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

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

#631

Post by carlosjobim » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

lurk2 wrote: post #627

carlosjobim wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> YouTube had plenty of content on it before the partner program was launched, and the content was better. It's not even comparable, not by a long shot. There is an immense amount of the highest quality video content you can find on YouTube, and the trend has only accelerated in the past few years. The ratio of good to bad content was better in the past, but that doesn't matter to the watcher. You subscribe to good s…

> There is an immense amount of the highest quality video content you can find on YouTube, and the trend has only accelerated in the past few years. This has not been my experience.

All right. Where can I find a larger library of high quality documentary, educational and instructional videos? I'm happy to pay for any service which can compare, just like I pay for YouTube Premium.

I tried Curiosity Stream and Nebula, both they couldn't compare.

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

#632

Post by esskay » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 6:21 PM UTC

nubinetwork wrote: post #351

neepi wrote: post #162

Yeah YouTube are getting shittier by the day. I keep getting banners telling me that ad blockers aren't allowed on YouTube. Stuff is pretty unwatchable now without them. Well fuck you I'll just download the videos with yt-dlp instead. If that stops working, I'll not bother.

What ads? I run the equivalent of pihole, and use a Samsung TV user agent on YouTube.com/tv and I never see ads, except for an occasional banner on the home tab.

Pihole isn't, and hasn't been able to block youtube ads for several years now, so if you aren't seeing ads its something else stopping them. Ads are served from the same dns address as videos, so a dns block is incredibly poor for youtube.

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

#633

Post by libraryatnight » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 6:25 PM UTC

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #13

I like the way Jeff signed off the article, pointing out that whilst the video has been pulled for (allegedly) promoting copyright infringement, Youtube, via Gemini, is (allegedly) slurping the content of Jeff's videos for the purposes of training their AI models. Seems ironic that their AI models are getting their detection of "Dangerous or Harmful Content" wrong. Maybe they just need to infringe more copyright in o…

The hoovering of data for ads went about the same. They consume my data and told me it was for better ads - the most visible result is that I get ads for things I've already bought and it conflates searches made only in the spirit of understanding with desire. On the bright-side it's produced quite a few good jokes. "I googled Breitbart and I'm getting ads for testerone treatment and viagra!" [my wife, 2014]

The least these creeps could do if they're going to treat us like this is deliver the experience they say the evil justifies.

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

#634

Post by overfeed » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 6:31 PM UTC

rolph wrote: post #610

p_j_w wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean what do you think happens? Do you think YouTube employs an army of people to watch and vet every single video that gets posted there?

no i think YT uses an AI to categorize and vet media based on standard rubrick, at a pace that exceeds a human collective by orders of magnitude. they know about it as soon as you post it.

The reason we're having this discussion this on this particular post because YT's AI is not infallible. There isn't a "standard rubric" - just automated correlation-based scoring derived from labeled training data. In this case, the AI learned that media piracy and self-hosted setups are correlated, but without actual judgement or a sense of causality. So YT doesn't truly "know" anything about the videos despite the AI augmentation.

I am curious what you consider to be a "standard rubric" - would that be based on the presence of keywords, or requires a deeper understanding of meaning to be able to differentiate the study/analysis of a topic versus promoting said subject.

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

#635

Post by thrance » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

SkyBelow wrote: post #492

thrance wrote: post #236

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.

It is a logical fallacy if used as part of an absolute claim, but it doesn't make it always wrong when used in general statements. Some slopes are slippery, we can look at history to see this. We can't claim all slopes are slippery, this doesn't mean that no slope is slippery. People aren't starting with axioms and then defining what absolutely will happen. People are discussing trends that appear to happen generally…

But that's the thing, when have hate speech laws led to repressive censorship, ever? It is a slippery slope, since there's no example to point to.

I'll link another comment of mine which expands on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200533

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

#636

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 6:45 PM UTC

myrmidon wrote: post #578

s1artibartfast wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are a lot of non-jews living within Israel's borders, and Israel (as a state) fails those people regularly (and, arguably, by design: it does not really want to protect interests of citizens that deviate from that jwewish national identity). I dont think this is well supported, or the source of conflict. The state seems to do a fairly good job of providing for citizens within boarders. Arab Israeli citizens ha…

Do you consider Westbank and/or Gaza a full state independent from Israel? Because to me, those are (somewhat) autonomous regions under Israels control-- so still responsible for people living there.

> Do you consider Westbank and/or Gaza a full state independent from Israel?

Whether or not a legally independent state exists with some or all of that territory within its borders, that area is effectively controlled by, and in large part (including all of the West Bank, though the exact administrative details differ in different locations in the WB) under military occupation by, Israel.

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

#637

Post by pr0zac » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 6:45 PM UTC

mardifoufs wrote: post #547

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

Mhmm, so would it be fine for a private platform not allowing say, Muslims on their website? Especially a platform as big as YouTube? I mean, it's essential to their rights to be able to do that, I guess? Like I understand your point, but this argument is usually not actually useful. Especially since it's usually not coming from "free speech absolutist" types, so it always comes off as a bit disingenuous. Unless you…

I don't think anyone would argue that would violate freedom of speech, however it would still be illegal as it would violate the civil rights act by discriminating based on religion. Theres more than one right involved in your hypothetical basically.

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

#638

Post by herbst » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

mardifoufs wrote: post #609

herbst wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright maybe. Talking about normal human things like sex or dangers definitely not

I don't think there's any law that restricts that type of speech in the US. YouTube is strict about those things because of advertisers, not because of any local law.

To my understanding COPPA is basically forcing all public media to be "child friendly"

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

#639

Post by swed420 » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 6:55 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #616

lurk2 wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without even the opportunity to make money, there's very little incentive for creators to spend time and effort making videos for these channels. YouTube had plenty of content on it before the partner program was launched, and the content was better. Some kinds of high-production value content like Wendover Productions or Tom Scott’s channel would become less common, but it would also remove the incentive for the f…

> YouTube had plenty of content on it before the partner program was launched, and the content was better. It's not even comparable, not by a long shot. There is an immense amount of the highest quality video content you can find on YouTube, and the trend has only accelerated in the past few years. The ratio of good to bad content was better in the past, but that doesn't matter to the watcher. You subscribe to good s…

> It's not even comparable, not by a long shot. There is an immense amount of the highest quality video content you can find on YouTube, and the trend has only accelerated in the past few years.

Both of you need to define what you mean by quality or you're going to keep talking past each other.

I agree with the person you responded to though: blind profit motive on platforms like youtube destroys quality and fills the firehose with brain melting content, even if it has professional lighting and is in 1080p.

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

#640

Post by error503 » Fri, Jun 06, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

PaulKeeble wrote: post #356

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.

The problem Youtube has is that it wants to make sure you can't skip the ad, so it has to signal in some way to its front end and app that this segment is an ad. That mechanism can and will be used to skip it with other clients. They can put the ads in band of the video stream like twitch does but if they are genuinely indistinguishable then they are also fast forward and skippable.

If they're injecting targeted ads in the stream, then the stream producer must be 'smart'. It's not much of a stretch for it to enforce playing out the segments at approximately realtime (or whatever speedup they want to allow), and to force the advert segments to play out before anything past them. Some sidechannel could be used to inform the client about what's going on and produce a sensible playhead position.

It seems inevitable that this is the end game, and I don't really see viable ways around it for realtime playback. For offline playback, yeah, presumably that sidechannel includes enough information to cut out the ads.