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YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.

This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.

This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.

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[–] 53 points 2 years ago (1 child)

I don't think even a decentralized service could hold a mass equal to youtube. That would require that either the owners of all instances pay from their own pockets with mostly no income to support it, or that every user paid up, which is not going to happen, at least not in a service like youtube.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Some of us are data holders and have Gigabit internet with options to go even higher. Don't count out the little guys ability to share massive amounts of data... been doing it since zip drives and CDs

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  • [–] 33 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Let's say only 500gb of video are uploaded every hour in this hypothetical federated YouTube (actual volume for the site looks to be ~200tb an hour). Are you honestly going to argue just that is even conceivably maintainable? You have to infinitely add storage space, multiple TBs a day.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Let's say I run my own hypothetical, federated, userpeer-to-peer and opt-in server CDN function-platform, also known as PeerTube...

    I'd only accept those video uploads/uploaders I consider quality content.

    I'd love to host many content creator's videos. From the goodness of my heart, for free, as a gift to you all. But certainly not all videos, and nowhere near 200 TB/h. But I can afford to host many TB's without it impacting my private economy.

    That video of some idiot eating tidepods or whatever the current thing is? They could find somebody else that will host. Or if unable, host their own videos. Now we're both happy.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    I'd only accept those video uploads/uploaders I consider quality content.

    Cool, I like that idea unironically. So how are you going to do that? To accept only "quality uploads" you would have to somehow know, ahead of time if the uploaded content is acceptable. Sure maybe you have a white list but have fun maintaining that.

    Okay so different idea maybe you let people vote on the video somehow and delete videos that are deemed poor quality. Great! So now you burn through writes instead of storage itself which is probably desirable though it only lessens the need for more drives. There's a flaw in this system though. How do you prevent a community from removing a video that's been voted to be poor quality (IE fake "bad" reviews)? Are these videos gonna be manually reviewed? Manually reviewing would have the same immense maintenance problems as a whitelist so again have fun maintaining that.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    And who pays the creators? They are usually partly or mostly ad supported. At best they have a patreon/floatplane or other support platform.
    They will simply not come over since there's no audience. No audience, no creator. No creator, no audience.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Just like nobody would leave reddit for Lemmy since all the content is on reddit?

    To be honest, I miss the times when people made videos because they wanted to make videos, not make money. I'm willing to forego quite a lot of YouTube content if that helps build a new paradigm for how the internet works. Would you?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Let's get real, most of the people stayed on reddit. Only a very small fraction tried lemmy and an even smaller fraction have completely stopped using reddit.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    That's OK, I stopped using reddit completely almost a decade ago. I'm happier with a small group of nice people than with a large group of unpleasant people.

    A lot of people seen to focus on profitability and maximum exposure as the goal. More and more people don't think like that anymore.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Wow can't believe you're being down voted on this, guess it shows a lot of people don't understand that it's the foodcarts that lead to a good restaurant scene. The hobbiests that provide valuable content(that is later repackaged and sold as a product by leachers large and small).

    There are some legitimate ideas to work through as far as a decentralized video hosting platform but the idea that something would be lost by every fucking nitwit looking to "make money on ads" not having a central video source foist their content on you...uhhh I'm down with that for sure.

    When stuff is done for passion and interest, it's almost always better than a paid product or service, and if you haven't learned that yet in life you're making me feel old.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    The beauty of the fediverse is that "if you don't like it, make your own" actually works.

    I don't like down votes as they're abused as a tool to suppress "unwanted" opinions. So the instance I'm on simply don't accept downvotes... This ride only goes up.

    Thanks for your support though, people on "hate filled" (😉) instances might find some of my opinions interesting but might not see them due to the group think downvotes.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    The mistake was allowing the internet to become “the cloud” in the first place.

    People should be able to host their own shit on their own machine at home. This should be simple for people to set up, like a NAS with an App Store. Default to a secure config. Don’t make it too easy; if you try to sugarcoat it all, people won’t realize what they’re getting into (like now with cloud shit)

    Otherwise we get what we have now - everything from TVs to social media to fucking door locks and lightbulbs needs a connection back to the manufacturer, and they can drop support at any time. This allows the worst of rent-seeking under the guise of “everyone too dumb to do on their own”, very similar to “we must not allow security because bad guys could hurt KIDS” (while true, it’s just an excuse to read everyone’s mail to protect the ruling class from any negative opinion brewing)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Uploaders would be manually screened at sign-up, I wouldn't run an open server. Many fediverse servers in general and several PT-instances in particular does it. It works fine for a community based platform. It's not meant to be one, monolithic server doing it all, open for all.

    There are many ways to handle storage requirements, I like datacenters with easily expandable storage.

    You bring up "have fun with that" but I'm having great fun already helping out running both a Mastodon and Lemmy instance. I don't see how a video hosting service would be much different, in regards to moderation. Maybe I'm missing part of your point?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    My moderation point is that with a video service you are forced to "watch" the content in the video in order to properly moderate (though you can just block people of course). You could have a bunch of filters like YouTube does to determine if your video should have ads and whatnot or you can rely on the community (or both).

    The main issue with it is that we want to prevent "bad content" that being very poor quality content to skip being all detailed. To do that kind of filtering really requires some form of community review of the content as it's infeasible to have it all manually reviewed. If you have a community review process you open the door to mass reporting and the like so you cannot simply automatically remove content if it gets a lot of reports, it must be manually reviewed (by watching the content) to ensure it's fair to remove it. Lemmy, at least in my usage doesn't have this desired "bad quality" filter outside of up votes/down votes which notably don't remove the content (and so doesn't remove the immense storage requirement)

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It seems like we have fundamental differences in how the fediverse could and should work. I don't see this conversation going any further, thanks for the interaction.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That video of some idiot eating tidepods or whatever the current thing is? They could find somebody else that will host

    Oh no! Censorship /s

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    No need to be sarcastic, in my kingdom I'll be absolute ruler and "censor" and suppress others as I see fit.

    And everybody else is free to do the same and tell me to feck off.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I think censorship in the Fediverse works because you can always find a host which aligns with your ideology. Bad ideas automatically die out if the overwhelming majority of people stop spreading it, not because a giant megacorp decides it's not a good message to show to their shareholders.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    Great, so you pretty much only host established creators. Nearly all big channels on Youtube started with what is now considered shitty contend. They trained their editing skills over time, bought proper equipment once they really got into it and probably only found their style halfway through their "career". If YouTube pre-filtered it's videos, then the site would be dead by now.

    Sure you can shove all responsibility to someone else and say they should self host it, but then you also have to acknowledge that peertube and the like eliminate 98% of all content before its made with its cobsiderably higher entry point, and that includes the good and the bad.

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