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YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

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Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#131

Post by gwd »

Lich wrote: post #52
RugnirViking wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things. They might try to make something look nice and be slick for the end user, but they won't usually hire people or use big studios. This contributed to a culture where the very best people in the fi…

Another negative aspect of compensation I’ve thought about is that it could cause content creators, particularly political and religious/non-religious ones, from seriously exploring opposing views. Why make videos exploring opposing views when you are making thousands of dollars by giving your audience what it wants? It may increase bias, and limit the self development of not only the creator, but audience as well.

> Another negative aspect of compensation I’ve thought about is that it could cause content creators, particularly political and religious/non-religious ones, from seriously exploring opposing views.

Almost worse, it puts up a barrier to resistance to me even reading opposing views. When I see an anti-Christian comment on HN or Slashdot, I have no problem reading it and potentially responding to it. But if I see an anti-Christian article on Medium, I'm a bit reluctant to click on it, because 1) that person may get money as a result, and 2) it may promote that article to more people, potentially leading to even more articles on a similar vein being written. I assume the situation is the same for lots of ideological positions -- Conservatives avoiding reading Liberal think-pieces, etc.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#132

Post by tjpnz »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #25

Last time this came up there was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion all the penetration testers move to pornhub.

It's not as crazy an idea as it may sound and there's supposedly a lot of gun related stuff there right now.

I'm surprised as to why PornHub haven't already launched a re-skin for regular content. They've clearly got the infrastructure and knowhow to make it work.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#133

Post by jefftk »

pmlnr wrote: post #125
RugnirViking wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things. They might try to make something look nice and be slick for the end user, but they won't usually hire people or use big studios. This contributed to a culture where the very best people in the fi…

> Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things. It's the other way around. When there is no compensation, people do stuff for fun, out of love, and not for optimisation, ROI, DAU/MAU, etc. "Back in the days" - pre-dot-com - the website was p…

My experience is people generally do different things when it's out of interest. More going deep on whatever their passion is, less of everything else. So you get ugly sites with interesting essays, or beautiful data visualization but no text for search engines to use to know to send people to the page. I really liked https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/the-costs-of-r... on this.

I also think (though don't have the numbers) that there are many more hobby sites now than there were in, say, 1995, because the whole web is so much bigger. They're just far smaller portion of what you're likely to encounter.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#134

Post by OJFord »

drdeadringer wrote: post #24
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #7

This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…

> Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things True Honest Question. What were these sights? I was a teenage in the 1990s. I seriously and literally do not know and now I want to.

You (and others in this thread) might be taking GP's 'before YouTube' a bit literally - it existed for a long time before it was in the dominant hyper-popular position (or even Google/Alphabet owned as) it is today.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#135

Post by dsfyu404ed »

tjpnz wrote: post #132
IIAOPSW wrote: post #25

Last time this came up there was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion all the penetration testers move to pornhub.

It's not as crazy an idea as it may sound and there's supposedly a lot of gun related stuff there right now. I'm surprised as to why PornHub haven't already launched a re-skin for regular content. They've clearly got the infrastructure and knowhow to make it work.

>I'm surprised as to why PornHub haven't already launched a re-skin for regular content. They've clearly got the infrastructure and knowhow to make it work.

It's outside their business model so they're not sure they can do a good job and make a good enough profit to make it worthwhile. It's the same reason your local heavy earth-moving contractors don't offer equipment rental and machine moving services even though those things use the same infrastructure (maintenance facilities and an army of low boy trailers) and workflows (dumping machines off at various addresses and picking them back up when the job is done) they already have.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#136

Post by dredmorbius »

pmlnr wrote: post #126
dredmorbius wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but having been there at the time, and looking at technical requirments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21256674 ), I'm calling bogus. Online downloadable audio was barely tractable in 1999 or earlier, let alone streaming video. What was this golden age, what were the sites, and what was the usage? Streaming video is almost wholly 2004 and later, generally years later.

Text. With pictures. You know, like books. Which you can actually use while, say, fixing something, unlike a video which you need to pause, rewind, watch again, while balancing pieces of a torn down laptop on your hands.

I'm aware there was text. And some pictures. Sometimes of pretty girls.

But the assertion I'm addressing was a golden age of online video specifically.

(I also typically prefer text to video, though good, well-produced, audience-respecting video and audio can be of value.)

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#137

Post by jefftk »

r_singh wrote: post #102
r_singh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get this argument about having millions of users reporting stuff. But just have a look at Facebook and Google's balance sheet, and the figures that other non profitable monopolies raise. However big the support team needs to be should be their problem, or rather part of their plan. And if they don't have enough money for a big enough team (or just don't prioritise support enough), then honestly, I don't think it's…

Update: 10% of 1B is 100M. 100M tickets in how much time? Let's say a year. And it takes on average 5 minutes to respond to 1. That is 500M minutes. So you need a team of ~1500 people to respond to 100M tickets in a year. Not that bad eh.

500M minutes is 8.3M hr. Full-time is 2080hr/y, so ~4,000 people.

Separately, your time estimates are much too low.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#138

Post by simonh »

wazoox wrote: post #116
simonh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sentiment mentioned often, but all the things we could do back in the day are not only still possible, they are actually still being done by people out there. What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though. Fortunately, in my experience…

> That's on us though. I'd like people to stop harping on "individual responsibility". It's not "on us". We are social monkeys, we are not perfectly rational autonomous individuals. Monopolies are emerging from collective behaviour that can't be subsumed into the simple aggregation of random personal choices.

Fair enough, but it's not really on Youtube that it's users are all a bunch of social monkeys that are too lazy to use other services alongside it, either.

Ook!

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#139

Post by [deleted] »

jefftk wrote: post #133
pmlnr wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things. It's the other way around. When there is no compensation, people do stuff for fun, out of love, and not for optimisation, ROI, DAU/MAU, etc. "Back in the days" - pre-dot-com - the website was p…

My experience is people generally do different things when it's out of interest. More going deep on whatever their passion is, less of everything else. So you get ugly sites with interesting essays, or beautiful data visualization but no text for search engines to use to know to send people to the page. I really liked https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/the-costs-of-r... on this. I also think (though don't…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#140

Post by edoo »

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #7

This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…

I see in this scenario Google as more of a natural monopoly. They really only got into censoring recently. The more people they alienate the bigger the opportunities for competition. A natural monopoly has the ability to fail itself out of the market.
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