and running for this. I doubt it even counts as an insurance policy against Google shenanigans, you are likely to lose all viewership if your channel goes kaput anyway.
The only way this can possibly be successful for anyone is if they make huge investments in marketing and that carries a risk that even then it may never pay back. YouTube just provides immense value through discovery. You may not like it but there's no denying.
"None of my videos have ever gotten a large number of views, and none are monetized, so I might as well copy them to a PeerTube instance I control."
As we know, there is a growing history of unexpected changes or even phase-outs of services/features that were once considered fixtures provided by Google.
There is nothing I am aware of that says a user could/should not simultaneously 1. keeps backups of her work on physcial media in her possession (as well "in the cloud"), 2. host her work on YouTube or some similarly commercial service, and 3. self-host her work on PeerTube. The decision to diversify should not matter whether the videos have significant views or not.
If both services are free, do you have to "move" from service X to service Y, or can you can just "copy" (mirror).
As a video creator, who in the world would go to all of the effort to create a video, upload it to youtube, and then delete every single piece of the original content in their possession leaving the final in YT as the only surviving copy? WHO? IDIOTS.
People who have limited storage resources? One of the wonderful things about making content for YouTube is its low barrier to entry, and that probably includes a lot of people using their mom's hand-me-down MacBook Air. Maybe people who haven't been bitten by significant data loss before? Sure, it usually only takes once, but maybe that would be their first time? Lots of young people on that platform that are probably really used to everything just kind of automatically being backed up in a cloud somewhere.
Someone not having your level of prudence and understanding in their MO doesn't mean they're idiots. Did you learn everything you know by reading the docs and best practices recommendations and acting accordingly, or did it take a couple of stinging mistakes to bring you to where you are? Your attitude is the stuff that nightmare bosses/parents/teachers/mentors are made of. Mellow out.
Dustin, from Smarter Every Day, has millions of subscribes and keeps his backup copies on old hard drives loosely placed into plastic containers. He also causally tosses them around.
I think it's not that someone intentionally does that, it's that daily creators or those that make large quantities of videos simply run out of space or get overwhelmed by how much storage is needed over time.
There are many videos by creators chronicling the solutions they've had to contrive to preserve their records and the cost/time tradeoffs they've made to continue creating while saving their archives.
Video files are large, so you usually have to store them on some kind of external disk. And it's very possible to lose an external disk. If videos are your livelihood then I imagine you're going to be a lot more disciplined than that but there are plenty of hobbyist vloggers out there.
I have over 160k+ subscribers. What you say is correct and something I've known for years. Build your own platform and hope others will follow you wherever you go. YouTube is a temporary marketing platform at the moment but there are still huge amounts of potential. I have no faith in it's long term stability though.
My flow for watching youtube has been to subscribe and sign up for email alerts (the bell). When I had some time to watch, I'd scan my youtube alerts email folder for items of interest. It was efficient and would quickly leave me with a queue of videos.
I don't even know what the alert bell is for now. If I look at notifications its full of "recommendations". If I go to my subscriptions its random items from all my subscriptions regardless of "the bell".
> Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority
Is it though?
I don’t make videos, but if I did it wouldn’t be as “my job”, it would be because I had information to share.
My favorite YouTube videos and channels aren’t “personalities” being “influencers”.
I guess I just don’t measure success in “popularity”. I don’t think my number one goal would be to get to people, it would be to contribute something useful to a couple people that could use that info.
I would value a good and reliable search feature over the highest possible user base, but this is all just me. I am aware there are people that need the attention / viewership more than I do.
If you count on ad revenue in any way, getting subscriptions matters. This is true even for channels that wouldn’t be categorized as (scare quotes) “influencers”. Your subscriber count directly affects your ability to turn each new video into more views and therefore more ad revenue.
Being censorship-proof is INFINITELY more important than "Multimillion dollar businesses" done on censorable platforms which invariably will become evil (not if but when).
I remember the internet before google - when you would search for anything there would be like a 25% chance that a given search result would be a porn site targeted for random keywords. Google has done a great job figuring out content curation at scale. A competitor for any of their services would need a suite of hard-to-implement features to be viable, including discoverability and content filtration. Are there any good open source solutions to solve these problems? Bonus points if they’ve been proven at scale
Years ago (and I think this was actually Google Video, and not YouTube) I was helping a customer who had trouble playing videos on the internet. I think it was one of those "it sometimes stops after a minute or so" problems. I fixed the problem with flash player and to test it I went video.google.com and clicked on a random video on the frontpage without paying much attention to what it was, and continued working on the next laptop while keeping half an eye on the video.
This is how I learned about R. Budd Dwyer killing himself on live TV in 1987, as the video was the recording of him shooting himself in the head.
I think a lot of people underestimate the kind of challenges YouTube faces at their scale.
It probably is, but afaik you can't see videos from random creators on your peertube instance. You have to subscribe to them to get a feed of their videos.
Just checked out the main site - on top of trending is a seven-second clip of a headless woman showing off her cleaveage. Remember when YouTube had to fix that problem?
>An embedded PeerTube video comes with a warning, because when you watch one of these videos using the web player, you may also be serving that video to other audience members watching it at the same time.
This is something the distributed video people don't seem to entirely understand. Look at how many copyright disputes happen on YouTube - not actual piracy, just disputes. Now imagine every dispute was resolved by sending DMCA takedown notices or subpoenas to individual users who happened to have the misfortune of watching a particular PeerTube video someone didn't like.
Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim. Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers. So you need some sort of mechanism to ensure people who provide you the video don't have an IP address to trace, which immediately puts you in all sorts of hard UX problems that the wave of encrypted P2P software from a decade and a half ago never really figured out.
Is your position that centralized services can out survive distributed ones? Because user IP's are less observable? The past 25 years of cyber/cypherpunk software and legal battles say otherwise. Decentralized solutions outlive centralized ones not because there is "no one to shut down" it's because there's too many people to shut down. Enforcement processes don't scale, especially when it comes to speech.
>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed
A more compelling argument:
>>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.
>
>
>Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.
>
>Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.
You're thinking about this from a pirate's point of view: "they can't sue all of us", and that's entirely correct. But it's also not what I'm worried about. People who know they're breaking the law and don't give a shit will take steps to protect themselves from legal prosecution. People who just see "oh hey free movies" will wind up using insecure services that get them lawsuits. This is what happened with people who used Gnutella and KaZaA back in the 2000s, or people who pirated fake porn from Strike 3 Holdings, or people who use Popcorn Time now. The more accessible an infringing service is, the more likely people will get legal nastygrams in the mail.
Imagine you're an average Internet user, you follow, say, a YouTuber that reviews movies. They say that their latest review isn't on YouTube, but on their website. You go there, watch the review, laugh, and move on with your life. But then you get a nastygram in the mail a week later. Turns out that particular YouTuber didn't have great copyright hygiene, and used an unlicensed music clip. Them moving it to PeerTube means that instead of their video getting taken down, the copyright holder has to sue the swarm - and they do. You get caught in that dragnet, and now you have a nice fat $10,000+ settlement you have to pay for watching a video, because PeerTube puts you in the chain of copyright liability.
these days people get music from spotify ($$) and similar services, not from torrents ($free). I'd say centralized won.
When I did torrent, I would frequently get warnings from content owners by way of my ISP, so at least identification of offenders seems to have scaled. They didn't take me to court personally, but some other end users were compelled to settle, and even the threat of punitive measures should be enough to discourage many others. So overall I don't agree with your characterizations.
It wouldn't matter if your IP is observable or not. It is not illegal in the US to download material even if you know the uploader did not have the rights to it. But uploading/sharing as in the case of peertube is illegal if the uploader did not have the rights
I am really curious what would happen if a case like this ever made it to court. Copyright law was designed when copying was a difficult and intentional act; how that computers are ubiquitous, that is very much no longer the case.
Sure, there have been lots of successful lawsuits against BitTorrent users, but the level of sophistication involved with using BitTorrent in the traditional way is high enough that it's pretty clear it's being used intentionally. But if you showed a jury what the purported infringement consisted of with a PeerTube video (clicking play on a video in a webpage, something that almost all of us do every day)... do you think they would convict?
If that ever did make it to court, and someone did end up losing a suit after playing a video, I would hope it'd make the news and that we'd get new legislation that reflects the reality of the internet today.
Copyright is a strict liability tort. That means considerations of intent or knowledge don't matter. The legal arguments for taking down a sophisticated BitTorrent piracy operation map one-to-one with suing individual PeerTube users.
There is a legal defense called "innocent infringement", but it's very limited. You have to be in a situation where it wouldn't be possible or reasonable to know about the copyright status of a work, not just be ignorant of the law. As an example of how fragile this is, merely putting the words "All Rights Reserved" on a work will generally prohibit defendants from using this defense. It also only disclaims statutory damages down to about $200, if the judge is okay with that. If the plaintiff can convince a court that you caused more than that in actual damages, then this defense won't do much, if at all.
In 2015 in Germany, popcorn time users received ~$1000 fines. The use is similar to peertube, many users were not aware these files were shared with other users as well but they were still in violation of the law.
>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim.
In Germany at least as of a few years ago it was exceedingly common for people who seeded torrents of movies/tv shows etc to receive copyright infringement notices which were sent out on mass, which is why pretty much everyone used a VPN.
Not sure what exactly the legal situation was but I think they simply relied on third party services who would host/scan for copyright infringement, colllect a ton of IPs, then go to a court, and thus you pretty easily circumvent any individual issues because you just do it in bulk.
Don't burn me at the stake... but what if we could solve user liability with DRM? Hear me out:
What if all video was encrypted with DRM by default, and viewers/peers only shared DRM-encrypted data? This would still enable the biggest benefit of PeerTube: viewer/peer bandwidth sharing. But now we've (arguably) reduced the scope of 'publishing' -- for the purpose of legal liability -- to only those PeerTube instances that provide the DRM key. That is, just sharing the encrypted video data no longer carries the legal significance of 'publishing' it, because the data is useless without the key. Wield the media companies' own DRM as a legal shield to limit user liability.
Now to be clear, I'm not an attorney, so I'm not making any kind of legal claim, or saying that this is an argument that a court would find convincing. But I think there's a chance this could work out because I'm pretty sure this strategy where the DRM key is more protected than the video data is utilized in the video distribution industry today, and considered to be an ok solution.
If DRM is used, the encryption key itself becomes the unit of publishing. How keys are distributed between instances is not limited at all, maybe by default the key is shared with all the other instances in its federation. Also, now instances have an instant way to "unpublish" a video in case of DMCA: just stop sharing the key. And since no users share the key with each other, even if they are unaware of their instance taking down a video that they watched and are still sharing it, downloading peers still won't be able to view it.
This idea isn't perfect of course. All viewers would still need to connect to a central/federated instance to get the key, but compared to sharing the actual video data this is much more reasonable to scale. Also, getting access to DRM itself is still pretty centralized today, so it might take significant effort to implement.
DRM is unnecessary - what you're describing sounds like a variation on FreeNet, MUTE, WASTE etc. Contributory liability would still be present if movie companies could prove you were distributing encrypted copies of their films. The main problem I would foresee is swarm security. If you're sharing your videos out to a wide audience, then the encryption isn't going to help. Your adversary isn't a passive deep packet inspection filter, it's copyright owners joining a swarm through normal means in order to IP addresses of people who are distributing content.
The no-sharing-keys property isn't useful either. Presumably someone is going to want to archive PeerTube content (P2P swarms tend to archive poorly), which means modifying PeerTube or a browser to scrape keys. If an archivist can do this, so can a copyright enforcement bot.
What you would really want is something more akin to Tor, where both ends of each peer connection don't know who each other are. The way this works is by using multiple layers of encryption, so each link in the chain just knows where to send which packets of nonsense. You can do this today, actually, but BitTorrent-over-Tor is heavily discouraged as speeds are slow even at low hop counts. There's also the problem of accidentally leaking your own IP address over Tor. This is why, for example, most VPNs ship browser extensions that disable P2P features such as WebRTC.
To have the DMCA safe harbor you have to submit a form at the copyright office and follow certain procedures. It's not automatic the way copyright itself is.
The DMCA does not allow you to disclaim liability for your own infringement. It only covers specific kinds of contributory liability that other people do using your online service that you do not have actual knowledge of. This is fragile enough that having human curators prevents you from using your safe harbor for anything they touch. (See Mavrix v. LiveJournal)
Remember a lot of people try these options because they post or watch controversial content. Now what happens when dissidents, or anti-dissidents, whatever all share their IPs with the world.
The privacy scare that Snowden brought to our attention is kind of abstract--"someday a different regime may use this data against me". But some lunatic who tracks you down because of an ideological dispute is a very real and physical threat.
> Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers.
For what it's worth:
France tried suing people using bittorrent to download illegally with the Hadopi law from 2009 to 2020 (it was ruled unconstitutional in May, because of a lack of judiciary oversight).
It cost between 5 to 10M€ every year, and resulted in only 87k€ in fines total. So not a huge success.
In America, we had a company whose business model was to make fake porn, upload it to BitTorrent, and then sue anyone in the swarm. It actually worked for a while - the only illegal part of this is that they lied about uploading the content to get around implied license arguments. (That and the fact that they made their lawyer drink himself to death, but that's not material to the scam.) There's other companies clogging up court dockets with similar infringement lawsuits against John Does to get access to expedited discovery. This shit is profitable enough that any video sharing service needs to either avoid legal liability for it's users or find a way to prevent copyright holders from gathering evidence from them.
Any CDN is bound to run into thousands of such issues, and yet they survive. What is the difference between tracing a video to a CDN and to a user? In fact, the former should be more straightforward to prosecute, as CDN’s IP is CDN’s, while a physical person is likely to share an IP with others behind the same router, no?
You're entirely correct, and that's why the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure exists. It's the only way to disclaim contributory liability for copyright infringement as an online service.
An individual user watching a PeerTube video would not be able to do the same thing. The DMCA only protects against infringement liability that other people cause. If you watch an infringing upload, well, that's your liability.
Or, alternatively, you just stay connected to a VPN when you browse the web, and stop worrying about this aspect. (yes, I know, VPNs are not the silver bullet they are advertised to be, but in this particular case they are helpful).
Probably because it's quite a personal thing, which can be used for port scanning, ddos, geolocation and other stuff. Also anyone can monitor p2p activity: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/
Exposures vary based on network config and other factors, but this study by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada talks about specific data acquired via IP address.
What if the video on how to patch an extremely vulnerable router? I could be pretty sure that anyone watching that video was susceptible to this exploit at that time.
for as long as that IP is pointing to your machine someone can perform analytics and scanning, subject you to manipulated packets and can track down your most recent activities as depicted by server caches, even spoofing a server you use often thus pwning you....
most people dont get this level of attention but you dont want it unless you like the thrill of cyberwar
Client-server apps like YouTube reveal your IP to the server (Google).
Peer-to-peer apps reveal your IP to any other peer in the network (anyone seeding, anyone else downloading, and anyone who wants to monitor by pretending to be a downloader).
You would probably want to limit the number of people who can see it. It may be of interest to some groups to set-up peer servers to gain partial control and knowledge of the users and system
I found one YouTube creator who moved his videos to Vimeo on Demand and then to Prime Video Direct. I think you can choose to require viewers pay for your video, or have them included for free for Prime members, where the pay is $.06 / hour of viewing (it used to be $.15 / hour).
Anyway, it's an interesting alternative for content creators, as long as their videos are high quality. The pay is certainly much better than YouTube, so I have a lot of sympathy for this route. Plus it's like YouTube Premium in that there are no ads.
I'm not sure if Amazon will actively promote these videos, so I suspect YouTube remains king for discovery.
What kind of money is that for the space? Assuming a 10 minute video where you want to make $100 you need 100k views. $100 / $.006 per hour = 16667 hours. 16667 hours * 6 10 minute views per hour = 100000.
Incidentally, Cloudflare Stream charges the same rates for serving video ($1 per 1000 minutes).
Any idea what kind of money a YouTuber would make off 100k views? Does something like Cloudflare's offering make a suitable backup where they could eat the cost of serving video temporarily if YouTube kicks them off?
I think it's a really hard problem because serving video is so expensive. YouTube must be a huge money pit.
Streaming video is hard and expensive, I think that's why there's very little serious competition to Youtube.
You not only have the network effects of social media ("everybody is on Youtube") but you also have to host and stream petabytes of data and still manage to turn a profit.
Now if on top of all of that you want to do it with decentralized technologies it become even harder to reach the same level of quality. Anybody who's attempted to download some niche torrent from a few years ago knows that the success rate tends to be very low. Meanwhile you can still watch the holiday video of some Polish family in Italy in 2011 on Youtube, even if it only has like 20 views.
I want a decentralized, peer-to-peer internet but when you face the technical and financial realities you realize that it really doesn't add up, IMO. You need huge economies of scale to make it work.
Or alternatively you need to convince people that things like web search, video streaming and email hosting are actually worth paying for. Good luck.
Interestingly, part of the problem is that people have switched to smaller and portable devices like laptop, tablets and phones, and away from desktop computers. Desktop computers are not constrained as much by energy consumption problems, can usually have more storage at the same price point, and can persistently connect to reliable internet.
In other words, and ironically, the physical deanchoring of compute devices has made it harder for virtually decentralized video sharing to take off.
Can I encode video to one format, like webm, and only serve this format without reendocing specifically for a client? Force all clients to watch only in resolutions in which the file is available on disk? It would deduct CPU/GPU time and only need to get storage and network, which isn't that expensive. I have a few dedicated kimsufi servers that are under-utilized.
That was my usual experience too, however, I think the article site is hosting their own. e.g. if you click from that article to a sample peertube embed, https://battlepenguin.com/tech/video/upgrading-the-ssd-on-an..., it played instantly for me. Fastest I have ever seen PeerTube work, just as fast as YouTube actually. I didn't know that was possible! So it does appear that hosting your own videos allows for instant streaming on PeerTube, no buffering!
Author here. I host on a dedicated server in Germany; 64GB of ram and a recent generation processor. It costs less than all my crappy Vultr/DigitalOcean nodes, so I moved a ton of stuff to it.
You do need a decent VM or dedicated server for PeerTube, but they're not that expensive if you shop around. I pay ~€60 a month.
Maybe it depends on the peers near you and when you watch. I tried to play a video on the OP's website, it played immediately at 1080p without any stutter.
> It’s 2020 and YouTube, as well as the rest of big tech, is continuing to remove content they don’t agree with from their platforms.
Bold of these folks to assume their little self-hosted hard disk will outlive YouTube. When an individual is in charge of keeping some resource online, it's a matter of when it disappears not if. I don't care how controversial your content is, it's more likely to be accessible by me in 10 years if you put it on YouTube versus your torrent or personal website.
Author is not making a statement regarding longevity of storage. It sounds like the issue is more around Google's behaviors emphasizing profitability above all else and removal of content that doesn't fit neatly into their commercial narratives.
Google may have the technically superior implementation but they're straight up amoral. To some people that may be a worse problem than how long their personal hard drive will last.
Yes, the website and its database are resilient. Torrents are less likely to be struck down by a singular authority like YouTube but on the other hand it suffers from the same problem as personal websites. Almost every torrent posted to tpb over the years, if you tried to download now, would have zero seeders. It's the same thing with IPFS. None of these P2P solutions will ever be like S3.
How does the non-profit select content to preserve? Can I just upload anything I want, 10 hour dashcams, and so long as it's not illegal it stays up? What is the criteria for exclusion and how is it better than YouTube's?
I only know of one "YouTuber" with a considerable amount of subscribers [0] who is uploading all of his content to PeerTube and wants to eventually move there exclusively.
I don't know of any in the west, but in Japan and China (though youtube being banned helps) there are other popular video sites, for example NicoNico in Japan and YouKu in China.
Readit News
Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.
From the article:
> “If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to self-host your content in the future.”
Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure they promote their other web assets to diversify.
Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be your #2 priority.
There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo, Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.
Most of the YouTube channels I follow have no external means to notify me about new videos. If I were to stop using YouTube, they were banned, or YouTube subscriptions stopped working the same, they would have no way to actually contact me about new content, and they’d lose me.
Effectively YouTube owns the relationship between the creators and I. This can be changed, CGPGrey has been building a mailing list for this reason, but it takes a lot of painstaking deliberate action to achieve. Migrating to a new platform alone is insufficient.
It's really no different than anything else in life. People hire contractors to do larger home repairs, and the contractors contact and subcontract other specialty workers as needed (drywall, woodworking, plumbing, electrical) for things they can't cover themselves. As the homeowner, unless you make an effort to know who these people are, you won't know who they are and may not know what their company is. The benefit is that you don't need to know any of it and can just let the contractor coordinate it all for you.
Youtube is just like that contractor, except instead of a local guy that cares about your business it's a giant multinational which is hard to get to care if they screw something up for you because you're one of many millions of other customers.
The parallels of you can handle all this coordination youtube offers with more control are obvious. Either hire someone to do it all for you or handle it yourself if you want control, because no matter what platform you go to that handles it for you, chances are it will exhibit some or all of the problems that Youtube has, or even new ones.
It would know what I read and watch. It would find new stuff for me, dedupe it, listen to my feedback,and learn from its mistakes. It would work with all kinds of media, not just youtube or HN.
And it would all be private. I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.
In the event that you have to change platform for whatever reason, you still have a line of communication.
I do, but the memory is well-faded, and growing dimmer...
I think it's hard to make a fully independent platform so I think topical ones are a better option - but YouTube is really in a position of power due to the network effect. As long as they don't shoot themselves in the foot with controversy and banning then they should be able to easily hold onto their position - everything challenging them has an uphill battle.
Dead Comment
Arguably, entire political movements; the far right and conspiracy vlogosphere relies on constantly being advertised for free to new suckers through youtube recommendations.
Can we at least get youtube to put up a banner saying "no it's impossible to defy the laws of physics and build a unlimited energy machine with a few magnets a microwave and a multimeter?"
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Check Blender's Peertube [1] and compare to their Youtube Channel [2]. At the time of writing the latest video is a week old and has 27K views on YouTube while a measly 28 views on PeerTube.
Those figures alone show that it's not even worth to keep an instance up and running for this. I doubt it even counts as an insurance policy against Google shenanigans, you are likely to lose all viewership if your channel goes kaput anyway.
The only way this can possibly be successful for anyone is if they make huge investments in marketing and that carries a risk that even then it may never pay back. YouTube just provides immense value through discovery. You may not like it but there's no denying.
[1] https://video.blender.org/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/c/BlenderFoundation/videos
As we know, there is a growing history of unexpected changes or even phase-outs of services/features that were once considered fixtures provided by Google.
There is nothing I am aware of that says a user could/should not simultaneously 1. keeps backups of her work on physcial media in her possession (as well "in the cloud"), 2. host her work on YouTube or some similarly commercial service, and 3. self-host her work on PeerTube. The decision to diversify should not matter whether the videos have significant views or not.
If both services are free, do you have to "move" from service X to service Y, or can you can just "copy" (mirror).
Someone not having your level of prudence and understanding in their MO doesn't mean they're idiots. Did you learn everything you know by reading the docs and best practices recommendations and acting accordingly, or did it take a couple of stinging mistakes to bring you to where you are? Your attitude is the stuff that nightmare bosses/parents/teachers/mentors are made of. Mellow out.
Dustin, from Smarter Every Day, has millions of subscribes and keeps his backup copies on old hard drives loosely placed into plastic containers. He also causally tosses them around.
He's hardly and idiot but...
Here's the video where Linus sets him up a 160tb server to replace his old "backup solution". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcWSrIiR1tY
There are many videos by creators chronicling the solutions they've had to contrive to preserve their records and the cost/time tradeoffs they've made to continue creating while saving their archives.
My flow for watching youtube has been to subscribe and sign up for email alerts (the bell). When I had some time to watch, I'd scan my youtube alerts email folder for items of interest. It was efficient and would quickly leave me with a queue of videos.
That workflow went away for me this month: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/63269933?hl=en
I don't even know what the alert bell is for now. If I look at notifications its full of "recommendations". If I go to my subscriptions its random items from all my subscriptions regardless of "the bell".
Is it though?
I don’t make videos, but if I did it wouldn’t be as “my job”, it would be because I had information to share.
My favorite YouTube videos and channels aren’t “personalities” being “influencers”.
I guess I just don’t measure success in “popularity”. I don’t think my number one goal would be to get to people, it would be to contribute something useful to a couple people that could use that info.
I would value a good and reliable search feature over the highest possible user base, but this is all just me. I am aware there are people that need the attention / viewership more than I do.
This is how I learned about R. Budd Dwyer killing himself on live TV in 1987, as the video was the recording of him shooting himself in the head.
I think a lot of people underestimate the kind of challenges YouTube faces at their scale.
https://yacy.net/
This is something the distributed video people don't seem to entirely understand. Look at how many copyright disputes happen on YouTube - not actual piracy, just disputes. Now imagine every dispute was resolved by sending DMCA takedown notices or subpoenas to individual users who happened to have the misfortune of watching a particular PeerTube video someone didn't like.
Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim. Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers. So you need some sort of mechanism to ensure people who provide you the video don't have an IP address to trace, which immediately puts you in all sorts of hard UX problems that the wave of encrypted P2P software from a decade and a half ago never really figured out.
>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed
A more compelling argument:
>>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography. > > >Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. > >Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09...
Imagine you're an average Internet user, you follow, say, a YouTuber that reviews movies. They say that their latest review isn't on YouTube, but on their website. You go there, watch the review, laugh, and move on with your life. But then you get a nastygram in the mail a week later. Turns out that particular YouTuber didn't have great copyright hygiene, and used an unlicensed music clip. Them moving it to PeerTube means that instead of their video getting taken down, the copyright holder has to sue the swarm - and they do. You get caught in that dragnet, and now you have a nice fat $10,000+ settlement you have to pay for watching a video, because PeerTube puts you in the chain of copyright liability.
When I did torrent, I would frequently get warnings from content owners by way of my ISP, so at least identification of offenders seems to have scaled. They didn't take me to court personally, but some other end users were compelled to settle, and even the threat of punitive measures should be enough to discourage many others. So overall I don't agree with your characterizations.
Sure, there have been lots of successful lawsuits against BitTorrent users, but the level of sophistication involved with using BitTorrent in the traditional way is high enough that it's pretty clear it's being used intentionally. But if you showed a jury what the purported infringement consisted of with a PeerTube video (clicking play on a video in a webpage, something that almost all of us do every day)... do you think they would convict?
If that ever did make it to court, and someone did end up losing a suit after playing a video, I would hope it'd make the news and that we'd get new legislation that reflects the reality of the internet today.
There is a legal defense called "innocent infringement", but it's very limited. You have to be in a situation where it wouldn't be possible or reasonable to know about the copyright status of a work, not just be ignorant of the law. As an example of how fragile this is, merely putting the words "All Rights Reserved" on a work will generally prohibit defendants from using this defense. It also only disclaims statutory damages down to about $200, if the judge is okay with that. If the plaintiff can convince a court that you caused more than that in actual damages, then this defense won't do much, if at all.
In Germany at least as of a few years ago it was exceedingly common for people who seeded torrents of movies/tv shows etc to receive copyright infringement notices which were sent out on mass, which is why pretty much everyone used a VPN.
Not sure what exactly the legal situation was but I think they simply relied on third party services who would host/scan for copyright infringement, colllect a ton of IPs, then go to a court, and thus you pretty easily circumvent any individual issues because you just do it in bulk.
What if all video was encrypted with DRM by default, and viewers/peers only shared DRM-encrypted data? This would still enable the biggest benefit of PeerTube: viewer/peer bandwidth sharing. But now we've (arguably) reduced the scope of 'publishing' -- for the purpose of legal liability -- to only those PeerTube instances that provide the DRM key. That is, just sharing the encrypted video data no longer carries the legal significance of 'publishing' it, because the data is useless without the key. Wield the media companies' own DRM as a legal shield to limit user liability.
Now to be clear, I'm not an attorney, so I'm not making any kind of legal claim, or saying that this is an argument that a court would find convincing. But I think there's a chance this could work out because I'm pretty sure this strategy where the DRM key is more protected than the video data is utilized in the video distribution industry today, and considered to be an ok solution.
If DRM is used, the encryption key itself becomes the unit of publishing. How keys are distributed between instances is not limited at all, maybe by default the key is shared with all the other instances in its federation. Also, now instances have an instant way to "unpublish" a video in case of DMCA: just stop sharing the key. And since no users share the key with each other, even if they are unaware of their instance taking down a video that they watched and are still sharing it, downloading peers still won't be able to view it.
This idea isn't perfect of course. All viewers would still need to connect to a central/federated instance to get the key, but compared to sharing the actual video data this is much more reasonable to scale. Also, getting access to DRM itself is still pretty centralized today, so it might take significant effort to implement.
What do you think?
The no-sharing-keys property isn't useful either. Presumably someone is going to want to archive PeerTube content (P2P swarms tend to archive poorly), which means modifying PeerTube or a browser to scrape keys. If an archivist can do this, so can a copyright enforcement bot.
What you would really want is something more akin to Tor, where both ends of each peer connection don't know who each other are. The way this works is by using multiple layers of encryption, so each link in the chain just knows where to send which packets of nonsense. You can do this today, actually, but BitTorrent-over-Tor is heavily discouraged as speeds are slow even at low hop counts. There's also the problem of accidentally leaking your own IP address over Tor. This is why, for example, most VPNs ship browser extensions that disable P2P features such as WebRTC.
The privacy scare that Snowden brought to our attention is kind of abstract--"someday a different regime may use this data against me". But some lunatic who tracks you down because of an ideological dispute is a very real and physical threat.
For what it's worth:
France tried suing people using bittorrent to download illegally with the Hadopi law from 2009 to 2020 (it was ruled unconstitutional in May, because of a lack of judiciary oversight).
It cost between 5 to 10M€ every year, and resulted in only 87k€ in fines total. So not a huge success.
An individual user watching a PeerTube video would not be able to do the same thing. The DMCA only protects against infringement liability that other people cause. If you watch an infringing upload, well, that's your liability.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387289
Not that big of a problem if it's dynamic.
https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/research...
most people dont get this level of attention but you dont want it unless you like the thrill of cyberwar
Original question: Wouldn’t you already have the IP of someone visiting your website?
The video is embedded on your own site, so you have all the info you need just from a regular page visit.
Peer-to-peer apps reveal your IP to any other peer in the network (anyone seeding, anyone else downloading, and anyone who wants to monitor by pretending to be a downloader).
Deleted Comment
https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G201978440
I found one YouTube creator who moved his videos to Vimeo on Demand and then to Prime Video Direct. I think you can choose to require viewers pay for your video, or have them included for free for Prime members, where the pay is $.06 / hour of viewing (it used to be $.15 / hour).
Anyway, it's an interesting alternative for content creators, as long as their videos are high quality. The pay is certainly much better than YouTube, so I have a lot of sympathy for this route. Plus it's like YouTube Premium in that there are no ads.
I'm not sure if Amazon will actively promote these videos, so I suspect YouTube remains king for discovery.
Here are the videos:
https://www.youtube.com/user/CountryHouseGent
https://www.amazon.com/Travels-by-Narrowboat/dp/B07S6CK8MW
Incidentally, Cloudflare Stream charges the same rates for serving video ($1 per 1000 minutes).
Any idea what kind of money a YouTuber would make off 100k views? Does something like Cloudflare's offering make a suitable backup where they could eat the cost of serving video temporarily if YouTube kicks them off?
I think it's a really hard problem because serving video is so expensive. YouTube must be a huge money pit.
Wow, serving video is expensive. I had no idea it was $.06 / hour. I presume Amazon and YouTube have their own CDN or something.
You not only have the network effects of social media ("everybody is on Youtube") but you also have to host and stream petabytes of data and still manage to turn a profit.
Now if on top of all of that you want to do it with decentralized technologies it become even harder to reach the same level of quality. Anybody who's attempted to download some niche torrent from a few years ago knows that the success rate tends to be very low. Meanwhile you can still watch the holiday video of some Polish family in Italy in 2011 on Youtube, even if it only has like 20 views.
I want a decentralized, peer-to-peer internet but when you face the technical and financial realities you realize that it really doesn't add up, IMO. You need huge economies of scale to make it work.
Or alternatively you need to convince people that things like web search, video streaming and email hosting are actually worth paying for. Good luck.
In other words, and ironically, the physical deanchoring of compute devices has made it harder for virtually decentralized video sharing to take off.
You do need a decent VM or dedicated server for PeerTube, but they're not that expensive if you shop around. I pay ~€60 a month.
Bold of these folks to assume their little self-hosted hard disk will outlive YouTube. When an individual is in charge of keeping some resource online, it's a matter of when it disappears not if. I don't care how controversial your content is, it's more likely to be accessible by me in 10 years if you put it on YouTube versus your torrent or personal website.
Google may have the technically superior implementation but they're straight up amoral. To some people that may be a worse problem than how long their personal hard drive will last.
I'm not familiar with the YouTuber industry but this scenario sounds like a death knell. Are there popular video bloggers that aren't on YouTube?
[0] https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/video-channels/luke_channel/vid...
Rogan, but he's moving to Spotify with a big check.
Personally that seems so weird. The amateur chem videos where what got me to start subscribing to YouTube channels.
Deleted Comment