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PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

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Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#181

Post by grahamburger »

themagician wrote: post #2

What the people who want decentralized services don't realize is that the content creators want centralized services (whether they realize it or not). In the old days we needed YouTube because you needed a Flash encoder if you wanted to make video accessible on the web to everyone. Now anyone can host video on anything. You can throw even throw some comments on the bottom if you want. But what those who create want i…

> But what those who create want is an audience. They want a community.

PeerTube seems to be aiming to provide exactly those things.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#182

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE »

meko wrote: post #156
yroc92 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top comment of almost any post on HN is negative.

I've noticed this and wonder why it is... Maybe developers /engineers are prone to seeking out, trying to identify constraints?

There probably less incentive or pressure to comment if you agree. If you disagree, you presumably have an opposing view and rationale which you may be compelled to share.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#183

Post by albertgoeswoof »

dragontamer wrote: post #179
dmoy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do peertube hosts pick what to host? Do they manually curate everything?

Probably the same as email curation. If a spammer is caught, you ban them from your server. If other servers notice that spam is coming from a particular server, those servers disconnect from that server. But Politics and Porn? These taboo subjects will be hard to deal with in a federated environment.

With Federated networks you can block an entire domain, so if you don’t like seeing it you don’t have to- but if you do want to talk about taboo subjects you can in your own space.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#184

Post by thevardanian »

themagician wrote: post #159
resters wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumptions are completely wrong. Content creators simply want a platform for gathering an audience. Youtube wants to play as many ads as possible. Let's not pretend that somehow those interests align perfectly in the product we know as youtube. The audience generation mechanics are an important ingredient for replacing youtube, but youtube has gone from being a free service that had little user generated conten…

I'm not wrong. We have moved towards a world of centralized services because that's what people want. To many people it's the centralized services that "are" the Internet: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—that's it. YouTube is the lowest common denominator of video. You aren't going to "fix" its problems with a more complex decentralized network. If you want to solve the problems with YouTube you have to do it w…

You listing out a bunch of decentralized, protocol based solutions means that there's competition in the market, which is evidence of a new market that is GROWING. The opposite of a dead market. Youtube is also a the result of such a competitive market. There used to be dozens of video hosting platforms. The same applies to almost every other company. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Ebay, etc. all grew up in very competitive markets. Competitive markets means that there's demand.

Decentralization does one very important thing. It makes it more profitable, and cheaper to make content accessible to your audience, while giving you the freedom of making money. That is to say decentralization amplifies the ability of computers to make work what Youtube and Google require billions to do. It DISTRIBUTES that workload among many independent workers, and lets the market decide how valuable their input is.

Secondly centralized solutions can exist in a decentralized environment. Content distribution should always have been decentralized, making profit on content is the centralization problem. You're getting content distribution, and profitability mixed up.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#185

Post by tombh »

themagician wrote: post #159
resters wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumptions are completely wrong. Content creators simply want a platform for gathering an audience. Youtube wants to play as many ads as possible. Let's not pretend that somehow those interests align perfectly in the product we know as youtube. The audience generation mechanics are an important ingredient for replacing youtube, but youtube has gone from being a free service that had little user generated conten…

I'm not wrong. We have moved towards a world of centralized services because that's what people want. To many people it's the centralized services that "are" the Internet: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—that's it. YouTube is the lowest common denominator of video. You aren't going to "fix" its problems with a more complex decentralized network. If you want to solve the problems with YouTube you have to do it w…

Is this not the archetypal battle of modern software? It makes me think of Eric Raymond's classic book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". At which point the other side rolls out the Linux precedent - the decentralised success.

I believe the world very much does want decentralised services, it's just that such services have quite different measures of success.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#186

Post by dragontamer »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #183
dragontamer wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the same as email curation. If a spammer is caught, you ban them from your server. If other servers notice that spam is coming from a particular server, those servers disconnect from that server. But Politics and Porn? These taboo subjects will be hard to deal with in a federated environment.

With Federated networks you can block an entire domain, so if you don’t like seeing it you don’t have to- but if you do want to talk about taboo subjects you can in your own space.

That kills the userbase however.

If your server builds a reputation as being a nanny state, your users will often exodus and go to another site.

As such, the status-quo eventually creates the loosest set of rules. See 4chan, Reddit, and other social networks. The fewer the rules, the bigger the userbase. Any effort to tamp down based on moral concerns leads to huge controversies (ie: /r/Jailbait, /r/TheFappening, and other controversial reddits)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

It takes an extraordinary amount of effort to clamp down on a taboo subject. The "free speech" advocates are incredibly strong. Even "obviously wrong" subreddits like /r/CreepShots took an absurd amount of Drama before things got resolved.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#187

Post by cyphar »

themagician wrote: post #169
smnplk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another point of decentralised services is cutting out the middleman and this is what should be appealing to content creators.

Not really. Content creators often look for middlemen to represent them. That's why they join networks that works directly with YouTube. Most of the views to people who do YouTube as a job. When you look on that trending list, 90% of those videos are people waking up and going to a job. The last thing they want is more bosses and more logistics.

> That's why they join networks that works directly with YouTube.

They usually join networks more out of necessity than choice (from memory you get access to more "perks" if you're with a network). Many YouTubers bemoan the existence of multi-channel networks because they take a lot of power away from content creators (even more than YouTube already does).

> When you look on that trending list [...]

These days it's pretty obvious that the trending list is effectively all paid promotions. It's not uncommon that content that has already gone viral is nowhere near the trending list (and the trending list is instead videos advertising new movies). In the "old days" of YouTube, the front page was hand-selected content that someone working at YouTube thought people would enjoy. These days it's all run by opaque algorithms.

> The last thing they want is more bosses and more logistics.

Given how many YouTubers are complaining about their current bosses being completely awful, I'd think the last thing they want is to continue with the status quo.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#188

Post by albertgoeswoof »

wetpaws wrote: post #148

I am concerned that federated service is being presented as distributed. Email is federated and it is precisely the reason why nobody is hosting their mail server and using Gmail instead.

Nobody except literally every sizeable corporation, the hundreds of gmail competitors and the millions that host their own server.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#189

Post by amitkgupta84 »

As a content creator, once you've recorded and edited your content, you have to solve for a few kinds of things:

1) hosting, content delivery, authentication and access control, styling and UI, etc. 2) discoverability, which requires things like a search engine, recommendation engine, a community/social network, links, etc. 3) some degree of independence, and the freedom to decide what content to show, what content to monetize, etc. free from whatever agenda/motives a company like YouTube/Alphabet might have.

One way to look at it is that PeerTube starts to make (1) a lot more accessible without something like YouTube. (2) is where YouTube shines, but is possible via existing structures in the Internet if you're just using PeerTube (plus PeerTube has some sort of federation, though I haven't looked into it much). (3) is where PeerTube shines.

There doesn't have to be one answer for the entire market. YouTube is probably better for smaller creators looking to build their audience and be discovered, but once you reach a sufficient size, and don't need to rely on the YouTube recommendation engine for people to find you, something that offers greater independence and self-determination would seem desirable. Of course, I'm only talking about tendencies, a very small content creator may have a strong desire for independence, and a a very large content creator may be perfectly fine coloring inside whatever lines YouTube draws.

Re: PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

#190

Post by Kalium »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #150
Kalium wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right! You can do that! It's possible that some things - like guarding against abuse - are sometimes difficult in distributed systems. But I'm sure these are mere matters of solvable technology...

I'm not sure that it is. And as it is, no one working on these systems seems to be interested in finding a solution.

I was being sarcastic. Stemming abuse in distributed systems has proven to be an intractable problem. Look at email.

Plenty of people are very interested in stemming abuse. So far, centralization is the most reliable way to accomplish it.

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