This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for content creators to be fairly compensated, but I will still miss it.
Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things.
They might try to make something look nice and be slick for the end user, but they won't usually hire people or use big studios.
This contributed to a culture where the very best people in the field are making things that any user could also go away and do themselves easily, which led to creativity.
Nowadays the best people get money, and lots of it, which leads to their production becoming better and better, which leads to a better product, but less innovation.
> which leads to their production becoming better and better, which leads to a better product, but less innovation.
"Better" in the sense that they are more polished and edited, but unfortunately that means more filtered, targeted and biased. There is an intrinsic, authentic value in raw productions that gets lost or doesn't exist in the former.
Hence https://joinpeertube.org/en/ existing and growing. YouTube has demonetized & banned LGBTQ+ mentioning videos[1], and continues to tighten the noose around those that make it a viable platform.
YouTube has helped to improve the product, but I am of the opinion that the most of the best YouTube channels are produced by a single person who post weekly at most. They seem to have struck a good balance between audience
engagement and information value. Consider Ben Eater or Technology Connections videos. The former may be more education oriented while the latter is well geared towards my quirky tastes in entertainment, yet both of these are producers who clearly respect their audiences by being interesting and to the point.
In contrast, the channels that have large production crews and publish more regularly usually feel thin on content. There is either very little value to the information or the density of information is incredibly low. There are exceptions. Vox comes to mind because they clearly respect their audience, has many more people involved in production, and produces more polished videos.
Yet those exceptions feel rare. More often than not I find new channels through those small time producers, either directly from the creator or through YouTube's automated recommendation while watching an interesting channel.
Now Google is sanitizing educational hacking videos, which is disconcerting because a lot of those videos are either lectures or produced by small producers. Google is probably doing that to protect their reputation, and there are likely cases when I would agree that it is a good thing. On the other hand, hacking is filled with a lot of grey areas. I enjoy some of those educational videos because it offers a glimpse into how hardware and software works, or demonstrates some interesting uses of everyday software. (At least for a Unix user, The other day, I was watching a video on reverse engineering firmware where I have regularly used all but one of the Unix utilities in the demonstration.) If Google takes that option away one of the best avenues for discoverability disappears. That hurts audiences and producers.
> In contrast, the channels that have large production crews and publish more regularly usually feel thin on content. There is either very little value to the information or the density of information is incredibly low. There are exceptions. Vox comes to mind because they clearly respect their audience, has many more people involved in production, and produces more polished videos.
Are you familiar with the youtube channel Kurzgesagt?
That's an exception to the rule - a rare case of people with enough integrity to not sacrifice quality and accuracy, while having a distinct and approachable enough style to attract a wider audience. And still, I'm not sure if they've reached "financial independence" point yet. Yes, there's Patreon (and I send them money there), but last I checked (roughly a year ago), they still funded it in big part from the money they make commercially as a creative agency.
> Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things.
It's the other way around. When there is no compensation, people do stuff for fun, out of love, and not for optimisation, ROI, DAU/MAU, etc.
"Back in the days" - pre-dot-com - the website was part of the hobby. People wanted to put their knowledge out there, maybe for pride, maybe just "why not?". And the site was theirs, it looked the way they wanted, it was organised they way they were thinking[^1]. But when money comes in, one has to deal with making more visitors, making the site according to trends, with negative space material auto dark/light design, constantly and regularly put in updates, add JSON-LD microdata... it's endless. And the fun dies. On platforms, everything looks the same, it doesn't feel like a home any more, it's not yours. It's a job.
This is what kills quirky, niche little sites and communities.
My experience is people generally do different things when it's out of interest. More going deep on whatever their passion is, less of everything else. So you get ugly sites with interesting essays, or beautiful data visualization but no text for search engines to use to know to send people to the page. I really liked https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/the-costs-of-r... on this.
I also think (though don't have the numbers) that there are many more hobby sites now than there were in, say, 1995, because the whole web is so much bigger. They're just far smaller portion of what you're likely to encounter.
> I also think (though don't have the numbers) that there are many more hobby sites now than there were in, say, 1995, because the whole web is so much bigger.
I severely doubt this. 1995-2004(?), essentially pre-myspace, was an era when many of us had a homepage as a hobby; some went into blogging as well, but still on their own site.
Compare it to the web today: everyone is posting content* on silos and a most don't event bother thinking of a website. Convenience, they say, but reality is that everyone thinks they might be able to make a living out of that hobby.
* "content" in the context of silos is a tricky thing to be honest. When was the last time you saw real, true, honest content, without an agenda, without cat videos, without selfies, on a modern content silo? When I say modern, I mean Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; WordPress and Tumblr are different, being more like providers of websites.
It sounds like you're talking about relative numbers, and I have no disagreement there, but I'm talking about absolute numbers. There just weren't that many people online in 1995, so even a large fraction then can easily be less than a very small fraction now.
I know lots of people with websites (ex: my own, https://jefftk.com) and a lot of this is it's so much easier and cheaper now. You don't have to be a sysadmin or be friends with one, domains cost 10x less than they used to, many more people have internet access, etc.
> When was the last time you saw real, true, honest content, without an agenda, without cat videos, without selfies, on a modern content silo?
I think it depends a lot who your friends are, what subcultures you're in, and how you choose who to follow. My Facebook feed is mostly my friends talking about interesting things and I like it a lot.
Deleting it is one option, but another is teaching FB to show you posts by friends who have more interesting things to say. This has worked well for me, though I also expect it depends on your friends and how they use FB.
Another negative aspect of compensation I’ve thought about is that it could cause content creators, particularly political and religious/non-religious ones, from seriously exploring opposing views. Why make videos exploring opposing views when you are making thousands of dollars by giving your audience what it wants? It may increase bias, and limit the self development of not only the creator, but audience as well.
> Another negative aspect of compensation I’ve thought about is that it could cause content creators, particularly political and religious/non-religious ones, from seriously exploring opposing views.
Almost worse, it puts up a barrier to resistance to me even reading opposing views. When I see an anti-Christian comment on HN or Slashdot, I have no problem reading it and potentially responding to it. But if I see an anti-Christian article on Medium, I'm a bit reluctant to click on it, because 1) that person may get money as a result, and 2) it may promote that article to more people, potentially leading to even more articles on a similar vein being written. I assume the situation is the same for lots of ideological positions -- Conservatives avoiding reading Liberal think-pieces, etc.
> When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things.
I don't know, I feel like it's the opposite
When you look at the myriad X-Files or guitar pedal schematic or whatever site, they could be endlessly detailed because it's what people did for fun. Nobody maxes out on fun.
I do, however, max out my work hours...generally as quickly as possible.
D
In a behavioral psych class, we had the "Bart vs Lisa" analogy of working.
If we pay Bart to study, his grades will increase. If we pay Lisa to study, her grades will decrease. I've forgotten the original papers this was based on because it's not my area.
Anyway. I'm sure Bart's work for pay is equivalent or better than Lisa's free work.
If asked, any rational human would work an hour for $5 versus $0, right? Nobody can spend time making anything complex or useful and then give it away freely.
I think what is missing here is the passion factor. Most devs will work on a project theyre passionate about for (insert reason here), but won't work on others unless theyre compensated for it.
I know this is true for myself. I will happily contribute to a project if I need it for work and my employer compensates me for it. I only work on a project if it is personally rewarding outside of work
I see this sentiment mentioned often, but all the things we could do back in the day are not only still possible, they are actually still being done by people out there.
What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though.
Fortunately, in my experience niche sites and communities are still thriving through social transmission, and the fact that so many more people are active online nowadays.
How would you track them down today? In the old days, you typed "knitting" into Lycos and you got this wonderfully weird site of someone for whom knitting was a passion, along with a webring full of similar sites.
Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise?
This is my problem as well. I'm tried using millionshort, obscure duckduckgo searches that exclude a lot of the big sites, and they still don't show up.
Those who wonder how these niche sites looked like, and example: http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/
This site has an immense amount of data in a reading-friendly format about old, obscure, beautiful photography equipment, in a way I've not seen for decades. Why? Because it hasn't been updated since 2005. And it just works.
Seriously. Subreddits are mini-Internets. Yes, centrally controlled and restricted to newsboard format (the latter is arguably a benefit), but they link out to interesting sites on the "main" Internet, and mostly haven't been poisoned by marketers just yet.
Not an elegant solution, and not a permanent solution - but it works for now.
But what if I want to search knitting to find out how to knit, not to revel in quirk culture?
The "authentic" people are on Youtube and Reddit and Medium and publishing on Twitter and closed Facebook groups. And yet, some of those people sometimes want to make a living on their passion. I would be willing to bet most people on the web in the 90s would have as well, if they could have.
There is more hobby and enthusiast content on the web now than there ever has been, with more depth, greater quality and dimensionality than the 90's web could ever have hoped to offer, as well as far more opportunities for interaction between people. I think that's a fair trade for nostalgia and "quirk."
(Edited for less snark and more clarity since it seems this comment is getting sniped.)
It's a result of things getting worse. In an effort to stop abuse and increase drive to sponsored creators, YouTube committed a cardinal sin with respect to their discovery algorithm. They made things worse.
Discovery on YouTube is now comically difficult, getting out of your filter bubble means making bizarre searches and filter edge cases, otherwise you see the same 15 videos weekly.
They've failed to filter the hate content they intended to eliminate, they've failed to improve their curated content volume, and discovery remains bound and gagged in the back of Ad monetization's sedan.
If you were here in 2010 it's worse now. Privacy / safety / predictability, I guess, but the magic is all gone.
YouTube could use an [adult swim] concept. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. YouTube.
If I needed to track down such a site I would try asking in person. Find a local knitting meetup and ask everyone there. Then go to the next city over and do the same thing. Hopefully you will bump into someone who knows someone who knows about that awesome knitting site.
I'd like people to stop harping on "individual responsibility". It's not "on us". We are social monkeys, we are not perfectly rational autonomous individuals. Monopolies are emerging from collective behaviour that can't be subsumed into the simple aggregation of random personal choices.
Fair enough, but it's not really on Youtube that it's users are all a bunch of social monkeys that are too lazy to use other services alongside it, either.
I miss StumbleUpon. It was a fun way for discovering unique out-of-the-way sites. One could lose oneself for hours much in the same way people do now on Reddit. It's a shame it's gone.
Thanks for taking the time and putting together your site.
Initially all businesses are trying to figure out how to make money by quickly exploring possible business ideas. That's when the most fun but also most start-up tragedies happen. Once some revenue stream is found, the company can start growing, getting into collaborative phase, where it is viewed as a super cool place and most people inside can change things. At some point business opportunities get exhausted, other measures need to be put in place, company grows too big for everybody to have a voice; bureaucracy and formalism sets in, company starts to be perceived as losing its edge and being stale, optimizing for its core profit, exploiting as much as it can and stopping most of the exploration. Innovative people move on to other spaces allowing exploration, reliable business types move in.
Don't forget how the rest of the story goes. As businesses mature and margins evaporate, they start ruthlessly optimizing and cutting corners on everything they can to maximize their profits. Qualities that made the space interesting in the first place are the first to be thrown under the bus.
Online downloadable audio was barely tractable in 1999 or earlier, let alone streaming video. What was this golden age, what were the sites, and what was the usage?
Streaming video is almost wholly 2004 and later, generally years later.
Text. With pictures. You know, like books. Which you can actually use while, say, fixing something, unlike a video which you need to pause, rewind, watch again, while balancing pieces of a torn down laptop on your hands.
Text with pictures suffer horribly from link rot when the pictures aren't on the same site (for example forum threads), with all the image hosting services that had closed in the last decade (or even dropbox stopping to serve as image host, even for paying clients)
You are absolutely correct about the timeline! My experiences with independent video sites were mostley between 2000 and 2007 I'd guess. I do not think this contradicts any of my other statements, though.
Looking back further before video, we had web-rings which allowed for finding some of the best and worst sites on a subject :) I can't be the only card carrying member of the HTML Writers Guild here, can I?
I think this is just rose tinted glasses. The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude more content available today than in the 90s across the full spectrum of human affairs. Although highly visible to the individual content creators, the slivers of content that get removed from YouTube are drops in the ocean compared to the massive amount of content made available on just YouTube alone. Most people on the internet today weren't even online during the supposed golden era, and for many others today's internet is the only internet they've ever known.
And that's neglecting to address the amount of content and traffic available.
I'm not making a "more is better" argument, rather, I believe that "more is different", often in hard-to-appreciate ways.
The 1999 audience, and contributors, wanted to be on the Internet, for the most part. They didn't have to be there, and more importantly, most use was not directly remunerative, though some may have been self-interested (expression, proselytising, shingle-hanging, tech advocacy, targeted sales, and yes, a nascent advertising niche).
Creators could rarely hope for direct benefits, with rare exceptions ("Million Dollar Homepage", etc.)
Use now is vastly broader, it's all but essential, being widely recognised as a basic human right. Devices are easier to use, but far less generative. Even traditionally creative platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows) increasingly get in the way of, rather than facilitate, creation (the time I spend nursing rather than using systems is ... depressing).
And whilst many of the newcomers are welcomed, a large share really aren't. Their use is not aimed at general benefit, but at private and personal appropriation, often through deception and fraud.
To some degree yes, but the feeling of belonging to niche forum in the 90's and 00's, really had a different feeling today's sub-reddit, discord, slack communities.
> The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude
This is very good point, and maybe what I'm mostly uncomfortable with. I'm uncomfortable using large web sites (like YouTube or Reddit) for community building. This could be tied to certain personality types, or lacking from something emotionally for me, but that may be what causes the feeling of missing those sites.
They didn’t exist. This person is full of it. There was no “golden age of internet video” before YouTube. Period.
Video was all through real player and was grainy, postage stamp affairs that constantly suffered from buffer underruns. It sucked. There was no independent dudes exploring abondoned buildings with high quality production (the proper people). No dudes picking locks in under 30 seconds (lock picking lawyer). No people taking apart power tools (ave).
None of that existed before YouTube. YouTube has dramatically changed the content landscape for the better—both for the producer and consumer. We’ve never lived in a greater time of independent content than now.
Sigh... I've replied to a couple of your other comments, but it is getting exhausting :( You are using quotes around something not from my comment, and not anything that I am referring to.
And it really seems like whatever site I tell you I miss is going to be met with reasons why YouTube is better for said content, which is completely orthogonal to my original point.
For some reason my comment got a lot of replies and comments. Take some time to think about why that is? Everyone is just on here full of it? Making up feelings of missing web sites? Maybe you don't miss any web sites–that is okay. Maybe it seems silly that someone would have strong-positive memories and emotions tied to certain web-sites that were actual communities to many of us–that is okay. But you shouldn't shame others. Not for this, not for anything.
Yeah, I also don't remember that. I remember being floored that Youtube was hosting so much video (you know, like 0.001% as much as they host now, by disk space consumed—way less of it and it was SD) for free—it blew my freaking mind. Server disk and bandwidth like that was so expensive. It was easy to find free hosting but it came with low disk use limits—video wasn't happening. Paid wasn't yet anywhere near as cheap as it is now, and came with lower limits. You could just sign up for free and upload... anything? Minutes and minutes, adding up to hours, of it? And anyone could watch it? It was incredible.
Of course I didn't yet understand the idea of operating at a huge loss to generate hockeystick growth and attract VC and/or acquisition, so I wasn't wrong and the math didn't make any damn sense, I just didn't know that it didn't matter.
It also seemed wild that their player actually kinda mostly worked. In the browser! Before YouTube it was all awful RealPlayer videos at ultra-low res and smeary, high compression rates, or maybe a short .mov or something of similar quality, and if it was streaming rather than a download it woul... [BUFFERING] ...d freeze constantly. Napster and friends were still mostly for music at the time. Some video sharing was going on but it was, like, really low-quality DiVX rips of DVDs for burning to CDs.
Most were small sites that had a few videos about a specific topic, and whose videos were not optimized for search engines or anything other than the topic at hand.
Why do you hear the words "hey guys" or "you guys" in virtually every YouTube video today? Because it's an approved (and extremely boring, meaningless, and effortless) way to address your audience in a non-specific manner.
Internet videos had a lot more character before they were a source of income.
Of course that same income potential produces a lot of garbage 20 minute videos about the latest Nintendo Switch rumor, for example, and they also allow truly passionate people to make money creating the videos they would not have time to create without that income, so it's a mixed bag.
The internet in general 20 years ago had a lot more character overall before people figured out how to make it profitable.
I'd wager the lack of availability and communication of widely accessible videos were limited mostly by cost of bandwidth. Watching videos over 28k was no joy.
In the early 2000s before YouTube, IME it was a lot more about P2P than web-based publishing or streaming (as mentioned, streaming video was mostly horrible RealPlayer).
A lot of videos were shared and downloaded through DirectConnect and the FastTrack (Kazaa/Grokster/iMesh/Morpheus) and Gnutella (Limewire) family protocols. Some was discovered via search and some (especially at LAN parties) via browsing others' archives. People seem to forget that early day P2P was far from only piracy - this is how homemade content was spread as well.
More sophisticated people would have web sites linking to FTP archives of their own content. I also gather that file-sharing (mostly piracy?) via IRC was big, but it's not something I personally used.
The web was less conflated with the internet back then.
Video quality and bitrates are tightly related. 240p video (320x240) requires 300-700 kbps for live streaming, well beyond the capabilities of modems. 360p is in the 700kbps - 1.5 Mbps range, now considered low-end DSL. 720p, a reasonable HD resolution (1280×720) runs at 2-4Mbps, and 4K is 15-25Mbps.
My own recollections are that live streaming video wasn't a commonly-encountered thing until the mid-2000s, that Netflix was still mailing (rather than streaming) video as of 2007, and adoption of that service took considerable time.
As of the late 1990s, online audio was a relative rarity, and much of that RealAudio based, witness early archives of programming from NPR and other sources locked in inaccessible, and very low-quality, audio codecs.
Assertions of a pre-2004, let alone pre-1999, golden age of Internet Video are implausible.
You (and others in this thread) might be taking GP's 'before YouTube' a bit literally - it existed for a long time before it was in the dominant hyper-popular position (or even Google/Alphabet owned as) it is today.
For video, it was really a bit later into the early and mid 00s.
Answering this is hard, though. The best way to think about it is think of all those super random, niche subreddits. I'm sure all of those had cool, interesting web sites made by people really into that thing. So really they existed for everything. Find someone who was online a bunch during this time people and ask them if them were members of any interesting online forums.
Can you name three such sites? Because I'm pretty sure you might be thinking of some other media; video was expensive to host efficiently because of the file size, and it's only right around the time of the inception of YouTube that costs came down far enough and bandwidth came up far enough to enable simple video sharing.
I didn't talk about before YouTube existed–I'm talking about when YouTube became the defacto standard for online video. Independent video sites existed and flourished along side YouTube in the beginning.
Sidenote: If we were having this conversation over beers at a meetup would you have said "Give me a break..." to me? Is this your conversational tone in person as well?
This is my HN tone because tons of people here love to play the “everything was better back in the day” card. Couple that with every mention of google bringing out people with huge axes to grind and it can become eye-roll city. Apologies for being so harsh.
It's okay. I understand that feeling and I'm probably guilty of it more than I realize it. I tried to say "miss" instead of "better", but even that phrasing implies I'd rather have the old and I'm not sure about that to be honest. This stuff is hard for sure. Hence why these conversations are good for beers after a meetup :)
So 10 second clips of grainy 300x300 cat videos stolen from broadcast tv? If you think that is all that is on YouTube, you are sadly mistaken.
Again. Give me a break. YouTube has absolutely transformed content distribution for then independent producer. We’ve never had a better age for independent content.
I didn't say it wasn't better and I didn't say it didn't transform content distribution for the independent producer. What I said was
1.) there used to be a lot of niche video sites
2.) many of those sites are gone
3.) The standardization of YouTube is one of the reasons many of those sites are gone.
The first two are facts and the second is my opinion, but which of those things do you not agree with?
I can miss something and understand that what we have now is better overall.
>Does YT have a quantifiable monopoly it abuses in an economic sense?
I really don't see how YouTube could be seen as anything but anticompetitive in many of its practices. Primarily, the fact that they have used and continue to use revenue driven by search from Google to maintain the tremendous infrastructure necessary to run YouTube. This means that anyone who wishes to compete with YouTube needs to be able to find investors (or pay themselves, but the number of people or organizations that could do that can be counted on one hand) willing to foot the bill to build billion-dollar infrastructure and then expect to run it at a profound loss, burning hundreds of millions of dollars a year for potentially a decade or more. Google is probably making some money on YouTube now, but they ran it at a mountainous loss for years and years for no reason other than suppressing the possibility of competition being developed. There also other smaller things, like the US government deciding to host all of their video content on YouTube without even considering following the legally-required bidding process - because there was no realistic competitor. That's pretty telling.
>But can't folks still create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap?
because of the network effect. Users end up flocking to the bigger platform and thus never even find out about the mon&pop store webpage with interesting content (not to mention the monetization is non-existent there).
They can use YouTube as a storefront window to reach the audience.
But it may be not completely prudent to use YouTube as the only place your videos are available. Through the same videos, it is possible to constantly advertise the other sources of one's videos.
The problem, of course, is monetization, or lack thereof outside YouTube.
On a slightly unrelated note:
When these to-be monopolies are just starting and raising dollars, their service and everything is on point. Once their too big to have competitors, there is absolutely no way of even contacting them (even if you're in the clear and they're wrong). Customer service from these tech monopolies really makes me feel like we're all cattle.
If you have, let's say, a billion users, each of which can report stuff, and have some algorithm that weeds out 90% of bogus reports, how big would your customer support team need to be to handle the remaining 10% in a reasonable time span?
I get this argument about having millions of users reporting stuff. But just have a look at Facebook and Google's balance sheet, and the figures that other non profitable monopolies raise. However big the support team needs to be should be their problem, or rather part of their plan. And if they don't have enough money for a big enough team (or just don't prioritise support enough), then honestly, I don't think it's truly scalable or sustainable. And eventually we as consumers will learn. This whole tech pump and dump (or promise something and change it later when it's time to profit[1]) wave is new, and we're just beginning to learn how companies change once they have enough leverage.
I'm sure if they don't take customer support seriously, they will pay a price for it in the long run.
Would just like to clarify, that I don't think expecting personal support for non-paid services is reasonable. But as a paid customer (for e.g. of Uber), one should at least be able to call an IVR. But these cos. deliberately make it harder for you to get their numbers.
[1]for e.g. how youtube was free speech and niche artists, how google would get you to the result the quickest
100M tickets in how much time? Let's say a year. And it takes on average 5 minutes to respond to 1. That is 500M minutes. So you need a team of ~1500 people to respond to 100M tickets in a year. Not that bad eh.
That's a side effect of too much centralization. Grocery stores handle billions of customers daily and have no problem processing even 10% of them complaining about something, because there's lots of stores and each handles complaints themselves. Customer support scales linearly with the scale of the sector.
You could say it's one of the negative side effects of globalization - instead of small market entities serving their local populations, you have large market entities that try to handle everyone themselves.
High speed internet is better and more available than ever before. Storage is also much cheaper than before youtube came along. If it could happen back then, it can happen much easier now.
We may see a lot of web 1.0 ideas renewed/reinvented in the "Web 3.0" world. I'm hopeful distributed computing will make the web feel like the Wild West again.
Although YouTube's market position or "monopoly" as you'd like to call it certainly has drawn a crosshair on it's forehead; a more causal relationship between the take-downs proliferates to me as what people describe to be "cancel culture".
it's the discovery. anyone can still put a video somewhere else. it's just that it's pointless putting it somewhere where it's hard to discover if you also want monetization.
I see in this scenario Google as more of a natural monopoly. They really only got into censoring recently. The more people they alienate the bigger the opportunities for competition. A natural monopoly has the ability to fail itself out of the market.
I learned security from t-files, 8lgm, phrack, and bugtraq. The people who taught me learned it from mentorship. The only meaningful progress in security is by people who work against it. It's a craft subculture, and the real value of it is in securing the freedom of people to not be subjects of platforms.
YouTube is lame for doing this, but it's a net positive for innovation.
Let them have their walled suburb. Innovation happens at the edges, and the social-sphere had made people lazy. The bar for entry to being a hacker is so low, it's the equivalent to governments setting up programs to train people to play punk music.
Tech giants have become like baby boomers who still think they are rebels.
I look forward to a new generation of kids who will spit upon their hands, hoist the black flag and make hacking dangerous again.
As you pursue the basic questions, you'll find yourself looking at specific threats, and the means (mechanisms, technologies, techniques) of addressing them.
Bruce Schneier and Freedom to Tinker are other good starting points -- ports of entry, not your be-all, end-all.
More broadly, this "start from a broad question, follow the implications" approach to research is a useful one in general.
Start with understanding Unix file permission system and the meaning of /etc/services. It will snowball from there. You need to be proficient in Unix operating systems to have a knowledge base.
With all due respect, the question was about more modern times. I feel like this was better advice in the 90s and early 2000s. It's not like knowing those things is bad, I just don't know how applicable it is now.
Today the scope is far too big and there are far too many different hacking disciplines now. The advice above was probably more suited to a time when people used to be granted shell access to university computers. We live in a world where people don't even run web applications in on servers anymore, rather containers hosted in cloud platforms.
That said, you really should develop a sound understanding of how computers work at a low level, it doesn't have to be perfect; but it helps you understand how even modern systems can be flawed (under all the shiny cloud marketing, they're computers after all). I would start with doing a course like: https://www.nand2tetris.org/.
Once that foundational knowledge is understood, learn how computer networks work (IP, TCP, UDP), network stacks and then higher level protocols like HTTP, HTTP(s) and other layer 7 protocols. Learning about databases is good too, basic SQL skills are useful.
By this stage you will probably bee having too much fun building new things using all the knowledge you've acquired rather than breaking other peoples stuff; Then again I guess it can still be fun to experiment with that too.
Understanding permissions leads to understanding of privilege escalation, interprocess communication, /proc, logging, avoiding logging, understanding /etc... Yep, that's where I would start.
You need to figure out what you mean by security. Cryptography? Hacking devices? Stalking/anti-stalking, malware, etc? Hardening boxes? Penetration testing?
I hate how removed videos don't retain a title. It's one thing for a video to be taken down, it's another to see a mystery box taunting me from my favorites playlist. What forbidden knowledge (cat video) is forever lost to time?
Thanks! Trying it on a few links it worked on a newer video from a terminated account but no dice on old stuff. It looks like they remade their account so that's definitely a win!
Well YouTube's actions is really unsurprising given that they have made it more unclear on which videos meet their Terms of Service. If that wasn't enough, creators also complained about 'The Algorithm' scanning their videos to demonetize or take down videos for the same reason.
At this point, It is worth looking at other alternatives such as Bitchute, PeerTube, etc with Patreon support to avoid this senseless behaviour that YouTube is doing to its creators.
If they can do it to creators with crazy conspiracy theorist videos or creators who have political opinion videos, YouTube can do it to anyone.
That’s really sad! Censoring informative content should never be part of any corporate strategy, especially in countries having freedom in their constitution.
Self-hosting PeerTube is trivial. So is self-hosting NextCloud (DropBox alternative). So is self-hosting PixelFed (Instagram alternative). So is self-hosting Mastodon, RocketChat, Code-Server (VSCode) etc. Rent a $5/month VPS and have 100% control over what you publish and federate with like-minded as you like. At some point those services will support 90% of all monopoly features and 99% features you care about. If you are worried about some unwanted illegal content coming in from federated users, it's trivial to get Deep Learning filters to remove 99% of unwanted content (e.g. porn) as well. You can decide the rules.
Is this actually happening? Because it makes little sense when you consider that YouTube-parent Google is sponsoring security education videos. See this GCP-sponsored LiveOverflow video:
Maybe Google's killing off dodgy script kiddie vids, and leaving quality content up (and I mean the rest of LiverOverflow's videos et al, not just the paid-for stuff.)
I think this came up months ago and it was clarified it was just a mistake, not an actually policy. Google didn't actually ban educational videos, but people drew conclusions from Twitter and assumed the worst against reason.
Reddit comments seems to confirm that this is just fear mongering at this point, and the OP should know by now what happened.
If you read the comments in the Reddit thread, this is clickbait fear-mongering. It's a sad state of affairs when Reddit users are savvier than HN users.
It's not as crazy an idea as it may sound and there's supposedly a lot of gun related stuff there right now.
I'm surprised as to why PornHub haven't already launched a re-skin for regular content. They've clearly got the infrastructure and knowhow to make it work.
>I'm surprised as to why PornHub haven't already launched a re-skin for regular content. They've clearly got the infrastructure and knowhow to make it work.
It's outside their business model so they're not sure they can do a good job and make a good enough profit to make it worthwhile. It's the same reason your local heavy earth-moving contractors don't offer equipment rental and machine moving services even though those things use the same infrastructure (maintenance facilities and an army of low boy trailers) and workflows (dumping machines off at various addresses and picking them back up when the job is done) they already have.
>I'm surprised as to why PornHub haven't already launched a re-skin for regular content. They've clearly got the infrastructure and knowhow to make it work.
Why should they? Porn is where the money is - the mainstream content which is seeking refuge with them is difficult to monetize (otherwise, it would still be on Youtube making moeny) and has an audience that's already willing to move to Pornhub.
I've been doing this for a few years now as I grew tired of video/audio getting removed without them leaving any trace of what the content was related to.
My current setup consists of several scripts on my personal server - basic CLI wrappers around "youtube-dl" (supports many sites, not just YouTube) - these scripts set my default preferences as well as the destination folder depending on the parameters passed.
Once the download is complete, the destination folder is just one of many paths scanned by my Plex instance. I can then pull up the video/audio on my television, computer or mobile device as I please.
Nothing fancy; basically what ravenstine said. If it's interesting, and I want to hold onto it, I youtube-dl it. Eventually it makes its way onto a USB backup drive.
Even the Redditor commenters are not falling for this.
Not sure why HN is getting hit so hard by the anti-big-tech FUD over the last few days, or why we keep taking the bait. Maybe just because HN has start up culture at its core.
YouTube doesn't seem to be interested in hosting any content that isn't manufactured from a giant media corporation or just vapid clickbait entertainment. Just take a look at the trending tab to see what YouTube wants to promote: http://youtube.com/trending
It's worth noting that "Trending" is curated by YouTube itself, and is not an algorithmically determined set of videos.
This is wrong. Trending is based on an actual mathematical formula based on the number of views per hour on the last 48h. Then on top of that you have some filtering who tries to downgrade clickbaity contents. In the US you also have human filtering. Curators can remove a video or ask the Trending algorithm to rate a video before it's normally rated but they can't add a video to an arbitrary position or change the ranking.
Clickbait entertainment is probably over represented but that's also a kind of video who receives a lot of view at the same time which what "Trending" means.
I feel like more and more educational youtubers are going to be moving to platforms like Skillshare, Brilliant, and other next-gen educational/learning subscription services that already sponsor them, more or less because they're undoubtedly going to be fairly compensated for their work on those platforms vs. YouTube, and catering to an audience that is passionate about learning and doesn't post asinine troll comments.
YouTube is undergoing the same transformation that happened to TLC, Discovery, and The History Channel; toy reviews, mainstream media and music, zany (yet soulless) influencers, and good-for-all-audiences content are ruling the platform because they bring in the most most advertising revenue, creating a beautiful moment in time, creating a lot of value for shareholders.
The one thing YouTube has for it (maybe not for long) against these platforms is that all content being free from paywalls encourages user exploration (search or clicking on random thumbnails) and thus easier discovery of your videos.
This is the safe, nice YouTube you've been asking for. Hope you enjoy it.
Remember when we were saying that it was going to end badly when the mainstream media were pressuring advertisers to have a moral stance on the content their advertisements are shown with? Well, this is exactly what was bound to happen. YouTube is (gradually, to reduce backlash) becoming Disney-VEVO-Time Warner tube, and that means they're going to have to find cost-effective ways to destroy all marginally-concerning-looking content.
There doesn't appear to be any evidence that educational videos are banned. This is just the same overblown news story from a month ago that they admitted was just a fluke of the content flagging system.
A quick search on Google shows plenty of educational content in hacking, some from Google themselves. I'd say this borders on conspiracy theory at this point.
So much educational content, particularly historic content, is now on the continuum from delisted to removed entirely. The hacking content is just of particular interest to this community; it's not the story.
Is there an official page from YouTube that lists banned categories? Even YouTube's public policy page [1] doesn't mention anything about educational hacking videos.
It's there somewhere, but it doesn't say "educational hacking videos". It says "hacking and spam/phishing".
It's just a rephrasing of their existing policy. It's the same idea of why they don't let you show videos advocating building bombs and using them in terrorist attacks. The videos that are banned are based on people trying to use these techniques to commit crimes. Not banning "hacking" in general.
Just came with an idea: IPFS shaddowing/mirroring, a browser plugin which seeds your public browsing cache as a source.
Then as more people visit the URL and keep it cached then the resource would live the longer or forever.
That would need to be zero-setup & interaction-free tool, Firefox killer-app ideally.
Time to mirror and self host your channel. Check out my open source package iSpooge Live on GitHub... it’s git a script to download, HLS encode for 3 playback rates, and generate a static site that’s all tuned for a CDN. Been using it for over a year myself.
You might want to reconsider the project name if you expect anyone to take it seriously. Especially with how you add "Powered by FreshSpooge" to the sites.
It almost seems that theres a business opportunity to start a site where independent creators can publish content deemed not mainstream enough for the major networks.
Oh wait..
Ask yourself who put alphabet and their sibling companies in charge of policing and censoring internet, the users have choice find alternatives. https://www.thetatoken.org/
While I agree with the sentiment, that's not really what this is about. Youtube-dl does nothing for videos already taken down, nor does it help content creators.
