You are clearly ignorant of the kinds of shit actual YouTube alternatives have to deal with. Their websites and videos get de-ranked or de-listed from search (Rumble [1]), their apps get removed from app store (LBRY [2]), their infrastructure gets constant attacks (BitChute [3]). Meanwhile, the mainstream media smears them at every opportunity.
This is nothing like the environment that Google and YouTube were started in.
https://rumble.com/vcxrxh-rumbles-anti-trust-lawsuit-against...
https://lbry.tv/@lbry:3f/googlebanslbry:7
https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/censorship-bitchute-depl...
- Nothing should be done, whether regulation or consumer action, because everything can and will be fixed by the entry of a new company.
- We are living in the best of worlds. Otherwise, a new company would have sprung to fill the gap and then we would be living in the best of worlds again.
I am yet to convince people holding this belief that it may not be the case.
No one likes spam, abusive content, fake news... However many won't qualify a given content the same way.
IMO, for example, history shows that anyone thinking that he is _right_ and has to educate others by coercing them to pay lip service to his ideas and also by censoring contradiction, walks on a path leading to violent and abusive acts.
Is that not what we do currently? (subject to certain legal restrictions, but generally in usa the restrictions other than copyright are pretty light. And if they aren't, well Tor). You have pretty wide discretion if you self-host, especially on bare metal. Not perfect mind you, but pretty wide.
> Fundamentally i think the solution is competitors. This was a much easier position to take when the web did not just have a few social media giants with network effects, but still: if youtube becomes to dranicon, start a new website. The tools to stream video (albeit not at scale) are just an apt-get away.
There's no serious YouTube competition because YouTube is not (just) a video host. Video hosting isn't that big a deal (though hard at scale).
YouTube is a network of videos, creators and viewers powered by recommendations, subscriptions advertisements (paying creators) and massive network effects.
You could build yet another video host and even have niche success with it. But you have no chance of providing the equivalent effect of a video landing on the YouTube frontpage.
Most people on Youtube never even have their videos land on the frontpage, and yet many of them are successful. That network effect and scale isn't necessary for the ability to broadcast and disseminate speech online, so it doesn't really contradict the premise that free speech on the web (as far as video is concerned) requires Youtube as a host, or that competition couldn't be as effective as, say, repealing Section 230 or having the government take over Youtube and force it to act as a public utility.
At the end of the day, all Youtube is, is popular. They're not like J.P. Morgan, holding monopoly power by physically controlling infrastructure and making competition impossible. The reason there isn't "effective" competition isn't because Google controls the web, it's because no one considers anything less than Google-scale to be "competition," so they write off the tons of other media streaming sites and social media platforms as irrelevant because they can't gain dominant market share. But this conflates the free speech argument with arguments about effective business strategy.
Even as recently as the 80s and 90s, liberals were much more likely to be anti-censorship. Now people who claim that label are all for shutting down "bad" things, without understanding that "good" and "bad" are largely human constructs, and the things that are considered "good" and "bad" can and will change over time. What about in the far future when bigotry inevitably becomes commonplace and systemic in a much worse way than humanity has already seen? Do we really want to just hand these tools of suppression and control to people like that on a silver platter? The entire point of freedom of speech is supposed to transcend that sort of control.
To go on a slight tangent, it's quite similar to how many traditional Christians in America would wish for their religion to have special privileges in law, when they don't realize that it would open the door for any other religion to do the same, should their population grow to the numbers they'd need to influence policy. The very same people who would wish to make Christianity privileged would bemoan Islam one day becoming the majority religion and instituting Islamic law via those same legal mechanisms. Nobody I've talked to face to face in my area has any kind of answer to that one.
We already have the problem of people creating too many filter-bubbles in their online lives. A fragmented social media environment will not usher in an age where everyone gets exposed to a more diverse set of ideas, we'll just get FoxNewsBook and MSNBCBook, or ChristianTube and MuslimTube, or whatever other social groups happen to be the most defining.
Moderated communities are basically the HOA neighborhoods of the internet. There is nothing wrong with liking the high property values, but competition alone does not prevent their abuses [3].
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/expresident/all-the-por...
[2] https://www.foodbeast.com/news/pepsi-boycott-kendall/
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/homeowners-...
In real life, you get to choose the people to be friend with or associate with, and we all have number of circles with interests that doesn't necessary overlap the same circles. That's pretty much the same thing that I have on the internet when using certain social media. It's great since you don't have spammers, and you don't have to deal with racists or people who just turn up the temperature of a room. Maybe that's the way it should be.
It's also much more difficult to spread vitriolic meme since it has to infiltrate the various disparate communities.
Moderated communities are basically the HOA neighborhoods of the internet. There is nothing wrong with liking the high property values, but competition alone does not prevent their abuses [3].
OK. Pretty much any places that aren't garbage have moderation of some sort. If nothing else to keep out spam.
And a community isn't a HOA, which you are basically stuck with if you live in them.
I agree. I wouldn't have a problem with YouTube doing anything if YouTube wasn't the video website. We need decentralization.
But at the same time more and more often I also see these same concerns raised with decentralized networks (going beyond standard practices like blocking and preventing federation with instances), and that gets me worried.
- Scuttlebutt
- GNUnet
- Secureshare
- Fereenet
- ZeroNet
- Retroshare
- Diaspora
- Mastadon
- Matrix
- Cabal
Decentralized platforms put more responsibility on the user (key management, account recovery, content hosting, etc) which is unlikely to get mass adoption from mainstream users unless the decentralized platform is as easy to use as twitter.
What would be a good way to make these platforms mainstream? Would you support some sort of a mandatory requirement to federate for the big players? Of course, they would still be able to refuse to talk to instances that violate their own policies.
But isn't that ability exactly what many people consider a violation of free speech on mainstream social media platforms, only applies to accounts rather than instances?
Complaining that you don’t have a ready made audience is pretty weak. You need to hustle for this stuff. People used to xerox and give away zines for an audience. As the Pirate Bay founder said recently[0], it’s embarrassing how easily people are giving up.
It’s almost as if they don’t want to actually put the stuff out there, but rather be held up as martyrs. Pirate Bay and SciHub are still up, and have multiple billion dollar corporations actively gunning for them socially, legally, and extra legally. It can be done.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-th...
It can be done, people are just being lazy instead of creative.
It’s like there’s a whole generation of engineers that don’t realize that you can actually buy a computer instead of just rent someone else’s.
Then you're in luck, YouTube is not the only video website. It's not even the biggest. Some video formats it can't even compete in because competitors are so far and away superior.
I think you really mean that YouTube is a popular site. But it is certainly not the site going by site size. That would be FB. Not the most engaging either with snapchat and tik tok out there. It's certainly better than the other "also rans" like daily motion though.
(Actually, now I think about it, I'm not even sure I would say it is necessarily "better" than DM. Maybe a better phrase would be "seems to be more popular"?)
We could just change our culture to be satisfied with 720p content and use traditional websites that don't use p2p tech. Like, we could all just start using bilibili.com or some other chinese competitors instead of youtube.
I mean, ok? Can't you simply not watch that content? What if there were a warning on the content, so that you could choose to not watch it?
Or maybe you could specify on your account, that you don't want to see that content, so it never shows up for you. Problem solved, and everyone wins.
Reach
You can't have competition when some of the competitors can't use the infrastructure. It is not without reason that utility providers can't discriminate and I think it is time to decide what is considered a utility in the internet age.
When it comes down to it - i like moderated spaces on the internet. I dont want to wade through spam, not to mention violent and abusive content. I don't like seeing shock images.
So yes, i support having moderation. The question to me is not: yes/no moderation, its where you draw the line; what are your policies and how are they enforced.
Fundamentally i think the solution is competitors. This was a much easier position to take when the web did not just have a few social media giants with network effects, but still: if youtube becomes to dranicon, start a new website. The tools to stream video (albeit not at scale) are just an apt-get away.