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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

by Liquix 7y ago

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?

Rooster61 7y ago
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.
- emiliobumachar 7y ago
  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?
  - bad_good_guy 7y ago
    I believe it is W for Washington
  - DavinMiler 7y ago
    Presumably OP was referring to big companies skirting around data laws and heavy lobbying by said companies. W would be the US government or similar.
  - 19870213 7y ago
    If you want to livestream on Youtube, you aren't allowed to mention or link to other livestreaming solutions, such as Twitch.
    - csdreamer7 7y ago
      Someone needs to tell Linus Tech Tips that. They mention the Twitch or Floatplane streams or streaming all the time. Either last week or the week before that they had an issue with the Youtube and Floatplane streams, but Twitch was doing fine. Would you link to those rules? Curious what the exact text is.
      - scruple 7y ago
        I don't know the rules, I'm not a YouTuber. I don't think anyone has ever accused Google or YouTube of applying their rules equally, though.
      - belorn 7y ago
        They did get a strike about that, or possible several times. For example, https://twitter.com/linustech/status/1008752236027973632?lang=en https://twitter.com/linustech/status/1008752236027973632?lan... talks about it and I strongly remember a wan show being almost dedicated to the same topic. If I recall right, they have said that there were not that many users who came from youtube so it doesn't matter much, and that wan show itself isn't really a money maker in the first place but rather a place where they can vent and just talk a bit about random stuff. They later changed their setup so the same stream goes to youtube, twitch and floatplane at the same time but they don't know if that is within the youtube rules.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Vimeo, Twitch, Bitchute etc., none of whom seem to be getting shut down.
- tamrix 7y ago
  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.
chrshawkes 7y ago
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.
- drak0n1c 7y ago
  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.
- kbenson 7y ago
  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.
  - jrumbut 7y ago
    Yeah, that's exactly how it was. Then we pushed for the rule of law, a set of fundamental rights, democracy, and a social safety net and while this stuff still happens it's a lot better than it was. Time will tell if we're able to keep it up. Certainly there are new threats and opportunities.
- jammygit 7y ago
  Is there a way to disable amp in my browser? It’s hard to get to the real sites
taurath 7y ago
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.
- loudmax 7y ago
  > The OS doesn't matter as much anymore. 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.
  - analognoise 7y ago
    What if Microsoft was offering the best solutions to enterprise, and that's why they kept their stranglehold?
    - loudmax 7y ago
      If solutions were independent of the environment, the fix would be easy: simply develop better software than Microsoft. Unfortunately Microsoft owns the stack so it's hard to compete with them on their turf. You can develop for Mac or Linux and sell to a tiny market. Or you can develop for Windows and hope Microsoft decides not to enter your market.
      - rappap 7y ago
        Without a full stack you're just a Jenga tower. Deeper!
ac29 7y ago
This is a sounds a lot like a Slippery Slope argument, which is considered a logical fallacy. YouTube banning videos that contain instructions on committing crimes* (in the US, at least) doesn't mean that before you know it they'll be coming for your cat videos. *I'm aware that these videos also serve a educational purpose, and just viewing them wouldn't be a crime. But, bypassing secured computer systems, in practice, is illegal.
- harshreality 7y ago
  But they are not instructionals on how to commit crimes. They are instructionals on how to bypass security systems, and that may or may not be a crime depending on your relationship with the entity controlling the security system. The same argument could be used to ban any videos showing weapons being used (target practice or demonstration dummies) or any martial arts. Because who knows whether viewers will use that knowledge against live targets. That would include a ban of all military combat and training videos.
  - otakucode 7y ago
    Videos that involve weaponry are already either banned outright or heavily hidden and demonetized on YouTube. There was a channel (not sure if it still exists) that was about making different kinds of slingshots. SLINGSHOTS. And YouTube came for them a few years ago. The content was popular and the audience loved it. Google, however, did not. They declared it in violation of their community guidelines and swiftly stripped away the creators livelihood. It's important to realize that we're not just talking about "oh some entertainment is no longer available" here but, in most cases, someone or groups of people just went from being able to feed their families to not.
  - qball 7y ago
    >The same argument could be used to ban any videos showing weapons being used That has actually already happened, to a certain extent (depends on the weapon). This is just the next step.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
jrjrk02n 7y ago
Our system of capitalism relies on censorship. The whole thing falls apart once “informed consent” becomes a requirement of the system. That said the technical manuals all still exist. They didn’t ban cooking channels. They banned showing certain recipes on their forum. The laws enable it by considering the infra Googles private property. This rhetoric just makes it sound like you want to burn a witch and not question your belief in witchcraft. We don’t need anymore people telling is what’s wrong. We need people talking about how to fix it. Edit: I like how in a post about censorship my comment is downvoted. Not debated. But flagged to be stricken from the discussion. Social media voting is a pox on discourse and HN (ycom staff and HN readers) aren't any less susceptible to squashing open debate as Google. No, sir. You will not be allowed to have your mental model considered. Stick to your place. What a joke our culture is.
notafraudster 7y ago
Let me retell your story from my perspective. 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.
teabee89 7y ago
This comment reminded me of the last lines of Hotel California: "You can check out any time you like // But you can never leave!"
pgt 7y ago
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.
- earenndil 7y ago
  Who is 'we'? You know, and I know. Most users of youtube do not.
  - pgt 7y ago
    Yes, not everyone needs to need to invent the future to enjoy it. A few rogue engineers are enough.
- ajsnigrutin 7y ago
  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.
stebann 7y ago
Damn! Don't forget auto-censorship... This is 1984.
ehsankia 7y ago
Except replace "the color blue" with one very specific shade of blue among millions of possible shades.
mythrwy 7y ago
Good analogy, but lets not forget Emperor G has to keep the Gods happy. Or at least the federal government(s) and to some extent the press and public. 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.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  > the degenerates who want blue houses Are we still talking about computer security tutorials? I'm not aware of any federal law prohibiting those.
- syshum 7y ago
  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
apatters 7y ago
There are other cities which you can move to. The problem is, Emperor G sells the only map to the Internet, and they're not shown on it.
- jefftk 7y ago
  Is your analogy trying to say that Google is the only search engine you can use, and that it doesn't list rival video sites? (Disclosure: I work for Google)
  - apatters 7y ago
    You can use other search engines, but the only one Mr. G tells you about is their own, and it consistently features YouTube above other sites. If this kind of behavior from a market leader isn't a textbook anti-trust concern I don't know what is. It's remarkably similar to Microsoft featuring and promoting its own browser at the expense of others. The level of bundling and integration that they were attempting between IE and Windows, and which ultimately got the DoJ to act, has been going on in Android with Search and Chrome from day one.
    - makapuf 7y ago
      Look up "search engine" on google and you find link to alternatives to google, and not google (of course you need to know what a search engine is and that it exists)
      - ajanuary 7y ago
        Even "alternatives to google" gives you a card with "Top 12 Search Engine Alternatives To Google"
      - apatters 7y ago
        It was also possible to use Windows to download alternatives to Internet Explorer. Microsoft got into hot water not because Windows blocked alternatives, but because it gave preference to Microsoft's own browser. Which is something that is normally perfectly legal and fine, but under US antitrust law it stops being fine once you're the market leader.
msiyer 7y ago
Human race has a lot of intellectual growing up to do. 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.
- ppm34 7y ago
  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.
solarized 7y ago
thanks to lightning me. i seriously try new firefox today.
scoutt 7y ago
I guess the lesson is "don't build your house in someone else's land".
- 0_gravitas 7y ago
  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.
edanm 7y ago
> 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.
- ajsnigrutin 7y ago
  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.
  - edanm 7y ago
    The difference between your example and the YouTube case is in how accessible are the alternatives. If the only store close to you bans you, then it can be somewhere between a major inconvenience and practically impossible to go to an alternative. On the other hand, replacing YouTube as a hosting platform isn't too hard (I think? I don't actually have much experience with this but there are alternatives). Of course the big issue isn't YouTube the host, it's YouTube the marketing platform - but even here there are alternatives. Host on vimeo, but use other social media more. More Facebook posts. Get an audience via podcasts. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying that I'm not at all convinced that YouTube really is a monopoly in the sense where we want to do something about it.
    - 7y ago
rmc 7y ago
> 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"
TheOperator 7y ago
Who cares about 97% of society? They can enjoy their shit.

by Liquix 7y ago

Rooster61 7y ago

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.

emiliobumachar 7y ago
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?
- bad_good_guy 7y ago
  I believe it is W for Washington
- DavinMiler 7y ago
  Presumably OP was referring to big companies skirting around data laws and heavy lobbying by said companies. W would be the US government or similar.
- 19870213 7y ago
  If you want to livestream on Youtube, you aren't allowed to mention or link to other livestreaming solutions, such as Twitch.
  - csdreamer7 7y ago
    Someone needs to tell Linus Tech Tips that. They mention the Twitch or Floatplane streams or streaming all the time. Either last week or the week before that they had an issue with the Youtube and Floatplane streams, but Twitch was doing fine. Would you link to those rules? Curious what the exact text is.
    - scruple 7y ago
      I don't know the rules, I'm not a YouTuber. I don't think anyone has ever accused Google or YouTube of applying their rules equally, though.
    - belorn 7y ago
      They did get a strike about that, or possible several times. For example, https://twitter.com/linustech/status/1008752236027973632?lang=en https://twitter.com/linustech/status/1008752236027973632?lan... talks about it and I strongly remember a wan show being almost dedicated to the same topic. If I recall right, they have said that there were not that many users who came from youtube so it doesn't matter much, and that wan show itself isn't really a money maker in the first place but rather a place where they can vent and just talk a bit about random stuff. They later changed their setup so the same stream goes to youtube, twitch and floatplane at the same time but they don't know if that is within the youtube rules.
anigbrowl 7y ago
Vimeo, Twitch, Bitchute etc., none of whom seem to be getting shut down.
tamrix 7y ago
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.

chrshawkes 7y ago

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.

drak0n1c 7y ago
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.
kbenson 7y ago
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.
- jrumbut 7y ago
  Yeah, that's exactly how it was. Then we pushed for the rule of law, a set of fundamental rights, democracy, and a social safety net and while this stuff still happens it's a lot better than it was. Time will tell if we're able to keep it up. Certainly there are new threats and opportunities.
jammygit 7y ago
Is there a way to disable amp in my browser? It’s hard to get to the real sites

taurath 7y ago

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.

loudmax 7y ago
> The OS doesn't matter as much anymore. 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.
- analognoise 7y ago
  What if Microsoft was offering the best solutions to enterprise, and that's why they kept their stranglehold?
  - loudmax 7y ago
    If solutions were independent of the environment, the fix would be easy: simply develop better software than Microsoft. Unfortunately Microsoft owns the stack so it's hard to compete with them on their turf. You can develop for Mac or Linux and sell to a tiny market. Or you can develop for Windows and hope Microsoft decides not to enter your market.
    - rappap 7y ago
      Without a full stack you're just a Jenga tower. Deeper!

ac29 7y ago

This is a sounds a lot like a Slippery Slope argument, which is considered a logical fallacy. YouTube banning videos that contain instructions on committing crimes* (in the US, at least) doesn't mean that before you know it they'll be coming for your cat videos. *I'm aware that these videos also serve a educational purpose, and just viewing them wouldn't be a crime. But, bypassing secured computer systems, in practice, is illegal.

harshreality 7y ago
But they are not instructionals on how to commit crimes. They are instructionals on how to bypass security systems, and that may or may not be a crime depending on your relationship with the entity controlling the security system. The same argument could be used to ban any videos showing weapons being used (target practice or demonstration dummies) or any martial arts. Because who knows whether viewers will use that knowledge against live targets. That would include a ban of all military combat and training videos.
- otakucode 7y ago
  Videos that involve weaponry are already either banned outright or heavily hidden and demonetized on YouTube. There was a channel (not sure if it still exists) that was about making different kinds of slingshots. SLINGSHOTS. And YouTube came for them a few years ago. The content was popular and the audience loved it. Google, however, did not. They declared it in violation of their community guidelines and swiftly stripped away the creators livelihood. It's important to realize that we're not just talking about "oh some entertainment is no longer available" here but, in most cases, someone or groups of people just went from being able to feed their families to not.
- qball 7y ago
  >The same argument could be used to ban any videos showing weapons being used That has actually already happened, to a certain extent (depends on the weapon). This is just the next step.
- yellowapple 7y ago

jrjrk02n 7y ago

Our system of capitalism relies on censorship. The whole thing falls apart once “informed consent” becomes a requirement of the system. That said the technical manuals all still exist. They didn’t ban cooking channels. They banned showing certain recipes on their forum. The laws enable it by considering the infra Googles private property. This rhetoric just makes it sound like you want to burn a witch and not question your belief in witchcraft. We don’t need anymore people telling is what’s wrong. We need people talking about how to fix it. Edit: I like how in a post about censorship my comment is downvoted. Not debated. But flagged to be stricken from the discussion. Social media voting is a pox on discourse and HN (ycom staff and HN readers) aren't any less susceptible to squashing open debate as Google. No, sir. You will not be allowed to have your mental model considered. Stick to your place. What a joke our culture is.

notafraudster 7y ago

Let me retell your story from my perspective. 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.

teabee89 7y ago

This comment reminded me of the last lines of Hotel California: "You can check out any time you like // But you can never leave!"

pgt 7y ago

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.

earenndil 7y ago
Who is 'we'? You know, and I know. Most users of youtube do not.
- pgt 7y ago
  Yes, not everyone needs to need to invent the future to enjoy it. A few rogue engineers are enough.
ajsnigrutin 7y ago
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.

stebann 7y ago

Damn! Don't forget auto-censorship... This is 1984.

ehsankia 7y ago

Except replace "the color blue" with one very specific shade of blue among millions of possible shades.

mythrwy 7y ago

Good analogy, but lets not forget Emperor G has to keep the Gods happy. Or at least the federal government(s) and to some extent the press and public. 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.

brianpgordon 7y ago
> the degenerates who want blue houses Are we still talking about computer security tutorials? I'm not aware of any federal law prohibiting those.
syshum 7y ago
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

apatters 7y ago

There are other cities which you can move to. The problem is, Emperor G sells the only map to the Internet, and they're not shown on it.

jefftk 7y ago
Is your analogy trying to say that Google is the only search engine you can use, and that it doesn't list rival video sites? (Disclosure: I work for Google)
- apatters 7y ago
  You can use other search engines, but the only one Mr. G tells you about is their own, and it consistently features YouTube above other sites. If this kind of behavior from a market leader isn't a textbook anti-trust concern I don't know what is. It's remarkably similar to Microsoft featuring and promoting its own browser at the expense of others. The level of bundling and integration that they were attempting between IE and Windows, and which ultimately got the DoJ to act, has been going on in Android with Search and Chrome from day one.
  - makapuf 7y ago
    Look up "search engine" on google and you find link to alternatives to google, and not google (of course you need to know what a search engine is and that it exists)
    - ajanuary 7y ago
      Even "alternatives to google" gives you a card with "Top 12 Search Engine Alternatives To Google"
    - apatters 7y ago
      It was also possible to use Windows to download alternatives to Internet Explorer. Microsoft got into hot water not because Windows blocked alternatives, but because it gave preference to Microsoft's own browser. Which is something that is normally perfectly legal and fine, but under US antitrust law it stops being fine once you're the market leader.

msiyer 7y ago

Human race has a lot of intellectual growing up to do. 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.

ppm34 7y ago
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.

solarized 7y ago

thanks to lightning me. i seriously try new firefox today.

scoutt 7y ago

I guess the lesson is "don't build your house in someone else's land".

0_gravitas 7y ago
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.

edanm 7y ago

> 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.

ajsnigrutin 7y ago
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.
- edanm 7y ago
  The difference between your example and the YouTube case is in how accessible are the alternatives. If the only store close to you bans you, then it can be somewhere between a major inconvenience and practically impossible to go to an alternative. On the other hand, replacing YouTube as a hosting platform isn't too hard (I think? I don't actually have much experience with this but there are alternatives). Of course the big issue isn't YouTube the host, it's YouTube the marketing platform - but even here there are alternatives. Host on vimeo, but use other social media more. More Facebook posts. Get an audience via podcasts. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying that I'm not at all convinced that YouTube really is a monopoly in the sense where we want to do something about it.
  - 7y ago

rmc 7y ago

TheOperator 7y ago

Who cares about 97% of society? They can enjoy their shit.