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>When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions

by Jerry2 7y ago

>When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't. Same can be said about other platforms like YouTube etc. When you produce content for all these mega-platforms, you're nothing more than a sharecropper... a digital one. [0] You really have no rights and you're at the whim of the 'feudal lord' who doesn't care about you and can take all your work away in an instant. Since there's thousand others that will take your place, they really don't care about what your losses are. They hold all the power and you have absolutely no chance of remedy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping

fiala__ 7y ago
The problem with YouTube specifically, is that while blog posts are easy to host on pretty much anything that has a CPU, self-hosting videos at scale is essentially impossible. So while Medium only added a marginal amount of convenience for your average blogger, YouTube straight up enabled the kind of content it hosts.
- fghtr 7y ago
  We now have peertube, which uses p2p to decrease the load on your server.
  - corobo 7y ago
    Unfortunately everyone (including GDPR laws) is scared of p2p
    - mikro2nd 7y ago
      Care to elaborate? I find this rather a sweeping statement and quite inconsistent with the level of activity and progress being made in the p2p sphere.
      - corobo 7y ago
        Fair comment. Unfortunately (for me!) I'm going to have to look like a bit of a wally. I can't elaborate on it and my stance has changed in the time since I posted (while looking up my former 'facts'). 1) Based on the GDPR comment. If you're really careful with how you do things the IP address could be argued to not be personal information (never let a user associate IP with any other PI - e.g. if a user can ban another from their channel something, don't let them see the underlying IP ban in place. Not sure how IPs are handled across ActivityPub). 2) People scared of p2p.. I'm still on the fence a little. For instance the opt out issue at Peertube[1] displays a snippet of p2p-fear however it should be noted that a feature to opt out of the p2p part is implemented in Peertube specifically now so may just be a non-issue. p2p fear needs to be determined with a simple "do users use this opt-out" before I can sway one way or the other [1]: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/685 https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/685 Thanks for calling it out, I might not have found out that what I knew was outdated otherwise :)
        vonmoltke 7y ago
        > If you're really careful with how you do things the IP address could be argued to not be personal information Current guidance (from the legal profession, not the HN peanut gallery) is that IPs are standalone personal data.
        corobo 7y ago
        You got a source on that if you're going to be referring to the rest of us as a peanut gallery? Everything I know and have found says IPs are classed as personal data only if combined with other data. I've yet to find anything that supports your claim, which is why I changed my mind on this.
        vonmoltke 7y ago
        > You got a source on that if you're going to be referring to the rest of us as a peanut gallery? Nothing that isn't privileged information, unfortunately. > Everything I know and have found says IPs are classed as personal data only if combined with other data. I've yet to find anything that supports your claim, which is why I changed my mind on this. Recital 30 (https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-30/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-30/) says "in particular" when combined with other information, but the addition of that phrase indicates this is not the only case. The accuracy of your statement depends on how you interpret that recital. Based on this case (https://www.alstonprivacy.com/ecj-declares-ip-addresses-personal-data/ https://www.alstonprivacy.com/ecj-declares-ip-addresses-pers...) I suspect the broader interpretation is the one that would win over regulators. Additionally, the information about that case states there is clear agreement that static IPs are personal data, which alone contradicts your belief.
- srrr 7y ago
  Is it really Impossible to selfhost videos? My 5€ webhosting has 250GB storage and unlimited traffic and every decent CMS has video capabilities. I think the hosting is not the problem. But the social features that YouTube provides are not easily replaced...
  - Theodores 7y ago
    Try it. Also there is Cloudflare doing a video CDN. I don't think they have a free plan with that, but it would be interesting to see what the costs actually are. There should not be a need for a CDN though if you are only showing a few videos to a few people. Video does the buffering thing so it should be possible to serve video half way across the world. I would give it a go myself but I only have audio!
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    Also consider their automatic video encoding / re-encoding / resizing; I think there's services (e.g. Amazon Elastic Transcoder) that can do that for you, but that would require some development time of your own. Is there a single video format supported by all browsers yet?
    - irrational 7y ago
      Those things are easily done with tools like ffmpeg and mbox. This stuff isn't rocket science. These are all solved problems and the tools are free and open-source. And yes, there are video format that are supported by all browsers. The number of naysayers that are implying that working with videos is so hard in these comments is shocking to me for such a supposedly technical group of people.
  - icdsoft 7y ago
    It is quite unlikely that the "unlimited" traffic you are paying for is truly unlimited. There is always a catch with such "unlimited" offers.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Self-hosting some very niche videos? Sure. Trying to make a generally popular channel? Forget it. It's the transfer and bandwidth that are the problem. There isn't really such a thing as "unlimited transfer" (there's a hidden limit past which they'll rate-limit you, and kindly ask to stop or pay more). Moreover, once your video gets somewhat popular, you'll hit bandwidth issues. Given how popularity on the Internet seems to happen in spikes, this will likely severely limit the reach of your video. People are also spoiled by big video services with unlimited budgets and CDNs all around the world.
- ralphstodomingo 7y ago
  This. And even if you manage to somehow self-host your videos, YouTube is also a discovery service for these videos. Think about how many times you looked for a video on a certain topic in YouTube's search bar itself, the recommendations and the Trending tab.
  - HeavyStorm 7y ago
    Well, so is Medium. I can self host a blog but how will people find me? As the OP said, Medium ranks well.
    - ralphstodomingo 7y ago
      It ranks well, but you rarely go on Medium's search bar or feed. I'd usually be here in HN, or Reddit, or some aggregator, where your self-hosted content can be found.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - irrational 7y ago
    >if you manager to somehow self-host your videos... Wait, we've been self-hosting our own videos for years. It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server.
    - merpnderp 7y ago
      How do you do this? I’ve looked at Digital Ocean and their super cheap bandwidth, but storing a serious amount of data would get expensive.
    - jasode 7y ago
      >It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server. You've left several comments in this thread talking down to people as if they're ignorant about how to write an HTML5 <video> tag on their own web server. I wasn't the one that downvoted your comment but for some reason, a lot of technical folks like you misunderstand Youtube and how it enables video uploaders. (A previous commenter misunderstands Youtube the same way and my previous reply to it.[0]) There is no self-hosting web server stack to serve videos that charges $0 to the content creator whether it gets zero or 1 billion views. Therefore, repeatedly recommending "self-host your videos" -- completely misses the point. Consider a corporate giant like Microsoft. Several years ago, they used to self-host their tech videos on channel9.msdn.com.[1] Now they're hosted on Youtube.[2] Obviously, MS is not so technically inept that they don't know how to stream their own videos! They also have billions in cash to prevent "server bandwidth exceeded" errors so cost isn't the issue. Stop and think about why Microsoft switched to Youtube instead of using their own MS Azure infrastructure. As for the other metaphor of "sharecropper" for Youtube that seems popular... is Microsoft a "sharecropper"? Why or why not? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275 [1] clicking any of the new videos on Microsoft's front page will play embedded Youtube videos: https://channel9.msdn.com/ https://channel9.msdn.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build
- frankzen 7y ago
  Three letters: AWS Same issue with regards to control but not as policed as YouTube...
nickjj 7y ago
> Same can be said about other platforms like YouTube etc. One big difference with Youtube is you don't create your work on their platform directly. You would record a video offline and then upload it to Youtube so you have a copy of your work by default. With Medium, chances are you wrote the article directly on their platform so now if it gets removed from their site you probably don't have a local copy of it so it's gone forever unless it got scraped somewhere. In either case I think Medium is really bad and I wouldn't use it.
- fragmede 7y ago
  > You would record a video offline and then upload it to Youtube I can't speak to how popular this feature actually is, but the YouTube app includes video recording, so not everyone is going have a local copy of their work, by default. Conversely, who uses the Medium editor, rather than, say, Google Docs?
MayeulC 7y ago
I thought some about this, and I am a bit afraid about "feudal lords" of some other kind: I'm starting to self-host my content and services as I am starting to have some income (beginning of my career). However, I have to pay for a domain name, internet access, etc. I can afford to pay all of this right now, but I have no guarantees that the content will remain available in the future. The biggest unknown for me is the domain name, as it sounds much like a single point of failure: what if my registrar closes, or refuses to do business with me, or if I can't afford it anymore? Medium provides some relief against this, but not enough that I would care to use it. How could this be "solved"? Ideally, I could write a static page, sign it with a private key (maybe associated to a human-compatible string), and then host it in multiple places. A search engine could pick the right mirror, and interested people could choose to mirror the content. This sounds a bit similar to IPFS, but with the possibility of picking your hosting place and the content you mirror. And to write something more about paid apps vs. add-based ones (which cropped up later in the discussion thread), when I was younder (kid/student), I was unfortunately in no position to buy paid apps (no income), nor to self host myself (I tried multiple times, but it was a pain to host even static content at the time). It seems to be getting better (github education pack, github/lab pages, etc), but I think that we as a society should think more about what is made available to kids. A free dynamic DNS and hosting service should probably be a minimal offer if you want to make them interested in tech. It could be also a good plan (though long-term) for a hosting platform to gain their trust/mindshare. Also making nice apps freely available to them. Unfortunately, I had no e-mail address provided by my high school at the time or earlier, so I wouldn't have been able to get a github student pack (if it existed). I think that's something that should be solved at he state level.
- PaulRobinson 7y ago
  There are specific measures in place to protect you from your registrar closing or refusing to do business with you. If you can't afford a few dollars a year for your domain name, you likely have bigger problems. If ICANN disappears, we all have bigger problems. Your solution is interesting, however hosting other people's content is fraught with danger. If I ran such a host, I'd assume within minutes I'd be hosting potentially illegal content. How would your system prevent that? The stuff about kids just reminds me of geocities, TBH. There might be an appetite for something like that once again...

by Jerry2 7y ago

fiala__ 7y ago

The problem with YouTube specifically, is that while blog posts are easy to host on pretty much anything that has a CPU, self-hosting videos at scale is essentially impossible. So while Medium only added a marginal amount of convenience for your average blogger, YouTube straight up enabled the kind of content it hosts.

fghtr 7y ago
We now have peertube, which uses p2p to decrease the load on your server.
- corobo 7y ago
  Unfortunately everyone (including GDPR laws) is scared of p2p
  - mikro2nd 7y ago
    Care to elaborate? I find this rather a sweeping statement and quite inconsistent with the level of activity and progress being made in the p2p sphere.
    - corobo 7y ago
      Fair comment. Unfortunately (for me!) I'm going to have to look like a bit of a wally. I can't elaborate on it and my stance has changed in the time since I posted (while looking up my former 'facts'). 1) Based on the GDPR comment. If you're really careful with how you do things the IP address could be argued to not be personal information (never let a user associate IP with any other PI - e.g. if a user can ban another from their channel something, don't let them see the underlying IP ban in place. Not sure how IPs are handled across ActivityPub). 2) People scared of p2p.. I'm still on the fence a little. For instance the opt out issue at Peertube[1] displays a snippet of p2p-fear however it should be noted that a feature to opt out of the p2p part is implemented in Peertube specifically now so may just be a non-issue. p2p fear needs to be determined with a simple "do users use this opt-out" before I can sway one way or the other [1]: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/685 https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/685 Thanks for calling it out, I might not have found out that what I knew was outdated otherwise :)
      - vonmoltke 7y ago
        > If you're really careful with how you do things the IP address could be argued to not be personal information Current guidance (from the legal profession, not the HN peanut gallery) is that IPs are standalone personal data.
        corobo 7y ago
        You got a source on that if you're going to be referring to the rest of us as a peanut gallery? Everything I know and have found says IPs are classed as personal data only if combined with other data. I've yet to find anything that supports your claim, which is why I changed my mind on this.
        vonmoltke 7y ago
        > You got a source on that if you're going to be referring to the rest of us as a peanut gallery? Nothing that isn't privileged information, unfortunately. > Everything I know and have found says IPs are classed as personal data only if combined with other data. I've yet to find anything that supports your claim, which is why I changed my mind on this. Recital 30 (https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-30/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-30/) says "in particular" when combined with other information, but the addition of that phrase indicates this is not the only case. The accuracy of your statement depends on how you interpret that recital. Based on this case (https://www.alstonprivacy.com/ecj-declares-ip-addresses-personal-data/ https://www.alstonprivacy.com/ecj-declares-ip-addresses-pers...) I suspect the broader interpretation is the one that would win over regulators. Additionally, the information about that case states there is clear agreement that static IPs are personal data, which alone contradicts your belief.
srrr 7y ago
Is it really Impossible to selfhost videos? My 5€ webhosting has 250GB storage and unlimited traffic and every decent CMS has video capabilities. I think the hosting is not the problem. But the social features that YouTube provides are not easily replaced...
- Theodores 7y ago
  Try it. Also there is Cloudflare doing a video CDN. I don't think they have a free plan with that, but it would be interesting to see what the costs actually are. There should not be a need for a CDN though if you are only showing a few videos to a few people. Video does the buffering thing so it should be possible to serve video half way across the world. I would give it a go myself but I only have audio!
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  Also consider their automatic video encoding / re-encoding / resizing; I think there's services (e.g. Amazon Elastic Transcoder) that can do that for you, but that would require some development time of your own. Is there a single video format supported by all browsers yet?
  - irrational 7y ago
    Those things are easily done with tools like ffmpeg and mbox. This stuff isn't rocket science. These are all solved problems and the tools are free and open-source. And yes, there are video format that are supported by all browsers. The number of naysayers that are implying that working with videos is so hard in these comments is shocking to me for such a supposedly technical group of people.
- icdsoft 7y ago
  It is quite unlikely that the "unlimited" traffic you are paying for is truly unlimited. There is always a catch with such "unlimited" offers.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Self-hosting some very niche videos? Sure. Trying to make a generally popular channel? Forget it. It's the transfer and bandwidth that are the problem. There isn't really such a thing as "unlimited transfer" (there's a hidden limit past which they'll rate-limit you, and kindly ask to stop or pay more). Moreover, once your video gets somewhat popular, you'll hit bandwidth issues. Given how popularity on the Internet seems to happen in spikes, this will likely severely limit the reach of your video. People are also spoiled by big video services with unlimited budgets and CDNs all around the world.
ralphstodomingo 7y ago
This. And even if you manage to somehow self-host your videos, YouTube is also a discovery service for these videos. Think about how many times you looked for a video on a certain topic in YouTube's search bar itself, the recommendations and the Trending tab.
- HeavyStorm 7y ago
  Well, so is Medium. I can self host a blog but how will people find me? As the OP said, Medium ranks well.
  - ralphstodomingo 7y ago
    It ranks well, but you rarely go on Medium's search bar or feed. I'd usually be here in HN, or Reddit, or some aggregator, where your self-hosted content can be found.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- irrational 7y ago
  >if you manager to somehow self-host your videos... Wait, we've been self-hosting our own videos for years. It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server.
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    How do you do this? I’ve looked at Digital Ocean and their super cheap bandwidth, but storing a serious amount of data would get expensive.
  - jasode 7y ago
    >It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server. You've left several comments in this thread talking down to people as if they're ignorant about how to write an HTML5 <video> tag on their own web server. I wasn't the one that downvoted your comment but for some reason, a lot of technical folks like you misunderstand Youtube and how it enables video uploaders. (A previous commenter misunderstands Youtube the same way and my previous reply to it.[0]) There is no self-hosting web server stack to serve videos that charges $0 to the content creator whether it gets zero or 1 billion views. Therefore, repeatedly recommending "self-host your videos" -- completely misses the point. Consider a corporate giant like Microsoft. Several years ago, they used to self-host their tech videos on channel9.msdn.com.[1] Now they're hosted on Youtube.[2] Obviously, MS is not so technically inept that they don't know how to stream their own videos! They also have billions in cash to prevent "server bandwidth exceeded" errors so cost isn't the issue. Stop and think about why Microsoft switched to Youtube instead of using their own MS Azure infrastructure. As for the other metaphor of "sharecropper" for Youtube that seems popular... is Microsoft a "sharecropper"? Why or why not? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275 [1] clicking any of the new videos on Microsoft's front page will play embedded Youtube videos: https://channel9.msdn.com/ https://channel9.msdn.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build
frankzen 7y ago
Three letters: AWS Same issue with regards to control but not as policed as YouTube...

nickjj 7y ago

> Same can be said about other platforms like YouTube etc. One big difference with Youtube is you don't create your work on their platform directly. You would record a video offline and then upload it to Youtube so you have a copy of your work by default. With Medium, chances are you wrote the article directly on their platform so now if it gets removed from their site you probably don't have a local copy of it so it's gone forever unless it got scraped somewhere. In either case I think Medium is really bad and I wouldn't use it.

fragmede 7y ago
> You would record a video offline and then upload it to Youtube I can't speak to how popular this feature actually is, but the YouTube app includes video recording, so not everyone is going have a local copy of their work, by default. Conversely, who uses the Medium editor, rather than, say, Google Docs?

MayeulC 7y ago

I thought some about this, and I am a bit afraid about "feudal lords" of some other kind: I'm starting to self-host my content and services as I am starting to have some income (beginning of my career). However, I have to pay for a domain name, internet access, etc. I can afford to pay all of this right now, but I have no guarantees that the content will remain available in the future. The biggest unknown for me is the domain name, as it sounds much like a single point of failure: what if my registrar closes, or refuses to do business with me, or if I can't afford it anymore? Medium provides some relief against this, but not enough that I would care to use it. How could this be "solved"? Ideally, I could write a static page, sign it with a private key (maybe associated to a human-compatible string), and then host it in multiple places. A search engine could pick the right mirror, and interested people could choose to mirror the content. This sounds a bit similar to IPFS, but with the possibility of picking your hosting place and the content you mirror. And to write something more about paid apps vs. add-based ones (which cropped up later in the discussion thread), when I was younder (kid/student), I was unfortunately in no position to buy paid apps (no income), nor to self host myself (I tried multiple times, but it was a pain to host even static content at the time). It seems to be getting better (github education pack, github/lab pages, etc), but I think that we as a society should think more about what is made available to kids. A free dynamic DNS and hosting service should probably be a minimal offer if you want to make them interested in tech. It could be also a good plan (though long-term) for a hosting platform to gain their trust/mindshare. Also making nice apps freely available to them. Unfortunately, I had no e-mail address provided by my high school at the time or earlier, so I wouldn't have been able to get a github student pack (if it existed). I think that's something that should be solved at he state level.

PaulRobinson 7y ago
There are specific measures in place to protect you from your registrar closing or refusing to do business with you. If you can't afford a few dollars a year for your domain name, you likely have bigger problems. If ICANN disappears, we all have bigger problems. Your solution is interesting, however hosting other people's content is fraught with danger. If I ran such a host, I'd assume within minutes I'd be hosting potentially illegal content. How would your system prevent that? The stuff about kids just reminds me of geocities, TBH. There might be an appetite for something like that once again...