Stop the presses!
Great American Satan informs us that there is a union action to have a “don’t look” strike on Youtube. [gas]
It’s the Youtube Walkout! The 10th through 13th we’re supposed to avoid watching youtube videos. They’ve dropped some fucking egregious new terms of service, promising to delete any channel they deem commercially unviable. Since the videos disproportionately affected by this are producers of LGBT and progressive content, you know what this is really about.
I fully support this idea. Although I fear that it will accomplish nothing but to show our masters how thoroughly they own the internet. What if it’s like one of those KKK rallies where only one goon shows up and they aren’t even wearing the hoodie, they just have a Trump hat on? If this doesn’t even cause a blip on Google’s needle then they’ll shrug and say, “see, we didn’t ever have to pretend to care.”
Youtube is the “stuff cloud” – it’s the endless repository of junk that we come to depend on because it’s solved that problem so well, there’s damn little point doing an alternative. Back when Adobe Flash players were all the thing, I actually wrote my own media player and hosted it on my website, so I could avoid being under any controls at all. It’s not hard, I hear. So my pledge in support of GAS is to re-research hosting my own media player on my ranum.com website (I have unlimited data and storage service there) and I will only link stuff I own or extract under fair use. That way, Google is going to wonder where some tiny number of hits went. Who am I kidding? Well, maybe I can make a cool player; there’s more to life than stabby things.
My attitude toward Google and Youtube et al has been “meh” all along. I’ll use them because they work but I never pay them anything and I always have my adblocker on. Sure, they track me, but so does the FBI, my service provider (Verizon, dark lord of data) and everybody else.
I do loathe Google and Youtube, reflexively. Have you ever noticed how Youtube’s player functions, now? A huge amount of the processing it does is to make sure you see those precious ads. There is code to block ad blockers, code to lurk and count linger-time when you switch to the next video, code to generate likely lists of related content, code to summarize your activity for the FBI – pretty much all the code in the known universe and, down at the bottom, in the corner of the bottom, under some dust and rubble: is a media player. And a not very good one, at that. It can’t remember what I was watching from session-to-session (but it reports that to everyone except me) and it cannot sometimes resume if you skip forward past some dumb embedded ad. It’s complicated and it’s a piece of shit, because it needs all that complexity to serve ads (its real job) and if you actually get to see any media that’s just a happy accident.
The ad-stream feeds into the unpleasant reality that it sells time to be a political platform. I.e.: whoever has money for ads now has a platform. So much for the early internet idea of making data equal. Thank corporate capitalists for that. Meanwhile, they can figure out how to deliver the ads, bill them correctly to their originator, but can’t be arsed to ban the ones that are obvious bullshit. That gives politicians wiggle-room to wring their hands and whinge about how their important message needs to be protected but the other guy’s needs to be silenced.
You know whose messages need to be protected? Not the rich: the political underdog. Right now that means: LGBTQ people, people of color, and the poor. Youtube’s service already is heavily slanted toward corporate interests and they have been rewriting their terms of service so they can pay out less and less to their popular channels. They’re just a bunch of sleazy capitalists exploiting labor, in other words. They have next to no content of their own; they’re just like the boss of a steel mill who sits in a comfortable office and moves pieces of paper from one side of the desk to another and calls it “work” while outside, in the furnace heat, workers die making minimum wage. Remember when people thought Google was going to accomplish some kind of change? They’re the new cloud-based Andrew Carnegie, that’s all.
Back in the day when all my clients were coming to me all excited about “the cloud” I’d say ‘Don’t you understand lock in yet? Didn’t Microsoft and Oracle teach you about that? Once their free services are absolutely crucial to your daily operations the price will go up and the terms of service will change. Were you born yesterday or something?” And the baby in the incubator would look at me and drool and blink and make muffled “ah ga” noises and wave its hands.
PS – the audiobook version of Siddartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies is really good. Listen to that instead of youtube. If you can’t afford a copy, contact me (I am serious) and I’ll gift you one. It’s on Google play. No, wait, it’s on Amazon. Ur, Apple iBooks! You know it’s at your local bookstore, if the place is still in business.
I keep expecting that some day I’m going to wake up and it’ll be like Shadowrun and the CEOs of all these horrible megacorporations will be actual dragons.
Are there any good alternatives for YouTube nowadays, I mean for people who have their own websites and want to occasionally upload online some video that would show up in their posts? Preferably accessible also for people who cannot do any programming.
This could describe me as well.
I was late to realize the YouTube walkout was on, but I’m now observing it until the 14th.
Andreas Avester@#2:
Are there any good alternatives for YouTube nowadays, I mean for people who have their own websites and want to occasionally upload online some video that would show up in their posts?
It depends on the website. If you’re handcoding everything in HTML (like I used to) then you’ll need an embeddable player that you install on the site and call (usually via php or something like that) with parameters like display size, etc. In that case it mostly depends how you are getting your data back and forth to the site – if you’re writing html on a local drive and syncing it up via FTP then you don’t have to worry about file sizes and whatnot.
If you’re using a content management system like WordPress you need to turn the upload file size up to where you want it (500mb?) – that’s a wordpress control parameter in the settings. On FTB’s wordpress instance you may not be able to do that FTB appears to be a bodged-together version of multiblog wordpress from before when wordpress had multiblog. On your own instance of wordpress just make sure it’s up to date then check the settings page for the upload file size. That is a huge pain in the ass because some hosting services require you to edit your .htaccess file, others require you to edit your wordpress config file, others you install a wordpress “upload any size file” plugin. Once you’ve done that, there are dozens of great free wordpress plugins that you can install, that will play various types of media for you. WordPress has a built in audio player, I believe; I haven’t checked to see if it has a built-in video player.
The file size limitation thing is because the www was written by idiots. Every time I am forced to gargle facedown in the toilet that is the internet code-base, it nearly gives me a heart attack. There are config files, default config files, options boxes, and when all that fails you just edit your code, rendering it forward-incompatible. If you ever wanted a software environment guaranteed to encourage failure, the internet’s basic services package is it.
Youtube should not exist; it exists only because people are just marginally too lazy to figure out how to set this stuff up in personal blogs. And facebook only exists because personal blogs were somehow not as cool as having a great big server full of other people’s shit, which just screams “cool” to me.
With both Adblock Plus and Adblocker Ultimate enabled on Firefox I don’t get any Toob adverts at all. Doesn’t stop the content creators slipping their “sponsored by” adverts in but I can skip past them. But I’ll still stop watching until the 14th anyhow.
We’ll, I was rewatching Blake’s 7, but I guess it can wait…
Soooooo… I just spent a while figuring out how to alter the upload size for my personal site. It’s now 500mb.
To get there I had to edit a php.ini file, then a .htaccess file saying “read the php.ini file” then install a plugin in wordpress that adjusts wordpress’ idea to match those. So far, so good.
But it appears that for security reasons or something, I can’t upload .MP4 to my own site. I don’t really know why because: reasons
See, it may have succeeded. Or maybe it failed. But some piece of bullshit code told some other piece of bullshit code, “I dunno!” and the second piece of bullshit code doesn’t know what the first one is talking about and decided to communicate the error message that there may be an error, or there may not, but hey, whatever are you so judgmental about, boomer?
The existence of youtube, of course, makes it super easy for hosting services to basically not host anything except text and a few images. Everyone goes, “youtube is the Cloaca Maxima of the internet, why not just put all your stuff there?”
It’s depressing. It could have been great, but it’s shit. You can make great things with it, if you have the time and the mental fortitude to wade through the many layers of congealed shit.
Why no ‘Burn it to the ground’ tag?
This is because certain kind of services tend to become ‘natural monopolies’ pretty soon. Before Youtube, you could’ve uploaded some video stuff to some hosting firm, but better fear success, because they would bill you for extra downloads Now, you can upload and hope for succes, and might even profit.
Another kind of natural monopoly are the waterworks, or the like, which means privatizing these in Thatcherian UK was bad (for the customers(.
HAahahhahahahaha you have to upload a plugin called, I shit you not, “disable real mime type check” – it should be called “I shit you not” Apparently the geniuses who wrote WordPress decided that, since some document types are dangerous they’d better block upload of certain types. Like MP4 and MP3. PDF is probably fine, because: imbeciles.
Meanwhile, while they were doing that, they were probably wondering “what is a cross-site scripting attack?”
https://tribulant.com/blog/wordpress/how-to-fix-sorry-this-file-type-is-not-permitted-for-security-reasons/
Sure, that stuff would make sense if I were running a site where I allowed my users to post their own images and content. But if I were doing that, I’d already be a complete dipshit. It ought not be hard to give this as an option, somewhere, and perhaps notice that I have ‘create new users’ turned off and commenting turned off.
The answer to these sort of problems is, all too often, “hack this shit into this piece of code and see if that works” thereby making sure that piece of code is unmaintainable. This is genius – it’s job security for really bad programmers.
I use the hell out of youtube normally. I’d rather not. Mostly on my smart tv I get christmas bullshit ads (got blockers on my laptop), but the other day I got one for fucking PragerU. I hates.
I am so fucking glad I quit web development over a decade ago. It was bad enough then, and it’s clearly only got worse since.
Dunc@#11:
I am so fucking glad I quit web development over a decade ago. It was bad enough then, and it’s clearly only got worse since.
I have a friend who periodically triggers me by telling me that I need to write autoconf makefiles for all my old stuff. Then, I look at autoconf, scream and pull my hair and roll around in ashes and stagger about as if I am damned.
The current state of “software development” involves gluing stuff from multiple sources together around a main loop. The resulting code is huge and has a separate config file for each component. It’s hell.
A little bird mentions that The Emperor of All Maladies is available with no DRM from libro:
[libro]
I sat with one of our IT folks yesterday creating a build pipeline for a small part of our codebase. Once it is set up, it will make things more streamlined as it will stop me being the bottleneck, but after 2 hours, it was still not working. Of course, this is on AWS, so all the configuration is through forms on webpages that do not load immediately. The pain remains, the only difference is the method of delivery.