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PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

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

#211

Post by antt »

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…

>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.

I remember in the early days people in the entertainment industry dismissing youtube as a useless piracy website which could never deliver any worth while content by itself.

This was in 2006 when the only real use for youtube was to watch music videos because of the 10 minute video limit.

A lot can change in 10 years once the base technology is in place.

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

#212

Post by _jal »

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…

> YouTube's audience doesn't care about anything at decentralized

You're speaking for quite a huge number of people about their preferences vs. something that does not exist. "Content creators" didn't care about the internet, until they did. For that matter, apparently I'm not a member of the "audience", either.

Maybe you're right. I'd need to see some argument other than "because I think so", and look at these failures[1], though.

As far as bald assertions, here's mine:

Video consumers on average don't know what the word "federated" means in the context of networked services. Nor do they care. They don't know that email is federated. They know they hit "send", and their words pop up in grandma's inbox.

Users don't care about the tech under the hood. They want the payloff. If the economics of federated content networks work, they will take off once someone figures out the proper feature set, placement and happens into a bit of luck.

If not, we're doomed to sharecropping on FaceGoogazon and this whole conversation is pointless.

[1] I have here a list of social network failures that prove nobody wants to use social networks. QED.

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

#213

Post by api »

jstarfish wrote: post #172
boron1006 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible, but I think it's way, way less likely. The thing with YouTube alternatives is that they have to be at least as good as YouTube. Creators will only go where their audiences will go, so a site that doesn't offer a good user experience will immediately be off the table. Discoverability is way harder on decentralized systems, as is providing recommendations, stability, etc. Sometimes HN/reddit gets s…

> A few months ago someone posted a decentralized "facebook alternative", where you had to download a bunch of stuff, and connect with an FTP client just in order to make a post. That's the irony with decentralized services. Your entire architecture depends on people participating in it. When you make it as humanly cumbersome as possible for people to actually participate , you will not have any infrastructure. I've…

This is a pet peeve of mine.

I've been a developer and sysadmin since the early 90s. I know how to do almost any sysadmin-type task on every platform, even exotic embedded stuff and niche OSes.

These days if something takes me longer than 20 or 30 minutes to set up it goes in the trash. The only exception are things that are very very high value or that I simply must have to do my work. The need has to be burning for me to wade through a multi-step convoluted install/maintenance process. I also instantly discard "Rube Goldberg machine" style things (lots of disjointed dependencies) and messy haphazard snot ball things.

It's not because I can't deal with it. It's because I view it as a sign of bad design and bad implementation and a preview of what using and maintaining the system will be like. I also have outright contempt for what I view as the mentality behind it. I don't want to reward the people who create these things with my attention.

It's not really that hard to design systems that are at least somewhat easier to use. Getting to iOS or Facebook ease of use is hard, but getting to something that isn't painful isn't too bad. I really do think the main reason so many projects are so painful to install and use is that nerds actually have a fetish for it. There's still this obnoxious residue of "real men don't need UX" in computing. It's always been there... I remember the phrase "point and drool" for "point and click" back in the 90s implying that people who "need" GUIs were somehow dumber than those who did everything on a green screen with text.

This mentality desperately needs to die. It's a major factor holding back open source, open systems, and decentralized computing. Not only does it prevent regular people from using these systems but it also holds us (nerds) back by wasting our time.

I'd been becoming gradually annoyed with this mentality for years, but the thing that tipped me over the edge to outright contempt for it was switching to Apple around 2007. I was so much more productive. I realized that all that hard to use "real hacker" stuff was preventing me from doing better things. I was spending hours futzing around with already-solved problems like drivers and graphics resolutions and package woes instead of doing new things. With a computer that "just worked" I could spend almost 100% of my time innovating.

I still use Linux on the server side but I don't really love it anymore. If there were a cleaner easier to use alternative I'd switch as long as it didn't come with onerous costs or limitations. I've been checkout out FreeBSD. Alpine Linux is also nice since it strips out a lot of over-engineered trash.

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

#214

Post by feral »

themagician wrote: post #202
feral wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think your argument is mostly running into selection issues.

If its the middle ages and the only people who have learned to read are the very most educated part of the the population, then the average printed material is going to be intellectual. As the reading population expands over the next 1000 years, and the average book hence becomes less scholarly, you might naively conclude that everything is becoming 'lowest common denominator'. But overall, education standards + sophistication are rising hugely.

Sure, when only nerds could access the web, it was super sophisticated. And it had to get easier to go mainstream. But that doesn't mean the mainstream trend is to always dumb down forever, as you are arguing.

Apple mouse used to have only one button, but now look at the power of the multitouch UX almost everyone uses on their smartphone daily. Look at Gmail compared to Hotmail v1, Youtube compared to cable TV etc. Its easy to forget how powerful and sophisticated they are. People have learned to do really sophisticated things, create, communicate etc.

Sure, things dumbed down since only CS grad students used the Internet. But now that growth is slowing, I bet tastes are going to increase in sophistication again.

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

#215

Post by smolder »

wpietri wrote: post #207
charlchi wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasting incredible sums of money and effort and resources is our way of life. We distrust each other, we compete, we hoard, we waste.

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

#216

Post by murjinsee »

themagician wrote: post #202
feral wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean? Should refinement equal surface complexity?

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

#217

Post by gulperxcx »

wetpaws wrote: post #192
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just for the sake of curiousity, where do you store your mail?

lol, I think you got em!

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

#218

Post by smolder »

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.

And that doesn't mean it's not very valuable feedback.

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

#219

Post by api »

feral wrote: post #214
themagician wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think your argument is mostly running into selection issues. If its the middle ages and the only people who have learned to read are the very most educated part of the the population, then the average printed material is going to be intellectual. As the reading population expands over the next 1000 years, and the average book hence becomes less scholarly, you might naively conclude that everything is becoming 'lowe…

That's great. A simpler way of explaining it is that sophistication tends to follow a U-shaped curve: initial complexity for the early adopter set, simplification for mass adoption, then a different kind of sophistication as the masses become more educated and savvy in the use of the new system.

This only applies to surface complexity though. Under the hood the web today is many orders of magnitude more complex than the web in the 1990s.

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

#220

Post by charlchi »

wpietri wrote: post #207
charlchi wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Making the assumption that new technology or "innovation" needs to involve larges sums of money, especially if we're talking about software, seems strange. Which is what these types of developers want to move away from, talking about money, advertisements etc... Why have nerds and geeks spent vasts amounts of time writing software for free and why are we continuing to do it? For money? Maybe I need to take my blinders off but it doesn't seem like it. IMO so many people are missing the entire point here. We're not talking about making money here we're talking about changing money. This is fundamental. People need to take a step back.
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