Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Whats so special about anti covid desinfo rules?

- The magnitude of content involved.

- The fact that there exists a significant part of the society which is vocal about not endorsing these particular deletions.

- The fact that many people became aware of the moderation ("censorship") that YouTube does and its power.

- The fact that these COVID information videos (despite being perhaps wrong) formed important patterns of opinions, i.e. some opinions considered "extremist" or "wrong" were suppressed.

All these concerns are muddled by thinking about Youtube as the example, since it is such a blind meta machine optimising for ad revenue, it’s already actively pushing all kinds of harmful content.

The problem with any laws for a good purpose is that, even if you can get everyone to agree on the general statement of a good purpose, there are disagreements on what actually counts as achieving the goal from both a moral and a scientific level.

For example, providing information on how to do something harmful X more safely might increase the risk of people doing X. On the moral side, someone might argue that even 1 more person doing X is worse than the reduction in harm of the others doing X. On the scientific side, there is likely not direct evidence to the exact numbers (ethical concerns with such research and all that), so you'll have some people disagreeing on how much the harm is increased or reduced and different numbers can both be reasonable but lead to different conclusions given the lack of direct research.

This all becomes supercharged when it comes to children, and you'll find people not even be consistent in their modes of thinking on different topics (or arguably they are consistent, but basing it off of unsaid unshared assumptions and models that they might not even be consciously aware of, but this then gets into a bunch of linguistic and logic semantics).

Big tech censorship disgusts me. Everything is completely backwards from what it should be, and the sheer scale of those platforms (bigger than many countries by population or money) prevents individual people and even governments from exercising meaningful democratic oversight. So these platforms congregate hundreds of millions of people and whatever their CEOs and/or douche tech bros in SV decide is what becomes law.

Another example: videos about the holocaust or WWII atrocities. Every one of them demonetised and hidden from recommendations because it touches a horrifying topic. Harms the children? On the contrary, nothing more important in an age of global fascism waves than a lesson in how it went last time.

Meanwhile the whole platform is a cesspool of addictive brainrot, gambling ads, turbo-consumerist toy unboxing videos, etc. Things that are actually truly harmful to kids. These are not restricted, these are promoted!

War is peace etc etc. Good is evil and evil is great. Everything is backwards.

I hate this so much.

These slippery slope comments always seem a little naive to me because they imply there is some pure way to handle moderation. In practice, you have to be an extremist to think literally no content should be removed from Youtube with the most obvious example of something nearly everyone wants to be removed being CSAM.

Maybe you would respond by saying that is illegal and only illegal content should be taken down. According to which laws? Hate speech is illegal some places, should that be removed? What about blasphemy?

Maybe you would suggest to closely follow the local law of the user. Does that mean the site needs to allow piracy in places that is legal? And who decides whether the video actually violates the law? Does the content have to stay up until a court makes the final decision? Or what about content that is legal locally, but might be under some restrictions. Should Youtube be obligated to host hardcore porn or gory violence?

There needs to be a line somewhere for normal people to actually want to use the site. I'm not going to claim to have the perfect answer on where that line should be, but there is always going to be an ongoing debate on its exact placement.

At least in the context of Covid, the real issue I saw was not the taking down of content, it was that a very small group of people dictated what content should be taken down.

Generally speaking in the world of "science" (any field) there will always be a level of disagreement. One scientist will come up with one theory, the other will come up with another theory, they will endlessly debate until the topic is "settled" and then the whole loop repeats if another scientist thinks that the settled topic is not actually settled. Overall I would say this is a very healthy dynamic and keeps society moving forward.

What people go so mad about during Covid was not the content being taken down, it's that you had had various scientific organizations around the world straight up break what I described in the previous paragraph. During covid you had one group make endless rushed decisions and then when other scientific groups challenged those findings, the response was not what I outlined above but rather an authoritarian "I am the science" response.

This "main group" (NIH, CDC, etc) painted all those challenges as conspiracy theories but if you actually listened to what the challenges were, they were often times quite reasonable. And the fact that they were reasonable arguments highlighted the insane hubris of the "main group" and ultimately led them to loose virtual all credibility by the time Covid wrapped up.

No it doesn't. I reject your slippery slope fallacy.

The line must always be drawn somewhere, should YouTube allow neonazi content because any censorship leads to more censorship? Of course not.

Those 3 are not even comparable to each other...

> Where "agreement" likely means "you accepted some tos 15 years ago so shut up".

I am not a content creator or business on yt but i am 99.9% certain as soon as you enter your business credentials to make money they pretty much are allowed to do as they please and change the terms without notice (to which you must agree). And because as pointed out into the article, yt is a monopoly in all but name you have to agree to it as there are no viable alternatives.

Uh? Veo 3 is arguably the result of owning YouTube and tapping into its content. No need to torrent much if you store the largest amount of footage on Earth.

You mean in the way Meta is being sued for, and bluntly are almost certainly going to lose and have to pay out lots and lots and lots of money for?

That's because they are not a platform for education. They are a platform for ads and encouraging hyperconsumerism. They merely allow educational material, sometimes. Expect more videos to be removed over time that don't align with their goals. e.g. I would not expect playlists of hour-long MIT lectures to stay there for the long term as the platform moves more toward shorts and algorithmic recommendations. Or their vast library of people's old random amateur videos that barely get any views/generate almost no revenue while costing them money.

But the tech companies all replaced the gun emoji with a squirt gun like a decade ago, I thought all gun violence ended after that?

Guns are not safe. No matter what you do, accidents will happen.

I don’t think Youtube is the place to look for education, and neither does youtube apparently.

It’d be pretty bad if someone watched youtube videos and thought they could handle guns safely and ended up hurt.

That doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me.

We should host a tobacco related Peertube instance at this point. Get Muttnchop, Snus at Home and some other guys on it and we would be free from youtube

Host your own content, monetize your own blog. I get that not as many people can do it without access to the big platforms but... that's ok?

> 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).

You left out one of the biggest providers of high (and low) quality VOD services: porn.

My intuition is that they're only left alone because they very explicitly don't step on any content and delivery trusts' toes.

I hadn't really thought about it until I did a crawl for a round of DMCA takedowns for a friend and was surprised by how many platforms apparently use the same few CMSes. It turns out, there are some fantastic, affordable options if you want to start an independent website and VOD service beyond the corporate fray.

> Pixelfed

I suspect a lot of these projects are being held back by bad branding. The first time I heard the term “fediverse,” I assumed it was alluding to Facebook’s Metaverse being a project of the CIA.

How will federation solve monetisation?

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).

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...

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.

> 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?

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).

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).

> 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.

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.

I was thinking Lawyer.

That's because of the amount of content which keeps increasing. Even outsourcing to low cost countries it wouldn't be cheap to hire thousands or tens of thousands of people to review cases. Still you need to have humans in there somewhere.

> Also most of the things in the queue should get "no" as an answer, so they just get into the habit of "no, no, no, no...".

I have access to these review queues on Stack Overflow (as basically everybody with sufficient karma has), but my default is "yes" (i.e. innocent, until proven otherwise).

This is why I have de-Googled my family - at least for the most part. The hardest part was Gmail. Hundreds of services and accounts relied on that email address for 2FA. If I were to be blocked from it, I would be screwed. So I bought a domain and spent the next couple of years migrating everything to it. Pain in the ass, but now no one can ever ban me from my own email address. Worst case scenario my provider blocks me and I switch to another one in minutes. Plus I can do cool things like catch-all, so when I sign up for services I use "verizon@[mydomain.com]". I have caught many cheeky fuckers selling my email address to spammers.

Outside of this there is very little harm in my Google account being banned now. I'd lose some YouTube watch history and a few locations on Google Maps.

Then i'll just stop using their services.

And if they're too big for people to not use them, then they need to be split up as they've attained (virtual) monopoly over specific market.

Would not be an easy one to swallow but I don't have a false expectation that these accounts are mine in any sense. They are Google's, and I'm just renting it paying with my personal data to feed the AdSense machine. Any day they might decide to do what they want with it, there might be a bug or a technical issue which will lock me out, and I doubt I would have a single way to influence it, the customer care or user support is clearly not a priority for this company and is virtually non-existent.

It really would be nice if they weren’t allowed to create the equivalent of the digitally unbanked by unilaterally wielding this power without any kind of due process.

YouTube is the only thing I use a Google account for. If they "retaliate", I can probably just open another one.

I've stopped logging into YouTube for this reason. Next step is to install a "YouTube browser" and configure my VPN to make sure all connections from that browser go over the VPN rather than my ISP's direct connection.

Friendly reminder to enable periodic personal data extraction from google (Google Takeout) and back it up so you don't lose your digital life in the rare case of being blocked.

Off-topic but I've found that best way to open YT is without account. No recommendations on frontpage. Just you and the search bar.

Are you using uBlock Origin on Firefox?

You don't have videos stop playing after exactly 1 minute ?

Learn a few dishes well, soon you are cooking them at home much faster than it would take to wait for them at any restaurant, including all cleanup and dishes.

Bonus: Cheaper, much higher quality, much better taste, and most importantly: you can drink as much as you want without getting kicked out.

> Sadly. Cooking decent food at home takes time

Why sadly? I need to eat more than I need to scroll internet or anything else. Preparing decent food is time well spent.

There was a headline here the other day that Youtube Premium Lite will now have more ads.

Eventually Premium will have ads too. It’s just a matter of time.

Pihole isn't, and hasn't been able to block youtube ads for several years now, so if you aren't seeing ads its something else stopping them. Ads are served from the same dns address as videos, so a dns block is incredibly poor for youtube.

Too unreliable. I just use yt-dlp and throw it on VLC on my iPad with airdrop.

If it's not worth that effort it probably wasn't worth watching anyway.

Every piece of content in my media library was paid for/legally acquired.

I go through some stupid lengths (probably a few thousand hours of my life by now, from buying media from eBay, old library collections, closed movie stores, then ripping everything) to make it so.

People are free to rip their purchased media. He even says that he buys blurays/dvds in the article. One can assume anything, but a completely legal setup can look exactly like that. Especially as most of those are relatively old movies - looking like a list of purchased blurays/dvds to me.

He says he bought all his own movies and tv shows on physical disc and ripped them for personal use.

He explains it in this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ8ijmy3qPo and even shows some of his physical disc collection.

I have like 50 DVDs in my collection. Do you have a problem if I make backups?

Assuming good faith on Jeff's part:

  In fact, in my own house, for multiple decades, I've purchased physical media (CDs, DVDs, and more recently, Blu-Rays), and only have legally-acquired content on my NAS. 

> there are so many screenshots that indicate he is indulging in his own piracy activities.

It's unclear to me how to differentiate twixt pirated movies and movies ripped from legally purchased BluRays and DVDs .. on the basis of a Kodi screenshot with folder art sourced from theTVDB, IMDB, and theMovieDB (also fanart, etc sites).

[flagged]

> Pair everything to a €5/mo torrent-friendly VPN

Or a usenet subscription + sabnzbd, and you get direct download speed, plus the extra protection of a (nowadays) arcane technology that's too hard for legislators to understand.

Also, Soularr works with Lidarr for Soulseek (which is still alive and the only solution for rare releases and the bottom end of the underground).

And just in case it isn't clear, "Arr!" is a traditional pirate exclamation.

For people who want less complicated setup. I occasionally download films to my MacBook, enable File Sharing (System Settings > General > Sharing) and then connect to it with Infuse Player (https://firecore.com/infuse) on Apple TV. I pirate only when it is too hard to get the film from a streaming service. If you're into good films, I suggest checking Mubi service (https://mubi.com), much better collection than Netflix.

My theoretical preference: as a file hosting provider, in Minecraft

- SFTP with anonymous login on disposable VM's, LFTP+SFTP for automation of batch transfers and rsync-like behavior in a chroot sftp-only login. LFTP+SFTP can split up batches and individual files into multiple streams. sch_cake balances throughput to and from each person, in Minecraft.

- Nginx+autoindex for people preferring happy-clicky access

Some to add

-Plex or Jellyfin: Netflix like interface to organize and watch your content.

-Overseerr: Managing your movie and tv show requests for you and people you share your media with. Works with Radarr/Sonarr/etc.

-Watchlistarr: syncs your Plex Watchlist with Overseerr.

Streisand effect at work