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Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

jeffgeerling.com

471–480 of 803 posts

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

#471
post #62
post #49

Since Youtube started to show me funny "TURN OFF THE ADBLOCKER!!!" notices, I just started slamming links in yt-dlp and watching them offline. No drawbacks so far.

It will become harder to ignore the possible retaliation Google can make against your/your family’s Google accounts.

I am sorry but what kind od argument is this? Do what Google told you to do or it will retaliate? Are you talking about some dystopian overlord?

Your statement alone should force your to rethink what you are doing and change your online behaviour.

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

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it safely is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb making materials is. >Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service. >Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform. Prolifera…

> Even though people may spew falsehoods the truth "just is" and will keep coming back up. I wish I had your level of confidence about this. I just feel like it is not the case these days and it’s depressing.

Indeed. In the ages pre-algorithmic social media and pre-generative AI I would agree that about truth. Now I'm not so sure.

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

#473
post #158
post #63

I purposefully avoid demonstrating any of the tools (with a suffix that rhymes with "car") that are popularly used to circumvent purchasing movie, TV, and other media content, or any tools that automatically slurp up YouTube content. Can't figure out what tool Jeff is writing about.

Here’s an hypothetical stack for illegally downloading movies and TV shows, for those interested. They all run on Docker: - QBittorrent: torrent client - Prowlarr: offers an API to torrent search services, connects to qbittorrent - Sonarr: uses Prowlarr to search latest episodes of TV shows, submits torrent file to QBittorrent for download, neatly categorises the completed file - Radarr: the same as above, but for mo…

And just in case it isn't clear, "Arr!" is a traditional pirate exclamation.

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

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, most good widely-adopted consumer products NEVER mention anonymity. Maybe security or privacy, but never anonymity. i meant anonymous as in "a user can receive a link to a video and watch it without having to log in" as well as "there's a list of content on the homepage to watch" - the same way youtube works if you go via private browsing. > OK so my thing is that all of this is just too hard. Give me ONE pro…

> i meant anonymous as in "a user can receive a link to a video and watch it without having to log in" as well as "there's a list of content on the homepage to watch" - the same way youtube works if you go via private browsing. Oh yeah this is my fault, I understood your meaning but wanted to make a separate point about the average user and their very specific. IMO the vast majority of open source projects will use t…

As I understand it, Signum (nee Burstcoin) is indeed the Proof of Capacity blockchain thingy that was using hard drives to store data with no external value. This is related to but different from to Proof of Storage schemes likes Filecoin where, IIRC, the data being stored was data of extrinsic value like PDFs or GIFs or whatever. I think that's also related to "Proof of Space-Time", meaning not only did you write the received data to disk, but you've _still_ got it written to disk.

PoC, e.g., Signum = get paid for proving that you paid for storage rather than CPU/GPU/ASIC cycles

PoS, e.g., Filecoin = get paid for renting out your storage to those willing to pay in return for storing data

Thanks for this really interesting side-thread; I have learned a lot! I've been interested in distributed storage for a long time and while I've known about PeerTube and IPFS and the Fediverse for ages I haven't really played with them personally. I go back and forth between keeping TiBs of storage online, and turning everything off as a concession to keeping my overall electricity bill in check. But in general I like the idea of letting my private machines contribute to something greater than themselves. I will have to look into the ways in which I can contribute to these projects.

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

#475
post #59

This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed. From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software." This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content. Here in the UK,…

> Many will say, this is good, children should be protected. The second part of that is true. But the way this is being done won't protect children in my opinion. It will result in many more topic areas falling below the censorship threshold. For example, YouTube currently has quite a lot of really good videos on harm reduction for drug users (and probably also a bunch that are not very good and/or directly misleadin…

The problem with any laws for a good purpose is that, even if you can get everyone to agree on the general statement of a good purpose, there are disagreements on what actually counts as achieving the goal from both a moral and a scientific level.

For example, providing information on how to do something harmful X more safely might increase the risk of people doing X. On the moral side, someone might argue that even 1 more person doing X is worse than the reduction in harm of the others doing X. On the scientific side, there is likely not direct evidence to the exact numbers (ethical concerns with such research and all that), so you'll have some people disagreeing on how much the harm is increased or reduced and different numbers can both be reasonable but lead to different conclusions given the lack of direct research.

This all becomes supercharged when it comes to children, and you'll find people not even be consistent in their modes of thinking on different topics (or arguably they are consistent, but basing it off of unsaid unshared assumptions and models that they might not even be consciously aware of, but this then gets into a bunch of linguistic and logic semantics).

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

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it safely is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb making materials is. >Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service. >Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform. Prolifera…

> Even though people may spew falsehoods the truth "just is" and will keep coming back up. I wish I had your level of confidence about this. I just feel like it is not the case these days and it’s depressing.

> Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

-- Jonathan Swift, 1710 [1]

(very apt that this has an ad in the middle of it)

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=KigTAAAAQAAJ&q=%22Truth+com...

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

#477
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing to understand is your last paragraph: everything big ads does is unsurprisingly focused toward making people into worse versions of themselves. You wouldn't let kids go to a casino or porn site for educational material. Don't let them use youtube either. It could be that someone happened to post educational videos to the porn site. If so you'd might as well download them while you have the chance, but don't…

There's extensions to remove or hide recommendations. Problem solved. YouTube has too much information to just ignore for education. It's the most efficient method of learning for many topics and for many people. It's closer to PBS than a porn site imo. (The idea of a porn site with YouTube's puritan guidelines sounds pretty funny.)

Problem is still not solved because search also returns a lot of garbage, and you don't want kids to be on a site that's 99% garbage. Xvideos could have a large library of science and history videos while still being 99% porn. Like I said, adults should download and curate the good stuff but recognize they're still in the seedy part of town, shouldn't let kids go there, and shouldn't expect it to be a platform for learning. That's just not its purpose. In fact youtube's purpose is basically the opposite of personal growth.

You can get literal pbs at pbs.org for $5/month, or your local library for free.

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

#478
post #107

This is mass problem with almost any topic you want to share. I'm sport shooter, range officer and competition jury. You have no idea what crazy stunts YouTube do for Gun/Sport Shooting related content. YT terms containt some weirdest restriction for things like "shown magazine capacity". Wrong angle on video and your 10 round mag is seen by YouTube as 30 round and your video is gone. You can show silencer disconnect…

Indeed. A family member of mine had a helpful amount of income coming in from a channel of his that was gaining momentum. The point of the channel was to teach gun safety to people new to guns. Keep in mind that where we live, all of this is 100% legal and even encouraged, yet, YouTube threw so many ridiculous barriers in the way that he could not create much content That didn't end up getting removed. He eventually threw in the towel, and now people new to guns have less access to genuinely helpful information that might save their lives. It seems ironic to me that they had to aggressively remove anything that mentioned covid and didn't go exactly down the government line because otherwise it could get people killed, but they have no problem removing gun safety videos.

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

#479

Feels like YouTube is ripe for disruption. In the recent past (say up to the mid 2010s) it was a really good product and there was a reason nobody gave a shit about Vimeo et al, YouTube as a site, app, platform was so far ahead of the competition. But now? Youtube is full of slop, search barely works, and Google is on an endless campaign to make ad-blocking and free downloading impossible. Even most of the "good" cha…

> Maybe it's time for someone to make a mastodon equivalent for youtube.

Plenty of people have set up unsuccessful YouTube equivalents too.

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

#480
"Free" video hosts work for advertisers. Those are their customers.

I can guarantee that if youtube got 70% of it's income from paid subscriptions, they would not give a fuck about 99% of this.

If you want youtube (or any other platform) to not suck...pay for it.

There is no world where you are not a paying customer and get treated like your opinion matters much.

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