
YouTube says it has ‘no obligation’ to host anyone’s video - pseudolus
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/11/20955864/youtube-terms-of-service-update-terminations-children-content-ftc
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502162)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21500325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21500325)

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mikece
Do they really need to make that explicit in the terms of service? I thought
it was obvious that I didn't have the right to make Google/YouTube pay for
hosting and serving a video just because I created it.

Or could this be a prelude to a culling of videos starting in the first
quarter of next year? I would say that now is the time for a wannabe
competitor to YouTube to get ready to step into the breech but if I'm not
mistaken, YouTube has never made money despite YouTube's attempts to sell
advertising content. I could see a future where it's going to cost (not much,
but more than zero) to host and serve videos on YouTube.

~~~
OzzyB
> I would say that now is the time for a wannabe competitor to YouTube

Yes, but how does the new upstart try to get traction from under an avalanche
of useful shills that will start to smear them as "NaziTube"?

Edit/Addendum: Do you honestly think a new upstart would enjoy an
"understanding press" in their "growing-pains years" like our current
incumbents did?

~~~
edmundsauto
I do. Media _love_ an underdog story, especially when the underdog is taking
on the companies that are costing them revenue.

I suspect the "NaziTube" nicknames (did this happen somewhere? Or is it more
of a hypothetical example) are because upstarts don't have the resources to
ensure Nazi videos are blocked. Thus, they become a breeding ground for that
pernicious type of scum that has been evicted from the larger, better
resourced, systems.

~~~
catalogia
Forget the nazi shit for a minute: I doubt a youtube competitor upstart could
get away with the sort of flagrant widespread copyright violation that was
once common on youtube. Youtube itself got away with that for a few years, but
can that stunt be replicated? I doubt it.

~~~
edmundsauto
Good point. OTOH, there wasn't as much amateur digital content back then --
pretty much anything I wanted to watch was owned by a larger company.
Nowadays, hobbyists and retirees and all kinds of people own the rights to
content that I would want to see.

The environment has changed a lot, and it might not be a prerequisite to copy
YT's growth model.

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jdlyga
I think we need a good YouTube alternative. Sure, there are lots of them out
there. But one people actually use. YouTube is the best place to find so many
things: creator videos, music, clips from TV shows, and years and years of
videos to build up an immense library.

Any YouTube alternative needs to take one of these niche areas and pick at it.

~~~
jrockway
After the spamming-emotes-got-your-gmail-deleted controversy, which is
absolutely outrageous and indefensible, I've heard a lot of people interested
in doing this.

I'm also very close to making some sort of self-hosted Twitch type thing. A
lot of streamers are getting caught up in Twitch's bullshit policies. Someone
I follow wore their workout clothes on stream after they finished a workout
and wanted to make their normal stream time. Twitch banned her for 30 days
because that's supposedly inappropriate. I think it's time to cut them out of
the loop and make streaming decentralized. The type of bandwidth and compute
power you need to distribute 5Mbps video to a couple thousand viewers is
easily in the reach of individuals now. (10Gbps connections to the Internet
can be had on the order of $1000.)

All you need is some software to run it all and a standard way of paying the
streamers across the decentralized network. Probably a good application for
cryptocurrency. People are crazy about their favorite streamers, and would
probably be willing to learn how to use something other than a credit card to
subscribe. Emotes are already decentralized with things like BTTV and FFZ. So
it could work. I just don't see how I would personally make any money, so I
haven't pursued it much. But the days of requiring some megacorp like Google
or Amazon to be able to distribute video are over -- this area is ripe for
disruption.

But I think as much as content creators love to hate on their platform, they
do love the free audience. A lot of people got their start when "the
algorithm" finally recognized them, and they turned their hobby into a day
job. I'm not sure it could ever work with a centralized gateway that collects
metadata and suggests new creators to users. But maybe it's OK if we put the
money and the servers in the hands of the creators, and let discovery be an
additional bonus. And maybe running that could be profitable; you get a $1
commission for sending a new subscriber their way.

I dunno, just some random thoughts... but this all sounds more and more
reasonable every day. People lost access to their email for chatting in a
streamer's chat. That's CRAZY.

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notyourwork
I think workout clothes depends on what it is. Wearing a sports bra is surely
different from wearing a T-shirt. Before we assume malicious intent by twitch
it should be worth specifying what streamer was wearing.

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wayoutthere
Nudity is one thing, but nobody should be enforcing dress codes which are only
applied to women.

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jrockway
Exactly.

Here is a summary of the situation:
[https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/overwatch-streamer-
hit...](https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/overwatch-streamer-hits-back-
twitch-lingerie-stream-warning-1025117)

I don't think Fareeha was out of line. I've watched people stream Overwatch
from their pool, and Twitch didn't mind at all even though the (male) streamer
was completely topless.

It's very arbitrary and unfair.

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Analemma_
The root issue here is that the thing people want-- a video hosting site that
is free, preserves uploads forever (by contrast with Twitch, which has limited
VOD support), has few to no ads, and doesn't algorithmically police
copyright-- is just impossible. It can't be operated at a profit. Google is in
a better position than anyone to leverage YouTube into profitability-- they
have an ad network to take advantage of all the viewership data they get, they
own so much fiber and control so much network traffic that they can leverage
better rates on bandwidth costs, and they have the expertise of cloud-scale
operations-- and they still can't do it: by all accounts YouTube has never
made money. And if Google can't, no one can.

People who think that this policy change is going to lead to some kind of
exodus to a YouTube competitor are fooling themselves. There's no one else in
the game and there never will be; it's economically impossible.

~~~
cobookman
Google also gets the ability to leverage wasted search assets for YT. YT's
video long tail is very low IOPs workload.

Search on the other hand is high IOPs.

As you scale out your HDD storage fleet its great to have the benefit of
putting a Low IOPs high storage with a High IOPs low storage.

~~~
Analemma_
This is interesting. Do you know for sure that YouTube actually runs on
literally the same disks as the Google search index? Because I used to work
for Bing and they definitely did not let any other services share hardware
with the search hotpath. Serving search results was a case where every
millisecond counted (even delays below the threshold of perception caused a
stat-sig drop in revenue), and so even suggesting that the index should share
disks with e.g. OneDrive would've gotten you laughed out of the room.

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factorialboy
Just as content creators are not obliged to host on YouTube.

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AnIdiotOnTheNet
Sure, but just try to find an audience without it.

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superkuh
As long as you're not driven by profit motive you can wait for the audience to
find you.

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sct202
Even if you aren't driven by profit, it's pretty sad to spend time to create
content and only have a handful of people see it.

~~~
spamizbad
Sure, but that's the story for most artists. Doesn't mean everyone's work
should be showcased at The Louvre.

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kevin_thibedeau
They never did.

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Krasnol
Now their content providers needs to realise, they have no obligation to host
their content there.

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robobro
Peertube ftw!

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arriu
I agree with others in this thread, we should have more options for where to
watch user created content.

With that in mind, can someone at Netflix please figure out a way to enable
user created content?

Your customer base is ready for this. You don't need to focus exclusively on
creating your own content. You've got the tech in place to support it. Many
popular channels on Youtube would be right at home on Netflix. Take a note
from Amazon, you don't need to be a book store when you can do much more.

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proc0
I also have no obligation to watch their ads.

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Causality1
Sadly the internet is a highly privatized place. Entities like YouTube must
curate their content at least to the degree that they do not violate law or
fail to make a profit. It would be nice if we had the data equivalent of the
post office. That is to say, a service that is completely content neutral and
bears no legal liability for anything transmitted across it.

~~~
lovehashbrowns
I just realized an equivalent of a public library but for user-submitted
videos would actually be amazing.

With the same privacy protections that come with checking out a book from the
library, the concept of it running at a cost, and the first amendment
protecting the content of the website.

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zepto
Then YouTube is a publisher and should not be subject to the DMCA safe harbor
provision.

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nodesocket
Well I am not a big fan of Google, but sounds about right to me. They are a
private company, thus are allowed to select which content exists on their
platform.

~~~
wang_li
And society has no obligation to give Youtube/Alphabet indemnification for the
content they present to users. If Youtube wants to curate their content more
power to them. And people can pressure their representatives to update the
DMCA to strip safe harbor provisions from service providers who don't allow
unpopular but legal speech on their platform. There's no reason a social media
site should be allowed to make hundreds of millions of dollars in inkind
donations to their preferred political party.

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Vysero
Why isn't YouTube charging for membership yet? The way I see it, if they
simply charged all of their users $7.99/month to use the service they could
eliminate a lot of their problems.

I mean we pay for Netflix, for HBO, for HULU... why not for YouTube? I would
rather pay for the service then see/hear about all the creators backlash from
their policies. Policies that seem to be derived from the fact that YouTube
needs to make money, just a thought anyhow.

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DaiPlusPlus
They do. I pay $10/mo for YouTube Premium and it literally pays for itself
because otherwise I’d be watching at least an hour of unskippable ads per
month.

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all2
UBlock origin eliminates all ads all the time. Since installing I've not had
to look at, or hear an advertisement.

~~~
sct202
Except the ones that the creators speak or insert themselves.

