A DOCUMENTARY FEATURING mothers surviving Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel’s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.
YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Peer tube?
Problem with PeerTube is the content is pretty scattered and there’s frankly just not that much normal content. There’s relatively a lot for like Linux stuff, but other than that there’s not a ton. Also, there’s no way to compensate people, so hard to attract content creators (this is both a plus and a negative tbh).
Other problem is that, like pretty much all fediverse stuff, it’s possible to wind up on an instance with a bunch of Nazi content federated to it. Of course, since YouTube has Nazi content, this isn’t really much different.
YouTube is one of the platforms that started at just the right time. People only know about it because it popped off in about 2005/6 . The creators didn’t get paid, at least I don’t think they did, it was just a lot of fun. Correct me if I’m wrong, maybe the first content creators did get paid.
Video content creation wasn’t a thing that far back.
YouTube was (in my experience) the first site at all where you could click a video and not wait 3 years for it to load, plus having a UI around it.
Most people’s Internet speeds weren’t even close to being fast enough to consistently load them fast enough to want to watch more than a few in a session. Decent waits and buffers throughout still made it painful. Just less painful than it was before.
Most other videos back then were scattered around on separate sites, and related to the content on the site, and they usually had to download completely before even starting to play. (Kinda like pirating a movie these days)
So given that most people couldn’t use other sites and tolerate it for long, YouTube created a market that didn’t exist before, and there wasn’t a content creation machine in place ready to go.
That kinda took off as more and more people got broadband connections and started being able to watch almost as soon as they clicked a link.
I don’t have hard dates for this, just an impression from memory of the era.
So the “creators” were just random people filming slightly less random things. There weren’t well known channels, or filters for different genes or topics. You could choose from “dude filming an animal do something funny” or “something unlikely to be caught on camera being caught on camera”.
And most of it was shot on terrible cameras (since digital cameras were still going from “looks like objects filmed through 4 layers of plastic” to “really tiny footage of decent quality”, there wasn’t much that existed to draw a lot of people other than a feeling of hoping to stumble on the newest really cool clip.
But, since capitalism exists to make everything worse, the market got its act together shortly after. But not immediately. It took a whole new kind of infrastructure to get it moving.
People needed better digital cameras (unless you thought transferring from analog tapes was a fun weekend), better Internet, and the site itself has to start figuring out how to run things to make a better experience.
Google buying it was both a great infusion of capital to help it as well as being a cancer injection that would poison it.
I like the concept of peertube, but it’s not gonna take off in its current state. I don’t think anything takes off without capitalism happening to it these days. If something takes off, it’s probably fruit of a poisonous tree. Can’t have any good new popular technology without it being tampered with by billionaires
I remember video hosting sites before YouTube. The only one that I can remember now is stupid videos. Stupid videos was like watching a compilation of people falling down. YouTube was unique in that people created videos specifically for YouTube
I don’t really remember how slow things were because slow was just normal to me. I think the slowness was more to do with dial up or slow DSL speeds. We had to be patient back then.
Not really. More like pirating a movie in 2012. These days, there are excellent-quality pirate streaming services, there’s the ability to stream videos over bittorrent (if there are enough seeds), and probably other options I’m not thinking of that make pirated video more accessible than ever.
Do they prioritize the data at the beginning now? I haven’t done it in years but last time I did it just downloaded little pieces of the files until it has them all assembled, meaning that playback would be impossible if you try until it’s finished.
I remember my bittorrent client having an option to do that even back in like 2010, though I never used it to actually stream, because my Internet wasn’t good enough.
I remember the buttons existing for it, but maybe it was just super and acceptable seeds.
Most stuff has so few seeds that I got anyway I was lucky to get the whole file anyway. Plus I was trying to get a collection of movies to keep, not just watch on demand.
So maybe I want the target audience for the feature. Plus if it had a lot of secrets it just made me more paranoid that there were undercover ones looking at it.
Which isn’t really bring the pale, especially since back then I didn’t even hardly know what encryption was, much less anything like Tor or VPNs.
I actually got a letter from the ISP one time, and it wasn’t even for a good movie.
i mean, albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, and ebaums world were things before and around the time of youtube; iirc the main thing youtube had was a clean design and a decent video player that handled buffering without stuttering. it made it easier for people to just upload a video and share it. ebaumsworld kind of had that i think, but the site layout was a mess and i’m pretty sure i remember them basically just stealing the content of other sites like albinoblacksheep
That’s kinda what I’m getting at. The waiting involved in watching one would kill me when they were popular. I was starting college in 04, and we upgraded to broadband shortly before I started, so I didn’t really go to them much at all before that. Watching a tiny gif was actual torture on dial up, video wasn’t even attempted unless it sounded REALLY cool.
But for documentation of significantly newsworthy footage, it seems like the place to upload. Which might spread awareness of the site itself.
For content that needs censorship, I’m stumped on a suitable solution.
Wouldn’t just a peertube instance dedicated to a particular purpose (say for academic purposes or just for documentary archives) be sufficient, with allowances for the content within to be downloaded/cloned if need be, but the root instance having a dedicated admin(s) with rules on quality control and making sure appropriate content is updated? (Not in terms of political spectrum, but making sure uploaded content is not fabricated and relevant to the instance’s purpose)
Think of this like a Wikimedia-esque entity but just for a single peertube/Odyseey group (that would allow distributed cloning ala piratebay/annas archive)
I agree with what I can understand, but I don’t have much expertise in the tech specifics. I’m still working on configuring my Linux desktop, just got a little obsessive about keyboard shortcuts and eMacs orgmode and very busy with working outside of tech.