PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by stale2002 » Fri, Jul 20, 2018, 11:51 PM UTC

thevardanian wrote: post #184

themagician wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 competiti…

Umm, I don't think I agree with you on the idea that decentralization decreases costs for contract distribution.

Distributing content to millions of people requires massive investment.

The total cost would likely INCREASE massively, as my home computer is much worse at acting as a CDN than Google.

Sure, the costs get DISTRIBUTED, to places where maybe you aren't the one paying for it. But SOMEONE is still paying that money. And they are doing much less efficient than a centralized service with thousands of engineers.

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

#202

Post by themagician » Fri, Jul 20, 2018, 11:54 PM UTC

feral wrote: post #178

themagician wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know whether you are right, but I don't find your argument persuasive. You could have made a parallel argument, before Youtube, about how people wanted only professional content, why a service for user created content would never work etc, because that's all that had worked, up to that point. Just because all the decentralized projects have failed so far doesn't mean they are doomed. Its really early days yet…

We grow down in sophistication in tech. Everything goes to the lowest common denominator, then it falls further. The web used to be sophisticated and it was only for nerds.

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

#203

Post by notatoad » Fri, Jul 20, 2018, 11:57 PM UTC

amitkgupta84 wrote: post #189

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 t…

2 and 3 are inherently linked. If you want somebody else to recommend your videos, you're automatically under their control. Expecting a third party to promote your content without caring what content you produce is not realistic.

You could definitely build a recommendation system on top of PeerTube, but content creators will be just as beholden to the peertube discovery algorithm, and the assumptions and preferences it is built on, as YouTube's content creators are to the preferences and assumptions of the YouTube algorithm.

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

#204

Post by wpietri » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 12:01 AM UTC

hueving wrote: post #140

tehduder9 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really grinding when any criticism isn't addressed but complained about for being pointed out.

It's not criticism. It's reactionary conjecture about why people are using YouTube without any evidence to back it up.

I don't think you can place the burden of evidence on one side alone. Enough people have experience with YouTube as users, creators, or both that it's not wild to think that many people have reasonable intuitions about why YouTube dominates the market.

And if we are going to demand evidence of critics, I think we should also demand evidence of promoters of things like this, who often seem guided by a Big Idea rather than any evidence of user needs or proven ability to solve those user needs.

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

#205

Post by api » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 12:04 AM UTC

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're making an assumption-- namely that federated or decentralized systems must be harder to use than centralized ones.

Present decentralized alternatives usually are. There are numerous reasons. Some have to do with unsolved or inadequately solved problems in distributed systems engineering, but most are I think more pragmatic.

The two largest reasons for distributed/decentralized/federated services sucking are (IMHO):

(1) Most of these things are developed by geeks who lack an appreciation for the critical importance of user experience and lack expertise in areas like GUI and UX design. The result is products by geeks for geeks and that fail to get much traction outside small geek-centric markets.

(2) There is no good economic model, which means that there's no incentive for developers to do the parts of software development that are not fun. Solving grand problems is fun, but fixing a trillion trillion edge case UI/UX and platform bugs is not. Supporting users definitely is not. But those are the things that take something from a niche or nerds-only product to something regular people will use. Centralized platforms have two economic models: charging directly for use or monetizing the user through surveillance capitalism. (The latter is more common.)

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

#206

Post by charlchi » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 12:04 AM UTC

taurath wrote: post #175

themagician wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We have moved towards a world of centralized services because that's what people want. Almost there. People want INTEROPERABLE services. If that occurs because one place has a monopoly, that’s okay. If everyone can participate across any platform they choose that has the features they want (privacy, a close knit community, etc) that’s better.

Ease of user interoperability trumps nearly everything else. Most users don't care about your conceptual and moral motivations as an engineer. All we need to do is change the tech serving the problem underneath without necessarily changing the user-facing solution too much. It's such a simple idea yet people seem unable to grasp it; and end up whining about issues that have minimal relevance. There's a gap in the thinking somewhere. Plus, please carry on arguing about why I need to view 3 advertisements simultaneously (yes, use the YouTube mobile app). Engineers who have been reading the news and seeing the results of our latest technological models for the past 10 years don't want the same broken manure that is good for the bottom line but bad for people. Literally stop thinking about the bottom line for one second and focus on the people and maybe you'll see sometimes it's not about choking every last bit of stink out of the old model but completely changing the game. Apparently these are broken dreams though.

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

#207

Post by wpietri » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 12:05 AM UTC

charlchi wrote: post #198

hueving wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not criticism. It's reactionary conjecture about why people are using YouTube without any evidence to back it up.

This. If everyone in the tech industry adopted a "X works and many people use it, so we shouldn't try to make Y work" then you can say goodbye to progress. Specifically, some of us don't want the internet to serve as an interactive billboard, where our interactions with billboards are monitored. 99% of users probably don't care but being part of the next generation of software engineers I want to build things that in…

Conversely, if we aren't sufficiently critical of new projects, we risk wasting incredible sums of money on things that never could have worked.

Our industry has a long history of that kind of waste. Exhibit A is the dot-com bubble, but there are plenty of modern failures too. If we want to maximize innovation, we cannot be too suspicious of novelty, but we also can't let it blind us.

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

#208

Post by iknowstuff » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 12:05 AM UTC

codefined wrote: post #103

jasode wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the laws of physics (speed of light) makes a decentralized discovery service slower which means it's extremely inconvenient for typical users. For example, go to youtube.com and see how fast it loads the main landing page with 20+ suggested video thumbnails. On my computer, it loads in 1136 milliseconds. The same centralized -system's speed advantage happens for video search results such as "3d printing".[1]…

I always considered my favourite system to be one where the discovery system was centralized, but the actual content itself and the ability to produce it was decentralized. So, for instance, you'd have "PeerTube" as a protocol for uploading your videos to be discovered, then you'd use something like "Youtube" to view videos from multiple peers. This prevents a massive amount of lockin as happens with the current serv…

Torrent works exactly like this, doesn't it? All it needs is WebTorrent to become more popular so you can stream videos directly from the browser.

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

#209

Post by wpietri » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 12:07 AM UTC

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?

I definitely was. It's much easier to appear smart when being critical than when being positive.

One of the things that helped me was the notion of Appreciative Inquiry. Basically that when you are dealing with new things, you first look for the good points that you can amplify, not bad points to beat on.

That said, I think coding is a powerful push back toward the negative. Code breaks so easily that we're thoroughly trained to be on the lookout for the next failure point.

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

#210

Post by api » Sat, Jul 21, 2018, 12:10 AM UTC

yroc92 wrote: post #135

jordigh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really grinding when the top comments of any sort of alternative thing to come out are always so negative. Long list of reasons why this will never work out. It's easy to be negative. It's more difficult but more fun to be inventive and industrious. To the peertube devs: don't let negative comments like this grind you down. Peertube has some great ideas and I think it can succeed.

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

The most popular videos on YouTube and the most clicked articles on the web are generally those that complain, troll, mock, criticize, or fear-monger. Humans seem to be biased toward paying attention to criticism and negativity. Maybe it has evolutionary roots. If you ignore good hunting advice you'll probably live, but if you ignore the person telling you there's a mountain lion in that bush you're cat food. The paranoid probably passed on their genes a bit more often than the optimistic.

You also see it in the arts. Dark edgy music is deep and profound while happy dancey music is trite and stupid... in spite of the fact that dark edgy music is often no more musically interesting or innovative than the happy dancey stuff.