YouTube suspends account for linking to a PhD research on WPA2 vulnerability

VW, one of the two largest auto makers, makes around 300€ profit per vehicle sale (excluding luxury brands). For some models it's even less than 100€. You can calculate around 1% profit for a car sale, often less.

The actual money is in leasing and financing, which is why almost all automakers own a bank.

It's the discovery piece that cannot be replicated. If hosting happened outside moderation can move to automatic with a user/ml flag with manual approve process that follows.

Maybe we could have the uploader host their own content, and do away with hosting platforms and their gatekeeping altogether?

I can see little reason today that well-established technologies and individual hosting arrangements couldn't offer similar value to whatever YouTube or some other centralised hosting service offers.

We are talking about the World Wide Web. Linking to other people's content is literally the central feature of the real platform here. For a long time, we did just fine with community-operated facilities and everyone linking to other sources of interesting content to help discoverability. We still do, really, but now the links and other community engagement tend to be locked up in places like different YouTube tabs for each channel, not the sidebar of someone's personal website. Of course, these days we also have entire sites (HN among them) built around sharing links to content that might be interesting to like-minded people. So I don't buy the usual arguments about centralised content hosting being the only way interesting content can gain exposure.

Numerous individual content creators make demos or livestream games or present tutorials with decent-to-excellent presentation values. They often use specialist software to do it. I therefore don't buy arguments about the technical difficulty of self-hosting either. There could be hosting packages offered by ISPs or other hosting services on a common carrier basis if individuals didn't want to set up all the infrastructure themselves, and those who were good/popular enough to make it more of a regular income would still have the ability to do so but now on their own terms.

Even at today's prices, you could serve tens of thousands of videos directly for less than a lot of people are paying for their ISP or mobile/cell phone plan each month. And of course, we know lots about how to efficiently serve interesting content via P2P networks that could be a big amplifier for popular content producers who were happy to share without wanting to monetise or otherwise collect large numbers of viewers on their own site for some reason. The available capacity and prices are surely only going to improve as the technology improves. So that's cost taken care of in most or all cases too.

So, if individuals hosting their own content is technically and economically feasible, and if individual creators and community groups facilitating content discovery is a viable culture along with all the other interactions they tend to have anyway, I struggle to see why the likes of YouTube are so valuable or irreplaceable in our society today. Obviously if YT disappeared overnight there would be a gap tomorrow, but we've been adapting and filling gaps and finding better ways to do things on the Internet since some time in the last millennium, and I see no reason to think we wouldn't do so again.