Thanks, that was a dumb mistake on my part... And a mistake I wouldn’t make if I could rely on a third party to build and run a datacenter for me. I’m not interested in building a datacenter.
most people do need middlemen though. if you require everybody to host their own content on their own websites, you go back to the old days of the internet where the only content was published by nerds. which had a certain charm, but was a lot smaller and less inclusive than today's internet.
Problem is no one wants to be a pipe. Imagine what Twitter could have been if they had accepted this vision instead of turning into yet another media company that sells ads. Even ISPs are trying to be media companies.
there's no reason someone couldn't make a small bit of desktop software which, fed AWS/Azure/GCP/DO/github pages/etc credentials, set up every aspect of a website, and automatically synced some local directory of content to the relevant site.
>there's no reason someone couldn't make a small bit of desktop software which, fed AWS/Azure/GCP/DO/
The gp (notatoad) mentioned technical skill as a barrier and you responded to that point but easy-to-use idiot-proof software isn't really the issue.
The bigger problem(s) mega-sites like Youtube solves is financial.
When one uploads a video to Youtube, it doesn't matter if it gets 0 views or 1 billion views. The cost is the same to the uploader: $0. Hosting it on one's own with AWS/Azure/GCP/DigitalOcean/etc will have variable egress costs and budgeting/forecasting a potential expense of thousands of dollars is not something regular people want to tackle. (The difficulty of this should be apparent from the stories of sophisticated tech geeks getting blindsided by unexpected AWS bandwidth bills.) The other option of placing a bandwidth limit to cap the costs means you create a different problem: a popular video will result in web surfers seeing annoying "bandwidth exceeded" error messages.
Another financial problem Youtube addresses is monetization. Hosting it on a self-managed cloud means less opportunities for ad revenue. Yes, a lot of HN despise ads but many uploaders of desirable video content like the ad payouts.
>Hosting it on one's own with AWS/Azure/GCP/DigitalOcean/etc will have variable egress costs and budgeting/forecasting a potential expense of thousands of dollars is not something regular people want to tackle.
Peer-to-peer distribution systems like BitTorrent, IPFS, and Dat are a good solution to this; distribution actually gets easier and cheaper as demand for a file increases.
Then you run into the opposite problem: if a video is not popular (which applies to most videos), P2P distribution relies on the uploader continually seeding it. That requires disk space to spare, fast upload speeds (since making viewers wait to start watching the video would be a massive downgrade from YouTube), and an always-on computer of some sort — which, if you don’t own a desktop PC (and aren’t a nerd who already has a NAS at home), needs to be a new purchase.
I’d like to see a hybrid solution that combines the best of both worlds: for “base load”, there’s be a decentralized market to pay for storage and seeding, ala Filecoin; for videos that become popular, viewers would also automatically seed while and after they watch them. Actually, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t already an ICO or two with this exact idea. (Googled it; more like five.) We’ll see if anything actually takes off.
Still, it’s going to take a lot to beat YouTube’s offer. $0 to have unlimited videos stored forever, re-encoded in various quality levels, and streamed to anyone on demand via a fast CDN – with no ads, unless you choose to enable them on your video in exchange for a cut of revenue. And it’s not like that’s only possible because Google’s unsustainably throwing money in a hole. While they don’t disclose revenue or cost figures, rumors hold that YouTube is anywhere from breaking even to already profitable, and it’s certainly meant to be a profit source in the future. It’s a classic example of an economy of scale. YouTube is certainly losing money on the long tail of videos, but in exchange they get all the popular videos on their platform, which make enough money to pay for everything. It’s hard for decentralized to compete with that. Less hard as costs go down over time, perhaps – but still hard.
> if you require everybody to host their own content on their own websites, you go back to the old days of the internet where the only content was published by nerds. which had a certain charm, but was a lot smaller and less inclusive than today's internet.
I'm afraid it's mostly inclusive in the sense of "you're included in the menu" rather than "you're included in the dinner guest list". It's easier than ever to be a human battery for someone else's social media machine. Not sure it's a good thing. I don't see it equivalent to running your own website in the "old days" in any but most superficial ways.
Seeing how some of the non-technical people use Facebook is just soul-crushing.
Even when people are fairly technical, many do not seem to realize the psychological costs to them individually, and social costs to everyone around them collectively.
Eventually, people will have to run ads on their own websites, the same as before Youtube. There will be a lot less video content because serving video is a tough thing.
It won't be so cheap if those cloud providers have to charge you the cost of the liability they're incurring for your potential copyright infringement.
You're absolutely right! It's certainly going to become cheaper and easier to host video!
With that said, is it perhaps possible that the problems publishers of content struggle with are in the main not those of the nuts and bolts of publishing? Perhaps, even, that these problems (content discovery, gaining access to users, analytics, ad management) might be well-addressed by platforms?
We could start a company that indexes websites so that they can be discovered. To help them monetize their content, we could also design an advertising platform that didn't require any special contracts or business clout to join. An advertising platform that was based on the words on the webpage - we could use it to fund the discovery side of our business. Let me call up my Stanford buddies and we'll get going. I know a guy named Eric that might like this idea.
