6 ms·

This article is a little on the surface level, but it's true. People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and

This article is a little on the surface level, but it's true. People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air. Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole thing. There either needs to be some neutrality, competition or youtubers need to organize somehow... unionize even. Trying to have a relationship with audiences that doesn't run through youtube won't work for most channels... even ones with millions of views. I always expected a porn company to come in and compete with youtube at some point. They have the infrastructure. I've also been surprised at how restricted youtube manage to be, and still succeed... just the skin censorship if nothing else.

um_ya 6y ago
There needs to be "content as a protocol" in the same way email is. If I don't like one email provider, I can always move to a different provider without losing access to all the user's that remain there. If I could make a Facebook post and have it's content propagate to other providers, websites would act more like UI filters rather than gatekeepers.
- dfcowell 6y ago
  This sounds like ActivityPub?
- kiwidrew 6y ago
  That content protocol is called HTTP and the service discovery protocol is called DNS. I know that it's a bit cliche to say that these days, but acquiring a domain name (either directly from a TLD registrar or indirectly through e.g. a DynDNS provider) and pointing it at a webhost is what allows content publishers to "mint" their very own globally unique URLs. Any consumers that are equipped with a suitable user agent can then plug that URL into their browser and view that publisher's content. Now let's be serious, there are numerous barriers that stand in the way of "normal" users that want to escape the evil platforms. Why not direct our ire at the real problem: Why Johnny Still Can't Host a Website! And if we fix that, perhaps we can move on to Why Johnny Can't Get Any Visitors (Because Google Won't Index It) and Why Johnny's Visitors Don't Receive His Updates (Because Google and Mozilla Killed RSS).
  - cookiengineer 6y ago
    While I agree with you I think that most of the described effects do only exist because the way the internet works is centralized, and humans have to remember domains which they aren't very good at. ...otherwise the most googled term would not be facebook, just to click on the facebook.com link. If there would be something like decentralized trackers (similar to the torrent architecture) you could have lots and lots of specialized communities that provide meta information about those websites and urls. This would also allow different sources of traffic and updates if the discovery aspect of similar semantic content would be provided by something like a tagging system or a search field.
    - kiwidrew 6y ago
      > Humans have to remember domains Humans don't have to remember domain names (and email addresses and URLs) because we have address books, contact lists, and bookmarks. We do have to recognize domains (and email addresses etc) when we see them, but that doesn't seem to present any issues in the real world. Domains are absolutely everywhere in modern life: business cards, restaurant menus, outdoor advertising signage, and even in people's conversations with each other. People do, in general, understand how to use domain names. Of course I do agree with your overall point that we need better protocols for content discovery, but I just don't think that domain names themselves are a stumbling block here.
- surajama 6y ago
  You are basically describing IPFS. Content-based addressing instead of location-based addressing. Allowing content to be decoupled from any single hosting platform
simias 6y ago
It's just incredibly hard to compete with Youtube. In a way that's Google's greatest achievement: they convinced everybody that they're entitled to host and stream 4K videos forever not only for free, but the creators get a share of the ad revenue despite fronting none of the hosting costs. It's an incredibly good deal. The amount of infrastructure and human resources required to merely keep a system like Youtube running is mind boggling. That makes people reasonably annoyed when Youtube decides to semi-arbitrarily pull the plug on a channel, but it also means that competition is very hard. If a competitor decides to start charging for hosting or streaming, they're doomed to be niche.
- vl 6y ago
  And this is why Google needs to be split up. No other enterprise can burn so many billions of dollars for so many years to corner the market. Google uses profits from search to napalm everything remotely looking like a threat.
  - random5634 6y ago
    Does google make or lose money on youtube? Based on the number of ads I see, I'd imagine they break even?
    - vl 6y ago
      Hard to say for sure, since YT uses shared Google infrastructure, and effectively cost of some things can’t be calculated. (Basically it’s much cheaper than you or me can do ourselves). But from what I understand, they burned money for many years and only very few years ago became profitable. But in some sense YT doesn’t really have to be profitable - for Google it’s more important to prop search itself, then to make money on YT.
      - HDMI_Cable 6y ago
        I' m guess Google gets a ton of side benefits for having YouTube, like the usage of Google Accounts or the data they get from people's watch habits.

um_ya 6y ago

There needs to be "content as a protocol" in the same way email is. If I don't like one email provider, I can always move to a different provider without losing access to all the user's that remain there. If I could make a Facebook post and have it's content propagate to other providers, websites would act more like UI filters rather than gatekeepers.

dfcowell 6y ago
This sounds like ActivityPub?
kiwidrew 6y ago
That content protocol is called HTTP and the service discovery protocol is called DNS. I know that it's a bit cliche to say that these days, but acquiring a domain name (either directly from a TLD registrar or indirectly through e.g. a DynDNS provider) and pointing it at a webhost is what allows content publishers to "mint" their very own globally unique URLs. Any consumers that are equipped with a suitable user agent can then plug that URL into their browser and view that publisher's content. Now let's be serious, there are numerous barriers that stand in the way of "normal" users that want to escape the evil platforms. Why not direct our ire at the real problem: Why Johnny Still Can't Host a Website! And if we fix that, perhaps we can move on to Why Johnny Can't Get Any Visitors (Because Google Won't Index It) and Why Johnny's Visitors Don't Receive His Updates (Because Google and Mozilla Killed RSS).
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  While I agree with you I think that most of the described effects do only exist because the way the internet works is centralized, and humans have to remember domains which they aren't very good at. ...otherwise the most googled term would not be facebook, just to click on the facebook.com link. If there would be something like decentralized trackers (similar to the torrent architecture) you could have lots and lots of specialized communities that provide meta information about those websites and urls. This would also allow different sources of traffic and updates if the discovery aspect of similar semantic content would be provided by something like a tagging system or a search field.
  - kiwidrew 6y ago
    > Humans have to remember domains Humans don't have to remember domain names (and email addresses and URLs) because we have address books, contact lists, and bookmarks. We do have to recognize domains (and email addresses etc) when we see them, but that doesn't seem to present any issues in the real world. Domains are absolutely everywhere in modern life: business cards, restaurant menus, outdoor advertising signage, and even in people's conversations with each other. People do, in general, understand how to use domain names. Of course I do agree with your overall point that we need better protocols for content discovery, but I just don't think that domain names themselves are a stumbling block here.
surajama 6y ago
You are basically describing IPFS. Content-based addressing instead of location-based addressing. Allowing content to be decoupled from any single hosting platform

simias 6y ago

It's just incredibly hard to compete with Youtube. In a way that's Google's greatest achievement: they convinced everybody that they're entitled to host and stream 4K videos forever not only for free, but the creators get a share of the ad revenue despite fronting none of the hosting costs. It's an incredibly good deal. The amount of infrastructure and human resources required to merely keep a system like Youtube running is mind boggling. That makes people reasonably annoyed when Youtube decides to semi-arbitrarily pull the plug on a channel, but it also means that competition is very hard. If a competitor decides to start charging for hosting or streaming, they're doomed to be niche.

vl 6y ago
And this is why Google needs to be split up. No other enterprise can burn so many billions of dollars for so many years to corner the market. Google uses profits from search to napalm everything remotely looking like a threat.
- random5634 6y ago
  Does google make or lose money on youtube? Based on the number of ads I see, I'd imagine they break even?
  - vl 6y ago
    Hard to say for sure, since YT uses shared Google infrastructure, and effectively cost of some things can’t be calculated. (Basically it’s much cheaper than you or me can do ourselves). But from what I understand, they burned money for many years and only very few years ago became profitable. But in some sense YT doesn’t really have to be profitable - for Google it’s more important to prop search itself, then to make money on YT.
    - HDMI_Cable 6y ago
      I' m guess Google gets a ton of side benefits for having YouTube, like the usage of Google Accounts or the data they get from people's watch habits.