Wait, we've been self-hosting our own videos for years. It's not exactly rocket science. YouTube is convenient, but what it is doing from a technical standpoint isn't that difficult to do on your own server.
You've left several comments in this thread talking down to people as if they're ignorant about how to write an HTML5 <video> tag on their own web server.
I wasn't the one that downvoted your comment but for some reason, a lot of technical folks like you misunderstand Youtube and how it enables video uploaders. (A previous commenter misunderstands Youtube the same way and my previous reply to it.[0])
There is no self-hosting web server stack to serve videos that charges $0 to the content creator whether it gets zero or 1 billion views. Therefore, repeatedly recommending "self-host your videos" -- completely misses the point.
Consider a corporate giant like Microsoft. Several years ago, they used to self-host their tech videos on channel9.msdn.com.[1] Now they're hosted on Youtube.[2] Obviously, MS is not so technically inept that they don't know how to stream their own videos! They also have billions in cash to prevent "server bandwidth exceeded" errors so cost isn't the issue.
Stop and think about why Microsoft switched to Youtube instead of using their own MS Azure infrastructure. As for the other metaphor of "sharecropper" for Youtube that seems popular... is Microsoft a "sharecropper"? Why or why not?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488275
[1] clicking any of the new videos on Microsoft's front page will play embedded Youtube videos: https://channel9.msdn.com/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/Microsoft/search?query=build
He seems to be trying to emphasize the relative triviality of the technical problem from building the MVP absent leveraging "someone else's computers" perspective.
You're talking about the delta and impact created by the fact we've become so dependent on someone else's computer to point us in the right direction to create the visibility and discoverability we want.
The point I think both of you are dancing around, but not hauling out into the light, is these platforms enable the abstraction of the techie work, and allow creators to just publish. Creators are so dependent on not having to do the techie work, that unfortunately, they are left at the mercy of the techie+business platform provider, and as a result, are vulnerable to censorship based on that platform's visibility to the world at large.
Large integrated platforms are cool and all, but at some point, we need to sit down and look at the federatability of these types of communication platforms.
We can't rely on implicit Gatekeepers not being manipulated into acting as amplifiers/dampers as circumstances warrant from their side.
At least that's the vibe I'm getting.
No, not the techie work. In both of my previous comments, I de-emphasized the technical reasons.
Instead, I've tried to emphasize that the killer feature of Youtube for the content creator is the simplifying of finances down to $0 costs for distributing video. Others may argue that "audience & discoverability" is equal to (or more important than) the $0 costs to distribute. That's valid as well.
Since a technical solution of self-hosted video web stack does not solve $0 distribution costs and audience reach, it is irrelevant to the discussion. (Context of discussion was parent comments by fiala__ & ralphstodomingo talking about "scale" and "discoverability".[0])
To add some counterbalance, it does not mean Youtube's "value proposition" of $0 payment for audience reach is always a good deal. An example of this is Netflix. They don't need nor want Youtube's servers to host videos.
>Creators are so dependent on not having to do the techie work,
Again, this type of statement is evidence of techies misunderstanding Youtube.
Even if the content creator hired a techie such as a webmaster to set up a self-hosted video site, it still does not solve the problem that Youtube solves.
Even if you gave a set-&-forget "video hosting web appliance" to a content creator, it still doesn't solve the same problems that Youtube solves.
In both cases of those technical solutions, you've created new problems that the content creator doesn't want to deal with!
I do agree with your core message, that video is hard and not something a small player should build their own solution for. But saying video is to hard even for Microsoft seems a bit of a stretch...
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/build eg https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/77571
I actually said the opposite of that. I emphasized that MS had both the technical skill and money to host their own videos and yet they still moved channel9 videos to Youtube. I wanted readers to pause and think about why they did that.
By using Microsoft as an example, I was hoping to break the mental loop of always referring back to "technical issues" as the reason creators choosing Youtube. It's not technical.
We still self-host for countries where YouTube isn’t available (or if something goes down), but for Channel 9 anyway[1], we’ve moved to YouTube because that’s where the audience is and it makes sense to be where our users expect us to be.
This isn’t about video being hard; our internal player is pretty good and works everywhere (which is not true for YouTube). This was a conscientious decision to go to where our audience is. We still have a self-hosted backup for each video, complete with captions in a variety of languages. But we’d heard repeatedly that our users preferred using YouTube to discover content and not being there didn’t make sense. This isn’t true for all Microsoft content, but for our developer focused videos, we want to be where the community is.
[1]: https://channel9.msdn.com
(I was directly involved in the decision to move our developer content to YouTube.)
The cost of keeping your videos accessible are higher than keeping a typical blog accessible. Storage and bandwidth are obvious ones. How do you get ad networks to monetize your videos, if you want to? How'd you get people to discover your videos, as they are not first-class citizens of a search result page? Where do people even watch videos these days? Everything is on Facebook or YouTube.
You can somehow self-host your videos, but even if you manage to do so, your original purpose for doing it in the first place won't be met, it simply isn't worth it.
Contrast this with Medium, where there are not as many benefits for letting them benefit from your content. Hosting plaintext or markup is trivial, easier to maintain a blog with stuff like Wordpress than to learn how to manage your own server directly to optimize for video. There are a lot of aggregators like HN and Reddit that are populated mostly by blog content, and even if you don't resort to these, your pages are first-class eligible citizens in search results.
Heck, even the policy regarding discussions not being actively shown may hurt your specific type of content. Moderation is tolerable with Disqus, for example.
I think the hosting is not the problem. But the social features that YouTube provides are not easily replaced...
It's the transfer and bandwidth that are the problem. There isn't really such a thing as "unlimited transfer" (there's a hidden limit past which they'll rate-limit you, and kindly ask to stop or pay more). Moreover, once your video gets somewhat popular, you'll hit bandwidth issues. Given how popularity on the Internet seems to happen in spikes, this will likely severely limit the reach of your video.
People are also spoiled by big video services with unlimited budgets and CDNs all around the world.
Is there a single video format supported by all browsers yet?
The number of naysayers that are implying that working with videos is so hard in these comments is shocking to me for such a supposedly technical group of people.
If you are really really popular investing in a cdn is likely the only solution and for this you need some money, be it from advertising, donations or memberships. But this is the same on Youtube too, only that Youtube does the advertising for you and takes a cut.
I would give it a go myself but I only have audio!
1) Based on the GDPR comment. If you're really careful with how you do things the IP address could be argued to not be personal information (never let a user associate IP with any other PI - e.g. if a user can ban another from their channel something, don't let them see the underlying IP ban in place. Not sure how IPs are handled across ActivityPub).
2) People scared of p2p.. I'm still on the fence a little. For instance the opt out issue at Peertube[1] displays a snippet of p2p-fear however it should be noted that a feature to opt out of the p2p part is implemented in Peertube specifically now so may just be a non-issue. p2p fear needs to be determined with a simple "do users use this opt-out" before I can sway one way or the other
[1]: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/685
Thanks for calling it out, I might not have found out that what I knew was outdated otherwise :)
Current guidance (from the legal profession, not the HN peanut gallery) is that IPs are standalone personal data.
Everything I know and have found says IPs are classed as personal data only if combined with other data. I've yet to find anything that supports your claim, which is why I changed my mind on this.
Nothing that isn't privileged information, unfortunately.
> Everything I know and have found says IPs are classed as personal data only if combined with other data. I've yet to find anything that supports your claim, which is why I changed my mind on this.
Recital 30 (https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-30/) says "in particular" when combined with other information, but the addition of that phrase indicates this is not the only case. The accuracy of your statement depends on how you interpret that recital. Based on this case (https://www.alstonprivacy.com/ecj-declares-ip-addresses-pers...) I suspect the broader interpretation is the one that would win over regulators.
Additionally, the information about that case states there is clear agreement that static IPs are personal data, which alone contradicts your belief.
One big difference with Youtube is you don't create your work on their platform directly. You would record a video offline and then upload it to Youtube so you have a copy of your work by default.
With Medium, chances are you wrote the article directly on their platform so now if it gets removed from their site you probably don't have a local copy of it so it's gone forever unless it got scraped somewhere.
In either case I think Medium is really bad and I wouldn't use it.
I can't speak to how popular this feature actually is, but the YouTube app includes video recording, so not everyone is going have a local copy of their work, by default. Conversely, who uses the Medium editor, rather than, say, Google Docs?
I'm starting to self-host my content and services as I am starting to have some income (beginning of my career). However, I have to pay for a domain name, internet access, etc. I can afford to pay all of this right now, but I have no guarantees that the content will remain available in the future. The biggest unknown for me is the domain name, as it sounds much like a single point of failure: what if my registrar closes, or refuses to do business with me, or if I can't afford it anymore? Medium provides some relief against this, but not enough that I would care to use it.
How could this be "solved"?
Ideally, I could write a static page, sign it with a private key (maybe associated to a human-compatible string), and then host it in multiple places. A search engine could pick the right mirror, and interested people could choose to mirror the content. This sounds a bit similar to IPFS, but with the possibility of picking your hosting place and the content you mirror.
And to write something more about paid apps vs. add-based ones (which cropped up later in the discussion thread), when I was younder (kid/student), I was unfortunately in no position to buy paid apps (no income), nor to self host myself (I tried multiple times, but it was a pain to host even static content at the time). It seems to be getting better (github education pack, github/lab pages, etc), but I think that we as a society should think more about what is made available to kids. A free dynamic DNS and hosting service should probably be a minimal offer if you want to make them interested in tech. It could be also a good plan (though long-term) for a hosting platform to gain their trust/mindshare. Also making nice apps freely available to them.
Unfortunately, I had no e-mail address provided by my high school at the time or earlier, so I wouldn't have been able to get a github student pack (if it existed). I think that's something that should be solved at he state level.
If you can't afford a few dollars a year for your domain name, you likely have bigger problems. If ICANN disappears, we all have bigger problems.
Your solution is interesting, however hosting other people's content is fraught with danger. If I ran such a host, I'd assume within minutes I'd be hosting potentially illegal content. How would your system prevent that?
The stuff about kids just reminds me of geocities, TBH. There might be an appetite for something like that once again...
I had never heard about geocities, that's interesting, thank you for sharing this.
Now, to elaborate a bit more about what I said, I don't think there is a lack of technical solutions for this, but rather a fully integrated solution is missing. I would like to be able to "seed"/mirror specific content, like articles that I find interesting. Of course, that wouldn't help with content I (or others) haven't read already, but you would be responsible for the content you host, as you pick it (unlike ipfs or freenet, AFAIK). Integrated in a web browser, I suppose it could also "mirror by default", though I would be concerned about leaking user-specific content (so maybe a spec/protocol extension would be necessary for html/http to tell what could be mirrored?).
It occured to me that this was a bit like "boosting" a post in mastodon. Indeed ActivityPub could be an interesting transport mechanism for this, and could be a way to propagate update notifications back. Though I am not sure the content itself is mirrored with the current mastodon "boost" implementation. A mirror index could also be ran over DHT, while a "search engine" could provide the post hashes, and let clients fetch the content from the DHT.
The whole idea is still quite a bit rough, but it surprises me that in 2019, hosting plain text content (more or less a few images) in a future-proof way isn't a solved problem, and we still have to rely on the Web archive. Applying trusted timestamping (by a few trusted third-parties) to the web archive content would be a good start, to trust mirrored content.
If your register closes, most likely someone will buy them out with the customers. I can't imagine a registrar going bankrupt - that would require serious skills in mismanagement.
If they refuse to do business, there's a good chance you can file a dispute with someone (depending on a country) to recover the domain. (Not 100% certain, but possible)
For affordability... just choose something cheap. If you can't afford $12 / year, you likely have bigger problems then your online services being unavailable.
But regarding better solutions - ipfs is definitely good. There's also i2p/onion if you're ok with much smaller/dedicated reach. Or use the free credits on some large provider like AWS / gcp. You can host a lot as static content on S3 for ~free.
I'm currently working on a platform aimed at reducing internet feudalism and would love to hear more of your concerns and what can be done to improve on the status quo.
If you're interested in talking about it and learning more about what I'm building, shoot me an email at [email protected]
Same can be said about other platforms like YouTube etc. When you produce content for all these mega-platforms, you're nothing more than a sharecropper... a digital one. [0]
You really have no rights and you're at the whim of the 'feudal lord' who doesn't care about you and can take all your work away in an instant. Since there's thousand others that will take your place, they really don't care about what your losses are. They hold all the power and you have absolutely no chance of remedy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping