Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#371

Post by hshdhdhj4444 » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 11:52 AM UTC

w14 wrote: post #59

This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed. From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software." This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content. Here in the UK,…

Yeah because if it wasn’t for COVID YouTube, Facebook, et al would never have removed any content on their platform, unlike what they had been doing all this while…

There are so many issues with this.

Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities.

The real problem is twofold. 1. A few platforms hold monopoly positions. Who else can compete with Youtubr? And the reason isn’t necessarily because YouTube has a particularly better UI that keeps viewers and content creators on it. The reason YT has all the content creators is because it leverages Google’s ad monopoly and is able to help creators make money. A decently functioning anti-trust system would have split google ads from the rest of the company by now.

2. The devastation of the promise of the open internet. VCs have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to ensure we remain in walled gardens. Open source, self hosted, software on the other hand, where the benefits are shared and not concentrated in individual hands which can then spend billions to ensure that concentration, has suffered.

We need govt funding for open source and self hosted alternatives that are easy and safe for people to setup.

Combine the two and instead of YT getting to choose what videos are seen and not seen on the internet, major and small content creators would self host and be the decision makers, and still make similar amounts of money because they could plugin the openly available Google Adsense (kind of like how you can on blogs…).

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#372

Post by arp242 » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 11:52 AM UTC

w14 wrote: post #59

This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed. From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software." This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content. Here in the UK,…

You already need to remove content if you don't want to be overrun with endless gore and porn videos and that type of thing.

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#373

Post by voidUpdate » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 11:55 AM UTC

Helmut10001 wrote: post #89

A bit off topic, but still: Why do we need YouTube and other "Video Hosting" platforms at all? Simply upload your video (webm, or MP4) to any static Webserver and embed in HTML5. Plays nicely and no adds. I don't get why some sites still embed their movies stored on YouTube.

No discoverability. Youtube will recommend videos from its vast library and you can search them, but if I host all my content on voidupdate.co.uk, nobody will ever find it unless they look at my HN profile or something

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#374

Post by andrepd » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 11:55 AM UTC

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #204

w14 wrote: post #59

This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed. From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software." This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content. Here in the UK,…

> Many will say, this is good, children should be protected. The second part of that is true. But the way this is being done won't protect children in my opinion. It will result in many more topic areas falling below the censorship threshold. For example, YouTube currently has quite a lot of really good videos on harm reduction for drug users (and probably also a bunch that are not very good and/or directly misleadin…

Big tech censorship disgusts me. Everything is completely backwards from what it should be, and the sheer scale of those platforms (bigger than many countries by population or money) prevents individual people and even governments from exercising meaningful democratic oversight. So these platforms congregate hundreds of millions of people and whatever their CEOs and/or douche tech bros in SV decide is what becomes law.

Another example: videos about the holocaust or WWII atrocities. Every one of them demonetised and hidden from recommendations because it touches a horrifying topic. Harms the children? On the contrary, nothing more important in an age of global fascism waves than a lesson in how it went last time.

Meanwhile the whole platform is a cesspool of addictive brainrot, gambling ads, turbo-consumerist toy unboxing videos, etc. Things that are actually truly harmful to kids. These are not restricted, these are promoted!

War is peace etc etc. Good is evil and evil is great. Everything is backwards.

I hate this so much.

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#375

Post by sph » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 11:57 AM UTC

Gareth321 wrote: post #347

nicce wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a time when computing is so cheap that ads will be injected to the stream in such a way that it is impossible to remove them without real-time AI detector that indentifies the parts where ads are.

By then we will have real-time AI detectors to identify and remove ads. Begun, the LLM ad wars have.

Laws of thermodynamics suggest it will be easier for ad companies to find a way to spam you, than for you to bypass all of their ads. These real-time AI detectors cannot be very cheap to run/train.

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#376

Post by catlifeonmars » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 11:59 AM UTC

shakna wrote: post #210

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whats so special about anti covid desinfo rules? - The magnitude of content involved. - The fact that there exists a significant part of the society which is vocal about not endorsing these particular deletions. - The fact that many people became aware of the moderation ("censorship") that YouTube does and its power. - The fact that these COVID information videos (despite being perhaps wrong) formed important patte…

We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it safely is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb making materials is. Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service. Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform.

I think an administration that was happy to spread disinformation and cast doubt on vaccination had an outsized impact. YT ain’t the problem.

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#377

Post by Glittergorp » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 11:59 AM UTC

Latty wrote: post #217

didntcheck wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also live in the UK, and I in fact care about both of these. "Things are worse in America" is a tired and harmful cliché frequently used to deflect valid complaints about affairs here. Is the Trump administration really the low bar we're happy with? And I'm afraid we're long past the point of dismissing police and state overreach into freedom of expression as an "American/right-wing myth". The Julian Foulkes case […

I explicitly said that the UK wasn't free of issues: my pointing out the US was worse wasn't defending our own, simply making the point that some Americans tend to massively exaggerate the UK's issues while pretending the US doesn't have any. Average people from the UK are going to assume that any pushback on speech controls is nutters if the message comes with absurd exaggerations and outright lies. There are legiti…

[flagged]

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#378

Post by roenxi » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 12:02 PM UTC

shakna wrote: post #258

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid disinformation got people killed. If they trust bad medical advice on YouTube and die, it's their problem.

Its the problem of those they affect. "Infectious" is not self-contained to a singular individual. Its also a problem for the platform - who is now party to it happening. YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube. Their safest option, is to disallow it.

> Its the problem of those they affect. "Infectious" is not self-contained to a singular individual.

The stats I've seen suggest the vast majority of people have caught COVID between 2019 and now and pretty much all the preventative measures that worked reliably were things that either individuals could do themselves or that required targeting travellers specifically.

It isn't obvious that people trusting YouTube about COVID affects any third party. Who and how are they affecting?

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#379

Post by DoctorOW » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 12:04 PM UTC

efitz wrote: post #227

This is reason #597 why you just don’t allow platforms to censor. If a site wants to be a publisher, by all means, be a publisher, and don’t monetize user content. If a site wants other people to provide the content for free, then sorry- no censorship for you. “Community guidelines” etc are just censorship with a nicer name. “The algorithm” is just opaque censorship by making content undiscoverable. “un-content” in O…

You absolutely need some rules.

Let's say I have a video called "Why Efitz is a serial killer". Sure, you can block my video, and the topic entirely but that doesn't really solve your problem. You're not really worried about you seeing it, but others. I didn't aim the video at you, but rather at a group that already hates people with your race/gender/orientation/religion/etc. They're already vaguely talking about that group being a threat, and my videos claims aren't really scrutinized. As the theory gains traction around the internet, there's a growing amount of people who believe you need to be stopped at all costs.

You'll notice that even within the world of the hypothetical, you were picked by random chance. Since the "evidence" is just an immutable trait of yours, the only thing preventing an angry mob from forming outside your house is the difficulty in forming one.

On an unrelated note, publishers make money off of creative's works all the time. TV networks aren't platforms, but they make money off of the shows they broadcast all the same.

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#380

Post by Latty » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 12:04 PM UTC

Glittergorp wrote: post #369

Latty wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always funny seeing Americans who have clearly got their news about the UK from questionable sources telling us how actually we live in a dystopian open-air prison. In the US, you have people being literally grabbed off the street and sent to foreign prisons because of their speech with no due process, but the UK is the one close to a loss of freedom of speech because checks notes you can be convicted in a court…

Yes the American media overblow some of the issues for clicks. However you can be arrested for speech and it isn't just threats to violence. > In the US, you have people being literally grabbed off the street and sent to foreign prisons because of their speech with no due process. This isn't true. Many of these people were arrested because they had entered the country illegally and then sent to foreign prisons. You a…

> This isn't true. Many of these people were arrested because they had entered the country illegally and then sent to foreign prisons. You are falling for the same rage bait media (except it is left leaning).

You say it isn't true, but then say "many", so it is true, just not in all cases? Just because others are being deported alongside you doesn't change that you are being sent to a foreign prison for speech, and with no due process anyone can be targeted.

> It depends which area of the city. The University will typically safer than other areas of a city. Most of the people there are students and there is campus security.

What are you talking about? I lived in the city—I rented a house with friends from my second year as most do rather than staying in halls (which are in Oadby), I went out all the time all over the place, as did everyone else. I didn't spend three years locked inside the University.

> As someone that lived outside the UK for long periods of time and knew what the country was like before the 2000s. This isn't true.

Given you are willing to claim it's rage bait media to point out people being extrajudicially imprisoned abroad for speech the admin in the US doesn't like, I'm not going to trust your judgement of how good freedom of expression is.