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Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

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Re: Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

#151

This article is a little on the surface level, but it's true. People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air. Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole t…

It's just incredibly hard to compete with Youtube. In a way that's Google's greatest achievement: they convinced everybody that they're entitled to host and stream 4K videos forever not only for free, but the creators get a share of the ad revenue despite fronting none of the hosting costs. It's an incredibly good deal. The amount of infrastructure and human resources required to merely keep a system like Youtube running is mind boggling.

That makes people reasonably annoyed when Youtube decides to semi-arbitrarily pull the plug on a channel, but it also means that competition is very hard. If a competitor decides to start charging for hosting or streaming, they're doomed to be niche.

Re: Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

#152
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yea? Or must mean those “alt right hosts”. No, I mean hosts like Nearly Free Speech which has been operating since 2002. I've seen this one posted many times on HN and it seems great. https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ I understand what you mean though. Since they are usually smaller hosts, they aren't used by big name companies and eventually acquire a reputation for hosting only offensive content. > one day around…

>> one day around the election GoDaddy made a decision to cancel them > Huh. How could they just do that? It eventually went back up right? > Do you have more examples? The first big deplatforming case was probably Cloudflare pulling The Daily Stormer. This is what Cloudflare CEO said: > "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power." Seems…

Wow that's extremely fucked up. He's right, nobody should have that power. If they do have that power, we should take it away from them.

Re: Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

#153
post #70

I follow CGP Grey’s stuff and it’s been interesting and instructive to see how he diversified. * His Youtube channel is his main platform * However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there * He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex * The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts * He had a second podcast, hello internet, curre…

CGP Grey is strange, so to say. He effectively abandoned Hello Internet. They once mentioned that they have 900K subs. Grey fully controlled HI, and it was way more popular than Cortex. If he wants to diversify so much abandoning project like this just doesn’t make sense.

Also he has no basic decency to announce cancelation and left Tims hanging, for many of whom it was the podcast.

Re: Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

#154
post #132

This article is a little on the surface level, but it's true. People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air. Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole t…

There needs to be "content as a protocol" in the same way email is. If I don't like one email provider, I can always move to a different provider without losing access to all the user's that remain there. If I could make a Facebook post and have it's content propagate to other providers, websites would act more like UI filters rather than gatekeepers.

That content protocol is called HTTP and the service discovery protocol is called DNS. I know that it's a bit cliche to say that these days, but acquiring a domain name (either directly from a TLD registrar or indirectly through e.g. a DynDNS provider) and pointing it at a webhost is what allows content publishers to "mint" their very own globally unique URLs. Any consumers that are equipped with a suitable user agent can then plug that URL into their browser and view that publisher's content.

Now let's be serious, there are numerous barriers that stand in the way of "normal" users that want to escape the evil platforms. Why not direct our ire at the real problem: Why Johnny Still Can't Host a Website!

And if we fix that, perhaps we can move on to Why Johnny Can't Get Any Visitors (Because Google Won't Index It) and Why Johnny's Visitors Don't Receive His Updates (Because Google and Mozilla Killed RSS).

Re: Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

#155

Why wouldn't you? It's becoming increasingly clear that you cannot trust your web presence (and by extension, your business) to one or two social media companies ... though that should have been obvious in hindsight. And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email.

> And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email.

My take is this: whenever I see a startup being described as "disrupting" some market, I interpret it in the other sense of the word: disruption, as in the effect of a disruptor, a fictional energy weapon used predominantly by the main villains of Star Trek franchise, Klingons and Romulans.

Re: Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there was some kind of really simple syndication so I didn’t have to visit 40 different sites to check if my favorite video creators have released anything new.

Fun fact for those who watch videos by creators who haven't moved off of YouTube yet: YouTube channels expose RSS feeds of uploads and you can watch videos directly without ads via youtube-dl automatically using MPV[1]. [1] https://mpv.io/installation/

Youtube will restrict your IP if you do this enough. I can't say I lost too much value when it happened, but it's been obnoxious having to go to the main site on my mobile to answer a battery of captchas every time I want to watch a video.

Re: Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have never seen somebody cancelled for an opinion similar to "Transgender women have an inherent advantage in women's sports due to the biological advantage of their body producing testosterone." So should a human born as a woman who happens to naturally have higher testosterone than is typical in other women, be excluded from women's sport? Of course not. > "Transgender women should not be in women's sports beca…

I guess with that specific statement it would depend on context. In a civil discussion it would be fine, however if you posted it on a trans athletes forum it would be offensive. You have sought out someone who would likely be offended in order to make that statement. As part of a debate etc it is a perfectly fine statement to debate/discuss.

These are thorny issues, and for the record I do want everyone to live a happy and productive life as free from injustice as possible. But from my perspective the accusations of racism, transphobia, and sexism are thrown around way too loosely today, without the attention to context that you recommend. Even when the context is inappropriate and the language is inflammatory, it may just be socially inept rather than hate filled malice.

Re: Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen somebody cancelled for an opinion similar to "Transgender women have an inherent advantage in women's sports due to the biological advantage of their body producing testosterone." I have seen people disagree with this opinion, but never call it immoral or transphobic. What I _have_ seen people get (correctly) called a transphobe for is the opinion "Transgender women should not be in women's sports b…

> I have never seen somebody cancelled for an opinion similar to "Transgender women have an inherent advantage in women's sports due to the biological advantage of their body producing testosterone." So should a human born as a woman who happens to naturally have higher testosterone than is typical in other women, be excluded from women's sport? Of course not. > "Transgender women should not be in women's sports beca…

> Really? That's offensive?

Yes, intentionally misgendering a trans person is offensive and transphobic???

> The reason they have higher testosterone is because they are men.

This is needlessyly pedantic. My comment doesn't include the detail of _why_ they have increased testortorone because it is obvious.

Really, what I meant to express was something like "because their biological sex is male" but writing that is awkward and the most obvious/common interpretation of "because they are men" is transphobic.

Re: Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

#159
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how is that different on any other platform?

Youtube could easily just obliterate a channel today, for some video posted 10 years ago if they deem it bad enough. Doubt if you had your own platform you'd delete yourself for something cringe you said 10 years ago

The general "danger" of old videos comes more from people digging up what was said and causing a shitstorm because of it, rather than Youtube themselves going out of their way to delete channels because of old videos. If people want to dig through your old videos and want to cause a shitstorm, self-hosting isn't going to protect you.

Re: Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have never seen somebody cancelled for an opinion similar to "Transgender women have an inherent advantage in women's sports due to the biological advantage of their body producing testosterone." So should a human born as a woman who happens to naturally have higher testosterone than is typical in other women, be excluded from women's sport? Of course not. > "Transgender women should not be in women's sports beca…

> Really? That's offensive? Yes, intentionally misgendering a trans person is offensive and transphobic??? > The reason they have higher testosterone is because they are men. This is needlessyly pedantic. My comment doesn't include the detail of _why_ they have increased testortorone because it is obvious. Really, what I meant to express was something like "because their biological sex is male" but writing that is aw…

> "because their biological sex is male" but writing that is awkward and the most obvious/common interpretation of "because they are men" is transphobic.

This is needlessyly pedantic.

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