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Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

jeffgeerling.com

411–420 of 803 posts

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

#411

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.

You don't even need HTML. Encoded as an mp4 with ffmpeg -movflags +faststart and you now have a mp4 that almost all browsers can use the seek bar within without any sort of javascript or HTML. Streaming without all the complexity of 'streaming'. Just a simple static .mp4 file on a webserver.

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

#412

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

I share the vast majority of my uploaded videos with friends and peers on IRC by directly giving them the link, so no problem.

Video hosting should not be tied to profit motives. If that's your thing, if your job is making videos to sell things or display ads, then yes, you're gonna need Alphabet's Google's Youtube or some similar megacorp to handle money transfers and for network effect.

If you're like 99% of the rest of us on Earth then a static .mp4 file with -movflags +faststart is great and satisfies all needs.

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. I reject your slippery slope fallacy. The line must always be drawn somewhere, should YouTube allow neonazi content because any censorship leads to more censorship? Of course not.

[flagged]

> If it is not against the law, it should be up.

Does this mean it would be illegal for private platforms to take down legal content? All platforms or only those that are defacto public spaces?

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, man. COVID deaths per capita were highest in countries that had very active vaccine skepticism. While this is not causation establishment, it is super highly correlative: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... gives good estimates of COVID death impact using a very reasonable methodology. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.27.22271579v... illustrates that it's hard to na…

Sure, you can absolutely claim correlation there and say something like "information making people hesitant to get the vaccine may have increased risk of death." That's wildly different than claiming that misinformation killed people. Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate. The populations aren't controlled at all, here you are assuming the only meaningful difference in the populations are vacci…

> the data itself isn't reliable due to differences in reporting and testing

That is why The Economist used excess-death estimates, skipping right over the whole "death caused by COVID" vs. "death caused by comorbidity" debate. Since COVID was arguably the only worldwide difference between 2019 and the following years, a presumption that the very-statistically-significant excess deaths were largely due to COVID was thus reasonable.

Where even raw death reporting was suspect, they used reasonable estimates. They made their data and analysis public, you can analyze it yourself and counterargue, or have an AI do it these days. Hey, maybe that would be a good exercise!

> Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate

It compares countries with their own prior years first AND THEN to each other, not countries directly to other countries. This should factor anything systematic at a per-country level, out, such as average health.

Hey, I'm not saying it's flawless (does that even exist?), I was just impressed by their work here back when I last looked at this. I am generally a skeptic and enjoy critical thinking, so I do not attribute this lightly.

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

#416
post #355

These platforms are still relatively young. We need to roll the clocks foward another 10-20 years to truly understand what level of control they will be able to exert on public knowledge and speech, either at the behest of their investors or through government pressure. I wonder whether one solution is for everyone to own a "personal cloud computer" (a relatively cheap VM) on which they install software much like the…

You're skipping over the tradeoffs: 1. YT provides a free service with massive audience 2. you would have to pay for the cloud hosting and find your own audience.

Point 1 is a plain lie. Point 2 is a misunderstanding of how markets work.

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

#417
Post your videos on Rumble. Lack of competition for YouTube causes a them to have power and a monopoly. Competition removes this power. Rumble has gone publicly traded. They have become a peer to YouTube. Smaller. Their ads keep them profitable for the long-term, so accept their ads being not quite as smooth as YouTube as the cost of preventing being censored. Or from YouTube being able to have power of what is allowed to be communicated.

Keep creating your videos. Keep supporting these projects. We need them.

I'm finding historically critical videos disappear from the internet. There was one interview with Jack Dorsey that he was threatened that if he didn't allow censorship rollout over twitter, that he felt (or was told?) they would remove twitter from the mobile app stores and kill it.

Do you want to see that interview? It has been scrubbed off of the internet. This happens with many key videos in history. We need a FileCoin IPFS way to use open source blockchain way to keep these videos forever. Even beyond the lifetime of any author, owner or company.

LibreELEC and JellyFin can be the open source part of making them easy to retrieve and watch. Open source for freedom. Blockchain for publishing freedom. Controlling information is their weapon. Protecting freedom for information spread keeps all other freedoms protected (and defendable).

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Now a counterpoint: we banned government censorship for a good reason(or tried to). Why would a private 3rd party be allowed to do so? especially if government can heavily incentivize the 3rd party(using either stick and/or carrot) to be basically outsourced censorship office? Why do we give power of censorship to private entities that can shape public opinion in a way that brings them the most profit? you can fix fo…

> you can fix former issue by education and culture shift - censorship is just a bandaid.

Bandaid is a surprisingly apt similie. It'd be nice to just be healed and healthy, but in the meantime we do have to stop the bleeding.

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

The thing to understand is your last paragraph: everything big ads does is unsurprisingly focused toward making people into worse versions of themselves. You wouldn't let kids go to a casino or porn site for educational material. Don't let them use youtube either. It could be that someone happened to post educational videos to the porn site. If so you'd might as well download them while you have the chance, but don't…

There's extensions to remove or hide recommendations. Problem solved.

YouTube has too much information to just ignore for education. It's the most efficient method of learning for many topics and for many people.

It's closer to PBS than a porn site imo. (The idea of a porn site with YouTube's puritan guidelines sounds pretty funny.)

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech. But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it. A lot of breakdown in society lately is clearly coming from the fact that some people/companies have…

The solution would be to revoke section 203 from any platform which acts as a digital public square if they do moderation beyond removing illegal content. Ofc they would try there best to be excluded to have there cake and eat it too.

The entire point of section 230 is to allow platforms to remove non-illegal content [1].

Basically there were two lawsuits about platforms showing content. One of the platfroms tried to curate content to create a family-friendly environment. The second platform just didn't take anything down. The first platform lost their lawsuit while the second won their lawsuit. Congress wants to allow platforms to create family friend environment online so section 230 was written.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#

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