At this point, Google is pretty much the fae folk of tech: immensely powerful beings with inscrutable motives and mercurial dispositions, inclined to rain ruin on your head at the slightest provocation or even just on a whim. Best to leave a saucer of milk out for them at night, and studiously avoid the areas they control if you value your anything.
Headcanon accepted. The fae are notoriously afraid of iron, and harmed by merely touching it. What's the equivalent for Google?
YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007
171–180 of 233 posts
Re: YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007
#172This is truly wrong. Far from censorship, this is a field test of memory-holing. Deleting a part of the history of the Internet (yes, this silly little nonsense video is now part of Modern Culture) is a Rubicon I'm shocked YouTube has the temerity to cross. I can't wait to see what more conventional history they'll delete. For now, note the conscious blowing-off, on YouTube's part, of all the re-uploads. Will they al…
Thank you for introducing me to the word temerity.
Clearly they are relying upon an immature AI dragnet to classify and kill categories of objectionable material. Thankfully they have an appeals process, but it seems to me that automated takedowns are blatantly wrong. Instead they ought to use that data to generate a queue for humans to review and flag, where more popular videos have more reviewers requiring consensus. No matter, it’s clear we’ve allowed a commercial platform to outgrow its structural integrity, and no algorithm can do a thing but delay its collapse under its own weight.
Re: YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007
#173If only Hacker News crowd noticed when thousands of videos with interviews, medical lectures, news footage and even congressional testimonies were removed for political reasons within the last couple years.
You say that even though there is a thread on the homepage about big tech companies censoring things about COVID almost literally every day? Here's the thread for today, currently at #2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693060
YouTube has been seriously ramping up its censorship for at least couple of years and it goes way beyond anti-vaccine videos. Comments on HN related to this subject routinely display ignorance of the issue or deny it outright. Moreover, a thread discussing some WaPo article that white-washes the whole thing as reasonable and scope-limited fight against disinformation is hardly proof that HN crowd started to take censorship seriously. There is a bit more awareness recently, but it's nowhere near what I would naively expect from a website full of tech-savvy people.
Re: YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007
#174I kind of get it. Punching someone outside a boxing ring is pretty much always a bad move. A funny video where the funny part seems to be an unsuspecting person getting punched may "encourage violence". (I don't feel this way, but I could understand the reasoning.) The cat is out of the bag on this one though. So much so, that I'd argue the video now has cultural and historical significance that justifies its wanton…
The idea that displaying {bad thing} inherently encourages {bad thing} is a dangerous idea imo, and one that comes up time and time again.
It seems self-evident that normalizing a behavior helps to propagate it. It's obviously not the sole driver of a behavior, but trends grow the more they're displayed / normalized, no?
For example, many people jaywalk because they see people doing it all the time without consequences.
Re: YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007
#175This isn't a great specific example (it's "just" a meme and not even a particularly culturally significant one in the grand scheme of things), but in general this is why projects like youtube-dl are important. It might not be glamorous, and it might be a little stupid, but damnit this is our culture, for better or worse! And we should preserve it. Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store…
To be fair, tons of TV shows have been wiped from history as well. I learned recently that many game shows from the 60s and 70s are mostly gone, including early episodes of Wheel of Fortune!
Re: YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just history of the internet: Youtube takes down videos of war crimes. Destroying or covering up evidence of war crimes is, itself, a war crime. I'm surprised that Youtube isn't in hot water over that. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170812/01102937985/once-... https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/youtube-ai-deletes-war-cr...
They're deleting a digital copy of evidence of war crimes. It's not like you can prank someone into being a war criminal filling up their storage with war crime videos, so that they're forced to delete it.
If I leave a gun I used to kill someone at your house (and you're aware that it is a murder weapon), can you just destroy it without being an accessory?
Also, lol at Youtube getting filled with war crime videos. Youtube has plenty of space.
Re: YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007
#177This isn't a great specific example (it's "just" a meme and not even a particularly culturally significant one in the grand scheme of things), but in general this is why projects like youtube-dl are important. It might not be glamorous, and it might be a little stupid, but damnit this is our culture, for better or worse! And we should preserve it. Private companies seem to be the only ones with the resources to store…
As copyrighted material, it should be required that a copy be stored with library of Congress. It used to be that LoC submission was part of the deal with copyright, but somehow we forgot that and important history has already been lost.
In the US, copyright protection is automatically granted as soon as a protected work is fixed in a tangible form[1], so it's not possible for the Library of Congress to store all copyrighted material.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#mywork
Re: YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007
#178At this point, Google is pretty much the fae folk of tech: immensely powerful beings with inscrutable motives and mercurial dispositions, inclined to rain ruin on your head at the slightest provocation or even just on a whim. Best to leave a saucer of milk out for them at night, and studiously avoid the areas they control if you value your anything.
Headcanon accepted. The fae are notoriously afraid of iron, and harmed by merely touching it. What's the equivalent for Google?
Taxes.
Re: YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007
#179we need a distributed torrent-like distributed youtube yesterday (maybe peertube, maybe something else). a system which democratically shares the load and where people can vote which videos get the most bandwidth. this dumb technocratic stewardship is just getting annoying.
Re: YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more like $300+ dollars but there's another, more important point: hard drives fail. If we're talking about YouTube creators who spend hours producing culturally relevant content, we're going to want a much more robust backup strategy than simply throwing it on an external hard drive. Is it possible for a home user to build a storage system with high availability and off-site backups? Sure. Will it be affordable…
I like your thinking... but why hide a video on a private HDD? I was just thinking about this problem from a different angle. What if everyone, or at least a bunch of willing souls, ran the following script on their on pc's: 1. YouTube-dlc every video you ever watch automatically in the background and save to NEW_VID directory 2. make a checksum of every file that comes into NEW_VID 3. Check by using the checksum if…
What if the original content creator does not want their content shared in this manner? For every view not on YT, they lose metrics/money. It is not your decision to do this.
I'm just so not understanding how the concept of ownership is lost to others.