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Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

jeffgeerling.com

681–690 of 803 posts

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

#681
post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All right. Where can I find a larger library of high quality documentary, educational and instructional videos? I'm happy to pay for any service which can compare, just like I pay for YouTube Premium. I tried Curiosity Stream and Nebula, both they couldn't compare.

> Where can I find a larger library of high quality documentary, educational and instructional videos? The question isn’t whether or not YouTube has this content, it’s if it would have proportionally more or less of this content in the absence of a profit-sharing model. The chief problem I have with social media is that the kind of organic content I want to see was already out there before some people decided they wa…

Consider a supermarket. They will have aisles full of candy, sugared cereal, biscuits, chips and soda in the front. The lowest quality slop you can put in your mouth. They will also have huge freezers with low quality ready to eat meals.

But in the back they have the highest quality and variety of meat and poultry you can find anywhere, the highest quality and variety of vegetables and dairy. That's why I go to the super market. I don't care about the slop in front because I'm not looking for it. I don't care that most shoppers have their cart full of toxic ultra processed junk, because I'm just looking for the stuff for me.

It's exactly the same with YouTube, except that you never have to see the low quality stuff which doesn't interest you. If you only like good videos and subscribe to good channels, the algorithm will quickly start to only recommend high quality content. If it slips, there's a dislike button.

You just have to make a minimal effort. The algorithm actually works very well. There's a lot of content which was never available anywhere before YouTube. And yes, the ability to get paid is necessary for many creators to make their videos, which they deserve. If you're making videos that help and entertain a large public, why shouldn't you get paid for the effort and talent?

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

#682
post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah because if it wasn’t for COVID YouTube, Facebook, et al would never have removed any content on their platform, unlike what they had been doing all this while… There are so many issues with this. Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities. The real problem is twofold. 1. A few platforms hold monopoly positions. Who else can compete with Youtubr? And the rea…

Why should "YouTube" as an entity enjoy freedom of speech? They're a platform for user-generated content. Outside of outright illegal content (which is even tenuous sometimes, I'd like to reserve this for the worst of things), they shouldn't be able to pick and choose which UGC they are willing to allow. They're the modern "town square". They're effectively a monopoly in this day and age (yes, there are other video h…

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

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>just as we now store more text than we will ever read. Yet, we are not reading, but hanging on social sites instead. Same with this supposed video cache. People go to YouTube not because of the platform, but because of other people. As long as they are there, the ones who are curious about them will also go there.

Obviously, but that's not what I'm getting at. Due to present technical limitations, "influencers" have to sharecrop for Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc. Bandwidth/storage/software improvements will allow successful "influencers" to flee the plantation.

Not until we solve the discovery and filtering part as well, at the very least. I'd say that is the largest value these platforms bring to the table, hand in hand with their existing network too of course.

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

#684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Stuff is pretty unwatchable now without them. Subscribe to Premium, and the Google ads are gone. I think it's only fair, given how vast and complex YouTube is as a service.

There was a headline here the other day that Youtube Premium Lite will now have more ads. Eventually Premium will have ads too. It’s just a matter of time.

I don't think I can solve these problems that far ahead. Currently, and for some good years now, YT Premium has not had any Google ads. I think subscribing to it it's presently a good value, and that's about it. We are free to cancel our subscription and do whatever adblocking we can when the ads eventually come.

I feel the outrage against the free YT, the free Spotify, and probably other services is misplaced, since these providers offer fair subscription prices that make the UX completely normal. I don't see why we, as users, should fight this. This fight could be allocated to actually pressing issues, or used as energy to give to the content itself that we get from these services.

But I guess this is something that is up to each individual.

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

#685
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a time when computing is so cheap that ads will be injected to the stream in such a way that it is impossible to remove them without real-time AI detector that indentifies the parts where ads are.

Sponsor Block add-on works well for this, but entirely dependent on ads being at fixed time in the video.

Future versions could id the start and end frames of the ad and thus be able to detect the segment anywhere in the video.

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

#686
post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where can I find a larger library of high quality documentary, educational and instructional videos? The question isn’t whether or not YouTube has this content, it’s if it would have proportionally more or less of this content in the absence of a profit-sharing model. The chief problem I have with social media is that the kind of organic content I want to see was already out there before some people decided they wa…

Consider a supermarket. They will have aisles full of candy, sugared cereal, biscuits, chips and soda in the front. The lowest quality slop you can put in your mouth. They will also have huge freezers with low quality ready to eat meals. But in the back they have the highest quality and variety of meat and poultry you can find anywhere, the highest quality and variety of vegetables and dairy. That's why I go to the s…

> except that you never have to see the low quality stuff which doesn't interest you.

This has not been my experience.

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

#688
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the problem of those they affect. "Infectious" is not self-contained to a singular individual. Its also a problem for the platform - who is now party to it happening. YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube. Their safest option, is to disallow it.

> YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube. YouTube censoring videos people want to see will also hurt YouTube.

Evidently not very much.

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

#689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you don't care about those people, what about the people who would be affected by them? A would-be bomb-maker might only blow themselves up, or they may kill many in a crowd. Somebody walking around with a deadly pathogen infects and kills others. Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense. Individual freedom ends at the point at which it causes real harm to other people. Also, you know w…

> Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense Do we know how many otherwise healthy children caught Covid and died from it? My impression from the official figures is that in most countries the number is vanishingly small if not zero.

So many caveats to this comment...

> "otherwise healthy"

Yeah, not all kids are otherwise healthy. There's kids with Leukemia or whatever that are extremely immunocompromised because of chemotherapy. They have to coexist with anti-vaxxers and, believe it or not, their lives matter too.

> caught Covid

You think the anti-vaxx crazy train starts and stops at Covid? These people have been attacking MMR for much longer than Covid. Children DO die to measles, mumps, and what have you.

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

#690
post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah because if it wasn’t for COVID YouTube, Facebook, et al would never have removed any content on their platform, unlike what they had been doing all this while… There are so many issues with this. Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities. The real problem is twofold. 1. A few platforms hold monopoly positions. Who else can compete with Youtubr? And the rea…

Why should "YouTube" as an entity enjoy freedom of speech? They're a platform for user-generated content. Outside of outright illegal content (which is even tenuous sometimes, I'd like to reserve this for the worst of things), they shouldn't be able to pick and choose which UGC they are willing to allow. They're the modern "town square". They're effectively a monopoly in this day and age (yes, there are other video h…

I think one thing that we should be more cognizant about in general is that corporations are a legal construct to begin with, and as such, there's no natural right to incorporate - it's strictly a privilege. So society attaching even very heavy strings to that is not unreasonable so long as they are applied consistently to all corporations. Which is to say, if corporations don't do what we as a society want them to do, beating them with a large and heavy stick until they start doing that is not wrong, and we should be doing more of it.

And if people really want their freedoms, well, they can go and run their business as individuals, with no corporate liability shield etc. Then I'm fine with saying that their freedom of speech etc overrides everything else.

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