Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding

quariety.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 305 posts

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

#251

Post by wpietri »

charlchi wrote: post #220
wpietri wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 blinder…

This is a crowdfunding announcement, so I think asking whether the money will be well-used is not unreasonable. And I think it's also reasonable to point out how much money our field wastes on new things. This may be free software, but it's still software, and it's directly competing with one of the world's largest tech companies.

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

#252

Post by MR4D »

marcusf wrote: post #51
MR4D wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're confuning centralization with a walled garden. Because if what you said were true, then why would Disney be buying Hulu? The larger of a content creator I am, the more I want to control distribution. Having my content on a site with someone else's rules sucks, because I am at their mercy. For example, with Disney owning Hulu, they can tell Google to go F-off, and never worry about their content being a…

Huge difference between a brand likey Disney able to pull off a streaming service and smaller producers. Smaller producers need demand, and for video demand = youtube.

I don’t think that right.

For instance, let’s say I’m a comedian and have a thousand loyal followers. Why couldn’t I just pay $20/month for a PeerTube hosting service with my own brand. Then I can just tweet out the links.

Why would I need YouTube?

As another example, let’s say I’m a white supremacist, and I have a hundred followers. I can email a link out to them and never worry about censorship by YouTube.

So demand can be small, and it still works. In fact, since I now have more control over the experience, it can be much more tailored than youtube.

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

#253

Post by karmakaze »

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…

These centralized services just happen to be the current iteration. There will be others. It's hard to do make decentralized software well and up to now hasn't been the main thing so we have centralized software.

Before TCP/IP there were many competing networking 'standards' put out by various vendors, some were local nets but others also did routing, but TCP/IP has superceded them and many application protocols are created just for the purpose of interoperability and decentralization.

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

#254

Post by anticensor »

mikec3010 wrote: post #87
tehduder9 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>youtube is great for building an audience, but not nessesarily good for keeping it. I wouldn't make that youtube's fault. People just grow out of content or like other content. And the overzealous community guidelines and copyright strikes are a result of hundreds of lawsuits against youtube by the movie industry, and a need to appeal to advertisers for their platform. Youtube barely makes any real income, just bare…

The hypocrisy will be hilarious when people start ripping yt vids and putting them on pt, given how yt was born off pirated content and hid behind "safe harbor" laws to build a browsable catalog. The first clip that came from yt will be met with scathing rebuke from Google's legal team.

You do not assign your copyright to Google in order to publish your video on YouTube. That will not hold water. Rather, you declare Google an irrevocable license to use and publish your video on their platform.

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

#255

Post by danShumway »

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…

> We have moved towards a world of centralized services because that's what people want.

No, nobody cares about centralization. Centralization is a mechanism that provides some of the values people do care about; convenience, indexing, free hosting, simple interfaces.

But it's a mistake to conflate centralization with the root cause that makes many of these services fail. If centralization was actually what people cared about, Google Plus would have beaten Facebook. After all, it's way more centralized than Facebook is. But it's not more convenient, better indexed, or simpler.

It's also a mistake to look at the list of failed efforts and say, "well, decentralized just doesn't work." Bear in mind that the list of failed centralized social networks is actually a great deal longer, and the chance of any one of them succeeding is just about as grim. The reality is that most social networks fail, period.

There are some compelling reasons why from an architectural standpoint centralization might make it easier to succeed, but the average person on the street can't even tell you what these words mean. They don't care.

And if a decentralized service comes around that's more convenient than the alternatives, they'll switch. Because they don't care.

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

#257

Post by danShumway »

anticensor wrote: post #254
mikec3010 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hypocrisy will be hilarious when people start ripping yt vids and putting them on pt, given how yt was born off pirated content and hid behind "safe harbor" laws to build a browsable catalog. The first clip that came from yt will be met with scathing rebuke from Google's legal team.

You do not assign your copyright to Google in order to publish your video on YouTube. That will not hold water. Rather, you declare Google an irrevocable license to use and publish your video on their platform.

I think what GP was getting at is that people will rip and re-host other people's videos.

That already happens plenty on Youtube itself, so I don't think it's crazy to assume that you'll start to see PeerTube instances that take someone else's channel and just mirror it.

Now, is that PeerTube's problem? Not really, it's between the copyright holder and the uploader. Is YouTube going to try and raise a fuss? I kind of doubt it, the press would have a field day pointing out the hypocrisy.

But the laissez faire attitude of content creators (and Youtube as a platform in general) might ironically make it attractive to hosts who want to fill up their instances with content quickly.

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

#258

Post by danShumway »

toasterlovin wrote: post #225
hansjorg wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the feed is always (in my experience) available as a link from a web page (hence decentralized and not dependent on iTunes).

Most people don’t know how to go to a podcast’s website, copy the link to the RSS feed, and then paste it into their podcast app. They just search for the podcast in their podcast app. So, if you produce a podcast, you need to be in the major podcast directories to get traction. Thus, in effect, podcasts are highly centralized.

This feels like moving the goalpost to me. If PeerTube succeeded, but most of its videos were being linked and shared on Facebook and Reddit, would you call it centralized?

It's fairly common for me to see people share direct links to a podcast's website if they want to share a specific episode. And even from the point of view where iTunes is a centralized indexer, they're still very clearly pointing at a decentralized service.

The biggest podcast aggregation service in the industry decided to rely on a decentralized model rather than hosting files themselves. That doesn't count for anything?

The fact that every single podcast app is using a distributed protocol (RSS), including Apple, doesn't count for anything?

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

#259

Post by Endy »

contravariant wrote: post #132
onli wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're using my machine and my bandwidth to host or transfer your video to another person, you're going to pay me for it That's a bit ridiculous. No one is ever gonna pay you for that. You get something for free, the video you want to watch, and the deal here is that your unused upload bandwidth gets used to help transfer it to others. It's a social contract thing, and thinking you might get a better deal magica…

I think you should be able to limit the upload rate though, although maybe the browser should be responsible for that.

Any time you allow the browser to do something without user input, you take away more user control and put it in the hands of a browser developer. That's a mistake.

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

#260

Post by hobofan »

smolder wrote: post #218
yroc92 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

What part of that is valuable feedback that the PeerTube team could act upon in any other way than to say "Fuck it, this person on HN said that our project won't work out. Let's all pack up and go home."?
Post reply on HN