3 ms·

This ia really cool but also feels like a potential burden on the commons,

• vasco 8mo ago
  That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries? They sure worry about the commons when launching another datacenter to optimize ads.
  • szundi 8mo ago
    [dead]
  • agnishom 8mo ago
    You are right, but YouTube is also a massive repository of human cultural expression, whose true value is much more than the economic value it brings to Google.
    • komali2 8mo ago
      Yes, but it's a classic story of what actually happened to the commons - they were fenced and sold to land "owners." Honestly, if you aren't taking full advantage within the constraints of the law of workarounds like this, you're basically losing money. Like not spending your entire per diem budget when on a business trip.
      • agnishom 8mo ago
        This seems like a narrow understanding of value. Which do you think has more value to me? (a) I save some money by exploiting the storage loophole (b) The existence of a cultural repository of cat videos, animated mathematics explainers, long video essays continue to be available to (some parts of) humanity (for the near future).
        • komali2 8mo ago
          This is assuming doing A has any meaningful impact on B. Anyway in this situation it's less that YouTube is providing us a service and more, it's captured a treasure trove of our cultural output and sold it back to us. Siphoning back as much value as we can is ethical. If YouTube goes away, we'll replace it - PeerTube or other federated options are viable. The loss of the corpus of videos would be sad but not catastrophic - some of it is backed up. I have ~5Tb of YouTube backed up, most of it smaller channels. I agree generally with you that the word "value" is overencompassing to the point of absurdity though. Instrumental value is equated with moral worth, personal attachment, and distribution of scarcity. Too many concepts for one word.
          • agnishom 8mo ago
            "Siphoning back as much value as we can is ethical." I feel the same way. (Although, I am less sure of it.) However, I think backing up important parts of YouTube, as you have done, is a much better approach towards doing this.
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
    • anjel 8mo ago
      So was Flickr
      • ancillary 8mo ago
        Somebody wrote a file encoder to take advantage of Flickr's free photo storage, too (though based on its Github repo I don't think a ton of people used it): https://alexcbecker.net/projects.html#storing-data-in-gifs https://alexcbecker.net/projects.html#storing-data-in-gifs
      • dotancohen 8mo ago
        So was Geocities.
  • cheonn638 8mo ago
    > That great commons that are the multi trillion dollar corporations that could buy multiple countries? Exactly which countries could they buy? Let me guess: you haven’t actually asked gemini
    • gregoryl 8mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
      • K0balt 8mo ago
        You don’t have to go ballistic!
    • cheschire 8mo ago
      Have you? Assuming Google would want to not put all their chips on that one number and invest all available capital in the purchase of a nation, and assuming that nation were open to being purchased in the first place (big assumption; see Greenland), Google is absolutely still in a place to be able to purchase multiple smaller countries, or one larger one.
      • arcticfox 8mo ago
        Greenland already has a wealthy benefactor, I'd be surprised if poor countries wouldn't be interested
    • russfrank 8mo ago
      The USA.
      • justinclift 8mo ago
        That one's not a "could" as it's already been done. ;)
    • RobotToaster 8mo ago
      Nauru, possibly Tuvalu.
  • asah 8mo ago
    no the "commons" in this case is the fundamental free-ness of YT - if abused then any corporations will have to shut it down... OTOH I'm 100.0% sure that google has a plan, been expecting this for years and in particular, has prior experience from free Gmail accounts being used for storage.
    • justinclift 8mo ago
      > no the "commons" in this case is the fundamental free-ness of YT ... Hmmm, isn't the "free-ness" of YouTube because there were determined to outspend and outlast any potential competitors (ie supported by the Search business), in order to create a monopoly for then extracting $$$ from? I'm kind of expecting the extracting part is only getting started. :(
    • rapnie 8mo ago
      There is no "fundamental free-ness" for vids stored on YT. Videos are stored to serve the business plan of Youtube and under the rules Google sets for them, where they serve their advertisement and surveillance capitalism business. Looking at the Wikipedia page for "Commons" [0] the first meaning of commons "accessible to all members of a society" is not really true, unless "on the whim of the YT platform". The second meaning of "natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit" is also not really true. There is no understanding that google will take any other than their own benefit into account. The third meaning of commons on that page is closest I guess to what is needed: > Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates. And that is certainly not what Youtube can be considered to be. Youtube videos are not in the commons, but kept on a proprietary platform where the proprietor is the sole decider what happens to its availability there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons