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YouTube Down

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Re: YouTube Down

#261

Post by dorkwood »

nonbirithm wrote: post #227

With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures. It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and st…

The saddest thing about YouTube disappearing would be losing the vast trove of educational content that has amassed over the years. We live in a unique time in history when you can go online and learn how to do absolutely anything you want for free. I feel like the majority of people still hugely underestimate how valuable this is. Granted, there's a lot of junk to wade through. But the information is out there.

Re: YouTube Down

#262

Post by nonbirithm »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #241
nonbirithm wrote: post #227

With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures. It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and st…

> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. > AOL has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. Things change. No one can predict how, or why. But time marches on.

Yes, I guess it's a bit arrogant to suggest that this one form of media is somehow different from all the others that came before it, and we've somehow finally reached the optimum because YouTube is special for some reason. Nobody can really pretend to know this at present. Maybe I was more imagining what the future would be like if it were true, looking back on the present.

Although, when AOL was around you could only practically use the Internet from a large desktop machine, but now you can access a massive amount of information from almost anywhere using a smartphone. And we're being introduced to computers at a younger age, and are spending more time with them. But that might not be indicative of what happens in the future.

Re: YouTube Down

#263

Post by iliketosleep »

nonbirithm wrote: post #227

With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures. It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and st…

> Not much of it actually helps me.

This is an excellent point. With the multitudes of content competing for our attention, it's important to be very selective and deliberate with usage. Otherwise, it can very easily turn into an addiction - you'll be mindlessly enjoying the dopamine hits of watching "interesting" videos whilst life passes by.

Re: YouTube Down

#264

Post by lovehashbrowns »

soheil wrote: post #250
lovehashbrowns wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our opinions and wish lists don’t matter. Content creators make money from being on YouTube. If you want to create an actual alternative, be ready to subsidize the income of a couple thousand content creators to the level that they can afford lambos. Then maybe you can create a competitor. Maybe. Because the step after that is to throw money at global infrastructure and still somehow make a profit.

The question wasn't so much what the content creators want as much as what the average viewers wants. I get that viewers are seeking creators' content, but going a step beyond that what are some of the things in the first place that if implemented would create a viable alternative to YouTube?

Is this a thought experiment or are you actually wanting to create an alternative to YouTube?

Re: YouTube Down

#265

Post by benlivengood »

nonbirithm wrote: post #227

With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures. It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and st…

Youtube and similar platforms were preceded by cable, broadcast television, newspaper, radio, rental media, and books. Presumably if any of those had suddenly disappeared people would similarly feel lost without them, but as time goes on it becomes possible to replace or augment the older technologies without missing them or getting rid of them entirely. Probably youtube will be the same. Hopefully archivists can rescue all the content before its eventual demise.

Re: YouTube Down

#266

Post by nonbirithm »

eat_veggies wrote: post #231
nonbirithm wrote: post #227

With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures. It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and st…

The notion of media that "actually helps" you is itself just as constructed as YouTube. Interrogate where it comes from and what sort of cultural work it's doing. Does "help" mean that it makes you a better worker? Why doesn't YouTube help you, and is that a bad thing? Second, the good old days of "before" we were enterprising enough to invent big data etc. is retroactively constituted, and not apparent until its dem…

Thank you for responding. I think I was projecting myself too much when saying that YouTube doesn't help me. That depends on how I use YouTube, but I don't want to indict the entire platform because I happen to use it suboptimally. There are so many ways to use YouTube that didn't immediately pass my mind, like for DIY or sharing family videos. On the other hand there is a lot of other content that is easy to get into, but which I cannot apply to learning skills or about people. Just because some people might have issues being too distracted by media that is really easy to reach doesn't mean that people more disciplined can take advantage of the same media for their own benefit.

I was more meaning about being distracted. A lot of times it feels like browsing sites with a lot of updates is something I do when there is not immediately anything else to do. But that's an individual issue. If I am going to rectify that problem, then I need to ask what I would be doing instead, and do that, instead of falling back to whatever happens to be in reach. Sometimes I apply a rule of only using YouTube for X hours if I know exactly what I want to watch ahead of time, instead of using the recommendations to watch something I didn't necessarily know or care about but looks like an enticing rabbit hole to fall into from the presentation.

I do enjoy using YouTube as a platform, I just need better viewing habits.

Re: YouTube Down

#267

Post by tengbretson »

soheil wrote: post #166
byteshock wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anyone is going to stop using YouTube because of a small downtime. There is really no alternative to it out there.

What about the new users visiting the site for the 1st time in that small downtime window? If their first experience sucks there is likelihood they won't come back. So: (number of new users) x (probability of those users not coming back) x (lifetime value of a youtube user) = I highly doubt this is equal to 0

I truly believe that the number of people that navigated to youtube for the first time ever in their lives during that window might actually be 0.

Re: YouTube Down

#268

Post by shmerl »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #243
boogies wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIUC part of the fiasco was the tests needing to use certain non-libre videos as they were the only ones with the worst DRM, but the RIAA also argued that the simpler obfuscation of normal videos was a “rolling cipher” and an “effective prevention mechanism” or whatever the DMCA legalese for DRM is as well.

Something people seem to forget is circumvention isn't always illegal. You may circumvent copy protection for a work you own the rights to view, so the complaints about youtube-dl are poorly founded.

That's the problem with DMCA 1201. It doesn't care that breaking of DRM can be done for legitimate uses. It just point blank forbids it.

The supposed excuse of that overreach in giving the Librarian of Congress the ability to define exceptions is totally lame and unacceptable.

Re: YouTube Down

#269

Post by jcims »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #236
soheil wrote: post #213

Now that YouTube is back up I take this opportunity to put this thread to a good use and ask what does it take to create an alternative to YouTube? Would love your opinions/wish list/must haves.

Our opinions and wish lists don’t matter. Content creators make money from being on YouTube. If you want to create an actual alternative, be ready to subsidize the income of a couple thousand content creators to the level that they can afford lambos. Then maybe you can create a competitor. Maybe. Because the step after that is to throw money at global infrastructure and still somehow make a profit.

So basically TikTok stretches into YouTube.

Re: YouTube Down

#270

Post by ardy42 »

nonbirithm wrote: post #227

With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures. It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and st…

> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries.

Is YouTube profitable yet?

I really doubt YouTube will last for centuries, or even twenty or thirty more years. There was a point where it seemed like Geocities was ubiquitous and would be around forever, and now it's gone. Internet services don't have a great track record for longevity. When YouTube finally goes kaput, much of its content will likely be lost, since I don't see Google going through the effort of offering archivists a dump.

Though, I'm kinda skeptical that even much digital data will last for centuries, unless formats and storage media ossify at some point on some long-term stable standard. The trend towards cloud storage makes things even more precarious.

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