40 ms·

YouTube deleted an electronics repair channel [video]

775 points by lmilcin 6y ago

FillardMillmore 6y ago
It looks like more of Big Tech is against the 'right to repair' than just Apple. I'd like to know what 'policy violations' were committed by Jordan Pier. But of course, Youtube has no obligation to let him know or to let his viewers know.
- Gravityloss 6y ago
  Youtube is a platform. But can one really build a business on that platform? What kind of protections does the enterpreneur have? Do they have a contract with youtube? Is it easy to switch to some other platform? How hard is it to buy video hosting from a web hotel? I think the whole idea of the internet was a difference to these "dial in" services. On the internet, you can run your thing anywhere and anybody can access it just the same. No walls. That's the whole point.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Build your own video hosting and streaming site? It's been done. They don't last. There were no walls once. But it turns out building walls is a great way to make a lot of money.
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      It's also that hosting video is still pretty expensive at large scales and the only way to make money with advertising is with huge audiences. Other models like subscriptions has a chicken and egg problem of needing to simultaneously have enough subscribers to get creators to use your new service and enough creators to get people to pay.
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    > you can run your thing anywhere and anybody can access it just the same. No walls Welcome to the future Marty! How was your ride in the time machine? I think you've got some catching up to do from the web/world of the early 2000's that you've just come from and are describing here. Let me fill you in on what has happened. Platform Monopolies are in full swing, and the internet is now a corporate owned web - with a myriad of apps that are surveilling our every touch and click (US but also abroad). Palantir has terrifying racist policing algorithms, the NSA is plugged into everything and has a dragnet filling a complex database for US 'homeland security', social media/Facebook campaigns can be used by 'Doublespeak'-ing authoritarian childhood-traumatized leaders to win elections [1], and Crypto AG is a CIA owned company that has been selling back-doored cryptography tools to national governments for many decades. [2] Oh and you might want to Google 'Edward Snowden' and go back and read some of the great the Guardian articles published about it. [3] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-mJnYmdVmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-mJnYmdVmQ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22500231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22500231 or https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812537258/uncovering-the-cias-operation-to-steal-state-secrets https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812537258/uncovering-the-cias... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden... - edit: seriously though - Intellectual Property laws and the Silicon Valley strategy of purchasing IP by buying up competition is suffocating and stifling much needed access to essential technologies, depriving humans the ability to remix, reuse and have access to the underlying technical components in a modular fashion. Our current reality is killing our ability to meet these human needs for play, growth, autonomy and cooperation. The most promising change I see possible is a transition to Commons-based peer production, using the Holographic chain distributed app pattern by Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun, together with a move to mutual credit currencies, replacing mechanisms and dynamics that create or sustain the artificial scarcity of information or knowledge. This world would bring us universal access and shared control of a rich Commons, fully accessible by every child. Essentially what I am describing is an open source world. An open source economic system made up of unencloseable carriers and ever-evolving protocols, immersing us in a diverse and beautiful Commons - our shared inheritance.
    - 6510 6y ago
      Things will improve but first they have to get worse.
      - bergstromm466 6y ago
        No. I think you're just not connected to those already suffering. Some people are living in hell today. [1] I think the narrative you describe comes from ubiquitous psychopathology, which affects all of us. In other words: the weight of our current systems creates a low level mental illness for all who are under it's influence and control. This weight comes from the continual stresses digitally technological society exerts on us. This is the shared reality of digital Rentier Capitalism [2]. It means the system keeps most of us fragmented and passive. But I think your narrative is dangerous. To believe more suffering has to happen, just because you didn't experience pain directly doesn't mean others' suffering isn't worthy of acting upon. All you did is reveal your privilege, which is a great first step. Next comes awareness, should you choose to accept that important mission [3] [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/precariat-global-class-rise-of-populism/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/precariat-global-clas... [2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corruption-capitalism-guy-standing/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8
        catalogia 6y ago
        > No. I think you're just not connected to those already suffering. Some people are living in hell today. [1] If you think things can't or won't get even worse, you're being too optimistic. Even if you think some people are already experiencing a maximally bad time, "some" can become "more".
        6510 6y ago
        Guy Standing does wonderful work, very inspiring. I also applaud your faith in gradual improvements and the quality of your posts. We need many of you. I've become to cynical. I hope you make it before the rest of us burn everything to the ground.
  - dageshi 6y ago
    The audiences won't move. Mixer proved it recently, they bought two of the top streamers from twitch (Ninja and Shroud) but barely a fraction of their audiences would leave twitch for mixer, maybe 10% if that. More to the point, it's not that simple, it's not just streaming but apps for all the mobile devices + everything else that people watch video on (xbox, playstation, smart tv's).
    - viraptor 6y ago
      I'm not sure those are comparable. If you remove ninja and shroud, you're left with ~infinity-2 people playing FPS games on twitch. Removing a high quality electronics repair channel on YouTube is a significant impact on that class of content. I'm going away from YouTube to twitch and other services for some specific tech content. If it's relatively unique, people will find it. (Or if you build awareness over a long time, rather than starting on the day of disappearance)
      - apacheCamel 6y ago
        I 100% believe they are comparable. People tend to watch channels for the personality behind the camera. Ninja and Shroud both do stream FPS games and hundreds of other people stream them too, but look at their numbers. They get more views because the people want to watch them, not somebody else.
        viraptor 6y ago
        They want to watch when those streamers are available. The tiny percentage which moved to mixer pretty much confirmed that not others will just find someone else to watch instead. It's like TV celebrities. People will be really into one reality tv, but when it ends they'll pick up another one.
        apacheCamel 6y ago
        That's what I am saying, the tech channels are the same way. There are an abundance of tech channels out there, once one gets accidentally deleted from Youtube, people will just pick another.
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    Yes they have a contract "YouTube Terms and Conditions" not really favorable for the content creator.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > On the internet, you can run your thing anywhere and anybody can access it just the same. No walls. That's the whole point. The whole issue is that serving videos is very expensive to do as a "run your thing" effort. YouTube and Netflix alone are soaking up a lot of Internet bandwidth, so the subsidy YT is providing to video creators and viewers should not be underestimated. And this means YT gets to decide what they want to host.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > How hard is it to buy video hosting from a web hotel? You can trivially host a peertube instance (or use an existing one). The question is how to move your viewers there. There doesn't seem to be anything explicitly stopping big accounts from mirroring content. See LTT channel creating floatplane (https://www.htxt.co.za/2019/12/17/linus-tech-tips-streaming-platform-floatplane-now-in-open-beta-calling-for-creators/ https://www.htxt.co.za/2019/12/17/linus-tech-tips-streaming-...)
- correct_horse 6y ago
  The banned channel apparently contained mostly "vintage audio repair", not exactly Google's bread and butter. Also they allow numerous other creators doing repair (ifixit, louis rossman, even the channel that posted this video). This probably isn't an anti-repair move, but a Kafkaesque bureaucratic one. Still an annoying problem.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    It would be nice to know the exact reason the Youtube decided to kill this and not other repair channels. As an amateur I am subscribed to many repair channels and I can't see any specific reason why this particular channel would deserve getting banned.
  - AzzieElbab 6y ago
    An algorithm just deleted entire channel without a warning?
    - voxic11 6y ago
      Happens all the time on YouTube.
      - isoos 6y ago
        Is there a good video backup tool that archives a channel for later viewing?
        crtasm 6y ago
        Yes, youtube-dl (also handles many, many other sites) https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl
        sp332 6y ago
        # Download all playlists of YouTube channel/user keeping each playlist in separate directory: $ youtube-dl -o '%(uploader)s/%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLinuxFoundation/playlists https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLinuxFoundation/playlists
- jowsie 6y ago
  Considering it's YouTube, it seems a lot more likely that some black box AI kept picking up on him saying electron gun and preemptively nuked his channel over fear of guns. Wouldn't even be close to the first time something similar has happened, and most definitely wont be the last.
  - dageshi 6y ago
    There's channels out there whose main topic of conversation is guns, lots of them! I'd be surprised if it's that.
    - karlkatzke 6y ago
      They also frequently get deleted, which is why a lot of people who have channels that feature or regard guns also have second or third channels for non-gun related things, on which they refer to them as "pew-pews" or other similar infantile things that are less likely to be flagged by an AI reading transcripts.
    - voxic11 6y ago
      You can talk about guns in general. For instance it's totally ok to comment on how guns are bad. But it's against YouTube policy to provide any information on the manufacturing, assembly or sale of firearms. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7667605?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7667605?hl=en
      - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        >You can talk about guns in general. >But it's against YouTube policy to provide any information on the manufacturing, assembly or sale of firearms These statements don't square with each other. I don't think there's any way to have even a historical discussion about arms (or many other subjects) without "providing any information about" manufacturing, assembly or sale. So I guess you can talk about guns until you draw someone's ire or the algo flags you at which point the latter statement is the justification for kicking out your channel.
deadalus 6y ago
Alternative Video Sites : https://lbry.tv/ https://lbry.tv/ https://www.dailymotion.com/ https://www.dailymotion.com/ https://www.bitchute.com/ https://www.bitchute.com/ https://dlive.tv/ https://dlive.tv/
- kanox 6y ago
  Alternative platforms exist but they much less content and it seems implausible for significant numbers of viewers to switch. In particular bitchute seems to be entirely filled with conspiracy videos to the point where it would be better if people didn't suggest it as an alternative.
  - partyboat1586 6y ago
    They need some way for people to voluntarily filter the content they see.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      With opt in for crazy talk
      - m0zg 6y ago
        Dangerous suggestion. Who gets to define what's "crazy talk"? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
        Natanael_L 6y ago
        Literally everybody has their own personal definition, and if you decide to rely on the choices of other people then their definitions will apply.
        jacobush 6y ago
        It doesn't have to be very draconian, just a little tick box: include controversial videos in search results yes-no.
dathinab 6y ago
Wait, what?! Honestly I'm completely speechless. EDIT: I actually mixed up the name with another person. I don't know about Jordan Pier's, so yeah. I will still not delete my comment for transparency. (I mixed him up with Louis Rossmann). I wonder what the reason was, why his channel got deleted?
charliebrownau 6y ago
LBRY CEO is a jewish zionist Whites are never going to get fair treatment on it Look into Bitchute or bit tube TV or uget TV or even self host a peertube server off a cheap VPS
halflings 6y ago
TL;DR: The channel seems to have been deleted by mistake, potentially by an automated moderation algorithm. Consequences of having tons of bad actors (like on any website). I hope the channel will be restored after contacting support, esp. since it has a decent following.
- asah 6y ago
  Reported to insiders for escalation.
  - Brian_K_White 6y ago
    As long as insiders keep putting out the high profile fires, the real problem remains. If everyone can't benefit from having access to an insider, then it would be better for everyone to keep getting hit in the face with the fact that this is a real problem, rather than hiding the problem from most people by having insiders fix the few cases everyone else ever might notice.
  - smileypete 6y ago
    Also please have a look at Craig Tube/Vinyl TV, his channels have returned under a slightly different new name, but all the previous content has been lost from the old ones: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC40wiRfP8u2DrVvUm_VGcqw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC40wiRfP8u2DrVvUm_VGcqw https://www.youtube.com/user/CraigTube/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/CraigTube/videos Archived copies: https://web.archive.org/web/20200227065130/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC40wiRfP8u2DrVvUm_VGcqw https://web.archive.org/web/20200227065130/https://www.youtu... https://web.archive.org/web/20120625045947/https://www.youtube.com/user/CraigTube/videos https://web.archive.org/web/20120625045947/https://www.youtu...
dgellow 6y ago
Business idea: videos creators pay $$ per month for a service to constantly scrap their videos from youtube as a backup system. If youtube delete your channel, in one click you can recreate it and reupload everything to another platform (or an alternative channel, whatever)
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  Use the same short links, too.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  While a great business idea, you can also use youtube-dl to backup your youtube videos locally.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    Sure, I'm just describing a nice web interface on top of youtube-dl. Someone could do it quite quickly IMHO. - daily scheduler for downloads, pay more for more frequent backups - simple web interface to manage your account - system to upload your backup to somewhere else So basically 3 components for a simple MVP that can be done on top of any cloud provider.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - jacobgreenleaf 6y ago
    Depending on the channel, this could be terabytes of content.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - dgellow 6y ago
      You can specify clear limits on how much content you will save per user. Or ask for more money for people with huge amount of videos.
Hard_Space 6y ago
Two ads to get to the video? Better a TLDW.
- aaron_m04 6y ago
  I have uBlock Origin on Firefox (both for my phone and my laptop) and I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on YouTube.
  - Hard_Space 6y ago
    I also have it on Firefox here in Windows 10, but it couldn't stop those two ads.
stevespang 6y ago
There are "underpaid" YouTube staff who are taking money under the table to delete entire sites, crush your competitors and take down sites . . . I have met some of them.
tom-thistime 6y ago
There is no Web 2.0. There are endless versions of sort of "AOL Reloaded." Why we embrace that is getting less and less clear.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > There is no Web 2.0. There are endless versions of sort of "AOL Reloaded." Why we embrace that is getting less and less clear. There was a web 2.0. It allowed tech giants to hoard a lot of data before cancelling the web 2.0 themselves. This is why I'm not using microformats and semantic HTML in my webpages, it only profits Google which then display the product of my hardwork on their own webpages without giving back anything.
motohagiography 6y ago
Youtube previously banned hacking demonstration videos, and his content might have got caught up in it. It could have been an accident, but even without evidence, one can't help but hypothesize he browsed or engaged with the wrong kind of ideas, or the wrong kind of people were interested in what he did and got associated with that traffic, triggering a cancellation. Conspiracy? Maybe, it doesn't take much to speculate on that conclusion, and there is enough mistrust in tech platforms right now that such a view would just be a product of the where their brands are. Youtube's service, their rules. They have the discretion to disappear peoples content for any reason, but it's worth considering that dumb stuff like this is a multiplier for reinforcing peoples negative views of their service. It's not a question of whether this person was arbitrarily cancelled, it's whether that's what everyone else thinks. Would you launch, invest in, or run a business that depended on Youtube? If there is hesitation, that's a problem with the platform's brand. In an economics sense, it's becoming an inferior product - something you substitute away from as soon as you can afford to. There is still lots of money to be made in inferior products, but that does imply a negative inflection point for growth.
- w-j-w 6y ago
  Why on Earth does YouTube get the benefit of the doubt that they had good reason to ban this person. Google has taken deliberate steps to make sure there are no real competitors, so why should we expect market forces to resolve the situation. When you create a monopoly, freedom for a company to operate as it pleases should be suspended.
- fiftyfifty 6y ago
  It's not just Youtube, Android apps and developers get banned as well, often with little explanation or recourse. I'm not sure why anyone would invest time or money building a business on any of Google's platforms.
- afrcnc 6y ago
  They banned home hacking videos and proof-of-concept videos only. You can still host your ransomware kit ad on YouTube without any problems for months.
keiferski 6y ago
At some point, the collective tech community needs to develop a serious alternative to the current reality of a single corporation controlling the overwhelming majority of a) online video content and b) online content in general (via search.) Online video is in its infancy now, but within a few decades, it will have become the modern equivalent of the book. Do we really want a single Kafkaesque, politically-biased entity controlling which books can be published? Presumably/hopefully this will happen when storage becomes cheap enough to easily host video and someone figures out a way to filter through all the undesirable content which currently afflicts free-speech-oriented alternatives.
- andai 6y ago
  Does the second half of your post not contradict the first?
  - keiferski 6y ago
    In what way? By ‘cheap enough to host video’ I meant in a distributed way, just as it became easier for more publishers to print books when the cost of paper/ink/presses went down.
    - controversy 6y ago
      It’s the filter out part that is seemingly contradictory.
      - keiferski 6y ago
        I don’t have a problem with users choosing to filter out certain content. I have a problem with a single corporation or entity deciding what should be deleted (not simply filtered) for me, without my input or choice. The issue then simply becomes one of labeling. You can remove or relabel content for mislabeling itself, but not for being controversial.
        andai 6y ago
altgoogler 6y ago
Googler here, who doesn't work in the YouTube PA. It does certainly seem like this was an erroneous take-down. I'm not familiar with the content, but I can't imagine a more innocuous channel. If JPdylon is out there, the first recommendation is to appeal the decision [1]. Granted that doesn't always work, and it's unfortunate that common next step is to resort to "Support via Hacker News". That being said, content moderation is a super hard problem. It needs to get better and more fair on both sides (i.e. taking down what should be; leaving up what is quality content), but the scale here is often forgotten. There is far, far too much content posted to manually review. If EEVblog's suggestion was taken and Susan (YouTube CEO) had to manually review every moderation action on channels with 5K+ subs, she would not be able to keep up. If you had a team of people, they would not be able to keep up. Even if you had a fleet of people, the scale is just unreal. EEVblog's suggestion to diversify platforms is reasonable. The fact that those platforms don't have some of the same problems doesn't necessarily mean that they're better at content moderation, however. They just don't have to operate on the same scale. [1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/185111 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/185111
- crazy1van 6y ago
  > If EEVblog's suggestion was taken and Susan (YouTube CEO) had to manually review every moderation action on channels with 5K+ subs, she would not be able to keep up. Maybe perform fewer moderation actions?
  - altgoogler 6y ago
    If there were fewer moderation actions, then we'd be seeing more articles saying how obviously abusive content that should have been taken down and wasn't. There are many sophisticated actors that try and game the system, and it's because of them at sometimes the system makes the wrong call.
  - belltaco 6y ago
    I feel only the questionable removals make it to HN or other tech sites that make it feel like lesser moderation would be better. But the fact is there is a vast ocean of disturbing content that literally causes some moderators to lose their mental and need counseling.
anderspitman 6y ago
We need to decouple video hosting from discoverability.
- acomjean 6y ago
  somewhat oddly google has "video search" with results from many sources.. But discoverability is a huge problem.
  - falcrist 6y ago
    You're technically correct in that the video search returns results from different websites, however the results are almost exclusively youtube or some website embedding a youtube video. "Almost exclusively" isn't an exaggeration, either. You have to dig pretty deep before you start seeing some results from other video hosting platforms.
raxxorrax 6y ago
I hate people that normalised censorship of this kind and it was predictable that someone would crash the fun at some point... Our own fault to give single corps that much control on content though. Content creators should always upload their videos to other platforms too. If those get a critical mass of content, they might stand a chance.
- libertine 6y ago
  If Youtube was liable for mistakes/wrongfully enforce their guidelines, this would be way less stressful. This guy would go to a website and file a claim on a legal authority that would put Youtube's balls in a wheel that would squeeze them gradually the longer Youtube would take to present the case with facts that support the take down, and I'm pretty sure you'd start to receive less auto-replies and you'd get more humans typing. Youtube is fucking over people's livelihoods because of a system that doesn't work properly, so they should pay for that. Shouldn't be the other way around. If Youtube gives the tools for people to make money on it, then Youtube should be responsible for such people - not only advertisers.
sschueller 6y ago
Ideally each community runs their own servers. Something like https://joinpeertube.org/en/ https://joinpeertube.org/en/ can help with that. So for example someone would run an electronics and repair instance that only has those kinds of videos. Those are then all discoverable by the Fediverse. This way also controversial instances can exist and people can choose to follow them or not. What's controversial in one country may not be in another. One size fits all doesn't work.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Someone make a service that automates uploading and managing channels on every video platform known to date: Youtube vimeo dailymotion etc. Wouldn’t that be a great tool for creators?
- Jommi 6y ago
  It would be awesome, and I have a huge network of creators ready to use this product when available. Email me at joakim(at) matchmade.tv if you're interested in developing this.
- john_miller 6y ago
  Something like that doesn't exist? Content creators and social media agency have to upload and curate their videos individually?
aaron_m04 6y ago
This is a shame. I strongly recommend this Python program called youtube-dl for archiving any videos you care about. Occasionally it stops working but if you update it, it always works after the update.
- PhantomGremlin 6y ago
  I upvoted this because it's important to know. Too much good stuff gets deleted from YouTube. But I have mixed feelings, because the first rule of youtube-dl is you don't talk about youtube-dl. E.g. it used to have a Wikipedia page but that got removed!
jaybuff 6y ago
John Gruber and Ben Thompson discussed a comparison of podcast vs. youtube and how podcasting isn't dominated by one company like youtube is for video. This is in the context of Joe Rogan moving to spotify. https://overcast.fm/+B7NB1G3rw/44:01 https://overcast.fm/+B7NB1G3rw/44:01
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Spotify is trying real hard to become the YouTube of podcasts unfortunately.
topkai22 6y ago
1) Alphabet needs to be broken up (at least YouTube, Google the search engine, and the ad business). Ideally, there would be a way to pull apart the hosting business, the “social”/channel/search business, and the ad delivery businesses. YouTube that runs only 3rd party ads looks very different than having to directly manage its own relationships with brands. 2) We need a creators bill of rights. Platforms that allow users to upload and share content should be required to inform users why content is removed, have a clear mechanism for appeal to a 3rd party, and allow users to exfiltrate their content if it even if it is removed.
jscheel 6y ago
We had YouTube take down our church livestream in the middle of service, claiming that we violated their community guidelines (we didn't). The clip in question was blank, and the note said that it was an automated takedown. I immediately appealed, switched our stream key, and let everyone know to refresh their browsers. But still, serious interruption to people's worship because google relies too-heavily on automation.
- valuearb 6y ago
  It was bots will.
  - asah 6y ago
    You should be ex-communicated for that joke. :-)
- ballenf 6y ago
  I would guess there are some passages from many religions' sacred texts which could get your whole channel deleted if promoted. Unless there's a written or unwritten exception. The conflict or tension that troubles me the most is between platforms' incentive to have the most vague and broad TOS and users' reasonable expectation of consistency and explanation. The same tension exists in government police/arrest powers and resulted in many historic documents and rights. YT is not a government but their power rivals many actual countries. It will be interesting to see if the same revolutionary actions result. I don't think it's clear yet that it will or could happen.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jandrese 6y ago
    * This section of the Bible is copyright BMG Music Group and has been removed. This is your first strike.
    - 6y ago
vezycash 6y ago
The problem with bandwidth is that its cure is largely political. Legislations and agreements that prevent competition, community run ISPs... Help YouTube. On more thought, bandwidth isn't the major politically caused road block. It's copyright laws. Facebook and Microsoft are both capable of building YouTube clones. But Microsoft has limited itself to cooperate video hosting. And I believe Facebook has intentionally bad video discovery mechanism to keep copyright sharks at bay. Porn hosting is pretty much triving in part because copyright laws / enforcement is weak there. YouTube started aggressive, automated takedowns because of copyright laws. Fix the laws and the tech will take care of the rest.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwawaysea 6y ago
Censorship is bad. Discuss a better future for video at https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeAlternatives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeAlternatives/. Current options seem like Bitchute (https://www.bitchute.com/ https://www.bitchute.com/), LBRY (https://lbry.com/ https://lbry.com/), and D.tube (https://d.tube/ https://d.tube/). Reddit and Twitter alternatives are listed at https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...
t0ughcritic 6y ago
This is surely getting out of hand, we need to go back to the days of competition. Google controls everything!
squarefoot 6y ago
We should have the UN mandate IPv6 adoption everywhere, then that a block of public IPs for everyone is considered a human right, and great part of the issue would be over.
godshatter 6y ago
Everyone wants a youtube replacement, but I'd rather see more options for niche content. It might not be doable for most people to create something big enough to give something the size of youtube a run for their money, but someone could make a site that is basically a private bit torrent tracker that people could upload their own videos to. They could court advertisers, or offer a small subscription to be able to log in for more than free content. Then you'd just need a way of finding sites like this.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  I've considered (though haven't had the energy) to build a serverless AWS video-on-demand project that anyone could spin up in their own AWS account, then either "just host" their own content or be a provider, and provide billing to customers. Yes, that means that serving videos would cost money rather than earn money... or the provider could run a donation/ad service. In any case, the ability to procure and operation a world-scale video distribution website easily is there, it is a matter of building it and having cost estimates built in.
  - williamscales 6y ago
    Have you thought about integrating a way to bill the viewers directly? There are all kinds of content on the internet that I'd be willing to pay $2-5 on the spot to get a high quality stream that I could watch for some period of time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
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stipps 6y ago
A female CEO would do so much better. Just like they did with Yahoo. They have the ethics and fine senses.
smabie 6y ago
I mean if YouTube is deleting flat earther videos than they should be deleting religious ones too. The thing is that they shouldn't be deleting flat earther videos, and instead delete videos that are explicitly illegal.
- asadlionpk 6y ago
  I don't get how you compare religious videos with flat earthers but I agree with your conclusion.
  - Solvitieg 6y ago
    It's an obtuse statement but it seems fair. Both have theories about the world that can't be reconciled with scientific data.
    - Cyph0n 6y ago
      Not really. Lack of data is very different from proof. Flat earthers believe in something that empirically and rigorously has been proven to be false. There is no discussion required here, philosophical or otherwise. Religion might be false based on the absence of evidence, but it has never been - and probably never will be - empirically proven to be false.
      - ikeboy 6y ago
        Claims about the Earth being only several thousand years old have been proven false.
        Cyph0n 6y ago
        Of course.
        dane-pgp 6y ago
        What about claims of the Earth being only five minutes old? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis#Five-minute_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis#Five-minut...
pizza 6y ago
What would it take to automatically upload every youtube video viewed in Chrome or Firefox to eg ipfs via a browser extension?
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  Lots and lots of storage.
nurettin 6y ago
Agadmator (a chess youtuber) complained about his live podcast being taken down by youtube as well. It appears there is a new youtube algorithm out there which doesn't like it when black's position is compromised by white.
mottosso 6y ago
While we're here getting riled up about the subject of this video, the content itself features a cleverly disguised banner running in a recorded video that cannot be blocked or paid to avoid. Well played, sir.
mbostleman 6y ago
It is hard to underestimate importance of the lack of competition in FAANG services.
legohead 6y ago
Copyright and patents need to be done away with or updated to work with contemporary thinking -- although, I don't trust the latter, so I'll stick with 'do away with'. People whine about YouTube being strict about content, well, they are just trying to cover their ass. As soon as a real replacement comes along and gets big enough, it's going to have the same issues as YouTube. I've seen it happen over and over again. One example is imgur. It was a nice replacement for all the image share sites and their annoying ads. But, now it has ads too. I've seen people asking for an imgur replacement.
- rjmunro 6y ago
  It's not just copyrights and patents, though. One of the main benefits of YouTube is that it handles all that for you. Sometimes it doesn't quite work, but it's pretty valuable to be able to post a video with some music and have it claimed, and they take the revenue, rather than they sue you and/or issue a take down notice of some kind. What about things like hate speech, abusive imagery and content aimed at children that actually is unsuitable?
rgrieselhuber 6y ago
These companies need to be broken up.
WalterBright 6y ago
Because of a miscommunication youtube once deleted some of our D conference videos. Fortunately, we had a backup of them. Moral: don't rely on the cloud as the only copy of your data. If you don't control it, it can disappear at any moment for any reason.
- wuunderbar 6y ago
  > don't rely on the cloud as the only copy of your data The real moral: don't think of YouTube (a public video discovery platform) as a cloud backup tool. They don't pretend to be and you shouldn't think of it as so.
pcunite 6y ago
YouTube = the new PayPal
squarefoot 6y ago
He's got the channel back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mRpj4jQ6Zg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mRpj4jQ6Zg However, if I was in the same situation I would seriously consider moving elsewhere, or at least keeping my stuff in more than one place just in case.
rhapsodic 6y ago
It's back: https://www.youtube.com/user/JPDylon https://www.youtube.com/user/JPDylon
rexreed 6y ago
He's back online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mRpj4jQ6Zg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mRpj4jQ6Zg It was a wrongful termination.
thewhitetulip 6y ago
And Youtube let's fraudsters who claim to get you money for free run channels. I tweeted to them about the recently fraudulent ads that I see, but they take no action. I still see the same ads over and over again. they seem to be targeting the gullible people who want 'secret pubg level' or 'get cashback of 500 in one hour' or get '10000 subscribers within one day'. all of which are fraudulent, that I am sure.
aabbcc1241 6y ago
Centralized service and Youtube can apply censorship as they like. This is by nature. I'd suggest more people get into p2p network like ZeroNet or PeerTube if they value freedom of speech over popularity.
torresjrjr 6y ago
Federated (decentralised) video hosting: PeerTube. https://joinpeertube.com https://joinpeertube.com - Don't use a company's service, then complain. - Use a federated server, and share videos freely. - Most importantly, learn what the Fediverse is. Forget BitTube, Daily Motion, LBRY, or whatever other proprietary (company owned) video hosting site. The reason you've never heard of PeerTube is because it's a a community project who don't advertise their software, because it's not a product. It's free (as in cost and freedom) for anyone to to use and it works. > But I won't get nearly enough views Then stay on YouTube. If you value your freedom, you'll make the decision and the views will come. Be the change.
- hydroxark 6y ago
  your link seems broken, I believe it's .org not .com
smileypete 6y ago
Just posted a topic about another channel that got deleted, 'CraigTube': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781180
frankzen 6y ago
These services can't be trusted anymore as a single point of failure. Distributed torrent like systems need to replace them. Trusting any of these companies as the stewards of content is foolish at this point.

775 points by lmilcin 6y ago

It looks like more of Big Tech is against the 'right to repair' than just Apple. I'd like to know what 'policy violations' were committed by Jordan Pier. But of course, Youtube has no obligation to let him know or to let his viewers know.

Gravityloss 6y ago
Youtube is a platform. But can one really build a business on that platform? What kind of protections does the enterpreneur have? Do they have a contract with youtube? Is it easy to switch to some other platform? How hard is it to buy video hosting from a web hotel? I think the whole idea of the internet was a difference to these "dial in" services. On the internet, you can run your thing anywhere and anybody can access it just the same. No walls. That's the whole point.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Build your own video hosting and streaming site? It's been done. They don't last. There were no walls once. But it turns out building walls is a great way to make a lot of money.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    It's also that hosting video is still pretty expensive at large scales and the only way to make money with advertising is with huge audiences. Other models like subscriptions has a chicken and egg problem of needing to simultaneously have enough subscribers to get creators to use your new service and enough creators to get people to pay.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > you can run your thing anywhere and anybody can access it just the same. No walls Welcome to the future Marty! How was your ride in the time machine? I think you've got some catching up to do from the web/world of the early 2000's that you've just come from and are describing here. Let me fill you in on what has happened. Platform Monopolies are in full swing, and the internet is now a corporate owned web - with a myriad of apps that are surveilling our every touch and click (US but also abroad). Palantir has terrifying racist policing algorithms, the NSA is plugged into everything and has a dragnet filling a complex database for US 'homeland security', social media/Facebook campaigns can be used by 'Doublespeak'-ing authoritarian childhood-traumatized leaders to win elections [1], and Crypto AG is a CIA owned company that has been selling back-doored cryptography tools to national governments for many decades. [2] Oh and you might want to Google 'Edward Snowden' and go back and read some of the great the Guardian articles published about it. [3] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-mJnYmdVmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-mJnYmdVmQ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22500231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22500231 or https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812537258/uncovering-the-cias-operation-to-steal-state-secrets https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812537258/uncovering-the-cias... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden... - edit: seriously though - Intellectual Property laws and the Silicon Valley strategy of purchasing IP by buying up competition is suffocating and stifling much needed access to essential technologies, depriving humans the ability to remix, reuse and have access to the underlying technical components in a modular fashion. Our current reality is killing our ability to meet these human needs for play, growth, autonomy and cooperation. The most promising change I see possible is a transition to Commons-based peer production, using the Holographic chain distributed app pattern by Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun, together with a move to mutual credit currencies, replacing mechanisms and dynamics that create or sustain the artificial scarcity of information or knowledge. This world would bring us universal access and shared control of a rich Commons, fully accessible by every child. Essentially what I am describing is an open source world. An open source economic system made up of unencloseable carriers and ever-evolving protocols, immersing us in a diverse and beautiful Commons - our shared inheritance.
  - 6510 6y ago
    Things will improve but first they have to get worse.
    - bergstromm466 6y ago
      No. I think you're just not connected to those already suffering. Some people are living in hell today. [1] I think the narrative you describe comes from ubiquitous psychopathology, which affects all of us. In other words: the weight of our current systems creates a low level mental illness for all who are under it's influence and control. This weight comes from the continual stresses digitally technological society exerts on us. This is the shared reality of digital Rentier Capitalism [2]. It means the system keeps most of us fragmented and passive. But I think your narrative is dangerous. To believe more suffering has to happen, just because you didn't experience pain directly doesn't mean others' suffering isn't worthy of acting upon. All you did is reveal your privilege, which is a great first step. Next comes awareness, should you choose to accept that important mission [3] [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/precariat-global-class-rise-of-populism/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/precariat-global-clas... [2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corruption-capitalism-guy-standing/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8
      - catalogia 6y ago
        > No. I think you're just not connected to those already suffering. Some people are living in hell today. [1] If you think things can't or won't get even worse, you're being too optimistic. Even if you think some people are already experiencing a maximally bad time, "some" can become "more".
      - 6510 6y ago
        Guy Standing does wonderful work, very inspiring. I also applaud your faith in gradual improvements and the quality of your posts. We need many of you. I've become to cynical. I hope you make it before the rest of us burn everything to the ground.
- dageshi 6y ago
  The audiences won't move. Mixer proved it recently, they bought two of the top streamers from twitch (Ninja and Shroud) but barely a fraction of their audiences would leave twitch for mixer, maybe 10% if that. More to the point, it's not that simple, it's not just streaming but apps for all the mobile devices + everything else that people watch video on (xbox, playstation, smart tv's).
  - viraptor 6y ago
    I'm not sure those are comparable. If you remove ninja and shroud, you're left with ~infinity-2 people playing FPS games on twitch. Removing a high quality electronics repair channel on YouTube is a significant impact on that class of content. I'm going away from YouTube to twitch and other services for some specific tech content. If it's relatively unique, people will find it. (Or if you build awareness over a long time, rather than starting on the day of disappearance)
    - apacheCamel 6y ago
      I 100% believe they are comparable. People tend to watch channels for the personality behind the camera. Ninja and Shroud both do stream FPS games and hundreds of other people stream them too, but look at their numbers. They get more views because the people want to watch them, not somebody else.
      - viraptor 6y ago
        They want to watch when those streamers are available. The tiny percentage which moved to mixer pretty much confirmed that not others will just find someone else to watch instead. It's like TV celebrities. People will be really into one reality tv, but when it ends they'll pick up another one.
        apacheCamel 6y ago
        That's what I am saying, the tech channels are the same way. There are an abundance of tech channels out there, once one gets accidentally deleted from Youtube, people will just pick another.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  Yes they have a contract "YouTube Terms and Conditions" not really favorable for the content creator.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > On the internet, you can run your thing anywhere and anybody can access it just the same. No walls. That's the whole point. The whole issue is that serving videos is very expensive to do as a "run your thing" effort. YouTube and Netflix alone are soaking up a lot of Internet bandwidth, so the subsidy YT is providing to video creators and viewers should not be underestimated. And this means YT gets to decide what they want to host.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > How hard is it to buy video hosting from a web hotel? You can trivially host a peertube instance (or use an existing one). The question is how to move your viewers there. There doesn't seem to be anything explicitly stopping big accounts from mirroring content. See LTT channel creating floatplane (https://www.htxt.co.za/2019/12/17/linus-tech-tips-streaming-platform-floatplane-now-in-open-beta-calling-for-creators/ https://www.htxt.co.za/2019/12/17/linus-tech-tips-streaming-...)
correct_horse 6y ago
The banned channel apparently contained mostly "vintage audio repair", not exactly Google's bread and butter. Also they allow numerous other creators doing repair (ifixit, louis rossman, even the channel that posted this video). This probably isn't an anti-repair move, but a Kafkaesque bureaucratic one. Still an annoying problem.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  It would be nice to know the exact reason the Youtube decided to kill this and not other repair channels. As an amateur I am subscribed to many repair channels and I can't see any specific reason why this particular channel would deserve getting banned.
- AzzieElbab 6y ago
  An algorithm just deleted entire channel without a warning?
  - voxic11 6y ago
    Happens all the time on YouTube.
    - isoos 6y ago
      Is there a good video backup tool that archives a channel for later viewing?
      - crtasm 6y ago
        Yes, youtube-dl (also handles many, many other sites) https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl
      - sp332 6y ago
        # Download all playlists of YouTube channel/user keeping each playlist in separate directory: $ youtube-dl -o '%(uploader)s/%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLinuxFoundation/playlists https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLinuxFoundation/playlists
jowsie 6y ago
Considering it's YouTube, it seems a lot more likely that some black box AI kept picking up on him saying electron gun and preemptively nuked his channel over fear of guns. Wouldn't even be close to the first time something similar has happened, and most definitely wont be the last.
- dageshi 6y ago
  There's channels out there whose main topic of conversation is guns, lots of them! I'd be surprised if it's that.
  - karlkatzke 6y ago
    They also frequently get deleted, which is why a lot of people who have channels that feature or regard guns also have second or third channels for non-gun related things, on which they refer to them as "pew-pews" or other similar infantile things that are less likely to be flagged by an AI reading transcripts.
  - voxic11 6y ago
    You can talk about guns in general. For instance it's totally ok to comment on how guns are bad. But it's against YouTube policy to provide any information on the manufacturing, assembly or sale of firearms. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7667605?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7667605?hl=en
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      >You can talk about guns in general. >But it's against YouTube policy to provide any information on the manufacturing, assembly or sale of firearms These statements don't square with each other. I don't think there's any way to have even a historical discussion about arms (or many other subjects) without "providing any information about" manufacturing, assembly or sale. So I guess you can talk about guns until you draw someone's ire or the algo flags you at which point the latter statement is the justification for kicking out your channel.

deadalus 6y ago

Alternative Video Sites : https://lbry.tv/ https://lbry.tv/ https://www.dailymotion.com/ https://www.dailymotion.com/ https://www.bitchute.com/ https://www.bitchute.com/ https://dlive.tv/ https://dlive.tv/

kanox 6y ago
Alternative platforms exist but they much less content and it seems implausible for significant numbers of viewers to switch. In particular bitchute seems to be entirely filled with conspiracy videos to the point where it would be better if people didn't suggest it as an alternative.
- partyboat1586 6y ago
  They need some way for people to voluntarily filter the content they see.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    With opt in for crazy talk
    - m0zg 6y ago
      Dangerous suggestion. Who gets to define what's "crazy talk"? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
      - Natanael_L 6y ago
        Literally everybody has their own personal definition, and if you decide to rely on the choices of other people then their definitions will apply.
      - jacobush 6y ago
        It doesn't have to be very draconian, just a little tick box: include controversial videos in search results yes-no.

dathinab 6y ago

Wait, what?! Honestly I'm completely speechless. EDIT: I actually mixed up the name with another person. I don't know about Jordan Pier's, so yeah. I will still not delete my comment for transparency. (I mixed him up with Louis Rossmann). I wonder what the reason was, why his channel got deleted?

charliebrownau 6y ago

LBRY CEO is a jewish zionist Whites are never going to get fair treatment on it Look into Bitchute or bit tube TV or uget TV or even self host a peertube server off a cheap VPS

halflings 6y ago

TL;DR: The channel seems to have been deleted by mistake, potentially by an automated moderation algorithm. Consequences of having tons of bad actors (like on any website). I hope the channel will be restored after contacting support, esp. since it has a decent following.

asah 6y ago
Reported to insiders for escalation.
- Brian_K_White 6y ago
  As long as insiders keep putting out the high profile fires, the real problem remains. If everyone can't benefit from having access to an insider, then it would be better for everyone to keep getting hit in the face with the fact that this is a real problem, rather than hiding the problem from most people by having insiders fix the few cases everyone else ever might notice.
- smileypete 6y ago
  Also please have a look at Craig Tube/Vinyl TV, his channels have returned under a slightly different new name, but all the previous content has been lost from the old ones: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC40wiRfP8u2DrVvUm_VGcqw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC40wiRfP8u2DrVvUm_VGcqw https://www.youtube.com/user/CraigTube/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/CraigTube/videos Archived copies: https://web.archive.org/web/20200227065130/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC40wiRfP8u2DrVvUm_VGcqw https://web.archive.org/web/20200227065130/https://www.youtu... https://web.archive.org/web/20120625045947/https://www.youtube.com/user/CraigTube/videos https://web.archive.org/web/20120625045947/https://www.youtu...

dgellow 6y ago

Business idea: videos creators pay $$ per month for a service to constantly scrap their videos from youtube as a backup system. If youtube delete your channel, in one click you can recreate it and reupload everything to another platform (or an alternative channel, whatever)

PopeDotNinja 6y ago
Use the same short links, too.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
While a great business idea, you can also use youtube-dl to backup your youtube videos locally.
- dgellow 6y ago
  Sure, I'm just describing a nice web interface on top of youtube-dl. Someone could do it quite quickly IMHO. - daily scheduler for downloads, pay more for more frequent backups - simple web interface to manage your account - system to upload your backup to somewhere else So basically 3 components for a simple MVP that can be done on top of any cloud provider.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- jacobgreenleaf 6y ago
  Depending on the channel, this could be terabytes of content.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dgellow 6y ago
    You can specify clear limits on how much content you will save per user. Or ask for more money for people with huge amount of videos.

Hard_Space 6y ago

Two ads to get to the video? Better a TLDW.

aaron_m04 6y ago
I have uBlock Origin on Firefox (both for my phone and my laptop) and I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on YouTube.
- Hard_Space 6y ago
  I also have it on Firefox here in Windows 10, but it couldn't stop those two ads.

stevespang 6y ago

There are "underpaid" YouTube staff who are taking money under the table to delete entire sites, crush your competitors and take down sites . . . I have met some of them.

tom-thistime 6y ago

There is no Web 2.0. There are endless versions of sort of "AOL Reloaded." Why we embrace that is getting less and less clear.

throw_m239339 6y ago
> There is no Web 2.0. There are endless versions of sort of "AOL Reloaded." Why we embrace that is getting less and less clear. There was a web 2.0. It allowed tech giants to hoard a lot of data before cancelling the web 2.0 themselves. This is why I'm not using microformats and semantic HTML in my webpages, it only profits Google which then display the product of my hardwork on their own webpages without giving back anything.

motohagiography 6y ago

Youtube previously banned hacking demonstration videos, and his content might have got caught up in it. It could have been an accident, but even without evidence, one can't help but hypothesize he browsed or engaged with the wrong kind of ideas, or the wrong kind of people were interested in what he did and got associated with that traffic, triggering a cancellation. Conspiracy? Maybe, it doesn't take much to speculate on that conclusion, and there is enough mistrust in tech platforms right now that such a view would just be a product of the where their brands are. Youtube's service, their rules. They have the discretion to disappear peoples content for any reason, but it's worth considering that dumb stuff like this is a multiplier for reinforcing peoples negative views of their service. It's not a question of whether this person was arbitrarily cancelled, it's whether that's what everyone else thinks. Would you launch, invest in, or run a business that depended on Youtube? If there is hesitation, that's a problem with the platform's brand. In an economics sense, it's becoming an inferior product - something you substitute away from as soon as you can afford to. There is still lots of money to be made in inferior products, but that does imply a negative inflection point for growth.

w-j-w 6y ago
Why on Earth does YouTube get the benefit of the doubt that they had good reason to ban this person. Google has taken deliberate steps to make sure there are no real competitors, so why should we expect market forces to resolve the situation. When you create a monopoly, freedom for a company to operate as it pleases should be suspended.
fiftyfifty 6y ago
It's not just Youtube, Android apps and developers get banned as well, often with little explanation or recourse. I'm not sure why anyone would invest time or money building a business on any of Google's platforms.
afrcnc 6y ago
They banned home hacking videos and proof-of-concept videos only. You can still host your ransomware kit ad on YouTube without any problems for months.

keiferski 6y ago

At some point, the collective tech community needs to develop a serious alternative to the current reality of a single corporation controlling the overwhelming majority of a) online video content and b) online content in general (via search.) Online video is in its infancy now, but within a few decades, it will have become the modern equivalent of the book. Do we really want a single Kafkaesque, politically-biased entity controlling which books can be published? Presumably/hopefully this will happen when storage becomes cheap enough to easily host video and someone figures out a way to filter through all the undesirable content which currently afflicts free-speech-oriented alternatives.

andai 6y ago
Does the second half of your post not contradict the first?
- keiferski 6y ago
  In what way? By ‘cheap enough to host video’ I meant in a distributed way, just as it became easier for more publishers to print books when the cost of paper/ink/presses went down.
  - controversy 6y ago
    It’s the filter out part that is seemingly contradictory.
    - keiferski 6y ago
      I don’t have a problem with users choosing to filter out certain content. I have a problem with a single corporation or entity deciding what should be deleted (not simply filtered) for me, without my input or choice. The issue then simply becomes one of labeling. You can remove or relabel content for mislabeling itself, but not for being controversial.
      - andai 6y ago

altgoogler 6y ago

Googler here, who doesn't work in the YouTube PA. It does certainly seem like this was an erroneous take-down. I'm not familiar with the content, but I can't imagine a more innocuous channel. If JPdylon is out there, the first recommendation is to appeal the decision [1]. Granted that doesn't always work, and it's unfortunate that common next step is to resort to "Support via Hacker News". That being said, content moderation is a super hard problem. It needs to get better and more fair on both sides (i.e. taking down what should be; leaving up what is quality content), but the scale here is often forgotten. There is far, far too much content posted to manually review. If EEVblog's suggestion was taken and Susan (YouTube CEO) had to manually review every moderation action on channels with 5K+ subs, she would not be able to keep up. If you had a team of people, they would not be able to keep up. Even if you had a fleet of people, the scale is just unreal. EEVblog's suggestion to diversify platforms is reasonable. The fact that those platforms don't have some of the same problems doesn't necessarily mean that they're better at content moderation, however. They just don't have to operate on the same scale. [1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/185111 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/185111

crazy1van 6y ago
> If EEVblog's suggestion was taken and Susan (YouTube CEO) had to manually review every moderation action on channels with 5K+ subs, she would not be able to keep up. Maybe perform fewer moderation actions?
- altgoogler 6y ago
  If there were fewer moderation actions, then we'd be seeing more articles saying how obviously abusive content that should have been taken down and wasn't. There are many sophisticated actors that try and game the system, and it's because of them at sometimes the system makes the wrong call.
- belltaco 6y ago
  I feel only the questionable removals make it to HN or other tech sites that make it feel like lesser moderation would be better. But the fact is there is a vast ocean of disturbing content that literally causes some moderators to lose their mental and need counseling.

anderspitman 6y ago

We need to decouple video hosting from discoverability.

acomjean 6y ago
somewhat oddly google has "video search" with results from many sources.. But discoverability is a huge problem.
- falcrist 6y ago
  You're technically correct in that the video search returns results from different websites, however the results are almost exclusively youtube or some website embedding a youtube video. "Almost exclusively" isn't an exaggeration, either. You have to dig pretty deep before you start seeing some results from other video hosting platforms.

raxxorrax 6y ago

I hate people that normalised censorship of this kind and it was predictable that someone would crash the fun at some point... Our own fault to give single corps that much control on content though. Content creators should always upload their videos to other platforms too. If those get a critical mass of content, they might stand a chance.

libertine 6y ago
If Youtube was liable for mistakes/wrongfully enforce their guidelines, this would be way less stressful. This guy would go to a website and file a claim on a legal authority that would put Youtube's balls in a wheel that would squeeze them gradually the longer Youtube would take to present the case with facts that support the take down, and I'm pretty sure you'd start to receive less auto-replies and you'd get more humans typing. Youtube is fucking over people's livelihoods because of a system that doesn't work properly, so they should pay for that. Shouldn't be the other way around. If Youtube gives the tools for people to make money on it, then Youtube should be responsible for such people - not only advertisers.

sschueller 6y ago

Ideally each community runs their own servers. Something like https://joinpeertube.org/en/ https://joinpeertube.org/en/ can help with that. So for example someone would run an electronics and repair instance that only has those kinds of videos. Those are then all discoverable by the Fediverse. This way also controversial instances can exist and people can choose to follow them or not. What's controversial in one country may not be in another. One size fits all doesn't work.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Someone make a service that automates uploading and managing channels on every video platform known to date: Youtube vimeo dailymotion etc. Wouldn’t that be a great tool for creators?

Jommi 6y ago
It would be awesome, and I have a huge network of creators ready to use this product when available. Email me at joakim(at) matchmade.tv if you're interested in developing this.
john_miller 6y ago
Something like that doesn't exist? Content creators and social media agency have to upload and curate their videos individually?

aaron_m04 6y ago

This is a shame. I strongly recommend this Python program called youtube-dl for archiving any videos you care about. Occasionally it stops working but if you update it, it always works after the update.

PhantomGremlin 6y ago
I upvoted this because it's important to know. Too much good stuff gets deleted from YouTube. But I have mixed feelings, because the first rule of youtube-dl is you don't talk about youtube-dl. E.g. it used to have a Wikipedia page but that got removed!

jaybuff 6y ago

John Gruber and Ben Thompson discussed a comparison of podcast vs. youtube and how podcasting isn't dominated by one company like youtube is for video. This is in the context of Joe Rogan moving to spotify. https://overcast.fm/+B7NB1G3rw/44:01 https://overcast.fm/+B7NB1G3rw/44:01

vxNsr 6y ago
Spotify is trying real hard to become the YouTube of podcasts unfortunately.

topkai22 6y ago

1) Alphabet needs to be broken up (at least YouTube, Google the search engine, and the ad business). Ideally, there would be a way to pull apart the hosting business, the “social”/channel/search business, and the ad delivery businesses. YouTube that runs only 3rd party ads looks very different than having to directly manage its own relationships with brands. 2) We need a creators bill of rights. Platforms that allow users to upload and share content should be required to inform users why content is removed, have a clear mechanism for appeal to a 3rd party, and allow users to exfiltrate their content if it even if it is removed.

jscheel 6y ago

We had YouTube take down our church livestream in the middle of service, claiming that we violated their community guidelines (we didn't). The clip in question was blank, and the note said that it was an automated takedown. I immediately appealed, switched our stream key, and let everyone know to refresh their browsers. But still, serious interruption to people's worship because google relies too-heavily on automation.

valuearb 6y ago
It was bots will.
- asah 6y ago
  You should be ex-communicated for that joke. :-)
ballenf 6y ago
I would guess there are some passages from many religions' sacred texts which could get your whole channel deleted if promoted. Unless there's a written or unwritten exception. The conflict or tension that troubles me the most is between platforms' incentive to have the most vague and broad TOS and users' reasonable expectation of consistency and explanation. The same tension exists in government police/arrest powers and resulted in many historic documents and rights. YT is not a government but their power rivals many actual countries. It will be interesting to see if the same revolutionary actions result. I don't think it's clear yet that it will or could happen.
- deleted 6y ago
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- jandrese 6y ago
  * This section of the Bible is copyright BMG Music Group and has been removed. This is your first strike.
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vezycash 6y ago

The problem with bandwidth is that its cure is largely political. Legislations and agreements that prevent competition, community run ISPs... Help YouTube. On more thought, bandwidth isn't the major politically caused road block. It's copyright laws. Facebook and Microsoft are both capable of building YouTube clones. But Microsoft has limited itself to cooperate video hosting. And I believe Facebook has intentionally bad video discovery mechanism to keep copyright sharks at bay. Porn hosting is pretty much triving in part because copyright laws / enforcement is weak there. YouTube started aggressive, automated takedowns because of copyright laws. Fix the laws and the tech will take care of the rest.

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throwawaysea 6y ago

Censorship is bad. Discuss a better future for video at https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeAlternatives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeAlternatives/. Current options seem like Bitchute (https://www.bitchute.com/ https://www.bitchute.com/), LBRY (https://lbry.com/ https://lbry.com/), and D.tube (https://d.tube/ https://d.tube/). Reddit and Twitter alternatives are listed at https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...

t0ughcritic 6y ago

This is surely getting out of hand, we need to go back to the days of competition. Google controls everything!

squarefoot 6y ago

We should have the UN mandate IPv6 adoption everywhere, then that a block of public IPs for everyone is considered a human right, and great part of the issue would be over.

godshatter 6y ago

Everyone wants a youtube replacement, but I'd rather see more options for niche content. It might not be doable for most people to create something big enough to give something the size of youtube a run for their money, but someone could make a site that is basically a private bit torrent tracker that people could upload their own videos to. They could court advertisers, or offer a small subscription to be able to log in for more than free content. Then you'd just need a way of finding sites like this.

unethical_ban 6y ago
I've considered (though haven't had the energy) to build a serverless AWS video-on-demand project that anyone could spin up in their own AWS account, then either "just host" their own content or be a provider, and provide billing to customers. Yes, that means that serving videos would cost money rather than earn money... or the provider could run a donation/ad service. In any case, the ability to procure and operation a world-scale video distribution website easily is there, it is a matter of building it and having cost estimates built in.
- williamscales 6y ago
  Have you thought about integrating a way to bill the viewers directly? There are all kinds of content on the internet that I'd be willing to pay $2-5 on the spot to get a high quality stream that I could watch for some period of time.
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stipps 6y ago

A female CEO would do so much better. Just like they did with Yahoo. They have the ethics and fine senses.

smabie 6y ago

I mean if YouTube is deleting flat earther videos than they should be deleting religious ones too. The thing is that they shouldn't be deleting flat earther videos, and instead delete videos that are explicitly illegal.

asadlionpk 6y ago
I don't get how you compare religious videos with flat earthers but I agree with your conclusion.
- Solvitieg 6y ago
  It's an obtuse statement but it seems fair. Both have theories about the world that can't be reconciled with scientific data.
  - Cyph0n 6y ago
    Not really. Lack of data is very different from proof. Flat earthers believe in something that empirically and rigorously has been proven to be false. There is no discussion required here, philosophical or otherwise. Religion might be false based on the absence of evidence, but it has never been - and probably never will be - empirically proven to be false.
    - ikeboy 6y ago
      Claims about the Earth being only several thousand years old have been proven false.
      - Cyph0n 6y ago
        Of course.
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        What about claims of the Earth being only five minutes old? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis#Five-minute_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis#Five-minut...

pizza 6y ago

What would it take to automatically upload every youtube video viewed in Chrome or Firefox to eg ipfs via a browser extension?

MrStonedOne 6y ago
Lots and lots of storage.

nurettin 6y ago

Agadmator (a chess youtuber) complained about his live podcast being taken down by youtube as well. It appears there is a new youtube algorithm out there which doesn't like it when black's position is compromised by white.

mottosso 6y ago

While we're here getting riled up about the subject of this video, the content itself features a cleverly disguised banner running in a recorded video that cannot be blocked or paid to avoid. Well played, sir.

mbostleman 6y ago

It is hard to underestimate importance of the lack of competition in FAANG services.

legohead 6y ago

Copyright and patents need to be done away with or updated to work with contemporary thinking -- although, I don't trust the latter, so I'll stick with 'do away with'. People whine about YouTube being strict about content, well, they are just trying to cover their ass. As soon as a real replacement comes along and gets big enough, it's going to have the same issues as YouTube. I've seen it happen over and over again. One example is imgur. It was a nice replacement for all the image share sites and their annoying ads. But, now it has ads too. I've seen people asking for an imgur replacement.

rjmunro 6y ago
It's not just copyrights and patents, though. One of the main benefits of YouTube is that it handles all that for you. Sometimes it doesn't quite work, but it's pretty valuable to be able to post a video with some music and have it claimed, and they take the revenue, rather than they sue you and/or issue a take down notice of some kind. What about things like hate speech, abusive imagery and content aimed at children that actually is unsuitable?

rgrieselhuber 6y ago

These companies need to be broken up.

WalterBright 6y ago

Because of a miscommunication youtube once deleted some of our D conference videos. Fortunately, we had a backup of them. Moral: don't rely on the cloud as the only copy of your data. If you don't control it, it can disappear at any moment for any reason.

wuunderbar 6y ago
> don't rely on the cloud as the only copy of your data The real moral: don't think of YouTube (a public video discovery platform) as a cloud backup tool. They don't pretend to be and you shouldn't think of it as so.

pcunite 6y ago

YouTube = the new PayPal

squarefoot 6y ago

He's got the channel back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mRpj4jQ6Zg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mRpj4jQ6Zg However, if I was in the same situation I would seriously consider moving elsewhere, or at least keeping my stuff in more than one place just in case.

rhapsodic 6y ago

It's back: https://www.youtube.com/user/JPDylon https://www.youtube.com/user/JPDylon

rexreed 6y ago

He's back online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mRpj4jQ6Zg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mRpj4jQ6Zg It was a wrongful termination.

thewhitetulip 6y ago

And Youtube let's fraudsters who claim to get you money for free run channels. I tweeted to them about the recently fraudulent ads that I see, but they take no action. I still see the same ads over and over again. they seem to be targeting the gullible people who want 'secret pubg level' or 'get cashback of 500 in one hour' or get '10000 subscribers within one day'. all of which are fraudulent, that I am sure.

aabbcc1241 6y ago

Centralized service and Youtube can apply censorship as they like. This is by nature. I'd suggest more people get into p2p network like ZeroNet or PeerTube if they value freedom of speech over popularity.

torresjrjr 6y ago

Federated (decentralised) video hosting: PeerTube. https://joinpeertube.com https://joinpeertube.com - Don't use a company's service, then complain. - Use a federated server, and share videos freely. - Most importantly, learn what the Fediverse is. Forget BitTube, Daily Motion, LBRY, or whatever other proprietary (company owned) video hosting site. The reason you've never heard of PeerTube is because it's a a community project who don't advertise their software, because it's not a product. It's free (as in cost and freedom) for anyone to to use and it works. > But I won't get nearly enough views Then stay on YouTube. If you value your freedom, you'll make the decision and the views will come. Be the change.

hydroxark 6y ago
your link seems broken, I believe it's .org not .com

smileypete 6y ago

Just posted a topic about another channel that got deleted, 'CraigTube': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781180

frankzen 6y ago

These services can't be trusted anymore as a single point of failure. Distributed torrent like systems need to replace them. Trusting any of these companies as the stewards of content is foolish at this point.