6 ms·

I think looking for a "YouTube Killer" is the wrong direction anyway, unless you're just looking for another large corporation to take over video dominance. Wh

by ehnto 6y ago

I think looking for a "YouTube Killer" is the wrong direction anyway, unless you're just looking for another large corporation to take over video dominance. What I would personally love is an aggregator, or many aggregators, that act like YouTube, but are actually a distributed network of video sources. The key to the concept is thinking of a source like a library of content, and the individual uploader manages their own source. You could consider it a channel, and then that uploader can syndicate their source/channel to any aggregator they want. Sources can be private/public, sources can be tagged, discoverable, and searchable. Another key point is that uploaders need not host things themselves, SaaS products will quickly fill that role. a) Anyone can start an aggregator and immediately have content, lowering the bar for entry. b) A niche aggregator can pick or have submitted to them video library sources that match their niche, and can curate them just like any other video hosting site. c) A cottage industry for video hosting can utilize an "average user" friendly UI to allow for anyone to create a source and submit it to these aggregators. d) Allows free information to flow freely f) Allows content creators full control over deals with aggregators on how they'll be reimbursed for access to their source. You can imagine YouTube accepting sources with an ad revenue share model just like they have now. Some aggregators will choose to "cache and redistribute" content from sources to allow for consistent UX to their users, but that's their decision.

vkou 6y ago
You're going to get a flood of porn, pirated content, illegal-for-other-reasons content, and, of course, nazis who have been banned from all the other platforms. Which will, of course, drive all the normies away. (Well, okay, all the pirated content might not, but then you'll also include 'all the media companies' and 'the government' as your list of enemies.) And if you add federated moderation (Like Mastodon did), you're going to quickly understand why federated moderation is a labour-sucking, drama-ridden, centralized-censorship, tire pyre.[1] (Like Mastodon did.) [1] Mastodon instance administrators blacklist instances that produce problem content and problem users.[2] (Child pornography, nazis, furries, etc.) These ban-lists are centralized, because nobody has time to investigate every single other instance in the network. I hope you trust the person running those centralized lists! [2] Oh, and if a troll group does not like a particular person, they can follow him around, shitting on every instance that he posts in. How do instance operators deal with this sort of thing? By banning[3] the target of the trolls, because then they can stop wasting time playing whack-a-mole. [3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassment-wil-wheaton-mobs-twitter https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...
- dimator 6y ago
  Do you have a link about mastadon's moderation problems?
  - vkou 6y ago
    In addition to Wil Wheaton's experience linked above, we have: https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/ https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challeng... https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e8abb1 https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr... [2] [1] See section on identity and moderation - you can't decouple them when you have a hybrid between a content platform and a social media application (Which is what any video hosting service that allows comments, or shows recommended videos, or cross-links to other distributed aggregators is.) [2] Bad[3] people show up to the community, everyone loses their mind, hard-coded bans starts happening, because the community interfaces with things like app stores, and app stores have policies that don't care one whit about your federated free-as-in-speech ideals, not to mention that developers and moderators are human beings too, and maybe they personally can't stand allowing furries/commies/fascists/homosexuals/homophobes/Englishmen in their space. [3] For whatever someone's definition of 'bad' is.
    - dijit 6y ago
      Wil Wheaton is a poor person to choose here; He is an incredibly toxic personality who's presence on the internet causes more people to turn to the alt-right. I say this in good faith, as I'm not part of the alt-right nor do I agree in any way with them. But toxic people are of all kinds and we should be aware of those in our camp who do harm to our causes by acting in deleterious ways. -- However, it raises a more valid point about 'what do we do about controversial figures' in general, and you would expect, as with most federated services, to be able to prevent "non-local" personas to be blocked from interacting with local users. In those situations though it degrades the experience; the best part about mastadon though is that you get to choose who you federate with, so you could, in theory, have linked mastadon installations for government officials (who are often controversial) and signup could be linked with an oauth2 identity system that ties back to a real identity somehow (this would be possible in Estonia with their e-ID systems).
Hello71 6y ago
you have reinvented peertube
- ehnto 6y ago
  Actually I would avoid peer to peer technology, as that takes a large group of peers to work well, and you can end up with practically orphaned content if it's not popular and there's no peers for it. Maybe the latter is a solved issue with new P2P networks, I haven't torrented in years. The other part of avoiding peer to peer is to ensure there's money in it for hosting and advertising. I hate to be cynical, but for companies to play along and join in, there has to be money in it.
t0ughcritic 6y ago
Sounds like tvlinks with links to megavideo and friends
ysavir 6y ago
I'm currently working on something just like this. https://www.mynexus.io https://www.mynexus.io (It's 95% ready but still a WIP, so excuse any clunkiness and the lack of content) It's a content aggregator for content creators (plus custom postings) -- Make your YouTube channel, Vimeo Vids, Twitch streams, etc. available to your audience all in one spot.* My hopes is that once this catches on, it will become easier for new video hosting services, etc. to pop up since the huge current barrier to entry--providing an audience for content creators--is no longer a necessity. The only thing new services need to compete on it the value they contribute as a content host. This isn't quite as technical a solution as what you described, but the current problem is that of coupling content hosting and audiences, and I believe severing that connection will bring about many improvements to online content creation and distribution. Feel free to respond with any questions or email me (yaniv <at> mynexus <dot> io). *The list was about to include Mixer too, but that opportunity faded away, unfortunately. Will be adding more content sources over time as they are requested by creators.
giantrobot 6y ago
Video storage and delivery is expensive. YouTube can make money because they're piggybacking on Google's massive infrastructure. Building a tracker/aggregator (like PeerTube etc) is straight forward. It's actually getting video content to clients that is challenging. Video is both large and sensitive to internal ordering. You need packet 1 before you can do anything with packet 2, if you have those but packet 3 is stalled you can't go forward. To serve video you need enough online storage to actually house it but then enough upstream bandwidth (and good latency) to serve it to clients in real-time. Serving up HD streams at a reasonable bitrate will quickly saturate a gigabit connection. A network of HTTP servers or even an overlay network like IPFS don't help solve these problems. Video needs a lot of storage and is very sensitive to a server's upstream capacity. Torrent based streaming can distribute that load but introduces its own problems. Torrent based streaming clients just request video content blocks in sequential order versus normal BT clients just accepting a random ordering of blocks. But again unless you've got a bunch of high bandwidth seeders it's difficult to serve content at playable rates. If the content is encoded to use 5Mb/s in order to play it back without buffering you need it delivered at least that rate. Both methods to distribute video suffer from popularity problems. If transitional servers stop hosting old/unpopular content or seeders for it drop off it becomes unavailable on the network even if it's still referenced in the aggregator. Not that YouTube is an overall good service or that monopolies in the space are good but online video is an area that gravitates towards centralization if not monopolies. If you want to compete with YouTube, or more likely Vimeo or another smaller player, you'd need to replicate their infrastructure. That's the difficult/expensive thing to build and maintain. Other self-hosted services are trivial by comparison.
- ehnto 6y ago
  I think these are all technical hurdles that would be solved by the hosting middlewares that pop up to serve such an ecosystem. While it would be possible for a creator to host their own, my expectation would be that they would upload them to "Source as a Service" type hosting platforms that handle this. You would also get aggregators of all sizes and advancement. From small aggregators of niche model train videos serving directly from the source, to large aggregators with their own hosting solutions they serve the source from. You're right though of course, which is why we have a YouTube monopoly in the first place.
derefr 6y ago
In other words, separate "curation/recommendation" from "hosting." I've been thinking the same thing about Amazon lately: things would be a whole lot better for the experience of buying things "on Amazon" if "Amazon.com, the storefront website" and "Amazon.com, the platform+marketplace that sellers register with" were two separate businesses. I'd love to use the latter without the former—to use some third-party "Amazon client" that talks to Amazon's marketplace backend but has its own way of searching, browsing, and recommending products, with its own curation, its own reviews, its own ratings, etc. added on top. In the end, you'd still be putting Amazon.com warehouse SKUs into your Amazon.com shopping cart, but those SKUs might be ones Amazon.com the website would never have surfaced for you no matter how much you searched. For just one thing, someone could build a "classic Amazon" frontend that filters out SKUs coming from "Amazon Marketplace" sellers. For another, someone could build a version that applies actual modern spam/scam-filtering techniques to the SKU database, paring it down such that any random thing ordered from the "safe" subset should actually be what it seems from the listing. (Not the approach that most benefits you if you're Amazon.com-the-website, because its listings might look empty; but certainly a niche to be filled!)

by ehnto 6y ago

vkou 6y ago

You're going to get a flood of porn, pirated content, illegal-for-other-reasons content, and, of course, nazis who have been banned from all the other platforms. Which will, of course, drive all the normies away. (Well, okay, all the pirated content might not, but then you'll also include 'all the media companies' and 'the government' as your list of enemies.) And if you add federated moderation (Like Mastodon did), you're going to quickly understand why federated moderation is a labour-sucking, drama-ridden, centralized-censorship, tire pyre.[1] (Like Mastodon did.) [1] Mastodon instance administrators blacklist instances that produce problem content and problem users.[2] (Child pornography, nazis, furries, etc.) These ban-lists are centralized, because nobody has time to investigate every single other instance in the network. I hope you trust the person running those centralized lists! [2] Oh, and if a troll group does not like a particular person, they can follow him around, shitting on every instance that he posts in. How do instance operators deal with this sort of thing? By banning[3] the target of the trolls, because then they can stop wasting time playing whack-a-mole. [3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassment-wil-wheaton-mobs-twitter https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...

dimator 6y ago
Do you have a link about mastadon's moderation problems?
- vkou 6y ago
  In addition to Wil Wheaton's experience linked above, we have: https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/ https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challeng... https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e8abb1 https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr... [2] [1] See section on identity and moderation - you can't decouple them when you have a hybrid between a content platform and a social media application (Which is what any video hosting service that allows comments, or shows recommended videos, or cross-links to other distributed aggregators is.) [2] Bad[3] people show up to the community, everyone loses their mind, hard-coded bans starts happening, because the community interfaces with things like app stores, and app stores have policies that don't care one whit about your federated free-as-in-speech ideals, not to mention that developers and moderators are human beings too, and maybe they personally can't stand allowing furries/commies/fascists/homosexuals/homophobes/Englishmen in their space. [3] For whatever someone's definition of 'bad' is.
  - dijit 6y ago
    Wil Wheaton is a poor person to choose here; He is an incredibly toxic personality who's presence on the internet causes more people to turn to the alt-right. I say this in good faith, as I'm not part of the alt-right nor do I agree in any way with them. But toxic people are of all kinds and we should be aware of those in our camp who do harm to our causes by acting in deleterious ways. -- However, it raises a more valid point about 'what do we do about controversial figures' in general, and you would expect, as with most federated services, to be able to prevent "non-local" personas to be blocked from interacting with local users. In those situations though it degrades the experience; the best part about mastadon though is that you get to choose who you federate with, so you could, in theory, have linked mastadon installations for government officials (who are often controversial) and signup could be linked with an oauth2 identity system that ties back to a real identity somehow (this would be possible in Estonia with their e-ID systems).

Hello71 6y ago

you have reinvented peertube

ehnto 6y ago
Actually I would avoid peer to peer technology, as that takes a large group of peers to work well, and you can end up with practically orphaned content if it's not popular and there's no peers for it. Maybe the latter is a solved issue with new P2P networks, I haven't torrented in years. The other part of avoiding peer to peer is to ensure there's money in it for hosting and advertising. I hate to be cynical, but for companies to play along and join in, there has to be money in it.

t0ughcritic 6y ago

Sounds like tvlinks with links to megavideo and friends

ysavir 6y ago

I'm currently working on something just like this. https://www.mynexus.io https://www.mynexus.io (It's 95% ready but still a WIP, so excuse any clunkiness and the lack of content) It's a content aggregator for content creators (plus custom postings) -- Make your YouTube channel, Vimeo Vids, Twitch streams, etc. available to your audience all in one spot.* My hopes is that once this catches on, it will become easier for new video hosting services, etc. to pop up since the huge current barrier to entry--providing an audience for content creators--is no longer a necessity. The only thing new services need to compete on it the value they contribute as a content host. This isn't quite as technical a solution as what you described, but the current problem is that of coupling content hosting and audiences, and I believe severing that connection will bring about many improvements to online content creation and distribution. Feel free to respond with any questions or email me (yaniv <at> mynexus <dot> io). *The list was about to include Mixer too, but that opportunity faded away, unfortunately. Will be adding more content sources over time as they are requested by creators.

giantrobot 6y ago

Video storage and delivery is expensive. YouTube can make money because they're piggybacking on Google's massive infrastructure. Building a tracker/aggregator (like PeerTube etc) is straight forward. It's actually getting video content to clients that is challenging. Video is both large and sensitive to internal ordering. You need packet 1 before you can do anything with packet 2, if you have those but packet 3 is stalled you can't go forward. To serve video you need enough online storage to actually house it but then enough upstream bandwidth (and good latency) to serve it to clients in real-time. Serving up HD streams at a reasonable bitrate will quickly saturate a gigabit connection. A network of HTTP servers or even an overlay network like IPFS don't help solve these problems. Video needs a lot of storage and is very sensitive to a server's upstream capacity. Torrent based streaming can distribute that load but introduces its own problems. Torrent based streaming clients just request video content blocks in sequential order versus normal BT clients just accepting a random ordering of blocks. But again unless you've got a bunch of high bandwidth seeders it's difficult to serve content at playable rates. If the content is encoded to use 5Mb/s in order to play it back without buffering you need it delivered at least that rate. Both methods to distribute video suffer from popularity problems. If transitional servers stop hosting old/unpopular content or seeders for it drop off it becomes unavailable on the network even if it's still referenced in the aggregator. Not that YouTube is an overall good service or that monopolies in the space are good but online video is an area that gravitates towards centralization if not monopolies. If you want to compete with YouTube, or more likely Vimeo or another smaller player, you'd need to replicate their infrastructure. That's the difficult/expensive thing to build and maintain. Other self-hosted services are trivial by comparison.

ehnto 6y ago
I think these are all technical hurdles that would be solved by the hosting middlewares that pop up to serve such an ecosystem. While it would be possible for a creator to host their own, my expectation would be that they would upload them to "Source as a Service" type hosting platforms that handle this. You would also get aggregators of all sizes and advancement. From small aggregators of niche model train videos serving directly from the source, to large aggregators with their own hosting solutions they serve the source from. You're right though of course, which is why we have a YouTube monopoly in the first place.

derefr 6y ago

In other words, separate "curation/recommendation" from "hosting." I've been thinking the same thing about Amazon lately: things would be a whole lot better for the experience of buying things "on Amazon" if "Amazon.com, the storefront website" and "Amazon.com, the platform+marketplace that sellers register with" were two separate businesses. I'd love to use the latter without the former—to use some third-party "Amazon client" that talks to Amazon's marketplace backend but has its own way of searching, browsing, and recommending products, with its own curation, its own reviews, its own ratings, etc. added on top. In the end, you'd still be putting Amazon.com warehouse SKUs into your Amazon.com shopping cart, but those SKUs might be ones Amazon.com the website would never have surfaced for you no matter how much you searched. For just one thing, someone could build a "classic Amazon" frontend that filters out SKUs coming from "Amazon Marketplace" sellers. For another, someone could build a version that applies actual modern spam/scam-filtering techniques to the SKU database, paring it down such that any random thing ordered from the "safe" subset should actually be what it seems from the listing. (Not the approach that most benefits you if you're Amazon.com-the-website, because its listings might look empty; but certainly a niche to be filled!)