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Yeah because if it wasn’t for COVID YouTube, Facebook, et al would never have removed any content on their platform, unlike what they had been doing all this wh

Yeah because if it wasn’t for COVID YouTube, Facebook, et al would never have removed any content on their platform, unlike what they had been doing all this while… There are so many issues with this. Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities. The real problem is twofold. 1. A few platforms hold monopoly positions. Who else can compete with Youtubr? And the reason isn’t necessarily because YouTube has a particularly better UI that keeps viewers and content creators on it. The reason YT has all the content creators is because it leverages Google’s ad monopoly and is able to help creators make money. A decently functioning anti-trust system would have split google ads from the rest of the company by now. 2. The devastation of the promise of the open internet. VCs have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to ensure we remain in walled gardens. Open source, self hosted, software on the other hand, where the benefits are shared and not concentrated in individual hands which can then spend billions to ensure that concentration, has suffered. We need govt funding for open source and self hosted alternatives that are easy and safe for people to setup. Combine the two and instead of YT getting to choose what videos are seen and not seen on the internet, major and small content creators would self host and be the decision makers, and still make similar amounts of money because they could plugin the openly available Google Adsense (kind of like how you can on blogs…).

ClumsyPilot 1y ago
> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech. But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it. A lot of breakdown in society lately is clearly coming from the fact that some people/companies have it both ways when it suits them.
- akimbostrawman 1y ago
  The solution would be to revoke section 203 from any platform which acts as a digital public square if they do moderation beyond removing illegal content. Ofc they would try there best to be excluded to have there cake and eat it too.
  - lesuorac 1y ago
    The entire point of section 230 is to allow platforms to remove non-illegal content [1]. Basically there were two lawsuits about platforms showing content. One of the platfroms tried to curate content to create a family-friendly environment. The second platform just didn't take anything down. The first platform lost their lawsuit while the second won their lawsuit. Congress wants to allow platforms to create family friend environment online so section 230 was written. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#
  - klooney 1y ago
    You need moderation for more than legality though, otherwise you can't have open forums like this, that aren't total cesspits.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      Right: * When a bot farm spams ads for erectile dysfunction pills into every comment thread on your blog... That's "legal content"! * When your model-train hobbyist site is invaded by posters sharing swastikas and planning neo-nazi rallies, that too is "legal content"--at least outside Germany. All sorts of deceptive, off-topic, and horribly offensive things are "legal content."
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    If something like that were put in place, any platforms acting as a “public square” should also be required to disable all recommendation and content surfacing features aside from search, algorithmic or otherwise. Those recommendation features already do plenty of damage even with platforms having the ability to remove anything they like. If platforms are restricted to only removing illegal content, that damage would quickly become much greater.
- Sloowms 1y ago
  This is correct. In the US tiktok is currently being sued for feeding kids choking game content through the algorithm that was earlier judged to be free speech.
  - maketheman 1y ago
    Curation and promotion, even if done by a machine (LOL, why does that matter at all?) needs to come with significant liability. It should be possible to protect content hosting services from extensive liability while not protecting companies from the consequences of what they choose to promote and present to people. Those are two separate and very different activities that aren't even necessarily connected (you could curate and promote without hosting, and in fact this happens all the time; you can host without curating and promoting, this also happens all the time—in fact, these typically are not mixed together outside of social media companies with their damned "algorithms", as far as content from 3rd parties goes)
- gspencley 1y ago
  > Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech. > But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it. There is no contradiction there. Imagine a forum about knitting. Someone, who has it in for the owners of this knitting forum (or perhaps even just a SPAM bot) starts posting illegal, or even just non-knitting content on this forum. The entire purpose of the forum is to be a community about knitting. Why is it the legal or moral responsibility of the knitting forum to host SPAM content? And why should they be legally liable for someone else posting content on their platform? You're equating specific pieces of content with the platform as a whole. There is no reality where I will accept that if I create something. I spend and risk my money on web hosting. I write the code. I put something out there... that other people get to dictate what content I have to distribute. That's an evil reality to contemplate. I don't want to live in that world. I certainly wont' do business under those terms. You're effectively trying to give other people an ultimatum in order to extract value from them that you did not earn and have no claim to. You're saying that if they don't host content that they don't want to distribute that they should be legally liable for anything that anyone uploads. The two don't connect at all. Anyone is, and should be free to create any kind of online service where they pick and choose what is or is not allowed. That shouldn't then subject them to criminal or civil liability because of how others decide to use that product or service. Imagine if that weird concept were applied to offline things, like kitchen knives. A kitchen knife manufacturer is perfectly within their rights to say "This product is intended to be used for culinary purposes and no other. If we find out that you are using it to do other things, we will stop doing business with you forever." That doesn't then make them liable for people who use their product for other purposes.
  - andrepd 1y ago
    The issue is that the knitting forum is a different beast from youtube. The latter is a platform. Its scale makes it QUALITATIVELY different. And there's network effects, there's dumping behaviour, there's preinstalls on every phone, there's integration with the ad behemoth, all to make sure it remains a platform.
  - dcow 1y ago
- andrepd 1y ago
  > A lot of breakdown in society lately is clearly coming from the fact that some people/companies have it both ways when it suits them. See how copyright is protected when it's whatcd violating it and when it's OpenAI
- tzs 1y ago
  Your premise is incomplete. When someone posts illegal content on YouTube they are not liable if they are not aware of the illegality of that content. Once they learn that they are hosting illegal content they lose their safe harbor if they don't remove it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - torstenvl 1y ago
    Please don't post deliberately false information on HN. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
    - tzs 1y ago
      Let me rephrase, since saying they lose their safe harbor was a poor choice of words. The safe harbor does indeed prevent them from being treated as the publisher of the illegal content. However illegal content can incur liability for acts other than publishing or distributing and section 230's safe harbor won't protect them from that.
  - rolph 1y ago
    i find it hard to believe there is any content on YT platform that they are unaware of.
    - p_j_w 1y ago
      I mean what do you think happens? Do you think YouTube employs an army of people to watch and vet every single video that gets posted there?
      - rolph 1y ago
        no i think YT uses an AI to categorize and vet media based on standard rubrick, at a pace that exceeds a human collective by orders of magnitude. they know about it as soon as you post it.
- intended 1y ago
  Sadly it turns out that the biggest driving force is politics, and the inability for our institutions to win with boring facts, against fast and loose engaging content. The idea is that in a competitive marketplace of ideas, the better idea wins. The reality is that if you dont compete on accuracy, but compete on engagement, you can earn enough revenue to stay cash flow positive. I would say as the cost of making content and publishing content went down, the competition for attention went up. The result is that expensive to produce information, cannot compete with cheap to produce content.
somenameforme 1y ago
I think their real edge is a practically free and practically infinite bandwidth/capacity global CDN setup. There's no real technical reason for this still to be the case, but bandwidth costs are significant for people relying on other services to provide such. Or they're cheap and slow/capped. This is the main reason I think alternative sites have a hard time competing. Play anything on YouTube from anywhere and if it's buffering/slow then it's probably your internet connection that's the problem. By contrast do the same on competing streaming sites and it's, more or less, expected especially if you aren't in certain geographic areas. Monetization on YouTube is mostly just a carrot on a stick. The overwhelming majority of content creators will never make anything more than pocket change off of it. That carrot might still work as an incentivization system, but I don't think it's necessarily the driving force.
- clucas 1y ago
  Plainview: You gonna change your shipping costs? Tilford: We don't dictate shipping costs. That's railroad business. Plainview: O-oh! You don't own the railroads? Course you do. Of course you do.
- luhn 1y ago
  Yeah, anybody can make a half-baked CDN, but Google has PoPs inside ISPs across the world [1] and competing with that is essentially impossible. [1] https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en
- tshaddox 1y ago
  I have to imagine that YouTube also has massive storage requirements that are a non-trivial portion of Google’s storage costs.
- sfn42 1y ago
  I'm not really disagreeing with you but I have a 700/700 fiber connection that generally works perfectly for anything I do, and youtube craps out pretty frequently. It'll just fail to load videos and I have to refresh up to multiple times before it starts working properly. Also the frontend is generally very wonky, I'm wondering if its severely over engineered or something. It seems very simple, but it's failing at all kinds of stuff all the time. Shorts fail to load when scrolling, the scrolling just stops working, some times it keeps playing the previous video's audio while the current video is frozen. Some times if I write a comment and try to highlight and delete some of it, when I hit backspace it deletes the part that wasn't highlighted. A normal <input type="text" /> does not do that. Have they implemented their own text inputs in JS or something? All you need for that component is a form with a textfield and a submit button. As far as I know that won't behave this way so I'm not sure what they're doing but it doesn't seem great. I went and checked, it's a div. No idea why they would do that for that simple comment form.
dcow 1y ago
We don’t need the government to throw money at “open source”. That’s silly. Youtube used to be a means to an end. I need to send my friend or a teacher a video but email has a 25mb attachment limit. Need to use youtube or image shack. These days you can just use a text message or whatever platform you’re using to communicate. So youtube has now become a platform for “content creators”. It’s a different beast. To compete with youtube you have to not only make the video stuff work but also break the network effect and figure out how to pay creators. Further, plenty of VCs don’t give two shits whether your thing is open source or not, they just want ROI. In my experience it’s tech law (or lack thereof) that missed the infusion of “internet maker ethos”. The depth of the average startup legal advice is “here’s a privacy policy and EULA that maximally protect your company at the expense of users”. “Here’s an employment contract template that tries to fuck your employees.” “It’s safest not to share your source code and keep it a trade secret.” “Go have fun.” If you want to see more open source then you need to cultivate that ethos among the people in power running the companies. So often I see the prevailing sentiment even here to be anti-gpl. The gpl may be imperfect, but if you care at all about the proliferation of open-source in a western copyright regime, then pissing on the gpl as “the brainchild of crackpot Stallman” is not the way to get there. If you want more open source then founders need to come to fundamentally understand that their source code is not what makes their business valuable, it’s the time and effort they put in to provide a service that others aren't providing or is better than the competition. Too many founders are living the delusion that at a software level their engineers are writing novel patentable or trade secret level code that gives them a true algorithmic leg up. 9 times out of ten their shit is just new and fresh and disruptive. I understand that in rare cases people are doing truly novel things with software, but that certainly isn’t the default case.
mbrumlow 1y ago
> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities I simply don’t think this applies to places like YouTube. But if does then they also must be responsible for the content. It makes no sense that curating content is their free speech but at the same time it’s not their speech when the content could have legal repercussions to them. The argument that removing videos is their speech implies that hosting videos is their speech. So they should be liable for all content they post.
- beej71 1y ago
  They are two different things, though. One is actually producing content, and the others deciding which content host and share. And there are all kinds of various legal and illegal combinations, here. For instance maybe they decide that it's okay to host Nazi content, something that is absolutely protected under the first amendment. Or maybe they decide that it's not okay to host Nazi content, even though it's definitely protected under the first amendment. Also see Gonzales v. Google. But really the most dangerous thing here is telling a company that they are legally liable for everything their users post. A large company like Google has the legal firepower to handle the massive onslaught of lawsuits that will instantly occur. A smaller startup thing? Not a chance. They're DOA. Heck, even on my tiny traffic personal website, I would take the comment section down because there's no way I can handle a lawsuit over something somebody posted there. I should not be required to host content I do not wish to host. And at the same time I must be shielded from liability from comments that people make on my website, if we are to have a comment section at all.
  - tshaddox 1y ago
    I think using the example of Nazi content and the first amendment is a distraction. What’s relevant is speech that is not legally protected. Should the New York Times have civil libel liability for what they publish in a newspaper? Should Google have civil libel liability for what they publish on YouTube?
    - Manuel_D 1y ago
intended 1y ago
One thing I really wish, is that more people volunteered to moderate things. It’s a volunteer position, it’s needed for most of the communities we are part of, and doing this raises the floor of conversations across the board. The distance between the average view point on how free speech works, and the reality that content moderation forces you to contend with, is frankly gut wrenching. We need to be able to shorten that distance so that when we discuss it online, we have ways to actually make sense of it. For the creativity of others ideas to be brought to bear. Otherwise, we’re doomed to reinvent the wheel over and over again, our collective intuitions advancing at a snails pace.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- driverdan 1y ago
  Why would you volunteer your time to a for-profit company?
  - tshaddox 1y ago
    Probably because they enjoy it. Same reason you and I contribute to a social media service operated by a for-profit company.
mardifoufs 1y ago
Mhmm, so would it be fine for a private platform not allowing say, Muslims on their website? Especially a platform as big as YouTube? I mean, it's essential to their rights to be able to do that, I guess? Like I understand your point, but this argument is usually not actually useful. Especially since it's usually not coming from "free speech absolutist" types, so it always comes off as a bit disingenuous. Unless you are arguing for big corporations having an absolute right to free speech, which I would disagree with but would at least make the argument consistent.
- pr0zac 1y ago
  I don't think anyone would argue that would violate freedom of speech, however it would still be illegal as it would violate the civil rights act by discriminating based on religion. Theres more than one right involved in your hypothetical basically.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > Mhmm, so would it be fine for a private platform not allowing say, Muslims on their website? Depends on the sense of “private”. If it is, private in the sense that it is a platform run by a Christian Church for the use of organizations affiliated with that Church, and not offering information dissemination to the general public, sure. If its a private business offering platform services to the public at large but specifically excluding Muslims, then it is potentially engaging in prohibited religious discrimination in a public accommodation. Unlike religion, political viewpoint is not, federally, a protected class in public accommodations, though state law may vary. (OTOH, under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and similar laws in many states, and case law based on and in line with the general motivation of such laws, laws including state public accommodation laws, are being looked at more skeptically when they prohibit religious and religiously-motivated discrimination, as an impairment of the religious freedom of the discriminating party, in theory irrespective of the religions on each side, but in practice favoring discrimination by Christians and against non-Christians, so possibly the Muslim exclusion would succeed even in a public accommodation.)
LocalH 1y ago
Why should "YouTube" as an entity enjoy freedom of speech? They're a platform for user-generated content. Outside of outright illegal content (which is even tenuous sometimes, I'd like to reserve this for the worst of things), they shouldn't be able to pick and choose which UGC they are willing to allow. They're the modern "town square". They're effectively a monopoly in this day and age (yes, there are other video hosting platforms, but YouTube has the largest share of all by far, and are de facto the place people expect to find video UGC). Serving video with high availability to millions of people is hard. Few organizations, that aren't already flush with capital, are going to be able to replicate that at any sort of scale. I'm tired of big corporations using their might to override individual freedom of speech. Once you reach a certain size, you should have to make moderation a more personal thing. Instead of taking videos that aren't illegal in and of themselves down, they should have to empower the user to moderate their own feed. Of course, this is incompatible with the modern drive to use these platforms to push content in front of people, instead of letting them curate their own experience. I don't have all the answers, but the "corporations = people, and thus corporations have freedom of speech" angle has done a lot of damage to the rights of individuals.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- int_19h 1y ago
  I think one thing that we should be more cognizant about in general is that corporations are a legal construct to begin with, and as such, there's no natural right to incorporate - it's strictly a privilege. So society attaching even very heavy strings to that is not unreasonable so long as they are applied consistently to all corporations. Which is to say, if corporations don't do what we as a society want them to do, beating them with a large and heavy stick until they start doing that is not wrong, and we should be doing more of it. And if people really want their freedoms, well, they can go and run their business as individuals, with no corporate liability shield etc. Then I'm fine with saying that their freedom of speech etc overrides everything else.
bigbadfeline 1y ago
> A decently functioning anti-trust system... Unfortunately, it's a tall order in the current political environment for the same reason open source funding isn't forthcoming, these are just parts of a bigger problem which is best discussed elsewhere. With that said, you're absolutely right in your assessment, this is approximately what needs to happen in order to improve the current sorry state of media and public discourse. Sadly, as evidanced by the other replies to your comment, the public at large simply doesn't get it and the situation is even worse with the structural changes needed to make a real solution possible. It's a vicious cycle that results in ever worse media, and not only media. The current public spat between the two smartest people in the world (by mass media metrics), garnished with public blackmail attempts and private-social media channels, is a jaw dropping proof of dysfunction but ofcourse the media presents it as casual entertainment.
- LocalH 1y ago
  > Sadly, as evidanced by the other replies to your comment, the public at large simply doesn't get it and the situation is even worse with the structural changes needed to make a real solution possible. The ones with money and power (which are effectively the same thing) want it to be this way, as it makes them richer and more powerful. The masses are just pawns literally being moved around on the chessboard of society.
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities. Here's some text from Section 230 of the CDA: > (c) (2) Civil liability > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— > (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or > (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1) ... > (e) (1) No effect on criminal law > Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute. Now in this case, you have YouTube, a service with obvious market power, taking down content promoting a competitor to YouTube. There are Federal criminal antitrust statutes.
raxxorraxor 1y ago
I dislike people promoting extensions to the formerly liberal moderation and content controls on the net because the current status quo was entirely predictable. And your statement is wrong. There was a culture that such content wasn't removed and if it was done, there was a backlash. Even on platforms like Facebook and there certainly was a time where such removals generated feedback. But activists demanded censorship and everything degenerated into some stupid partisan shit about bullshit topics that do not matter. It doesn't take too much to comprehend that the demands for censorhip normalized it in the end. And open solutions like ActivityPub also had to suffer the insufferable and made the openness a moot point. Govt funding would make everything even worse because people would demand even more content controls and there are numerous leverages where public officials could be pressured to enact more content controls.
Slava_Propanei 1y ago
[dead]

ClumsyPilot 1y ago

> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech. But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it. A lot of breakdown in society lately is clearly coming from the fact that some people/companies have it both ways when it suits them.

akimbostrawman 1y ago
The solution would be to revoke section 203 from any platform which acts as a digital public square if they do moderation beyond removing illegal content. Ofc they would try there best to be excluded to have there cake and eat it too.
- lesuorac 1y ago
  The entire point of section 230 is to allow platforms to remove non-illegal content [1]. Basically there were two lawsuits about platforms showing content. One of the platfroms tried to curate content to create a family-friendly environment. The second platform just didn't take anything down. The first platform lost their lawsuit while the second won their lawsuit. Congress wants to allow platforms to create family friend environment online so section 230 was written. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#
- klooney 1y ago
  You need moderation for more than legality though, otherwise you can't have open forums like this, that aren't total cesspits.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Right: * When a bot farm spams ads for erectile dysfunction pills into every comment thread on your blog... That's "legal content"! * When your model-train hobbyist site is invaded by posters sharing swastikas and planning neo-nazi rallies, that too is "legal content"--at least outside Germany. All sorts of deceptive, off-topic, and horribly offensive things are "legal content."
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  If something like that were put in place, any platforms acting as a “public square” should also be required to disable all recommendation and content surfacing features aside from search, algorithmic or otherwise. Those recommendation features already do plenty of damage even with platforms having the ability to remove anything they like. If platforms are restricted to only removing illegal content, that damage would quickly become much greater.
Sloowms 1y ago
This is correct. In the US tiktok is currently being sued for feeding kids choking game content through the algorithm that was earlier judged to be free speech.
- maketheman 1y ago
  Curation and promotion, even if done by a machine (LOL, why does that matter at all?) needs to come with significant liability. It should be possible to protect content hosting services from extensive liability while not protecting companies from the consequences of what they choose to promote and present to people. Those are two separate and very different activities that aren't even necessarily connected (you could curate and promote without hosting, and in fact this happens all the time; you can host without curating and promoting, this also happens all the time—in fact, these typically are not mixed together outside of social media companies with their damned "algorithms", as far as content from 3rd parties goes)
gspencley 1y ago
> Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech. > But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it. There is no contradiction there. Imagine a forum about knitting. Someone, who has it in for the owners of this knitting forum (or perhaps even just a SPAM bot) starts posting illegal, or even just non-knitting content on this forum. The entire purpose of the forum is to be a community about knitting. Why is it the legal or moral responsibility of the knitting forum to host SPAM content? And why should they be legally liable for someone else posting content on their platform? You're equating specific pieces of content with the platform as a whole. There is no reality where I will accept that if I create something. I spend and risk my money on web hosting. I write the code. I put something out there... that other people get to dictate what content I have to distribute. That's an evil reality to contemplate. I don't want to live in that world. I certainly wont' do business under those terms. You're effectively trying to give other people an ultimatum in order to extract value from them that you did not earn and have no claim to. You're saying that if they don't host content that they don't want to distribute that they should be legally liable for anything that anyone uploads. The two don't connect at all. Anyone is, and should be free to create any kind of online service where they pick and choose what is or is not allowed. That shouldn't then subject them to criminal or civil liability because of how others decide to use that product or service. Imagine if that weird concept were applied to offline things, like kitchen knives. A kitchen knife manufacturer is perfectly within their rights to say "This product is intended to be used for culinary purposes and no other. If we find out that you are using it to do other things, we will stop doing business with you forever." That doesn't then make them liable for people who use their product for other purposes.
- andrepd 1y ago
  The issue is that the knitting forum is a different beast from youtube. The latter is a platform. Its scale makes it QUALITATIVELY different. And there's network effects, there's dumping behaviour, there's preinstalls on every phone, there's integration with the ad behemoth, all to make sure it remains a platform.
- dcow 1y ago
andrepd 1y ago
> A lot of breakdown in society lately is clearly coming from the fact that some people/companies have it both ways when it suits them. See how copyright is protected when it's whatcd violating it and when it's OpenAI
tzs 1y ago
Your premise is incomplete. When someone posts illegal content on YouTube they are not liable if they are not aware of the illegality of that content. Once they learn that they are hosting illegal content they lose their safe harbor if they don't remove it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- torstenvl 1y ago
  Please don't post deliberately false information on HN. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
  - tzs 1y ago
    Let me rephrase, since saying they lose their safe harbor was a poor choice of words. The safe harbor does indeed prevent them from being treated as the publisher of the illegal content. However illegal content can incur liability for acts other than publishing or distributing and section 230's safe harbor won't protect them from that.
- rolph 1y ago
  i find it hard to believe there is any content on YT platform that they are unaware of.
  - p_j_w 1y ago
    I mean what do you think happens? Do you think YouTube employs an army of people to watch and vet every single video that gets posted there?
    - rolph 1y ago
      no i think YT uses an AI to categorize and vet media based on standard rubrick, at a pace that exceeds a human collective by orders of magnitude. they know about it as soon as you post it.
intended 1y ago
Sadly it turns out that the biggest driving force is politics, and the inability for our institutions to win with boring facts, against fast and loose engaging content. The idea is that in a competitive marketplace of ideas, the better idea wins. The reality is that if you dont compete on accuracy, but compete on engagement, you can earn enough revenue to stay cash flow positive. I would say as the cost of making content and publishing content went down, the competition for attention went up. The result is that expensive to produce information, cannot compete with cheap to produce content.

somenameforme 1y ago

I think their real edge is a practically free and practically infinite bandwidth/capacity global CDN setup. There's no real technical reason for this still to be the case, but bandwidth costs are significant for people relying on other services to provide such. Or they're cheap and slow/capped. This is the main reason I think alternative sites have a hard time competing. Play anything on YouTube from anywhere and if it's buffering/slow then it's probably your internet connection that's the problem. By contrast do the same on competing streaming sites and it's, more or less, expected especially if you aren't in certain geographic areas. Monetization on YouTube is mostly just a carrot on a stick. The overwhelming majority of content creators will never make anything more than pocket change off of it. That carrot might still work as an incentivization system, but I don't think it's necessarily the driving force.

clucas 1y ago
Plainview: You gonna change your shipping costs? Tilford: We don't dictate shipping costs. That's railroad business. Plainview: O-oh! You don't own the railroads? Course you do. Of course you do.
luhn 1y ago
Yeah, anybody can make a half-baked CDN, but Google has PoPs inside ISPs across the world [1] and competing with that is essentially impossible. [1] https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en
tshaddox 1y ago
I have to imagine that YouTube also has massive storage requirements that are a non-trivial portion of Google’s storage costs.
sfn42 1y ago
I'm not really disagreeing with you but I have a 700/700 fiber connection that generally works perfectly for anything I do, and youtube craps out pretty frequently. It'll just fail to load videos and I have to refresh up to multiple times before it starts working properly. Also the frontend is generally very wonky, I'm wondering if its severely over engineered or something. It seems very simple, but it's failing at all kinds of stuff all the time. Shorts fail to load when scrolling, the scrolling just stops working, some times it keeps playing the previous video's audio while the current video is frozen. Some times if I write a comment and try to highlight and delete some of it, when I hit backspace it deletes the part that wasn't highlighted. A normal <input type="text" /> does not do that. Have they implemented their own text inputs in JS or something? All you need for that component is a form with a textfield and a submit button. As far as I know that won't behave this way so I'm not sure what they're doing but it doesn't seem great. I went and checked, it's a div. No idea why they would do that for that simple comment form.

dcow 1y ago

We don’t need the government to throw money at “open source”. That’s silly. Youtube used to be a means to an end. I need to send my friend or a teacher a video but email has a 25mb attachment limit. Need to use youtube or image shack. These days you can just use a text message or whatever platform you’re using to communicate. So youtube has now become a platform for “content creators”. It’s a different beast. To compete with youtube you have to not only make the video stuff work but also break the network effect and figure out how to pay creators. Further, plenty of VCs don’t give two shits whether your thing is open source or not, they just want ROI. In my experience it’s tech law (or lack thereof) that missed the infusion of “internet maker ethos”. The depth of the average startup legal advice is “here’s a privacy policy and EULA that maximally protect your company at the expense of users”. “Here’s an employment contract template that tries to fuck your employees.” “It’s safest not to share your source code and keep it a trade secret.” “Go have fun.” If you want to see more open source then you need to cultivate that ethos among the people in power running the companies. So often I see the prevailing sentiment even here to be anti-gpl. The gpl may be imperfect, but if you care at all about the proliferation of open-source in a western copyright regime, then pissing on the gpl as “the brainchild of crackpot Stallman” is not the way to get there. If you want more open source then founders need to come to fundamentally understand that their source code is not what makes their business valuable, it’s the time and effort they put in to provide a service that others aren't providing or is better than the competition. Too many founders are living the delusion that at a software level their engineers are writing novel patentable or trade secret level code that gives them a true algorithmic leg up. 9 times out of ten their shit is just new and fresh and disruptive. I understand that in rare cases people are doing truly novel things with software, but that certainly isn’t the default case.

mbrumlow 1y ago

> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities I simply don’t think this applies to places like YouTube. But if does then they also must be responsible for the content. It makes no sense that curating content is their free speech but at the same time it’s not their speech when the content could have legal repercussions to them. The argument that removing videos is their speech implies that hosting videos is their speech. So they should be liable for all content they post.

beej71 1y ago
They are two different things, though. One is actually producing content, and the others deciding which content host and share. And there are all kinds of various legal and illegal combinations, here. For instance maybe they decide that it's okay to host Nazi content, something that is absolutely protected under the first amendment. Or maybe they decide that it's not okay to host Nazi content, even though it's definitely protected under the first amendment. Also see Gonzales v. Google. But really the most dangerous thing here is telling a company that they are legally liable for everything their users post. A large company like Google has the legal firepower to handle the massive onslaught of lawsuits that will instantly occur. A smaller startup thing? Not a chance. They're DOA. Heck, even on my tiny traffic personal website, I would take the comment section down because there's no way I can handle a lawsuit over something somebody posted there. I should not be required to host content I do not wish to host. And at the same time I must be shielded from liability from comments that people make on my website, if we are to have a comment section at all.
- tshaddox 1y ago
  I think using the example of Nazi content and the first amendment is a distraction. What’s relevant is speech that is not legally protected. Should the New York Times have civil libel liability for what they publish in a newspaper? Should Google have civil libel liability for what they publish on YouTube?
  - Manuel_D 1y ago

intended 1y ago

One thing I really wish, is that more people volunteered to moderate things. It’s a volunteer position, it’s needed for most of the communities we are part of, and doing this raises the floor of conversations across the board. The distance between the average view point on how free speech works, and the reality that content moderation forces you to contend with, is frankly gut wrenching. We need to be able to shorten that distance so that when we discuss it online, we have ways to actually make sense of it. For the creativity of others ideas to be brought to bear. Otherwise, we’re doomed to reinvent the wheel over and over again, our collective intuitions advancing at a snails pace.

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driverdan 1y ago
Why would you volunteer your time to a for-profit company?
- tshaddox 1y ago
  Probably because they enjoy it. Same reason you and I contribute to a social media service operated by a for-profit company.

mardifoufs 1y ago

Mhmm, so would it be fine for a private platform not allowing say, Muslims on their website? Especially a platform as big as YouTube? I mean, it's essential to their rights to be able to do that, I guess? Like I understand your point, but this argument is usually not actually useful. Especially since it's usually not coming from "free speech absolutist" types, so it always comes off as a bit disingenuous. Unless you are arguing for big corporations having an absolute right to free speech, which I would disagree with but would at least make the argument consistent.

pr0zac 1y ago
I don't think anyone would argue that would violate freedom of speech, however it would still be illegal as it would violate the civil rights act by discriminating based on religion. Theres more than one right involved in your hypothetical basically.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> Mhmm, so would it be fine for a private platform not allowing say, Muslims on their website? Depends on the sense of “private”. If it is, private in the sense that it is a platform run by a Christian Church for the use of organizations affiliated with that Church, and not offering information dissemination to the general public, sure. If its a private business offering platform services to the public at large but specifically excluding Muslims, then it is potentially engaging in prohibited religious discrimination in a public accommodation. Unlike religion, political viewpoint is not, federally, a protected class in public accommodations, though state law may vary. (OTOH, under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and similar laws in many states, and case law based on and in line with the general motivation of such laws, laws including state public accommodation laws, are being looked at more skeptically when they prohibit religious and religiously-motivated discrimination, as an impairment of the religious freedom of the discriminating party, in theory irrespective of the religions on each side, but in practice favoring discrimination by Christians and against non-Christians, so possibly the Muslim exclusion would succeed even in a public accommodation.)

LocalH 1y ago

Why should "YouTube" as an entity enjoy freedom of speech? They're a platform for user-generated content. Outside of outright illegal content (which is even tenuous sometimes, I'd like to reserve this for the worst of things), they shouldn't be able to pick and choose which UGC they are willing to allow. They're the modern "town square". They're effectively a monopoly in this day and age (yes, there are other video hosting platforms, but YouTube has the largest share of all by far, and are de facto the place people expect to find video UGC). Serving video with high availability to millions of people is hard. Few organizations, that aren't already flush with capital, are going to be able to replicate that at any sort of scale. I'm tired of big corporations using their might to override individual freedom of speech. Once you reach a certain size, you should have to make moderation a more personal thing. Instead of taking videos that aren't illegal in and of themselves down, they should have to empower the user to moderate their own feed. Of course, this is incompatible with the modern drive to use these platforms to push content in front of people, instead of letting them curate their own experience. I don't have all the answers, but the "corporations = people, and thus corporations have freedom of speech" angle has done a lot of damage to the rights of individuals.

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int_19h 1y ago
I think one thing that we should be more cognizant about in general is that corporations are a legal construct to begin with, and as such, there's no natural right to incorporate - it's strictly a privilege. So society attaching even very heavy strings to that is not unreasonable so long as they are applied consistently to all corporations. Which is to say, if corporations don't do what we as a society want them to do, beating them with a large and heavy stick until they start doing that is not wrong, and we should be doing more of it. And if people really want their freedoms, well, they can go and run their business as individuals, with no corporate liability shield etc. Then I'm fine with saying that their freedom of speech etc overrides everything else.

bigbadfeline 1y ago

> A decently functioning anti-trust system... Unfortunately, it's a tall order in the current political environment for the same reason open source funding isn't forthcoming, these are just parts of a bigger problem which is best discussed elsewhere. With that said, you're absolutely right in your assessment, this is approximately what needs to happen in order to improve the current sorry state of media and public discourse. Sadly, as evidanced by the other replies to your comment, the public at large simply doesn't get it and the situation is even worse with the structural changes needed to make a real solution possible. It's a vicious cycle that results in ever worse media, and not only media. The current public spat between the two smartest people in the world (by mass media metrics), garnished with public blackmail attempts and private-social media channels, is a jaw dropping proof of dysfunction but ofcourse the media presents it as casual entertainment.

LocalH 1y ago
> Sadly, as evidanced by the other replies to your comment, the public at large simply doesn't get it and the situation is even worse with the structural changes needed to make a real solution possible. The ones with money and power (which are effectively the same thing) want it to be this way, as it makes them richer and more powerful. The masses are just pawns literally being moved around on the chessboard of society.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago

> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities. Here's some text from Section 230 of the CDA: > (c) (2) Civil liability > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— > (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or > (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1) ... > (e) (1) No effect on criminal law > Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 or 231 of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute. Now in this case, you have YouTube, a service with obvious market power, taking down content promoting a competitor to YouTube. There are Federal criminal antitrust statutes.

raxxorraxor 1y ago

I dislike people promoting extensions to the formerly liberal moderation and content controls on the net because the current status quo was entirely predictable. And your statement is wrong. There was a culture that such content wasn't removed and if it was done, there was a backlash. Even on platforms like Facebook and there certainly was a time where such removals generated feedback. But activists demanded censorship and everything degenerated into some stupid partisan shit about bullshit topics that do not matter. It doesn't take too much to comprehend that the demands for censorhip normalized it in the end. And open solutions like ActivityPub also had to suffer the insufferable and made the openness a moot point. Govt funding would make everything even worse because people would demand even more content controls and there are numerous leverages where public officials could be pressured to enact more content controls.

Slava_Propanei 1y ago

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