3 ms·

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.

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.