Video tutorials now on PeerTube(solvespace.com)
solvespace.com
Video tutorials now on PeerTube
https://solvespace.com/forum.pl?action=viewthread&parent=3756&tt=1625649760
240 comments
>it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice
And we gave it all to them, for the price of the convince of using their service.
And we gave it all to them, for the price of the convince of using their service.
> forced ads
Recently, some people were trying to tell me that ads are entirely controlled by the video uploader, when I brought up some videos that clearly had way more ads than any content creator would reasonably allow.
Recently, some people were trying to tell me that ads are entirely controlled by the video uploader, when I brought up some videos that clearly had way more ads than any content creator would reasonably allow.
> ads are entirely controlled by the video uploader
Some Youtubers talk shop on their channels. I have learnt from them that this is not the case. Even if a Youtuber is very meticulous about placing and restricting the ads (e.g. two mid-rolls), sometimes the software "forgets" and goes full ad blast on the viewer (one pre-roll and six mid-rolls). The cynic's interpretation would be that this happens on purpose.
Some Youtubers talk shop on their channels. I have learnt from them that this is not the case. Even if a Youtuber is very meticulous about placing and restricting the ads (e.g. two mid-rolls), sometimes the software "forgets" and goes full ad blast on the viewer (one pre-roll and six mid-rolls). The cynic's interpretation would be that this happens on purpose.
It's as if Google doesn't want to host the world's videos for free
I once swore to myself that I'd never monetize videos. Now my small-time channel has ads before my videos and I don't even have enough watch-time (yet) to monetize them to grab the pennies that could be mine.
Once I do have the watch-time (4000 hours per year) to monetize, I will feel sleazy about it but I don't think it would make any difference to viewers, I'll just be taking the pennies I deserve.
Once I do have the watch-time (4000 hours per year) to monetize, I will feel sleazy about it but I don't think it would make any difference to viewers, I'll just be taking the pennies I deserve.
You can monetize your videos from day 1. Just line up sponsors. If you want you can embed ads for your sponsors.
Oh, wait, you mean you can't monetize without exerting some actual effort? How is that Youtube's fault?
Oh, wait, you mean you can't monetize without exerting some actual effort? How is that Youtube's fault?
How recently? Up until Wednesday last week, I believe every single ad was placed by the creator. Some just go more wild with it than others.
(disclaimer- I work for the Goog)
(disclaimer- I work for the Goog)
Hm, this was a few weeks ago. I just thought it was ridiculous that a creator would put an ad every three minutes on a three hour video. I guess it's possible.
There were some other creators that I saw some less egregious but still questionable cadences with, which I thought would go against their general ethos (like ads every five minutes on an hour long video by a person who is generally against a culture of over-capitalization).
Maybe A/B tests?
There were some other creators that I saw some less egregious but still questionable cadences with, which I thought would go against their general ethos (like ads every five minutes on an hour long video by a person who is generally against a culture of over-capitalization).
Maybe A/B tests?
Consumers need to be able and willing to pay money rather than renting their eyeballs. (And creators need to be willing to pay for hosting/discovery.) If YouTube could make more money as a gated subscription site that charged for uploads and, say, $100/year to access, they'd be more than happy to do so.
I am a small time Youtuber with a monetized channel. There are two things to consider for anyone thinking about ads on YouTube.
One is that subscribing to YT Premium will get rid of all the ads. (You can’t get rid of sponsor shoutouts with Premium, though.) From the data that YouTube gives me, only a tiny fraction of my revenue comes from Premium users. I assume this means only a tiny fraction of users have Premium.
Second, if you are in YPP (monetized channel), you can choose which videos have ads and when the ads appear. One workaround I’ve seen people use is to get accepted into YPP and then use that to turn off ads. The Zig channel would qualify given its viewership.
Not advocating for one way over another, just wanted to add info.
One is that subscribing to YT Premium will get rid of all the ads. (You can’t get rid of sponsor shoutouts with Premium, though.) From the data that YouTube gives me, only a tiny fraction of my revenue comes from Premium users. I assume this means only a tiny fraction of users have Premium.
Second, if you are in YPP (monetized channel), you can choose which videos have ads and when the ads appear. One workaround I’ve seen people use is to get accepted into YPP and then use that to turn off ads. The Zig channel would qualify given its viewership.
Not advocating for one way over another, just wanted to add info.
It's called Youtube Premium and the vast majority of people of the internet made it very clear they will never pay for it even if the ads are driving them crazy.
Youtubers also get far more money from premium views than normal views.
Ironically, most of the complains people have with youtube are derived directly or indirectly from the fact that the platform is ad-supported. Youtube doesn't care that your video is offensive, but advertisers do. Every demonetization wave was preceded by a mass of people putting pressure on them (eg. NYT "journalists" literally searching for isis videos, taking screenshots and telling the companies with ads next to them that they will be listed in their article if they don't stop doing business with youtube)
Youtubers also get far more money from premium views than normal views.
Ironically, most of the complains people have with youtube are derived directly or indirectly from the fact that the platform is ad-supported. Youtube doesn't care that your video is offensive, but advertisers do. Every demonetization wave was preceded by a mass of people putting pressure on them (eg. NYT "journalists" literally searching for isis videos, taking screenshots and telling the companies with ads next to them that they will be listed in their article if they don't stop doing business with youtube)
I'm torn, because on the one hand, yes, YT ~deserves to get paid for their product. On the other hand, as a user, it feels like they intentionally made the free tier worse - more ads, removing features - to try and get people to pay, which makes me want to avoid giving them money. It feels like rewarding them for solving a problem that they artificially created.
I did subscribe to Youtube premium for a pretty decent chunk of time, I think a couple of years, and it was specifically to support creators. It's a worse experience than adblocking, not just in terms of cost, but purely in terms of the service itself.
It doesn't get rid of tracking, and it doesn't get rid of the eternal problem of Youtube's recommendation engine. However blocking ads, cookies, and several key scripts on Youtube does seem to get Youtube to at least stop constantly customizing things for me. Maybe it's gotten better now, but Youtube was also constantly trying to get me to watch exclusive videos, so it wasn't even actually getting rid of ads, just ads inside videos. It promised the ability to download videos, but they were locked in a weird format on Android and periodically deleted themselves or errored out, they were completely unreliable. Their app also used something like twice the battery of NewPipe, a program that (for viewers) seems to do literally everything their app does but better.
The final kind of insult to injury was that I found out that if I was signed into Youtube on both my desktop and on my phone, it would block me if I tried to play videos on both at the same time, which... nothing else has that problem. I don't have that problem when I'm blocking ads, I can watch videos on as many devices as I want. Logging into Youtube shouldn't give me a worse experience than logging out of it.
I eventually gave up because I was paying Google $10 a month, and then signing out of my account and using UBlock Origin to watch videos. So none of that was going to the creators I wanted to support, and I just didn't see the point anymore. For a while it was getting bundled with Google Play Music, which was at least something, but even that ended and now they have Youtube Music or whatever. So I dropped Youtube Premium and just started giving people money on Patreon instead. It's more direct, it's more valuable to them, it's a better experience for me, and I get very slightly better privacy.
It's not necessarily that people are unwilling to pay, it's that the service is bad. Even if Youtube Premium was free I wouldn't use it. If Ublock Origin and NewPipe were $15 a month, they would still be a better deal than Youtube Premium was at the time I was subscribed.
It doesn't get rid of tracking, and it doesn't get rid of the eternal problem of Youtube's recommendation engine. However blocking ads, cookies, and several key scripts on Youtube does seem to get Youtube to at least stop constantly customizing things for me. Maybe it's gotten better now, but Youtube was also constantly trying to get me to watch exclusive videos, so it wasn't even actually getting rid of ads, just ads inside videos. It promised the ability to download videos, but they were locked in a weird format on Android and periodically deleted themselves or errored out, they were completely unreliable. Their app also used something like twice the battery of NewPipe, a program that (for viewers) seems to do literally everything their app does but better.
The final kind of insult to injury was that I found out that if I was signed into Youtube on both my desktop and on my phone, it would block me if I tried to play videos on both at the same time, which... nothing else has that problem. I don't have that problem when I'm blocking ads, I can watch videos on as many devices as I want. Logging into Youtube shouldn't give me a worse experience than logging out of it.
I eventually gave up because I was paying Google $10 a month, and then signing out of my account and using UBlock Origin to watch videos. So none of that was going to the creators I wanted to support, and I just didn't see the point anymore. For a while it was getting bundled with Google Play Music, which was at least something, but even that ended and now they have Youtube Music or whatever. So I dropped Youtube Premium and just started giving people money on Patreon instead. It's more direct, it's more valuable to them, it's a better experience for me, and I get very slightly better privacy.
It's not necessarily that people are unwilling to pay, it's that the service is bad. Even if Youtube Premium was free I wouldn't use it. If Ublock Origin and NewPipe were $15 a month, they would still be a better deal than Youtube Premium was at the time I was subscribed.
If YT demonetizes you, do you still get money from premium viewers?
I don't have a reference for you, but when I last researched this the answer was "yes".
Now, that of course doesn't apply if a copyright holder is claiming your ad revenue. But my researched back then is that yes, it does mean you still get paid for "advertiser-unfriendly" content.
Now, that of course doesn't apply if a copyright holder is claiming your ad revenue. But my researched back then is that yes, it does mean you still get paid for "advertiser-unfriendly" content.
Why can't we just have a publicly owned video site that is paid for by all of us? We all use YouTube so it seems like a prime fit for public infrastructure. This would guarantee 1A rights to political speech and journalism, as well as remove advertising and engagement incentives.
Because even if you pay they will eventually insert ads into your feed. See Amazon Prime lately. So what is the point?
Was it HBO that pioneered this model?
The concept of "publicly owned" is interesting. When a company is listed on an open stock exchange and anybody is allowed to purchase a piece of ownership and be able to vote as a shareholder, that is "privately owned." When a "company" is controlled by the government and the public has no say in who is appointed to make decisions for that organization, the company is "publicly owned." For a publicly owned entity, the public can, in theory, vote in a politician who can appoint somebody to appoint somebody to control the entity.
So privately owned companies can be directly controlled by their owners in proportion to the amount of ownership. Publicly owned companies cannot usually be directly controlled by their owners, but can be indirectly controlled in proportion to the political power of the owner.
So privately owned companies can be directly controlled by their owners in proportion to the amount of ownership. Publicly owned companies cannot usually be directly controlled by their owners, but can be indirectly controlled in proportion to the political power of the owner.
> 90% of all stock is owned institutionally. It is impossible to compare the stock market with a representative democracy. In the former, the wealthy rule, in the latter, the poor have a chance by virtue of sheer numbers.
In a private company, you have no chance of appeal. In a government, you at least have elections. The worst most corrosive parts of our government come from its contact with the wealthy and the corporate sector and those aspiring to become them.
In a private company, you have no chance of appeal. In a government, you at least have elections. The worst most corrosive parts of our government come from its contact with the wealthy and the corporate sector and those aspiring to become them.
Who do you trust to run it?
Any representative body would do better than a corporate monarchy.
> "Any representative body would do better than a corporate monarchy."
In theory I wanna agree with you, but in practice, "representative bodies" often represent their corporate masters far more than they do the will of the people.
In theory I wanna agree with you, but in practice, "representative bodies" often represent their corporate masters far more than they do the will of the people.
It's a complex topic to really dig into, but I think you can at least say this briefly: Representative bodies at least have the potential to cooperatively work to their constituent's benefit. A monarchy can only be forced to do so out of fear.
The people who are willing to pay for such subscription are the most valuable to advertisers.
They will offer way more money than you can offer for the service.
They will offer way more money than you can offer for the service.
There are lots of ways to make money with content that do not involve charging for copies. One of the most popular and promising is the pay to release model where a preview may be free but the product is only released in full once enough money has been spent on it. This a more flexible approach that does not lock producers into a particular price structure or production schedule. Now that copies no longer have significant cost or barriers it is necessary to move away from making exchange of copies the primary point of revenue generation.
Wait, isn't YouTube premium this and basically no one uses it
I've been paying for YouTube Premium for a few months now and absolutely love it. If I ever get logged out it's a horrible reminder of how annoying the ads are.
YouTube Premium has tens of millions of subscribers, tons of people use it. I use it so much that I would cancel Netflix before I would cancel YouTube Premium.
I see a lot of negative about YT premium online but I've been using it for years.. I don't know how you can use the YT app on mobile without it.
Newpipe from FDroid.
How about we stop pushing these alternatives that ensure creators never get paid?
It’s hard work to make content, many channels are run full time. I know people hate ads, and if that’s the case, just pay for Premium.
It’s hard work to make content, many channels are run full time. I know people hate ads, and if that’s the case, just pay for Premium.
>How about we stop pushing these alternatives that ensure creators never get paid?
My client, my computers, my rules.
My client, my computers, my rules.
If they please they can easily make content premium only instead of relying on people's willingness to see ads. If people can with a few clicks see no ads then 10-25% of people will probably do so while the majority continue to watch ads. Content isn't premium only because they have already run the numbers and they get more from the majority that watch the ads than they would by putting it behind a paywall.
Does premium fee go to content authors?
Yeah. It might depend on the channel, but I saw one creator (maybe CGP Grey?) say that they make more from a YT Premium viewer than an ad-supported one
Like with ad revenue, it's a split between content creator and Google.
They're being secretive about exactly how that split works.
They're being secretive about exactly how that split works.
i used to be all about these workarounds when I was younger. now $10/mo saves a lot of hassle.
I have been using YouTube Premium from day one and I absolutely love it.
YouTube Premium is overpriced because it includes Music and other stuff. Easy way around that is signing up using a VPN in Russia or India. My YTP costs $3/mo.
You still have sponsored segments even with Youtube premium. I refuse to pay for a service and still get ads.
That's sort of my point. You could also look at Vimeo vs. YouTube.
There's also the point that pretty much every time a paywalled article is posted here, someone will inevitably post some work around to the paywall.
There's also the point that pretty much every time a paywalled article is posted here, someone will inevitably post some work around to the paywall.
I remember way when youtube first started they had a premium subscription option which allowed you to upload longer and higher quality videos. If you didnt have a subscription you were limited to 10 minutes per video
I remember that too, good times.
Anime series had A, B and C parts.
I pay for Nebula. It has a lot of the YouTube channels I was already watching and isn't evil.
https://nebula.app/
I will sometimes user NewPipe even to view their videos though. The Android app needs work.
https://nebula.app/
I will sometimes user NewPipe even to view their videos though. The Android app needs work.
> say, $100/year
How much of that is hosting, and how much is content?
How much of that is hosting, and how much is content?
However that subscription access might dilute their control. What bothers me about YouTube is how they try to police content and censor (ie the Wuhan lab leak). If there’s a stronger model where viewers do pay (and not just rent to use your word) then YouTube may feel they have less control to censor.
He made the right choice there. It's not fit for purpose for small creators or users anymore and the big established media players have spoilt it for them.
Unsurprisingly, YouTube only follows the big money so they know that they cannot and will never change. Creators become victims to the recommendation algorithm and compete against viewership governed by 'The Algorithm'.
For those who are after monetisation on YouTube, It can best described as shooting a video on a tight-rope, blind folded and surrounded by thousands of snakes and crocodiles on a daily basis.
One slip up, wrong move or silly sound and your account could be demonetised, permanently banned or both. That's doesn't seem like 'freedom' as YouTube describes it. [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/about/
Unsurprisingly, YouTube only follows the big money so they know that they cannot and will never change. Creators become victims to the recommendation algorithm and compete against viewership governed by 'The Algorithm'.
For those who are after monetisation on YouTube, It can best described as shooting a video on a tight-rope, blind folded and surrounded by thousands of snakes and crocodiles on a daily basis.
One slip up, wrong move or silly sound and your account could be demonetised, permanently banned or both. That's doesn't seem like 'freedom' as YouTube describes it. [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/about/
Can you add advertiser-unfriendly content to your video to avoid YouTube forcing ads?
You can turn off ads.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6332943?hl=en
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6332943?hl=en
Wow, ugh. TIL, thank you!
You can add advertiser-unfriendly content. You can add Youtube-unfriendly content. But that won't necessarily prevent Youtube from forcing ads.
Or... you could route around Youtube completely. Why do you use a service with which you are unfriendly?
Or... you could route around Youtube completely. Why do you use a service with which you are unfriendly?
I hate YouTube ads and do my best to block them where I can, but let’s not forget that YouTube is serving a billion hours of video a day, which costs.
If you don’t want ads to appear on your videos, you can host the videos on your own website and pay for the data or use another video service. Neither are likely to give the streaming performance or audience you’d get with YouTube.
If you don’t want ads to appear on your videos, you can host the videos on your own website and pay for the data or use another video service. Neither are likely to give the streaming performance or audience you’d get with YouTube.
Alternatively you host your videos on both your own Peertube site as well as Youtube and direct Youtube-visitors to either Peertube, Invidious [2] or - if they're using Android - NewPipe. If they are command-line savvy they can use youtube-dl or one of the mediaplayers which make use of its functionality (mpv, VLC, smplayer etc). In other words there are many ways to both have your cake and eat it here. Self-hosted Peertube with Youtube as CDN and discovery network gives you the best of both worlds. If Google ever decides your videos don't fit the desired narrative you won't be left out in the cold. By self-hosting you also avoid being branded -ist or -phobe just because you happen to use some alternative video platform (Odysee etc) which also hosts content made by others.
[1] https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube
[2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
[3] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
[1] https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube
[2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
[3] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
Is Invidious anything other than a YouTube proxy?
Is there Invidious-native content?
(Mind: the proxy feature is quite usfeul. It's also ... limited and limiting.)
Is there Invidious-native content?
(Mind: the proxy feature is quite usfeul. It's also ... limited and limiting.)
No, it is only a proxy. For native content Peertube is a good option, I've been running it for a few years without any real problems, starting out on a machine with a Pentium E2220 and 2GB of RAM (video transcoding was... slow... but once transcoded it worked fine), later moving to less anaemic hardware.
Invidious is useful for more than just filtering out ads, it actually makes Youtube content useable on older hardware - like the Thinkpad T42p I'm using right now - where the "official" interface and player are close to useless. When configured correctly - i.e. when videos are proxied through the server - it keeps your video viewing habits out of Google's hands. It makes it possible to follow channels without Google knowing about it. It can not help against censorship, when Google removes content it can no longer be accessed through Invidious. I've used Peertube to mirror Youtube channels which have had videos removed which does help against censorship - run a cron job to monitor a channel for changes and mirror new videos to Peertube. All of this can be done anonymously - I do not even have a Google or Youtube account.
Invidious is useful for more than just filtering out ads, it actually makes Youtube content useable on older hardware - like the Thinkpad T42p I'm using right now - where the "official" interface and player are close to useless. When configured correctly - i.e. when videos are proxied through the server - it keeps your video viewing habits out of Google's hands. It makes it possible to follow channels without Google knowing about it. It can not help against censorship, when Google removes content it can no longer be accessed through Invidious. I've used Peertube to mirror Youtube channels which have had videos removed which does help against censorship - run a cron job to monitor a channel for changes and mirror new videos to Peertube. All of this can be done anonymously - I do not even have a Google or Youtube account.
Thanks, that largely reflects my own experience.
The now-largely-unusable (thanks to API key limitations) mps-youtube command-line utility still remains the most useful interface to YouTube I've ever used:
- Runs without any browser at all.
- From a console.
- Without video, if you so specify.
- Enables full search, can be limited to music, includes both content and account search. That is, you can search for content matching terms, or for a username / account matching a term. Also playlists IIRC.
- Can play based on a given account's videos / postings.
- Individual items can be saved to a queue. Those may be ephemeral (session-only), or saved to disk.
- Content can be downloaded if preferred.
- No YouTube account required, no play history on YouTube.
YouTube apparently did all they could to kill this, and largely succeeded. I'd used it fairly extensively for my own preferred use of the site: finding lectures (and occasionally book-readings or similar content), and queuing up playlists or downloading archives of those. Works on absolutely minimal hardware.
The now-largely-unusable (thanks to API key limitations) mps-youtube command-line utility still remains the most useful interface to YouTube I've ever used:
- Runs without any browser at all.
- From a console.
- Without video, if you so specify.
- Enables full search, can be limited to music, includes both content and account search. That is, you can search for content matching terms, or for a username / account matching a term. Also playlists IIRC.
- Can play based on a given account's videos / postings.
- Individual items can be saved to a queue. Those may be ephemeral (session-only), or saved to disk.
- Content can be downloaded if preferred.
- No YouTube account required, no play history on YouTube.
YouTube apparently did all they could to kill this, and largely succeeded. I'd used it fairly extensively for my own preferred use of the site: finding lectures (and occasionally book-readings or similar content), and queuing up playlists or downloading archives of those. Works on absolutely minimal hardware.
If only NewPipe had access to Google's recommendation engine (or its dataset). That's the only reason why I'm on youtube.com a lot.
In the past I would agree, but anymore all of the recommendations are things I watched a couple of years ago. I'm not getting turned on to new, relevant content but refed stuff I 'liked'.
Hm, I actually see this as an advantage of these alternative frontends since there is far less incentive to be pulled down some rabbit hole. Without recommendations and autoplay the thing just plays the video you point it at and stops without trying to entice you to stay just a bit longer [1].
[1] ...cue audio from that ancient C64 game: Another visitor, stay a while, stay FOREVER... https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Impossible_Mission
[1] ...cue audio from that ancient C64 game: Another visitor, stay a while, stay FOREVER... https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Impossible_Mission
If you tap a video in Newpipe then swipe left/right on the bottom area of the screen you get comments, description and related videos - is that what you want?
They've also dramatically increased the proportion and intrusiveness of those ads over the last year, taking advantage of a near-monopoly position and a captive audience.
I would also argue that part of the reason for the escalation of ads is spread of ad blocking. They have fewer users they can monetize, so they have to monetize those users more.
Do you know the percentage of users that use ad blocking on YT?
No idea, but I know it's a self defeating cycle. I started blocking ads because they were getting annoying, I'm sure many other do the same.
> They've also dramatically increased the proportion and intrusiveness of those ads over the last year, taking advantage of a near-monopoly position and a captive audience.
Agreed.
But they didn’t do this until after providing you with the option to pay for ad-free.
If ads bother you that much really, just put up and pay for it. Your problem will be solved across all your machines, devices, phones, tablets and TVs in less than a minute.
Agreed.
But they didn’t do this until after providing you with the option to pay for ad-free.
If ads bother you that much really, just put up and pay for it. Your problem will be solved across all your machines, devices, phones, tablets and TVs in less than a minute.
Google created this "problem" and they also created a "solution" for it.
A better solution is to move away from YouTube, if at all possible.
A better solution is to move away from YouTube, if at all possible.
The existence of alternatives doesn't mean I need to like either, and they have changed the parameters of the choice in the last year. I don't have to like that, either.
You know that you can pay the same that you pay for Netflix and have no adds right?
What I don't understand is why do I never get ads for Youtube premium? Why isn't there a "signup to Premium to remove ads" on every page.
To find out about Premium I have to go to my channel-> Purchases and memberships->Read More
To find out about Premium I have to go to my channel-> Purchases and memberships->Read More
What monopoly?
I could buy the search monopoly position, but not video.
I could buy the search monopoly position, but not video.
If anything, YouTube is even more of a monopoly than Google, because while other search engines can index the same internet and show similar results, YouTube competitors don't have the creators behind them to create content for them, and the creators don't want to create content for these platforms since they don't have the users.
The original submission here is related to solvespace. Why would solvespace want to have a bigger audience for these videos than just the people who visit their site? And why couldn't they meet the streaming needs of that audience just as well as youtube?
If you are trying to reach a larger and larger audience beyond your own abilities to stream, it sounds like you yourself are advertising. So you are annoyed that the advertising firm you use to advertise is using your advertisement to advertise.
If you are trying to reach a larger and larger audience beyond your own abilities to stream, it sounds like you yourself are advertising. So you are annoyed that the advertising firm you use to advertise is using your advertisement to advertise.
Personally I’d miss the discoverability that YouTube provides. Actually I miss it already since they nerfed their algorithm. Maybe we should be building better directories and searches?
I'm guessing your use case is different. Solvespace doesn't need youtube for discoverability of these videos. These are not ad videos. They are tutorials. So why not host them on the same site as you host the software downloads?
Discoverability is good for advertising. It seems odd that people complain about ads on a service they use for advertising.
Discoverability is good for advertising. It seems odd that people complain about ads on a service they use for advertising.
I mostly watch tutorials. Some of which I search for but many have been suggested and allowed me to discover new hobbies and interests or even just new channels on the same topic with good presenters.
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> I hate YouTube ads and do my best to block them where I can, but let’s not forget that YouTube is serving a billion hours of video a day, which costs.
You understand the costs involved to serve billions of hours of video a day yet still block the ads used to help sustain the site?
Why not pay for premium?
You understand the costs involved to serve billions of hours of video a day yet still block the ads used to help sustain the site?
Why not pay for premium?
They don't deserve my subscription, their ads are too annoying and intrusive. Seriously, a 20 minute video can contain 6 midrolls. I recently tried to watch some video about how singapore is the only succesful dictatorship and instead it kept getting interrupted mid-sentence.
At this point I am fully convinced even cable tv has a better signal to noise ratio.
At this point I am fully convinced even cable tv has a better signal to noise ratio.
What are the costs involved in hosting for a single 10 minute 720p video?
Assuming it's 50MB compressed, about 0.1c per month to store it, 0.4c per view for bandwidth, plus cpu cost to stream it(unsure of how much this costs), plus transcoding costs on upload.(based on gcp storage costs)
Then there's also the non-dollar cost of the access to the very sizeable YouTube audience that google curates.
Comparing the cost of the actual hosting is silly though. Nobody thinks the value of hosting the nyt cooking site comes from the engineering behind the website, it comes from the content stored. The exact same. Thing is true here, the value of your video being on youtube is it being in a storefront.
Then there's also the non-dollar cost of the access to the very sizeable YouTube audience that google curates.
Comparing the cost of the actual hosting is silly though. Nobody thinks the value of hosting the nyt cooking site comes from the engineering behind the website, it comes from the content stored. The exact same. Thing is true here, the value of your video being on youtube is it being in a storefront.
...and then all the complexity starts. You really want to store many transcodes, and send a transcode appropriate for the combination of device and bandwidth. No point wasting money on bandwidth sending a 4k video to a small smartphone on a dicey mobile connection, after all.
Is the video served from some datacenter in Germany, no matter where the user is? You can cut bandwidth costs and improve latency by caching videos closer to the users, at the cost of handling all of the caching complexity and business arrangements.
If video 6-of-15 in the tutorial series suddenly goes viral, are you on the hook for outlandish bandwidth charges, or does your site hit a quota and just die?
Overall, it's VERY understandable that businesses outsource the complexity of video hosting, based on the engineering complexity alone.
Is the video served from some datacenter in Germany, no matter where the user is? You can cut bandwidth costs and improve latency by caching videos closer to the users, at the cost of handling all of the caching complexity and business arrangements.
If video 6-of-15 in the tutorial series suddenly goes viral, are you on the hook for outlandish bandwidth charges, or does your site hit a quota and just die?
Overall, it's VERY understandable that businesses outsource the complexity of video hosting, based on the engineering complexity alone.
> about 0.1c per month to store it,
> 0.4c per view for bandwidth
No. Those estimates are 1 order of magnitude wrong. You wouldnt even pay that much contracting the highest tiers in AWS/Azure/GC , let alone owning the infrastructure.
No. Those estimates are 1 order of magnitude wrong. You wouldnt even pay that much contracting the highest tiers in AWS/Azure/GC , let alone owning the infrastructure.
Those estimates are taken from the gcp pricing page [0] that say $0.02 (or 2c) per GB. Have you a source for your claim that I'm wrong?
[0] https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#price-tables
[0] https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#price-tables
You are correct, I must have made a dumb mistake in my mental calculations
Google could easily figure out how to distribute the bandwidth and storage costs of that were a priority.
Bandwidth and storage is distributed in data centers around the world.
Or you mean using users’ bandwidth and storage to power the service? That might go over less well than you think.
Or you mean using users’ bandwidth and storage to power the service? That might go over less well than you think.
The latter. In the age of patreon people clicking the 'support creator with reseed' box to temporarily donate some spare resources to creators they like is almost a given.
[deleted]
I have to ask the obvious question here: How do you plan to maintain the second largest website on the internet that has high bandwidth demands to serve 4k video content and serves 122 million users a day, 2+ billion a month if you are not willing to even tolerate simple adds that you can easily bypass in 1 minute of your time by installing an add blocker or downloading Brave browser or God forbid paying 10 dollars a month?
My friends will not even host the torrent that they just downloaded for a single hour and my family don't know what torrent is and more important than that, they don't care. Good luck with really large scale p2p solutions. You must be really happy paying 100 bucks on fees to transfer 10 dollars on the Bitcoin or ETH networks, but hey! no adds or "evil" companies!
My friends will not even host the torrent that they just downloaded for a single hour and my family don't know what torrent is and more important than that, they don't care. Good luck with really large scale p2p solutions. You must be really happy paying 100 bucks on fees to transfer 10 dollars on the Bitcoin or ETH networks, but hey! no adds or "evil" companies!
I don't block ads, I just use a host file avoiding connections to sites I don't like to send metadata.
Ad blocking it's just a feature.
Ad blocking it's just a feature.
Somewhat of a plug (apologies), but we're bootstrapping an open platform for video on top of RSS to solve this problem.
It can play videos on (most) podcasting apps people already have on their phones. Here's an example: https://evan.streambus.com/rss/main.xml (try putting that into your podcasting app)
We make a publishing tool for it with a linear/superhuman-like interface that's free to use. Since it's just RSS, it's fundamentally open: if you want to use a different tool, or roll your own, you can do so without losing your audience. And since it's a podcast, you can piggy-back off of an already thriving ecosystem of apps, tools, distribution channels, and monetization strategies.
If you watch videos on RSS, and the app you're using puts ads on the videos, you can just use a different app. And if the video creator wants to put ads on their videos; the money is at least going to them, and not giving a 45% cut to one of the wealthiest companies in the world.
It's a bit early, but if you'd like to try it, send me an email: evan @ streambus dot com, or fill out the thing here: https://streambus.com/
It can play videos on (most) podcasting apps people already have on their phones. Here's an example: https://evan.streambus.com/rss/main.xml (try putting that into your podcasting app)
We make a publishing tool for it with a linear/superhuman-like interface that's free to use. Since it's just RSS, it's fundamentally open: if you want to use a different tool, or roll your own, you can do so without losing your audience. And since it's a podcast, you can piggy-back off of an already thriving ecosystem of apps, tools, distribution channels, and monetization strategies.
If you watch videos on RSS, and the app you're using puts ads on the videos, you can just use a different app. And if the video creator wants to put ads on their videos; the money is at least going to them, and not giving a 45% cut to one of the wealthiest companies in the world.
It's a bit early, but if you'd like to try it, send me an email: evan @ streambus dot com, or fill out the thing here: https://streambus.com/
RSS is definitely a useful technology.
What I discovered about PeerTube recently, as a Mastodon user, is that PeerTube feeds can be subscribed to / followed as any other Mastodon user. Possibly even aggregated instances (I'm still sorting out how this operates).
This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is more addictive and a greater timesuck).
But the ability to be notified of new content from within what's a primary social channel is pretty compelling. My RSS reader(s) by contrast seem to be higher-friction / higher-frustration (there are many, many, many poorly-structured or poorly-utilised feeds, I should of course weed those out, that ... seems like more work than it's worth).
The problem that direct access is seen as remunerative (that is: hitting a website directly), whilst various syndication channels are seen as appropriating value from the sites is also problematic. It's endemic to both advertising and surveillance-capitalism based monetisation, and is yet another case of how such practices when widely adopted actively destroy useful tools and platforms.
What I discovered about PeerTube recently, as a Mastodon user, is that PeerTube feeds can be subscribed to / followed as any other Mastodon user. Possibly even aggregated instances (I'm still sorting out how this operates).
This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is more addictive and a greater timesuck).
But the ability to be notified of new content from within what's a primary social channel is pretty compelling. My RSS reader(s) by contrast seem to be higher-friction / higher-frustration (there are many, many, many poorly-structured or poorly-utilised feeds, I should of course weed those out, that ... seems like more work than it's worth).
The problem that direct access is seen as remunerative (that is: hitting a website directly), whilst various syndication channels are seen as appropriating value from the sites is also problematic. It's endemic to both advertising and surveillance-capitalism based monetisation, and is yet another case of how such practices when widely adopted actively destroy useful tools and platforms.
> This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is more addictive and a greater timesuck).
I mostly agree with you on this. In fact, this concept somewhat came from a fediverse/activity_pub thing I was working on awhile ago: https://github.com/pubcast/pubcast
The concept of having an "inbox" and "outbox" and then just interlacing with everyone else really hits that part of my brain.
I mostly agree with you on this. In fact, this concept somewhat came from a fediverse/activity_pub thing I was working on awhile ago: https://github.com/pubcast/pubcast
The concept of having an "inbox" and "outbox" and then just interlacing with everyone else really hits that part of my brain.
That's awesome to hear, I'm a little surprised videos in RSS have been so unpopular, the UX is pretty amazing and all the tools are there ready to go.
It's still a bit clunky. Not every app supports every video format, and RSS doesn't cleanly do fallbacks.
Our goal right now is to create a publishing platform that smooths over some of these hiccups (for example, generating backwards-compatible RSS links for each app), as well as creating incentives for apps to coalesce around HLS/m3u8 natively.
Our goal right now is to create a publishing platform that smooths over some of these hiccups (for example, generating backwards-compatible RSS links for each app), as well as creating incentives for apps to coalesce around HLS/m3u8 natively.
Just here to point out that you can actually pay for YouTube. It's $12/mo (https://www.youtube.com/premium).
I don't get any ads at all. Ever. Other than those "sponsorships" that are just as annoying.
I don't get any ads at all. Ever. Other than those "sponsorships" that are just as annoying.
> Andrew Kelley of Zig also moved away from YouTube because of forced ads
JFTR, Eric Buijs[0] (author of mentioned SolveSpace video tutorials) moved to PeerTube[1] few years ago:
> I do hope that people, that love their privacy and want to control their content, will follow me and start uploading great content to PeerTube for this is the only way to get out of the YouTube stranglehold. To get you started I’ve made a list of some useful links. See you on PeerTube.
P.S. Follow Eric & me on Mastodon if you are interested in showcases of SolveSpace app, a free & open-source 2D/3D CAD software.[2,3]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=homehack.nl
[1] https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/
[2] https://fosstodon.org/@ericbuijs/103665384686311116
[3] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/103665316320159292
JFTR, Eric Buijs[0] (author of mentioned SolveSpace video tutorials) moved to PeerTube[1] few years ago:
> I do hope that people, that love their privacy and want to control their content, will follow me and start uploading great content to PeerTube for this is the only way to get out of the YouTube stranglehold. To get you started I’ve made a list of some useful links. See you on PeerTube.
P.S. Follow Eric & me on Mastodon if you are interested in showcases of SolveSpace app, a free & open-source 2D/3D CAD software.[2,3]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=homehack.nl
[1] https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/
[2] https://fosstodon.org/@ericbuijs/103665384686311116
[3] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/103665316320159292
I wonder at what point we as internet users will decide that we're willing to pay for services in order to maintain more control?
In the meantime I sympathize with folks who in a way have ground rules changed on them, but then again were using a free service where they were the product...
The internet is a weird place where we demand everything be free as just a baseline rule, and then complain when the product that we didn't pay for changes, or in some other cases just tries to turn a profit / be sustainable.
In the meantime I sympathize with folks who in a way have ground rules changed on them, but then again were using a free service where they were the product...
The internet is a weird place where we demand everything be free as just a baseline rule, and then complain when the product that we didn't pay for changes, or in some other cases just tries to turn a profit / be sustainable.
I would pay a sub for YouTube due to the value provided if they, in turn, paid me for the data they have stolen from me. Of course, if I get to name my price in this "free market," they would be paying me far more than they could reasonably charge for YT. And really, why would I want to give money to an abusive company?
I keep hearing this lament that everyone just wants stuff for free. I think it is a distraction from the current wild west where these surveillance companies are the ones getting high value data for petty baubles.
I keep hearing this lament that everyone just wants stuff for free. I think it is a distraction from the current wild west where these surveillance companies are the ones getting high value data for petty baubles.
> these surveillance companies are the ones getting high value data for petty baubles
Because we give it to them.
The end user's choices matter here.
Because we give it to them.
The end user's choices matter here.
But should the audience pay or the creators? I can pay a subscription to watch videos but the creators may choose another video hosting service. So this only works if it's a monopoly, or if the services agrees to create a federation. Looks like PeerTube is better suited for this than Youtube but who should I pay and how do hosting platforms pay each creator wherever they host their content?
"give" only in the technical sense.
"did not turn off third party cookies" should not equate "authorized this company to log about every site I visit"
(of course, if you are on youtube itself, that is another matter -- but you are replying to, I think, a more general comment about the two sides and the value they obtain/extract from each other)
"did not turn off third party cookies" should not equate "authorized this company to log about every site I visit"
(of course, if you are on youtube itself, that is another matter -- but you are replying to, I think, a more general comment about the two sides and the value they obtain/extract from each other)
the main holdup i think is truly effortless and secure, private, and widely accepted micropayments.
there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it didn't involve creating yet another account and giving them my credit card info.
there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it didn't involve creating yet another account and giving them my credit card info.
Clay Shirky wrote a couple of decades ago about the problem of mental transaction costs associated with paying a few cents to read an article or consume some other sort of media. I still tend to agree with that. If it were just a technology or network effect problem, I have to believe it would have been solved given how many media payment issues could in principle be solved by micropayments.
Here is Clay Shirky's article on Micropayments:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030911092002/http://www.shirky...
https://web.archive.org/web/20030911092002/http://www.shirky...
I don't buy this argument, for a couple of reasons.
First, for large classes of media, the energy required to consume the media is much larger than the mental cost of even an explicit microtransaction - e.g. the energy required to decide whether or not I want to pay 10c to watch a 10 minute educational video is dwarfed by the energy spent watching the video itself, and probably comparable to the cost of watching 10 seconds of ads beforehand.
Second, for many of the media for which the opposite is true (e.g. short TikTok videos), you can make an argument that the value of those media is very low anyway.
Third, for short media that is still valuable, the cost can be amortized through either buying chunks all at once (e.g. the algorithm pre-computes a feed of 30 minutes of video and tells you the cost, and you can decide whether to watch or not), or through other technical solutions like setting a "payment limit" for the day - there are lots of ways that you can get creative with this.
Fourth, as for "I have to believe it would have been solved" - there are many, many problems that could be solved through technically superior solutions that aren't, because of external forces (monopolies on a market, manufacturing difficulties, lack of a market, economic dis-incentives for either sellers or buyers, band-wagoning/legacy baggage that people are emotionally attached to, etc).
I think that the answer is much simpler - people don't want to pay for content. People want it to be free. And, currently, most people (at least based on my interpersonal experiences) either don't know how much of their data is being harvested in order to pay for their zero-dollar-cost services, don't care, or do care but not enough to push for a micropayment solution.
EDIT: As an entirely separate point from what I wrote above, I think that the mental transaction costs would actually be useful (even if people hate them), because they'd disincentivize tiny chunks of content (due to the overhead of the decision being much higher relative to the length of the content), and incentivize long-form, thoughtful content, which would have a number of beneficial effects.
First, for large classes of media, the energy required to consume the media is much larger than the mental cost of even an explicit microtransaction - e.g. the energy required to decide whether or not I want to pay 10c to watch a 10 minute educational video is dwarfed by the energy spent watching the video itself, and probably comparable to the cost of watching 10 seconds of ads beforehand.
Second, for many of the media for which the opposite is true (e.g. short TikTok videos), you can make an argument that the value of those media is very low anyway.
Third, for short media that is still valuable, the cost can be amortized through either buying chunks all at once (e.g. the algorithm pre-computes a feed of 30 minutes of video and tells you the cost, and you can decide whether to watch or not), or through other technical solutions like setting a "payment limit" for the day - there are lots of ways that you can get creative with this.
Fourth, as for "I have to believe it would have been solved" - there are many, many problems that could be solved through technically superior solutions that aren't, because of external forces (monopolies on a market, manufacturing difficulties, lack of a market, economic dis-incentives for either sellers or buyers, band-wagoning/legacy baggage that people are emotionally attached to, etc).
I think that the answer is much simpler - people don't want to pay for content. People want it to be free. And, currently, most people (at least based on my interpersonal experiences) either don't know how much of their data is being harvested in order to pay for their zero-dollar-cost services, don't care, or do care but not enough to push for a micropayment solution.
EDIT: As an entirely separate point from what I wrote above, I think that the mental transaction costs would actually be useful (even if people hate them), because they'd disincentivize tiny chunks of content (due to the overhead of the decision being much higher relative to the length of the content), and incentivize long-form, thoughtful content, which would have a number of beneficial effects.
>People want it to be free.
I'm not sure we're even disagreeing. Of course, people want things to be free as the default condition. Which is what sets up the mental transaction cost when something isn't free. And we see this in all sorts of settings. It's quite well established that there's a bigger gulf between free and really cheap than there is between really cheap and just cheap.
I'm not sure we're even disagreeing. Of course, people want things to be free as the default condition. Which is what sets up the mental transaction cost when something isn't free. And we see this in all sorts of settings. It's quite well established that there's a bigger gulf between free and really cheap than there is between really cheap and just cheap.
You're right, on further inspection, we may not be disagreeing.
To clarify: I'm arguing against the idea of people not liking the mental transaction costs being the primary reason why microtransactions haven't been adopted (which is the point that I thought that you were making). I agree that the monetary costs themselves are the primary reason.
To clarify: I'm arguing against the idea of people not liking the mental transaction costs being the primary reason why microtransactions haven't been adopted (which is the point that I thought that you were making). I agree that the monetary costs themselves are the primary reason.
There once was such a system —Google Contributor. It was supposed to be expanded into a full micropayment system once there was a baseline market activity to set the prices by, using the price of ads to bootstrap.
It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay. Not even if a typical cost is single digit dollars per month, or less.
It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay. Not even if a typical cost is single digit dollars per month, or less.
I like Blendle for the occasional paywalled news article I really want to read. But, yeah, mostly I just bounce if something’s not free and, I think people need to be honest with themselves about the consequences of removing ads from the internet: it’ll be significantly harder for new sites to both be profitable and attract an audience and they’ll have to choose between giving away unmonetized content to attract people and putting content behind some sort of paywall so that they can cover their operational costs.
We’re already starting to see this model with Substack and Medium, and I’m not sure if it’s a better model, or just a different one.
We’re already starting to see this model with Substack and Medium, and I’m not sure if it’s a better model, or just a different one.
>It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay.
Are you sure about that? I reckon a lot of people didn't know it existed.
Are you sure about that? I reckon a lot of people didn't know it existed.
Nobody has managed micropayments that are actually micro. Even F2P games rarely allow you to spend less than about $1 at a time - it's all about chasing whales who'll spend $99.99 repeatedly...
In the case of something like YouTube, they'd want vastly more (and as a monthly subscription) to remove the ads than they'd earn from an average user watching the ads.
The alternative might have been a 'watch without ads' button, allowing a truly small transaction (a few cents) to watch a specific video without ads.
In the case of something like YouTube, they'd want vastly more (and as a monthly subscription) to remove the ads than they'd earn from an average user watching the ads.
The alternative might have been a 'watch without ads' button, allowing a truly small transaction (a few cents) to watch a specific video without ads.
For charging just a few cents to work, it would have to be normed across a wide range of media to the degree that a meter just transparently clicked against a payment balance in essentially the same manner as turning on a faucet or a light switch. And that's a really high bar in an online world where people are used to either free or a relative handful of all-you-can-eat subscription services that cost enough that people sign up for them fairly deliberately.
> that's a really high bar in an online world
For all the BS projects google has spent money on, then just killed off, a micropayment system should be easy.
> all-you-can-eat subscription services
Then give an alternative AYCE option too. Just implement micropayment caps. e.g. When total monthly micropayments are => $10, cap it at that amount until some other thresh-hold. Allow pre-payments. easy.
For all the BS projects google has spent money on, then just killed off, a micropayment system should be easy.
> all-you-can-eat subscription services
Then give an alternative AYCE option too. Just implement micropayment caps. e.g. When total monthly micropayments are => $10, cap it at that amount until some other thresh-hold. Allow pre-payments. easy.
How would it work with not creating an account?
Low-friction payment methods are here. Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year later and want access again?
A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
Low-friction payment methods are here. Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year later and want access again?
A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
>> Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year later and want access again?
Yet another reason why identity verification by default would make the net better. No spam, easy payments, elimination of middle-men for many use cases.
Yet another reason why identity verification by default would make the net better. No spam, easy payments, elimination of middle-men for many use cases.
Of course, now you're talking about essentially eliminating anonymity on the web which not everyone would want.
Maybe browsers should looking at adding a "create account" API or something? Similar to "Login with Apple ID", but instead password managers could hook into it and create an account semi-automatically. This could also allow automation of "[email protected]"-style rules.
I know that creating an account isn't adding _much_ friction, but there is some and I could see myself appreciating this.
I know that creating an account isn't adding _much_ friction, but there is some and I could see myself appreciating this.
> How would it work with not creating an account?
Notice that they said "yet another account" - I'm pretty sure that they're not objecting to the idea of creating a single account for the micropayments service, but instead creating a separate account for each individual service that they could instead use micropayments for.
> A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
That was already excluded by their comment - "and giving them my credit card info" - wherein it's made clear that part of the problem is the proliferation of private data among a very large number of individual sites/services/systems. A password manager doesn't do anything at all to help secure your private information from these services that you would be signing up for.
Notice that they said "yet another account" - I'm pretty sure that they're not objecting to the idea of creating a single account for the micropayments service, but instead creating a separate account for each individual service that they could instead use micropayments for.
> A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
That was already excluded by their comment - "and giving them my credit card info" - wherein it's made clear that part of the problem is the proliferation of private data among a very large number of individual sites/services/systems. A password manager doesn't do anything at all to help secure your private information from these services that you would be signing up for.
I don't know about Google Pay, but I believe Apple Pay uses the payment tokenization scheme from EMVCo. Sites don't get your primary account number (PAN), they get a generated number that is linked to that number.
SecurityNow did a podcast about it (episode 477).
SecurityNow did a podcast about it (episode 477).
Right - that's an argument to use a centralized payment service (which Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, etc. (probably) fulfill). I (might have mis-)read that part of your post as being about micro-payment systems not being necessary.
I'm not sure whether or not Google & Apple pay are "micro-" enough, though. Do they charge per-transaction fees that are significant enough that 5 cent transactions are infeasible? What's the transaction time like? Can you set up 1-click payments?
I'm not sure whether or not Google & Apple pay are "micro-" enough, though. Do they charge per-transaction fees that are significant enough that 5 cent transactions are infeasible? What's the transaction time like? Can you set up 1-click payments?
Now that you mention it though, there was some service i saw ads for that generates a new cc for each use. i forget the name maybe some here works there :)
There is the privacy aspect too. Maybe I don't want [big sketchy data] to be able to buy my CC purchases and see know which creators i support.
There is the privacy aspect too. Maybe I don't want [big sketchy data] to be able to buy my CC purchases and see know which creators i support.
Apple Pay does this. Merchants get a token which looks like a credit card number but isn't. If you are using an Apple Credit Card, then the processor (Goldman Sachs) is not allowed to use your purchase data in that way.
I wonder about this often.
I've certainly imagined a central micropayment system that I could just see what is being used, how much, manage it all... but otherwise just use services seamlessly (the traditional cart experience seems a bit jarring in many cases) and still pay the creators for their work .
I've certainly imagined a central micropayment system that I could just see what is being used, how much, manage it all... but otherwise just use services seamlessly (the traditional cart experience seems a bit jarring in many cases) and still pay the creators for their work .
I was even willing to create accounts and provide my credit card info for sites with good value, but not being able to cancel online (and being forced to wait on hold for 40 minutes to cancel over the phone) has me unwilling to subscribe to almost anything any more.
Ted Nelson was very explicit on this point in his visionary book "Dream Machines".
I wonder if Bitcoin Cash or something similar can fit that void. It's already possible to send cents for reasonable fees.
HTTP 402 being left unimplemented only seemed natural to me just a decade ago; today looks an incredibly stupid decision. How things change……
I didn't know what the HTTP 402 status code was:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
Its payment required.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
Its payment required.
402 is not the issue, the issue is having a payment system that wouldn't just add an implicit dependency on some payment service.
> I wonder at what point we as internet users will decide that we're willing to pay for services in order to maintain more control?
You mean like this? https://www.youtube.com/premium
You mean like this? https://www.youtube.com/premium
> I wonder at what point we as internet users will decide that we're willing to pay for services in order to maintain more control?
You can already do this at Vimeo. I guess we should look at how well they are doing with that. (That's not leading; I don't know.)
You can already do this at Vimeo. I guess we should look at how well they are doing with that. (That's not leading; I don't know.)
Probably never. I'd venture that the overwhelming majority of users on the internet do not even understand the concept of the ad model, much less the downsides.
To them the internet and everything on it is free (and what isn't free is just greed by the owner) and ads are these annoying thing that crop up everywhere.
To them the internet and everything on it is free (and what isn't free is just greed by the owner) and ads are these annoying thing that crop up everywhere.
I fear you may be correct. Or maybe even that people just don't care about privacy enough to do a thing about it :(
Sadly I think it's both: everything is free right, and what's the big deal with this privacy stuff anyway?
This is a super important point. We as users control how we are treated on the Internet. We can choose to pay for content, or we can choose to exchange our time, data, buying habits, psychographics, etc, etc, etc in return for "free" services.
The choice is ours...Pay or barter? Barter our time watching ads, or pay money that we earned elsewhere.
Disclaimer: Founder of YouTube alternative where site owners who are tired of exchanging their traffic, and user data for free video hosting can pay affordable pricing just like they do for their web host, database host, and other services.
The choice is ours...Pay or barter? Barter our time watching ads, or pay money that we earned elsewhere.
Disclaimer: Founder of YouTube alternative where site owners who are tired of exchanging their traffic, and user data for free video hosting can pay affordable pricing just like they do for their web host, database host, and other services.
Isn't that what commercial streaming services like CuriousityStream and Skillshare are trying to provide?
Torrents seem like the ideal solution for something like this? The infrastructure cost of hosting is shared by all those who find the content valuable. It also has a natural cache-like behavior where popular content will be highly seeded, while unpopular content drops out.
Interestingly, Peertube seems to be backed by exactly such infrastructure.
Interestingly, Peertube seems to be backed by exactly such infrastructure.
> I wonder at what point we as internet users will decide that we're willing to pay for services in order to maintain more control?
The non-free service will always be a smaller player IMO. But if there were a big enough bundle, people might see the value. A not-too-many-USD-per-year Youtube+LinkedIn+Facebook+Twitter web suite would be feasible IMO. Just imagine if it were seen as a public good and countries could fund it with a comparatively small per capita investment.
The non-free service will always be a smaller player IMO. But if there were a big enough bundle, people might see the value. A not-too-many-USD-per-year Youtube+LinkedIn+Facebook+Twitter web suite would be feasible IMO. Just imagine if it were seen as a public good and countries could fund it with a comparatively small per capita investment.
I use IPFS and host my media (mainly photography) on my domain. (With cloudflare as a IPFS gateway in case a visitor doesn't use IPFS)
Hosting cost: $0.
Some details: https://fabian.social/posts/2020-11-07-ipfs-blogging.html
Example: https://fabian.social/photography/2021-01-15-incidentes-vial...
Hosting cost: $0.
Some details: https://fabian.social/posts/2020-11-07-ipfs-blogging.html
Example: https://fabian.social/photography/2021-01-15-incidentes-vial...
Wow, thanks for the example. I've been wanting to do this myself soon.
There's a small cost of keeping your computer on 24/7 if you aren't using a pinning service, but it can be pretty cheap if you use something like a raspberry pi
Cloudflare does some caching, in my experience up to a week, and pinata.cloud (pinning service) has a great free tier and API.
I’ve briefly tried hosting with IPFS in the past and always found it to be super slow/not working at all.
If one has a super low traffic site and is already hosting themselves (whether on a home computer or VPS), what’s the benefit of IPFS? My understanding is that if a file isn’t popular, it’ll be served by your own IPFS node/pulled from your local web server, which seems redundant to me.
(I totally get the use case for popular files; it’s awesome for that!)
If one has a super low traffic site and is already hosting themselves (whether on a home computer or VPS), what’s the benefit of IPFS? My understanding is that if a file isn’t popular, it’ll be served by your own IPFS node/pulled from your local web server, which seems redundant to me.
(I totally get the use case for popular files; it’s awesome for that!)
My main argument (even for low traffic sites) is the following:
> Centralized personal sites/blogs become fragile and expensive while a decent(ralized) alternative (like what is in use here) is anti-fragile and inexpensive.
> The only costs are the domain registration and running my own computer (where the IPFS daemon takes less than 1% of my cpu usage and 200 MB of memory) and some bandwidth.
> The more popular something is, the more peers replicate it.
> As such more bandwidth and redundant fetch locations become available that could get the content to you (the reader) at lower latencies. (It is challenging to do a hug of death / slashdotting on such sites/blogs)
> Centralized personal sites/blogs become fragile and expensive while a decent(ralized) alternative (like what is in use here) is anti-fragile and inexpensive.
> The only costs are the domain registration and running my own computer (where the IPFS daemon takes less than 1% of my cpu usage and 200 MB of memory) and some bandwidth.
> The more popular something is, the more peers replicate it.
> As such more bandwidth and redundant fetch locations become available that could get the content to you (the reader) at lower latencies. (It is challenging to do a hug of death / slashdotting on such sites/blogs)
That's a good example. I've visited a few IPFS websites and they were terribly slow to load, but yours was as fast as a regular blog.
That's nice information to have. Cloudfare IPFS is new to me. Seems to be like the ipfs.io gateway.
I think it would be really cool if there some super easy way to do IPFS blogging. Some GUI or CLI that you point at a repo for the source, then a host with a username, password or SSH key, a dropdown with your domain name registrar and your username+password, and finally a big "deploy" button.
DNS-link is no fun setting up and maintaining. Sure, you can write your own scripts and connect everything to a CI/CD, but for budding developers that's a lot of work.
I think it would be really cool if there some super easy way to do IPFS blogging. Some GUI or CLI that you point at a repo for the source, then a host with a username, password or SSH key, a dropdown with your domain name registrar and your username+password, and finally a big "deploy" button.
DNS-link is no fun setting up and maintaining. Sure, you can write your own scripts and connect everything to a CI/CD, but for budding developers that's a lot of work.
Some examples of what the OP means by "lost sovereignty" would be useful. I assume he means ability to monetize how he wants, or to avoid algorithmic claims against his work etc....but who knows - the author does not explain.
Mentioned in the first minute here: https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/videos/watch/6b779810-671...
He had no intention to ever monetise the channel, but with YouTube's ToS update he had to agree that YouTube can monetise his channel even if he doesn't want it to.
Considering he's basically forced to serve ads he has no control over and he does not earn a cent from it, I'd say "lost sovereignty" holds true.
He had no intention to ever monetise the channel, but with YouTube's ToS update he had to agree that YouTube can monetise his channel even if he doesn't want it to.
Considering he's basically forced to serve ads he has no control over and he does not earn a cent from it, I'd say "lost sovereignty" holds true.
What does he expect for a site that serves his videos for free, not to mention recommends them to people as well to get a wider audience?
"Sovereignty" is a bizarre word here. It's a business deal. Nobody's ever "sovereign" in any exchange, it's either a good deal or not.
If he wants to pay for hosting himself, then go ahead, but no need to act like it's a question of "sovereignty". Nobody's a king here.
"Sovereignty" is a bizarre word here. It's a business deal. Nobody's ever "sovereign" in any exchange, it's either a good deal or not.
If he wants to pay for hosting himself, then go ahead, but no need to act like it's a question of "sovereignty". Nobody's a king here.
>> What does he expect for a site that serves his videos for free, not to mention recommends them to people as well to get a wider audience?
Lets turn that around. YouTube is a huge content provider that has 100 percent of their content provided FOR FREE and they feel that they can "monetize" it any way they see fit. There needs to be some balance. If enough people leave like this, there will be a credible competitor to YouTube and they'll never get those people back. Better yet, self hosting and federated services will start to become a thing and that could be an existential threat to Google itself.
But sure, they are free to do what they like on their platform. Doesn't mean it's always the best thing to do.
Lets turn that around. YouTube is a huge content provider that has 100 percent of their content provided FOR FREE and they feel that they can "monetize" it any way they see fit. There needs to be some balance. If enough people leave like this, there will be a credible competitor to YouTube and they'll never get those people back. Better yet, self hosting and federated services will start to become a thing and that could be an existential threat to Google itself.
But sure, they are free to do what they like on their platform. Doesn't mean it's always the best thing to do.
> that has 100 percent of their content provided FOR FREE
Not true. Creators can get paid for their video views and some make a living at it. Some of the content Google doesn't pay anything for, but tons of it (and most of the popular stuff) Google pays for on a per-view basis. It's not free to Google.
> There needs to be some balance.
That already is the balance, Google paying creators for the popular content.
Not true. Creators can get paid for their video views and some make a living at it. Some of the content Google doesn't pay anything for, but tons of it (and most of the popular stuff) Google pays for on a per-view basis. It's not free to Google.
> There needs to be some balance.
That already is the balance, Google paying creators for the popular content.
The business deal used to be good. Now there is a sovereignty problem. The free part is not relevant here. We can't help that Google is having problems monetizing a service by first providing an acceptable service and then later changing the terms of the deal. Perhaps their business model is unrealistic.
Google isn't having problems monetizing... their business model is entirely realistic, in fact it's wildly successful.
Perhaps the business deal was too good before, and now it's merely good? Previously it was "acceptable" for them to store and host your videos for zero cost and show them without ads, and now you think it's "unrealistic" for them to finally cover those costs with ads?
Perhaps the business deal was too good before, and now it's merely good? Previously it was "acceptable" for them to store and host your videos for zero cost and show them without ads, and now you think it's "unrealistic" for them to finally cover those costs with ads?
> their business model .. wildly successful
On what basis? They has an old model, build up the success of the platform, then changed the model. On what basis can we judge the new model successful versus the momentum of the old model?
On what basis? They has an old model, build up the success of the platform, then changed the model. On what basis can we judge the new model successful versus the momentum of the old model?
> On what basis?
Literally the line that says "YouTube ads" in their quarterly report?
2020 Q1 was $4 billion, 2021 Q1 was $6 billion. [1]
Seems like wild success to me. But, you know, keep checking for the next few quarters if you're convinced Google is killing their golden goose. They've got some pretty smart business analysts and product people over there though, I wouldn't bet against them.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20210428_alphabet_10Q.pd...
Literally the line that says "YouTube ads" in their quarterly report?
2020 Q1 was $4 billion, 2021 Q1 was $6 billion. [1]
Seems like wild success to me. But, you know, keep checking for the next few quarters if you're convinced Google is killing their golden goose. They've got some pretty smart business analysts and product people over there though, I wouldn't bet against them.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20210428_alphabet_10Q.pd...
sure, but don't mind if I discount a pandemic year.
Perhaps it would be useful for competition to require media platforms provide content creators a way out. E.g. a mandatory "redirect to my new site" option.
Was his expectation that YouTube would cover his hosting, encoding and bandwidth costs for free forever? I wonder what his backup plan is and where will he host the videos now.
(It's still kind of wierd that YouTube doesn't support simply paying for their hosting.)
(It's still kind of wierd that YouTube doesn't support simply paying for their hosting.)
I can't speak for him, but yes, I was (foolishly) expecting free YouTube hosting forever without ads because that's what they've always provided. I would think that enough YouTube content makers opt into ads and monetization to cover the costs for those of us that don't want it.
One possibility would be for YouTube to take a larger cut from content creators that do monetize, and the leave the unmonetized content alone.
He posted a video[1] about why he left. It sounds like YouTube updated terms of service that required him to allow YouTube to put ads in his videos and he never wanted to monetize his work, he’s making the videos to share information, not to make money for him or anyone else.
[1]https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/videos/watch/6b779810-671...
[1]https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/videos/watch/6b779810-671...
Evil company decides not to take a loss on hosting probably zettabytes of video?
It's really hard to paint youtube as the villain here and keep a straight face.
It's really hard to paint youtube as the villain here and keep a straight face.
"Poor giant video hosting company has to play multiple ads before, during and after every video otherwise they go broke" doesn't really work either. Having the most content available to show viewers has made them the de facto video sharing website - videos freely contributed by people who wanted to share something with the world have helped to put YT in the position where they are basically a monopoly and they are now aggressively capitalising on that. I don't believe they need to monetise everything just to keep the lights on.
Ultimately though, the guy doesn't want his content monetised so he's removing it - that's his prerogative just as much as it is Youtube's for advertising however they please.
Ultimately though, the guy doesn't want his content monetised so he's removing it - that's his prerogative just as much as it is Youtube's for advertising however they please.
Not a monopoly there’s a ton of video sharing sites - like I guess peertube? Creators can walk away and bring their business elsewhere, as he did.
YouTube happens to be very good at advertising your videos and driving you viewers (just like, say, NBC was good at bringing viewers to Seinfeld).
YouTube happens to be very good at advertising your videos and driving you viewers (just like, say, NBC was good at bringing viewers to Seinfeld).
nobody called anyone a villain. he simply didn’t like the change and moved to a new service. basic free market forces working well and we can all be happy about it
no one called anyone a villain, but most will agree that having the terms of service changed out from under you after you already have hosted content/a social following/an internet 'home' is a pretty shitty thing to experience.
does the means justify the ends? should this be allowed to ensure that the YT bottom line isn't red? I don't know; all I know is that the personal experience of the content creator got to such a negative point that they decided to forego all the benefits of YouTube and host elsewhere -- and that's really the only point that matters.
does the means justify the ends? should this be allowed to ensure that the YT bottom line isn't red? I don't know; all I know is that the personal experience of the content creator got to such a negative point that they decided to forego all the benefits of YouTube and host elsewhere -- and that's really the only point that matters.
Thats a good point. Hosting isn't free, so someone is going to have to pay some cost. Even if the original goal was just to share information and not profit, there are some costs associated with running a site.
One wonders if youtube had an option for you to pay them to host videos for you without ads, if that would be popular. Of course then someone with a 1 million+ view video and a large bill would then start complaining..
You can always host yourself but you loose the audience youtube brings.
One wonders if youtube had an option for you to pay them to host videos for you without ads, if that would be popular. Of course then someone with a 1 million+ view video and a large bill would then start complaining..
You can always host yourself but you loose the audience youtube brings.
In general, when we use someone's platform to publish, we give up control. People continually rediscover this fact. If you want more control, publish on a standard website on a standard Linux machine.
>In general, when we use someone's platform to publish, we give up control. People continually rediscover this fact.
In broad strokes : you're right.
For the sake of a bit more nuance, i'd like to add that 'the control' isn't just given up by the user. 'The control' is promised by providers, and then slowly dwindled until some threshold is met where users are lost to competitors.
YouTube became popular because it gave creators just enough independence, while handling the technical stuff for them.
Now that the technical part is becoming increasingly easy to deal with, it stands to reason that YouTube must become more flexible, or lose market share.
Will G/YT be flexible enough to keep everyone happy enough to exist within their walled garden? Personally, I don't think so -- and people like the parent article are proving that point by packing up and taking their data elsewhere.
Discoverability is becoming less and less of an issue due to the pervasiveness of many different types and styles of social media; IMO that's YT's big advantage and I feel with anti-creator stuff like this stuff, along with YTs recommender being one of the biggest industry in-jokes on the planet -- they really squandered that advantage.
In broad strokes : you're right.
For the sake of a bit more nuance, i'd like to add that 'the control' isn't just given up by the user. 'The control' is promised by providers, and then slowly dwindled until some threshold is met where users are lost to competitors.
YouTube became popular because it gave creators just enough independence, while handling the technical stuff for them.
Now that the technical part is becoming increasingly easy to deal with, it stands to reason that YouTube must become more flexible, or lose market share.
Will G/YT be flexible enough to keep everyone happy enough to exist within their walled garden? Personally, I don't think so -- and people like the parent article are proving that point by packing up and taking their data elsewhere.
Discoverability is becoming less and less of an issue due to the pervasiveness of many different types and styles of social media; IMO that's YT's big advantage and I feel with anti-creator stuff like this stuff, along with YTs recommender being one of the biggest industry in-jokes on the planet -- they really squandered that advantage.
A transcript of his video "I'm leaving YouTube", that I pulled from the closed caption file[1]
https://pastebin.com/8ZTwaJEm
[1] https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/lazy-static/video-caption...
https://pastebin.com/8ZTwaJEm
[1] https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/lazy-static/video-caption...
I understand and a sympathize with his opinion, at the same time the platform must be financed somehow, no?
Yeah I know Google are rich but still, from a technical standpoint YT is pretty damn good. I've never had any issues watching videos or streaming, and instantly served in EU, Asia and the US.
For that and the massive selection of content I'd say it's worth it for me.
Yeah I know Google are rich but still, from a technical standpoint YT is pretty damn good. I've never had any issues watching videos or streaming, and instantly served in EU, Asia and the US.
For that and the massive selection of content I'd say it's worth it for me.
Yes, the platform must be financed somehow. However, that 'somehow' didn't seem to be an issue for 15 years.
A video series about parametric 2d/3d CAD is not going to do Logan Paul numbers, so what merit is there to jam ads into it anyway?
A video series about parametric 2d/3d CAD is not going to do Logan Paul numbers, so what merit is there to jam ads into it anyway?
> However, that 'somehow' didn't seem to be an issue for 15 years.
It has absolutely been an issue. If you listen in on the earnings call, shareholders have been asking for YouTube revenue for years. Google has to show it can be a profitable business.
It has absolutely been an issue. If you listen in on the earnings call, shareholders have been asking for YouTube revenue for years. Google has to show it can be a profitable business.
Asking about revenue is not the same as asking about profit. In any case, the 80-20 principle still applies. Monetizing already successful content categories will deliver far more profit than long-tail niche content that far fewer people see.
It the tail is fat, then it absolutely matters to youtube that it is monetized as well. The value proposition of youtube over traditional media has long been that it offers a chance for individuals to be seen, though I don't know to what degree that is still the primary value. Even if it isn't, it costs more per view for youtube to serve less popular videos, since they still need to be distributed around the world. Even if it isn't necessary, it would still be fair for those videos to see at least as much advertising.
It's pretty hard to imagine what people think they gain by "switching" to PeerTube. Beyond idealism, there's not a whole lot going for the platform technically; it isn't peer to peer meaningfully. It would be better to just claim you are paying to self host your videos, which is what the author is doing.
If people want sovereignty, they can run their own server, but no one would find it. Peertube is a good middle ground, especially since you can run your own instance if you really want more control.
I think Peertube is "marketed" in the wrong way, perhaps inescapably. Making a simple video-hosting platform is going to invite comparisons to Youtube, but Frama is very clear they don't see themselves that way. Peertube is NOT an alternative to Youtube, and it can't be with the tiny team working on it.
However, it does have one edge-case use that's come up a few times. If you have a few bucks, moderate technical knowledge, and just need a way to put 20 or 30 videos online in a form that's easy to link to and navigate for the non-technical, Peertube can be a handy tool. In the past you might say "Why not Youtube?", but Youtube has become increasingly obnoxious to use for simple "throwaway" cases. What's the alternative? Tossing the files up on a shady site like Mega? Running an FTP server or hosting a torrent? Youtube used to be a no-brainer for something like this, but there are so many techno-bureaucratic gotchas now that an alternative just might be worth it. There's zero discoverability, no ad revenue, and you have to deal with hosting and security, but at least Peertube is a ready-made package that mostly "just works."
However, it does have one edge-case use that's come up a few times. If you have a few bucks, moderate technical knowledge, and just need a way to put 20 or 30 videos online in a form that's easy to link to and navigate for the non-technical, Peertube can be a handy tool. In the past you might say "Why not Youtube?", but Youtube has become increasingly obnoxious to use for simple "throwaway" cases. What's the alternative? Tossing the files up on a shady site like Mega? Running an FTP server or hosting a torrent? Youtube used to be a no-brainer for something like this, but there are so many techno-bureaucratic gotchas now that an alternative just might be worth it. There's zero discoverability, no ad revenue, and you have to deal with hosting and security, but at least Peertube is a ready-made package that mostly "just works."
discoverability isn't zero. you need a foothold on other parts of the fediverse so that people know who you are and once you have that people will subscribe and share.
Technically, if I understand correctly, one of the thing going for peertube is that it allows you to survive [insert any popular forum]'s hug of death. Some website don't even handle a surge of connections when it's just text. With peertube, most of the time, you're serving directly from your website, but in case of virality, the video will be distributed across most of the simultaneous viewers.
If the website is "hugged", nobody can reach the page with the javascript to make WebRTC connections. People tend to close the window after they're done watching anyway, which sort of negates the whole concept.
Is there a downside to going to peertube versus self-hosting? Even if you just use it as a CMS for your videos, it seems like it’s all upside to me. Plus it adds a drop to the bucket of network effect for the platform, which appears to be the only viable alternative to YouTube in which the publisher retains the lion’s share of authority.
Centralized ad based services are never in your interest. What you spend your time on matters, so I try to be critical of my browsing habits.
Some sites/services I currently use:
neeva.com
Paid search that I'm liking atm. Feels like I can find stuff again and it's 4 months free.
For video hosting and content I like
Odysee.com
as an ad free decentralized Youtube, but the network effect hasn't quite taken hold yet.
Social I like
peakd.com
as a decentralized blogging and social platform.
Some sites/services I currently use:
neeva.com
Paid search that I'm liking atm. Feels like I can find stuff again and it's 4 months free.
For video hosting and content I like
Odysee.com
as an ad free decentralized Youtube, but the network effect hasn't quite taken hold yet.
Social I like
peakd.com
as a decentralized blogging and social platform.
Once PeerTube adds a way for plugin developers to monetize videos without ads directly on peertube, it might become much more interesting to people trying to build a career making content. Right now, the only option is to link to other pages (mostly paypal and patreon) and hope to get supporters that way.
It's OK to keep it the way it is now, but there's friction in order to support content creators: you need at least one other account on another website in order to support at least one creator. I also doubt most people will support more than a few creators through those means.
A "donate as you watch" plugin or something would be very useful. Transfer funds at some frequency to your peertube/activitypub account, and define rules (or keep some reasonable default) of how that is distributed.
Examples:
- 100% of your funds go to your favorite creator - 90% to favorite creator, 10% to the next top 2 depending on accumulated watch time in a month - Funds are distributed proportionally to watch time in a month
Given that this is opensource and plugins are possible, there's a lot of room for innovation.
It's OK to keep it the way it is now, but there's friction in order to support content creators: you need at least one other account on another website in order to support at least one creator. I also doubt most people will support more than a few creators through those means.
A "donate as you watch" plugin or something would be very useful. Transfer funds at some frequency to your peertube/activitypub account, and define rules (or keep some reasonable default) of how that is distributed.
Examples:
- 100% of your funds go to your favorite creator - 90% to favorite creator, 10% to the next top 2 depending on accumulated watch time in a month - Funds are distributed proportionally to watch time in a month
Given that this is opensource and plugins are possible, there's a lot of room for innovation.
Youtube Alternatives :
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
I'm pleasantly surprised how good Odysee's UX is, for the viewer anyway.
[deleted]
In my experience Vimeo is great, while Dailymotion is absolute garbage: the streaming itself stutters at low quality and the amount of unskippable super long ads is insane.
Peertube is Federated not Decentralized (via ActivityPub)
What is the primary cost issue preventing greater competition and hosted videos? Is it band with, storage space, or just infrastructure? It seems this arena is very crowded with producers yet everyone is beholden to YouTube. Why?
Copyright compliance, lawsuit threats, illegal activity, legal investigations, similar such aspects have been a bane of decentralised service provision since the 1990s, if not before.
One underappreciated role of a large, well-financed and well-capitalised publisher is in providing legal defence to both itself and its creators.
One underappreciated role of a large, well-financed and well-capitalised publisher is in providing legal defence to both itself and its creators.
Good.
YouTube cannot be fixed and they will never change, and it is no more about 'the creators' anymore, It's for the big influencers, advertisers and now for the already established cable news networks. It's for the best to start leaving the platform since it is completely skewed for them.
At least there are some sane alternative platforms that exist which make the switch possible to some.
YouTube cannot be fixed and they will never change, and it is no more about 'the creators' anymore, It's for the big influencers, advertisers and now for the already established cable news networks. It's for the best to start leaving the platform since it is completely skewed for them.
At least there are some sane alternative platforms that exist which make the switch possible to some.
In the early days of TV, when the first broadcast licenses were being granted, there was a legislative proposal to make advertising on TV illegal. It was defeated, resulting in a century of TV that was largely a wasteland in the service of the tobacco and fast food industries. We have a political choice.
> We have a political choice.
Do we though? It seems to me that a few very wealthy people have choices. The rest of us are simply along for the ride.
Do we though? It seems to me that a few very wealthy people have choices. The rest of us are simply along for the ride.
What do you imagine the alternative world of 100% ad-free television would look like? Hundreds of channels of PBS? I think that is naively optimistic.
I don’t know what it would have looked like, obviously. But I think it would have been better than what we got. Even having just two or three PBS-type channels and subtracting the rest would have been an improvement.
Noob question:
Does youtube show fewer ads on embedded videos?
(Or maybe uBlock just works better against embedded videos.)
If so, then maybe host a page of embedded videos.
Further, for more than a handful of videos (embedded), I'd want some kind of carousel, so you don't crush the client's browser with dozens of videos pre-loading.
(Hot damn I hate youtube.)
Does youtube show fewer ads on embedded videos?
(Or maybe uBlock just works better against embedded videos.)
If so, then maybe host a page of embedded videos.
Further, for more than a handful of videos (embedded), I'd want some kind of carousel, so you don't crush the client's browser with dozens of videos pre-loading.
(Hot damn I hate youtube.)
I had those solvespace tutorials bookmarked and was wondering why they went private a few days ago. I'm glad they're back and even more happy they're no longer on YouTube.
I recently set up peertube on a $5 VPS using yunohost and it was very easy. definitely would need more work if I got more than 10 little views a day.
What are the per-viewer costs these days to host video files on a plain web server? Perhaps with a CDN?
Video is the sort of thing that benefits significantly from economies of scale. Encoding and bandwidth costs are your two biggest factors. Encoding has to be done once -- well, once per rendition you ship, more on that in a second -- but bandwidth costs are, modulo volume discounts, very linear, and thus a direct per-viewer-minute line item. Those bandwidth costs typically depend on your desired quality of video (bitrate) and capacity of service. CDNs and traditional cloud services tend to have expensive outbound bandwidth. VPSes etc. don't, but it's not fast enough to serve many users, and what happens when you hit transfer limits is Not Great.
It is pretty rare in 2021 to serve video just as "video files". HLS and DASH allow for adaptive quality streaming for bandwidth- or performance-constrained devices -- which can also help keep costs down, if you're shipping lower bitrate 480p renditions to some clients rather than full-boat 1080p -- and make resumption of partially played media easier. (Because you can append segments to an HLS or DASH manifest, you can also use this technology more easily for live-streamed content.)
This stuff is complicated. You can build out the pipelines to do this stuff yourself with either cloud services or a lot of duct tape -- I've done it before -- but it's A Lot Of Work to get right and economies of scale are a real thing. There exist services like Mux Video (YC W16, https://mux.com -- this is a shameless plug; I work on the devex team) package this and present straightforwardly consumable APIs for folks who just want to ship decent video at a reasonable price.
It is pretty rare in 2021 to serve video just as "video files". HLS and DASH allow for adaptive quality streaming for bandwidth- or performance-constrained devices -- which can also help keep costs down, if you're shipping lower bitrate 480p renditions to some clients rather than full-boat 1080p -- and make resumption of partially played media easier. (Because you can append segments to an HLS or DASH manifest, you can also use this technology more easily for live-streamed content.)
This stuff is complicated. You can build out the pipelines to do this stuff yourself with either cloud services or a lot of duct tape -- I've done it before -- but it's A Lot Of Work to get right and economies of scale are a real thing. There exist services like Mux Video (YC W16, https://mux.com -- this is a shameless plug; I work on the devex team) package this and present straightforwardly consumable APIs for folks who just want to ship decent video at a reasonable price.
>> but bandwidth costs are, modulo volume discounts, very linear, and thus a direct per-viewer-minute line item
We need something like bit torrent for video, where the peers send chunks biased toward the beginning of the video. This would spread the bandwidth costs to the viewers. Sure, the main site might be constantly streaming 1 or 2 full streams, but that can be fairly low bandwidth.
We need something like bit torrent for video, where the peers send chunks biased toward the beginning of the video. This would spread the bandwidth costs to the viewers. Sure, the main site might be constantly streaming 1 or 2 full streams, but that can be fairly low bandwidth.
It's possible. I have my doubts, for a few reasons; as with most technical challenges, it's a deeper problem than most people realize.
1) Orchestration of this is not trivial, and creates new points of centralization. Who runs your moral equivalent of a tracker/DHT? How do they keep the lights on for your relatively niche video? There are social differences between the infrastructural audiences of BitTorrent and a hypothetical general-purpose video tracker. If the idea is that everyone runs their own, you're getting into latency-sensitive problems of coordination (and given the push towards static sites, make me ask "do we expect people to have the capacity to do this?") that strike me as tricky given the requirements of video streaming.
2) This assumes that clients are both willing and able to do peer-to-peer transfers. I wouldn't bet on it.
3) This assumes that clients keep old chunks around for the purpose of peer-to-peer transfers (and don't evict things when under memory/storage pressure) and adequately update the tracker with what it has available at all times. I wouldn't bet on that being a reasonable assumption.
4) This assumes clients are reliable and have reliable upload. If you don't get a chunk from that peer client fast enough or that client disappears before you can handshake with another one and get that chunk, you have a video drop. Video drops are a game-over condition in 2021. Which probably seems unfair to say, but something like this has to present a better solution for clients, not for content providers, and this strikes me as really not viable for clients. Otherwise, people leave.
Video is really, really hard. It wasn't until I built a pipeline myself (not a fancy one, either) that I realized how nasty it was. Slinging huge amounts of data around with stiff latency requirements seems to lend itself to more vertical scaling than this approach suggests.
1) Orchestration of this is not trivial, and creates new points of centralization. Who runs your moral equivalent of a tracker/DHT? How do they keep the lights on for your relatively niche video? There are social differences between the infrastructural audiences of BitTorrent and a hypothetical general-purpose video tracker. If the idea is that everyone runs their own, you're getting into latency-sensitive problems of coordination (and given the push towards static sites, make me ask "do we expect people to have the capacity to do this?") that strike me as tricky given the requirements of video streaming.
2) This assumes that clients are both willing and able to do peer-to-peer transfers. I wouldn't bet on it.
3) This assumes that clients keep old chunks around for the purpose of peer-to-peer transfers (and don't evict things when under memory/storage pressure) and adequately update the tracker with what it has available at all times. I wouldn't bet on that being a reasonable assumption.
4) This assumes clients are reliable and have reliable upload. If you don't get a chunk from that peer client fast enough or that client disappears before you can handshake with another one and get that chunk, you have a video drop. Video drops are a game-over condition in 2021. Which probably seems unfair to say, but something like this has to present a better solution for clients, not for content providers, and this strikes me as really not viable for clients. Otherwise, people leave.
Video is really, really hard. It wasn't until I built a pipeline myself (not a fancy one, either) that I realized how nasty it was. Slinging huge amounts of data around with stiff latency requirements seems to lend itself to more vertical scaling than this approach suggests.
That's actually something that PeerTube does and is enabled by default! It uses P2P Media Loader to have peers share HLS segments.
This guy's videos are deleted, but a different SolveSpace guide [1] is a 78MB download, and the most-viewed solvespace content on youtube has 10,000 views for a total of 780 gigabytes.
Some of the most expensive cloud bandwidth is AWS egress, which costs $0.09 per gigabyte for the most expensive band [2]. So we're looking at $70 per video. Plus of course the price of your time to get everything set up and working right.
Of course, you could undoubtedly get lower prices - either with an 'unlimited traffic' VPS if you're a small user, or by getting into a cheaper CDN pricing tier if you're a large user.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oROPkh6YosE [2] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc2=type_a
Some of the most expensive cloud bandwidth is AWS egress, which costs $0.09 per gigabyte for the most expensive band [2]. So we're looking at $70 per video. Plus of course the price of your time to get everything set up and working right.
Of course, you could undoubtedly get lower prices - either with an 'unlimited traffic' VPS if you're a small user, or by getting into a cheaper CDN pricing tier if you're a large user.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oROPkh6YosE [2] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc2=type_a
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It's going to totally depend on how popular you are. For videos with a relative handful of viewers, host it wherever. If you're a popular site, costs could be hundreds, maybe thousands per month. But you'd have to make some assumptions and do the math.
And, as peer says, discoverability unless you already have an audience.
And, as peer says, discoverability unless you already have an audience.
I'd argue the risk aspect is what prevents more people from self-hosting than the actual cost. At least it is for me: The idea of waking up to a bill of a few thousand dollars is chilling. And then there is also this conflict of objectives: With an ad-supported platform more popularity means more money, with self-hosting more popularity is less money. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
Self-host at places like OVH or Hetzner that bill by pipe bandwidth rather than gigabytes transferred. Your site may get slow if it gets a hug of death but you won't get a stupid high bill. You can also get 2-4X the compute and RAM for pennies (comparatively).
If you are using AWS, Google, Oracle, or Azure and are just using VMs, you are getting horribly ripped off. There is absolutely zero advantage to using these for just compute. None. They only make sense in a business setting if you are leveraging their managed services to save on labor costs, or if you need to elastically scale to really enormous sizes and have confidence that you won't run out of resources.
VPS providers like Digital Ocean, Vultr, or Linode charge for bandwidth overages but their costs are generally at least an order of magnitude less than the big cloud vendors.
If you are using AWS, Google, Oracle, or Azure and are just using VMs, you are getting horribly ripped off. There is absolutely zero advantage to using these for just compute. None. They only make sense in a business setting if you are leveraging their managed services to save on labor costs, or if you need to elastically scale to really enormous sizes and have confidence that you won't run out of resources.
VPS providers like Digital Ocean, Vultr, or Linode charge for bandwidth overages but their costs are generally at least an order of magnitude less than the big cloud vendors.
S3 can make sense for lightweight hosting of media files. I pay less than I would for a VPS. That said, if I were starting from scratch, I'd probably use Backblaze B2 because I believe they let you set hard quotas.
But, yes, in general for an individual hobby site, I'd choose an option that resulted in a hug of death rather than a big bill.
But, yes, in general for an individual hobby site, I'd choose an option that resulted in a hug of death rather than a big bill.
I think you can set quotas on S3 somehow too.
You can set alerts but not hard quotas. This is a perpetual topic of debate around pretty much all the big cloud providers. They're really set up for companies that presumably don't want to "burn everything down" if they get a usage spike or screw something up. But it makes them at least something of a risk for an individual who absolutely doesn't want to wake up to a $3K bill under any circumstances.
> Self-host at places like OVH that bill by pipe bandwidth rather than gigabytes transferred. Your site may get slow if it gets a hug of death but you won't get a stupid high bill.
If your primary concern is cost consciousness, and when your failure case is "get slow and fall over" and you're OK with that, this makes sense. For the OP, who doesn't seem to have a profit motive, I think this is good advice.
The caveat I would add is that a lot of folks try to extrapolate from personal stuff into the small-business (opposing "startup" -- that is, not swimming in VC money) realm, and it's easy to staple your hand to your face when looking at video in that way. Balancing cost controls against quality of service is kinda pretty hard for video because engagement is tied in pretty tightly to time-to-first-frame and to consistency of the video stream coming down, and even a well-provisioned set of boxes in an OVH datacenter somewhere are going to have more trouble with latency as well as bandwidth to geographically distributed clients. Yeah, you can fix this...by building your own CDN out of multiple points of presence at multiple data centers, but there are economies of scale to just paying your local friendly CDN overlords to ship your stuff from their POPs. Not all video usage is directly tied to revenue, though, which is why I characterize it as risk: the particulars of your venture may be such that the risk of higher costs due to sudden popularity is worth the quality of service during the 99.9% period for your users who aren't local to your point of presence. But there are no hard-and-fast rules here.
If your primary concern is cost consciousness, and when your failure case is "get slow and fall over" and you're OK with that, this makes sense. For the OP, who doesn't seem to have a profit motive, I think this is good advice.
The caveat I would add is that a lot of folks try to extrapolate from personal stuff into the small-business (opposing "startup" -- that is, not swimming in VC money) realm, and it's easy to staple your hand to your face when looking at video in that way. Balancing cost controls against quality of service is kinda pretty hard for video because engagement is tied in pretty tightly to time-to-first-frame and to consistency of the video stream coming down, and even a well-provisioned set of boxes in an OVH datacenter somewhere are going to have more trouble with latency as well as bandwidth to geographically distributed clients. Yeah, you can fix this...by building your own CDN out of multiple points of presence at multiple data centers, but there are economies of scale to just paying your local friendly CDN overlords to ship your stuff from their POPs. Not all video usage is directly tied to revenue, though, which is why I characterize it as risk: the particulars of your venture may be such that the risk of higher costs due to sudden popularity is worth the quality of service during the 99.9% period for your users who aren't local to your point of presence. But there are no hard-and-fast rules here.
odysee.com is also another good decentralised alternative. YT creators can easily sign up and setup automatic sync of all of their videos. This is a great way to have a backup in case Google decides to ban them or do some wonky policy changes.
Lots of discussion on advertising. None on the blacklisting & censorship by YouTube of millions of American opinions. Of course HN is a liberal website, so this is welcomed.
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Absolutely loving how people are starting to abandon ship for self hosted platforms.
If I had to compare this to a historical event, it would be like the Puritans leaving England for America to escape the oppressive bureaucracy that controlled their lives.
There's radical freedom in decentralized social media. The question is whether or not it will take off as a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter/YouTube -- or whether it will become the next Parler-esque shipwreck.
If I had to compare this to a historical event, it would be like the Puritans leaving England for America to escape the oppressive bureaucracy that controlled their lives.
There's radical freedom in decentralized social media. The question is whether or not it will take off as a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter/YouTube -- or whether it will become the next Parler-esque shipwreck.
People have been abandoning walled gardens for many decades, but still walled gardens persist. Most either value the walls, or are indifferent to them.
Well, to be quite fair, places like England persisted, too.
YouTube is an amazing collection of knowledge, but it's unfortunate that it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice. A degradation of the experience over time seems inevitable.
How to organize human endeavors in a way that captures the innovation and superbly focused effort of early-stage companies without devolving into the raw exploitation, rent-seeking, and monopolistic behavior of late-stage companies seems an open problem.