PeerTube, the “Decentralized YouTube”, succeeds in crowdfunding
I'm seeing folly all over the startup and tech landscape. The Yuser app wants to be the next Facebook - with the added wrinkle that users get blockchain coin for eyeball grabbing content and no advertising. And now PeerTube promises to break YouTubes' grip on video.
Sorry PeerTube, I don't think it will happen. You are just a new Napster, and we all know what happened to Napster. Sorry Yuser, the cost of policing your platform will eat you alive.
The bottom line is that PeerTube and Yuser have the same fundamental problem: user generated content with next to zero policing. Both are designed with little to no oversight built in. Because of this, all of the worst of humanity will spill into these communities. They will become cesspools of trash.
I see a new security paradigm coming. Yes we worry about DDoS attacks and fishing. And the new security frontier is security from the nastiness of humanity. PeerTube and Yuser will either have to spend tons of money securing their user generated footprints or be relegated the the corners of the internet where porn, terrorism, human trafficking, arms sales, and NeoNazi's find refuge.
Have they never heard of 4chan?
Top comments (10)
I'm happy to see projects like Peertube.
First I'm dev, and Peertube show usage for ActivityPub and webtorrent. It's a great idea to use torrent for streaming, it's solve the hosting bandwitch problem.
Next, Peertube is a software, not a platform. The creator wants people install their own instance and not that they use his: Youtube will not be replaced by one peertube but thousands of instances.
It's federated, so you can join an instance with strict rules, like no-nudity. I love mastodon for this. In this point I find my Mastodon instance is more secure than Twitter.
It's federated so you can join instance only linked to trusted instances, (or block all people of one specific instance) to avoid harassement or something you don't want to see. Instances can be fully private, for family or enterprise usages.
Let's talk about Framasoft (community behind this project). Framasoft's goal is to promote self-hosting alternatives to private platform, software like Wordpress, GitLab ... this DIY movement helps public to understand another tools are available.
We have problems with harassement, drugs, terrorism, hate and we have theses problems on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube because when we report abuse, content is not instantly deleted. user is not instantly blocked so theses content spread arround the web. Federation limit this spread.
Content rules will be applied by instance owner, he have to check if users make good content.
I think theses tools will implement new features to protects users, like content-warning in Mastodon. Of courses, illegal instances will appear but they could be more easily blocked than Twitter accounts. (Maybe it'll be used by police as honeypot).
Because this software is open-source you can adapt your instance, add somes rules, for example if a "trusted" user report abuse on a "unknown" user's content, this content is immediatly deleted and the user suspended. I don't think we could see this reactivity in big platforms like Twitter.
Web is to promote content, bad people are everywhere, I don't blame the tools.
I appreciate your perspective. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Perhaps Peertube will succeed. Or turn into something else.
My bigger point is that there are tons of startups coming online daily that seem to have a "different take on social" - when it isn't the tech that is the issue - it is the humans behind the tech.
Thanks for adding your prespective
P.S. When is the server list for all nudity all the time and all 4chan all the time coming?
"It's federated, so you can join an instance with strict rules, like no-nudity. "
Yes, I know nothing about Yuser but the federation/instances of peertube is, in my opinion, a great way to see improvement into social media because you can implement any idea on your own instance and submit idea to Peertube team.
I didn't understand your P.S. 😶
I agree, and the catch is that as developers we're instantly looking for tech solutions for what is ultimately a problem of human behaviour. Such a solution does not exist.
You can of course use tech to make the work of human moderators easier but the system will still have to rely on human judgment, and its perceived quality will be tied to the quality of decisions moderators make.
Sounds like the AI/ML bias problem - no? ;) . Garbage in, garbage out. How we all wish we were all better than our lizard brains
Well, yes. Maybe.
But I do also feel that without it there would be no innovation, and no software development. For innovation there has to be an urge to optimise things, and once that urge exists, it's inevitable that people will use it on others, leading to exploitation.
In general, everybody being nice with everybody is not a stable strategy (unless like in Asimov's Gaia, we completely cease to be independent agents). The nicer we are to each other, the more there is to be won for that one person who isn't. Of course everybody cheating doesn't work either. It will always be an equilibrium state between the two.
So the best you can hope for is to employ little Maxwell daemons who actively maintain a ratio different to what game theory would predict.
Just landed on this post two years later! I recently posted an impossibly niche piece of content on a PeerTube instance (LED blinkenlights driven by my favorite programming language), and was looking around to see whether dev.to allowed embedding PeerTube content. (It doesn't, and that's perfectly OK.)
Great points raised on both sides about moderation. Especially given the fact that we're discussing this on dev.to, which, honestly, has an incredible combination of both broad-based community responsibility and a level-headed group of moderators.
I like the idea of PeerTube taking power away from YouTube and giving it back to content creators! But I've already left Twitter & Facebook due to their, uh.... non-existent(?) moderation policies. So I'm interested to see what happens with PeerTube and whether it becomes overrun. A little 4channery would scare me off quickly.
At least as someone with somewhat narrow interests, the server I landed on had kept things clean (probably just by luck!) and is mainly trafficking in Debian & Linux related posts, electronics nerdery, etc!
Oh yeah. Here's my Blinken MIDI masterpiece. :-D
diode.zone/videos/watch/4b24adc5-f...
I am soooooo with you on this. If I can gather my thoughts properly I'll follow up with another comment in the near future. 🙂
I have a list of these that just keeps growing. Stay tuned, and thanks for the support