10 ms·

> In that case, I was happy to see my appeal granted within an hour of the strike being placed on the channel. (Nevermind the fact the video had been live for o

> In that case, I was happy to see my appeal granted within an hour of the strike being placed on the channel. (Nevermind the fact the video had been live for over two years at that point, with nary a problem!) Looks like some L-(5|6|whateverthefuck) just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software. Quick appeal grant of course, because it was more about sending a message and making people who want to talk about that kind of software think twice before the next video. > But until that time, YouTube's AdSense revenue and vast reach is a kind of 'golden handcuff.' > > The handcuff has been a bit tarnished of late, however, with Google recently adding AI summaries to videos—which seems to indicate maybe Gemini is slurping up my content and using it in their AI models? Balanced take towards the end (after the above quote), but yep, the writing is on the wall. I really wonder where the internet goes in this age. The contract between third party content hosters and creators is getting squeezed, and the whole "you're the product" thing is being laid bare more and more. Is it a given that at some point creators will stop posting their contents to platforms like YouTube? Is it even possible at this point given that YouTube garners so many eyeballs and is just so easy? Does a challenger somehow unseat YouTube because programming and underlying libraries (ffmpeg et al) becomes so easy to use that spinning up a YouTube competitor goes down to basically zero? Seems like there needs to be a new paradigm for anyone to have a choice other than youtube. Maybe AI will enable this -- maybe "does jeff have any new videos" -> a video gets played on a screen in your house and it's NOT hosted on YouTube, but no one knows and no one cares?

conradfr 1y ago
Isn't the competitor TikTok?
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  Yes, sometimes -- I think TikTok's content/goals are a bit different than YouTube. TikTok is a direct competitor to YouTube Shorts, but not YouTube as a whole -- YouTube also competes with Netflix and surprisingly paid course sites (did you know YouTube has courses?) I don't think it's as easy as thinking TikTok will unseat YouTube. Also, I personally think TikTok's... approach is a bit hard to sustain. Just like Facebook's approach of initially showing you a feed of friends activities, but morphed into something else over time (some of that is not FB's fault, humans have certain behaviors that can be toxic all on their own).
  - touristtam 1y ago
    > TikTok is a direct competitor to YouTube Shorts That sounds odd since I recall them comparing themselves to IG shorts, and YT shorts not being a thing while TT was becoming the in social media; just an observation, more than anything else.
    - prmoustache 1y ago
      They are still a competitor in the sense they are with instagram actively engaged in the task of reducing people's average attention span which makes the traditional youtube format less popular.
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        Unfortunately, the generalized "brainrot content and distribution" market is massive and contains many competitors.
kazinator 1y ago
> L-whateverthefuck LM
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  If LLMs are already doing this, engineers are cooked. I don't think this is a job that requires an LLM but if an LLM took the order, made the plan to go through the relevant data(bases|lakes|platforms) and triggered the warnings, etc. I'd be very impressed.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  I was thinking Lawyer.
politelemon 1y ago
Based on my observations over the past decade of similar stories on HN, nothing will change, the squeeze will simply continue. It's because we only hear of incidents in isolation from each other when the giants that abuse their platforms - most often the stories are from apple, google, amazon - take something down that didn't suit their revenue streams even if it's by vague interpretations AND someone with enough of a social presence has their incident heard. The rest of us, the unwashed users of the platform, do not hear about it or act upon it en masse. We'll occasionally see a post like this on HN or Reddit, shake our heads and call it a shame, there need to be alternatives and so on, then go right back into those platforms and forget that something happened but a few months later
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  > Based on my observations over the past decade of similar stories on HN, nothing will change, the squeeze will simply continue. I do agree here, but sometimes (let's say 10% of the time? less?) the squeeze does not continue -- see Apple. Perplexity/ChatGPT vs Google search right now. > The rest of us, the unwashed users of the platform, do not hear about it or act upon it en masse. We'll occasionally see a post like this on HN or Reddit, shake our heads and call it a shame, there need to be alternatives and so on, then go right back into those platforms and forget that something happened but a few months later Yup, wish I could add "- posted from Chrome browser" to my own response here but I use Firefox. I'm still going to watch YouTube. I think the thing that might bring hope is that Google/YouTube doesn't actualy own the new paradigm of AI -- I can very much imagine a world where people just ask for videos/scroll through them, and YouTube isn't the site they do it on (in fact they don't do it on a "site", per say). But then again, that's really calling for the death/dramatic reduction of the open/surfable internet. Is that what it takes?
- anal_reactor 1y ago
  Most people don't even give a fuck. And most of those who do aren't ready to do anything about it. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  Publicly shame people that use platforms. Especially the kind of scum that still does it professionally. 2025 has given a great opportunity to ratchet it up a notch (outside of USA) : with Trump 2 the pretense that USA is an ally of EUrope is gone, so the decade old conclusion that US laws aren't compatible with fundamental rights (Patriot Act => Schrems 2), and therefore US infocoms are illegal — is not something that ought to be ignored any more (so far it was, out of convenience).
genewitch 1y ago
There's peertube and Pixelfed and someone was working on an activitypub version of Instagram, but really it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video. So the next stage, ideally, would be everyone kinda sharing hosting responsibilities, and if you like a creator, you just follow them. This has the benefit of possibly caching/mirroring all the videos, too. My Fediverse server was chewing through disk, one of the reasons I shut it down - but I was following 1400 news and journalist accounts, plus my ~100 or so gang of idiots. I was nearing 1TB on disk after about 16 months on my essentially single user instance. I exported my follows and moved to an acquaintance's server and imported, the owner doesn't even blink. Who knows what they've got going for storage. Anyhow if you don't need to follow 1500 people, this becomes tractable. If it gets popular, someone will post how to cron the multimedia stuff to compress it as it ages, moving it to cold storage, whatever.
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  > There's peertube and Pixelfed and someone was working on an activitypub version of Instagram, but really it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video. > it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video. This is a huge problem IMO. Just like Mastodon/Bluesky (which seems to be working recently) and all these other things, the tech and experience need to be SUPER easy. I mean as-easy-or-easier than YouTube, etc for people to switch en masse. > So the next stage, ideally, would be everyone kinda sharing hosting responsibilities, and if you like a creator, you just follow them. This has the benefit of possibly caching/mirroring all the videos, too. My Fediverse server was chewing through disk, one of the reasons I shut it down - but I was following 1400 news and journalist accounts, plus my ~100 or so gang of idiots. I was nearing 1TB on disk after about 16 months on my essentially single user instance. Yeah the problem is people won't do this/can't be expected to do this, unless it's drop dead easy. Really appreciate hearing about your point on the scaling curve for this tech though, clearly the tech has come really far, that sounds like much more than the average person and "only" 1TB and a single server is quite nice. The best ever approach I have seen to this is PopcornTime. It took the world by storm (and IIRC people still use it/ it still exists in some form, they're just lower profile now), and it worked better the more people used it, because torrents (aka, the technology being a mature, perfect match for the usecase). > I exported my follows and moved to an acquaintance's server and imported, the owner doesn't even blink. Who knows what they've got going for storage. > > Anyhow if you don't need to follow 1500 people, this becomes tractable. If it gets popular, someone will post how to cron the multimedia stuff to compress it as it ages, moving it to cold storage, whatever. I could see this working if that acquaintance got paid for this. Tying money as an incentive to things is sometimes bad/not what you want, but having people think of computers and compute as an asset/tool for them to use is a step in the right direction IMO. I'm not a crypto person (kind of wish I was, 10 years ago), but Filecoin was really interesting originally to me because it just made sense. The marketplace of data storage seems like something that could be easily democratized in this way (no need for the crypto bits, but the ease of payment was a legitimate use IMO).
bsder 1y ago
> Is it even possible at this point given that YouTube garners so many eyeballs and is just so easy? The big problem is that someone will download your video and upload it to YouTube if you do not. Often while monetizing it until you stomp on them. The only things that will break YouTube hegemony (spelled that hegemoney originally ... talk about a typo) are either an anti-trust action or a successful copyright infringement lawsuit from someone other than a BigCorp.
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  > The big problem is that someone will download your video and upload it to YouTube if you do not. Often while monetizing it until you stomp on them. Let's automate the stomping then. If people are bothered by this and it keeps happening, then that should create demand for someone who is able to scour YouTube and sue the appropriate parties/do the appropriate reporting. At some point, it will become enough of a problem for YouTube that they will change/have to hurt their business model that currently benefits from it. > The only things that will break YouTube hegemony (spelled that hegemoney originally ... talk about a typo) are either an anti-trust action or a successful copyright infringement lawsuit from someone other than a BigCorp. Really disappointed in lawyers of this age. I'm a layperson but it looks like they should have been eating out in the age of AI and with all the copyright infringement that goes on (whether you agree with copyright infringement or not). Why are there not 100 suits against these AI companies right now? Probably because it's too expensive and courts are already packed, but why let reality get in the way of a possibly really profitable venture? I'm certainly not a great proponent of IP/copyright and all the associated moral stances, but IMO the tech is useful without that gray area -- having that stuff get properly legislated is only going to prompt retraining on safe/permissioned content, and maybe that's what SHOULD happen.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    > Let's automate the stomping then. If people are bothered by this and it keeps happening, then that should create demand for someone who is able to scour YouTube and sue the appropriate parties/do the appropriate reporting. But it's already automated. Where do you think those completely wrong DMCA claims that people complain once in a while about come from?
jaredhallen 1y ago
Unfortunately, my belief is that no matter how many content creators jump ship, there will be and endless supply of replacements. The real salt in the wound is that attrition will select for the content that the platforms desire.
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  That's fine IMO! Content creation is a really top heavy thing anyway -- it seems like anyone can just be replaced with anyone else, but if that were true we wouldn't have such outsized discrepancies between successful creators who are able to monetize and those that can't. It's a power law distribution. In fact, companies know this so they do sneaky stuff to keep high value creators on their platforms, have heard some stories (try to find some stuff on the Twitch vs Mixer saga).
tumult 1y ago
> Quick appeal grant of course, because it was more about sending a message and making people who want to talk about that kind of software think twice before the next video. That was talking about a previous video, not the one that is the main subject of this blog post. For the video that is the subject of this blog post, which is just about running your own software to watch media you legally own, the appeal was apparently denied.
JKCalhoun 1y ago
> I really wonder where the internet goes in this age. Self-hosting? (Whoops!)
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  If only, but we know that the vast majority of people don't want to self-host, as the majority of people don't even want to make their own coffee. In the right form (on devices they already own, with internet connections they already own, etc) self-hosting could work though...

conradfr 1y ago

Isn't the competitor TikTok?

hardwaresofton 1y ago
Yes, sometimes -- I think TikTok's content/goals are a bit different than YouTube. TikTok is a direct competitor to YouTube Shorts, but not YouTube as a whole -- YouTube also competes with Netflix and surprisingly paid course sites (did you know YouTube has courses?) I don't think it's as easy as thinking TikTok will unseat YouTube. Also, I personally think TikTok's... approach is a bit hard to sustain. Just like Facebook's approach of initially showing you a feed of friends activities, but morphed into something else over time (some of that is not FB's fault, humans have certain behaviors that can be toxic all on their own).
- touristtam 1y ago
  > TikTok is a direct competitor to YouTube Shorts That sounds odd since I recall them comparing themselves to IG shorts, and YT shorts not being a thing while TT was becoming the in social media; just an observation, more than anything else.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    They are still a competitor in the sense they are with instagram actively engaged in the task of reducing people's average attention span which makes the traditional youtube format less popular.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      Unfortunately, the generalized "brainrot content and distribution" market is massive and contains many competitors.

kazinator 1y ago

> L-whateverthefuck LM

hardwaresofton 1y ago
If LLMs are already doing this, engineers are cooked. I don't think this is a job that requires an LLM but if an LLM took the order, made the plan to go through the relevant data(bases|lakes|platforms) and triggered the warnings, etc. I'd be very impressed.
dotancohen 1y ago
I was thinking Lawyer.

politelemon 1y ago

Based on my observations over the past decade of similar stories on HN, nothing will change, the squeeze will simply continue. It's because we only hear of incidents in isolation from each other when the giants that abuse their platforms - most often the stories are from apple, google, amazon - take something down that didn't suit their revenue streams even if it's by vague interpretations AND someone with enough of a social presence has their incident heard. The rest of us, the unwashed users of the platform, do not hear about it or act upon it en masse. We'll occasionally see a post like this on HN or Reddit, shake our heads and call it a shame, there need to be alternatives and so on, then go right back into those platforms and forget that something happened but a few months later

hardwaresofton 1y ago
> Based on my observations over the past decade of similar stories on HN, nothing will change, the squeeze will simply continue. I do agree here, but sometimes (let's say 10% of the time? less?) the squeeze does not continue -- see Apple. Perplexity/ChatGPT vs Google search right now. > The rest of us, the unwashed users of the platform, do not hear about it or act upon it en masse. We'll occasionally see a post like this on HN or Reddit, shake our heads and call it a shame, there need to be alternatives and so on, then go right back into those platforms and forget that something happened but a few months later Yup, wish I could add "- posted from Chrome browser" to my own response here but I use Firefox. I'm still going to watch YouTube. I think the thing that might bring hope is that Google/YouTube doesn't actualy own the new paradigm of AI -- I can very much imagine a world where people just ask for videos/scroll through them, and YouTube isn't the site they do it on (in fact they don't do it on a "site", per say). But then again, that's really calling for the death/dramatic reduction of the open/surfable internet. Is that what it takes?
anal_reactor 1y ago
Most people don't even give a fuck. And most of those who do aren't ready to do anything about it. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
BlueTemplar 1y ago
Publicly shame people that use platforms. Especially the kind of scum that still does it professionally. 2025 has given a great opportunity to ratchet it up a notch (outside of USA) : with Trump 2 the pretense that USA is an ally of EUrope is gone, so the decade old conclusion that US laws aren't compatible with fundamental rights (Patriot Act => Schrems 2), and therefore US infocoms are illegal — is not something that ought to be ignored any more (so far it was, out of convenience).

genewitch 1y ago

There's peertube and Pixelfed and someone was working on an activitypub version of Instagram, but really it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video. So the next stage, ideally, would be everyone kinda sharing hosting responsibilities, and if you like a creator, you just follow them. This has the benefit of possibly caching/mirroring all the videos, too. My Fediverse server was chewing through disk, one of the reasons I shut it down - but I was following 1400 news and journalist accounts, plus my ~100 or so gang of idiots. I was nearing 1TB on disk after about 16 months on my essentially single user instance. I exported my follows and moved to an acquaintance's server and imported, the owner doesn't even blink. Who knows what they've got going for storage. Anyhow if you don't need to follow 1500 people, this becomes tractable. If it gets popular, someone will post how to cron the multimedia stuff to compress it as it ages, moving it to cold storage, whatever.

hardwaresofton 1y ago
> There's peertube and Pixelfed and someone was working on an activitypub version of Instagram, but really it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video. > it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video. This is a huge problem IMO. Just like Mastodon/Bluesky (which seems to be working recently) and all these other things, the tech and experience need to be SUPER easy. I mean as-easy-or-easier than YouTube, etc for people to switch en masse. > So the next stage, ideally, would be everyone kinda sharing hosting responsibilities, and if you like a creator, you just follow them. This has the benefit of possibly caching/mirroring all the videos, too. My Fediverse server was chewing through disk, one of the reasons I shut it down - but I was following 1400 news and journalist accounts, plus my ~100 or so gang of idiots. I was nearing 1TB on disk after about 16 months on my essentially single user instance. Yeah the problem is people won't do this/can't be expected to do this, unless it's drop dead easy. Really appreciate hearing about your point on the scaling curve for this tech though, clearly the tech has come really far, that sounds like much more than the average person and "only" 1TB and a single server is quite nice. The best ever approach I have seen to this is PopcornTime. It took the world by storm (and IIRC people still use it/ it still exists in some form, they're just lower profile now), and it worked better the more people used it, because torrents (aka, the technology being a mature, perfect match for the usecase). > I exported my follows and moved to an acquaintance's server and imported, the owner doesn't even blink. Who knows what they've got going for storage. > > Anyhow if you don't need to follow 1500 people, this becomes tractable. If it gets popular, someone will post how to cron the multimedia stuff to compress it as it ages, moving it to cold storage, whatever. I could see this working if that acquaintance got paid for this. Tying money as an incentive to things is sometimes bad/not what you want, but having people think of computers and compute as an asset/tool for them to use is a step in the right direction IMO. I'm not a crypto person (kind of wish I was, 10 years ago), but Filecoin was really interesting originally to me because it just made sense. The marketplace of data storage seems like something that could be easily democratized in this way (no need for the crypto bits, but the ease of payment was a legitimate use IMO).

bsder 1y ago

> Is it even possible at this point given that YouTube garners so many eyeballs and is just so easy? The big problem is that someone will download your video and upload it to YouTube if you do not. Often while monetizing it until you stomp on them. The only things that will break YouTube hegemony (spelled that hegemoney originally ... talk about a typo) are either an anti-trust action or a successful copyright infringement lawsuit from someone other than a BigCorp.

hardwaresofton 1y ago
> The big problem is that someone will download your video and upload it to YouTube if you do not. Often while monetizing it until you stomp on them. Let's automate the stomping then. If people are bothered by this and it keeps happening, then that should create demand for someone who is able to scour YouTube and sue the appropriate parties/do the appropriate reporting. At some point, it will become enough of a problem for YouTube that they will change/have to hurt their business model that currently benefits from it. > The only things that will break YouTube hegemony (spelled that hegemoney originally ... talk about a typo) are either an anti-trust action or a successful copyright infringement lawsuit from someone other than a BigCorp. Really disappointed in lawyers of this age. I'm a layperson but it looks like they should have been eating out in the age of AI and with all the copyright infringement that goes on (whether you agree with copyright infringement or not). Why are there not 100 suits against these AI companies right now? Probably because it's too expensive and courts are already packed, but why let reality get in the way of a possibly really profitable venture? I'm certainly not a great proponent of IP/copyright and all the associated moral stances, but IMO the tech is useful without that gray area -- having that stuff get properly legislated is only going to prompt retraining on safe/permissioned content, and maybe that's what SHOULD happen.
- nottorp 1y ago
  > Let's automate the stomping then. If people are bothered by this and it keeps happening, then that should create demand for someone who is able to scour YouTube and sue the appropriate parties/do the appropriate reporting. But it's already automated. Where do you think those completely wrong DMCA claims that people complain once in a while about come from?

jaredhallen 1y ago

Unfortunately, my belief is that no matter how many content creators jump ship, there will be and endless supply of replacements. The real salt in the wound is that attrition will select for the content that the platforms desire.

hardwaresofton 1y ago
That's fine IMO! Content creation is a really top heavy thing anyway -- it seems like anyone can just be replaced with anyone else, but if that were true we wouldn't have such outsized discrepancies between successful creators who are able to monetize and those that can't. It's a power law distribution. In fact, companies know this so they do sneaky stuff to keep high value creators on their platforms, have heard some stories (try to find some stuff on the Twitch vs Mixer saga).

tumult 1y ago

> Quick appeal grant of course, because it was more about sending a message and making people who want to talk about that kind of software think twice before the next video. That was talking about a previous video, not the one that is the main subject of this blog post. For the video that is the subject of this blog post, which is just about running your own software to watch media you legally own, the appeal was apparently denied.

JKCalhoun 1y ago

> I really wonder where the internet goes in this age. Self-hosting? (Whoops!)

hardwaresofton 1y ago
If only, but we know that the vast majority of people don't want to self-host, as the majority of people don't even want to make their own coffee. In the right form (on devices they already own, with internet connections they already own, etc) self-hosting could work though...