261–270 of 341 posts
Not everyone has the time to create their own platform and curation network. That's the reason why people will keep using Medium. We need to stop acting like it's easy to build these types of platforms.
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The problem with YouTube specifically, is that while blog posts are easy to host on pretty much anything that has a CPU, self-hosting videos at scale is essentially impossible. So while Medium only added a marginal amount of convenience for your average blogger, YouTube straight up enabled the kind of content it hosts.
Is it really Impossible to selfhost videos? My 5€ webhosting has 250GB storage and unlimited traffic and every decent CMS has video capabilities. I think the hosting is not the problem. But the social features that YouTube provides are not easily replaced...
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Use DigitalOcean One-click instances, and it essentially makes it for you with all the necessary steps. It's super simple. I used that a while back and now run it on Docker on GCP since DO was a bit expensive.
Which costs money, and medium does not.
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Care to elaborate? I find this rather a sweeping statement and quite inconsistent with the level of activity and progress being made in the p2p sphere.
Fair comment. Unfortunately (for me!) I'm going to have to look like a bit of a wally. I can't elaborate on it and my stance has changed in the time since I posted (while looking up my former 'facts'). 1) Based on the GDPR comment. If you're really careful with how you do things the IP address could be argued to not be personal information (never let a user associate IP with any other PI - e.g. if a user can ban anot…
Current guidance (from the legal profession, not the HN peanut gallery) is that IPs are standalone personal data.
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If I use Medium, they might earn money with my content. My blog, on the other hand, costs me money. I do have a personal blog instead of Medium. But it's definitely not about the money.
Personally, depending on my mood, if I have the obnoxious "sign in" prompt that medium and others give I'll maybe just not read the blog at all 1 time in 4. I am sure I am not the only one that gets put off by that crap.
Instead they have "pardon the interruption" and "Let's make this official". The "pardon me" politeness doesn't fly, because they recognize it as an interruption. If they are aware, then the polite thing would be to not interrupt.
And let's not make this official.
I don't want to sign up to read an article. I don't want the clap. I don't want to vote. I don't want to share my data. I just want to view the article. Maybe half way through I might even decide that the author has nothing interesting to say. 50% chance I don't want to read the full article.
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> When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't. Same can be said about other platforms like YouTube etc. When you produce content for all these mega-platforms, you're nothing more than a sharecropper... a digital one. [0] You really have no rights and you're at th…
I thought some about this, and I am a bit afraid about "feudal lords" of some other kind: I'm starting to self-host my content and services as I am starting to have some income (beginning of my career). However, I have to pay for a domain name, internet access, etc. I can afford to pay all of this right now, but I have no guarantees that the content will remain available in the future. The biggest unknown for me is t…
I'm currently working on a platform aimed at reducing internet feudalism and would love to hear more of your concerns and what can be done to improve on the status quo.
If you're interested in talking about it and learning more about what I'm building, shoot me an email at yaniv@mynexus.io
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Is it really Impossible to selfhost videos? My 5€ webhosting has 250GB storage and unlimited traffic and every decent CMS has video capabilities. I think the hosting is not the problem. But the social features that YouTube provides are not easily replaced...
Also consider their automatic video encoding / re-encoding / resizing; I think there's services (e.g. Amazon Elastic Transcoder) that can do that for you, but that would require some development time of your own. Is there a single video format supported by all browsers yet?
The number of naysayers that are implying that working with videos is so hard in these comments is shocking to me for such a supposedly technical group of people.
And isn't that kinda of the point of sites like Medium, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, etc. - that provide enough of a valuable service to people by providing a single place for people to view a certain type of content that in spite of ads, centralized control, some pay walls, crappy technology, etc. that consumers and producers still find it worth while to use for viewing and publishing.
I would even go a step further and say such aggregate sites like Medium represent what the "new" internet represents, convenience and monetization. The average user doesn't care about privacy or ads as much as they want easy access to information. The average producer doesn't care about control compared to what runs their operation, revenue and readers. I think many "technologists" and other people who populate sites like Hacker News have values the align more closely to that of the "old" internet, so view many of the new trends negatively.
I'm not trying to say if it's right or wrong, just my two cents.
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This. And even if you manage to somehow self-host your videos, YouTube is also a discovery service for these videos. Think about how many times you looked for a video on a certain topic in YouTube's search bar itself, the recommendations and the Trending tab.
>if you manager to somehow self-host your videos... Wait, we've been self-hosting our own videos for years. It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server.
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RCs are a pretty common name, even among academics, at least in neurobiology (though it’s for sure recognized as “speaking in dialect/slang” as some would say... e.g., not everyone would immediately know what you’re saying). I do agree that “compounds” or 5-HT agonists, or whatever are far more neutral (if overly broad) terms and those should be used if you’re being careful (perhaps with some added description).
> 5-HT agonists, or whatever are far more neutral (if overly broad) terms and those should be used if you’re being careful Google ranking doesn't care how technical you are. If you do a google search about anything somewhat nutritional or health related, you get a slew of low credibility websites with dubious information. Getting to any scientifically rigorous papers is a real research project.
It's a much easier project (though still requires some review and judgement) if you use Google scholar instead of the general search engine.
But that's true or any domain; if you are specifically looking for scientific papers, the general search engine is like going to the grocery store for lab glassware.