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Media Youtube Censorship The Internet Technology

Ask Slashdot: Will P2P Video Sites Someday Replace YouTube? 68

dryriver writes: BitChute is a video-hosting website like YouTube, except that it states its mission as being "anti-censorship" and is Peer-To-Peer, WebTorrent based. "It is based on the peer-to-peer WebTorrent system, a JavaScript torrenting program that can run in a web browser," according to Wikipedia. "Users who watch a video also seed it. BitChute does not rely on advertising, and users can send payments to video creators directly. In November 2018 BitChute was banned from PayPal." So it seems that you don't need huge datacenters to build something like YouTube -- Bitchute effectively relies on its users to act as a distributed P2P datacenter. Is this the future of internet video? Will more and more people flock to P2P video-hosting sites as/when more mainstream services like YouTube fall prey to various forms of censorship?
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Ask Slashdot: Will P2P Video Sites Someday Replace YouTube?

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  • Video Gnutella? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @08:42PM (#59254878)
    Sounds like a video playing version of Gnutella. Will probably be packed with fake links and become useless in the same way.
    • Does this have an equal to YouTube's copyright system? If not, here come the rip-offs of the mainstreams. At that point, it becomes Video Napster...

    • Re:Video Gnutella? (Score:4, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @04:07AM (#59255818) Homepage Journal

      There was something like that based on Bittorrent a while back. It did have a bit of a spam problem but it wasn't too bad because Bittorrent relies on websites for the links and the good ones are curated a little.

      The main problem was that it just wasn't as easy to use as YouTube so didn't catch on.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by Cid Highwind ( 9258 )

      More likely it'll be "angry young white man shouting about how much he detests women and brown people"-tube. The 8ch or voat to Youtube's reddit, if you will. That's who turns up when you light the "uncensored free speech" beacon these days. :(

  • "BitChute is a video-hosting website like YouTube, except that it states its mission as being "anti-censorship" and is Peer-To-Peer"

    So which? Do they host videos, or do they simply connect peer-to-peer?
    • P2P was always a bad idea.. it's trying to be untraceable like the audio apps of the modem days, isn't this why YouTube works and everything else failed?

      • I was downloading videos on napster a decade before YouTube existed and I'm still downloading them via torrent
    • So which? Do they host videos, or do they simply connect peer-to-peer?

      And more important, how will video makers monetize their "work"?

      After all, when you hear about "YouTube censorship", what you're mostly hearing is, "YouTube won't give me money for my video any more! Wah!" Actual YouTube videos being censored is pretty rare.

      Will each individual video maker have to sell their own advertising time to sponsors? Judging from your average "YouTube star" that has been "censored" by not getting free money any

      • There's been some takedowns of some political-talkers recently, and I hear some lotteries have to pay to keep their old drawing videos up.

        There's plenty of copyright enforcement now... so what lets this system become better than YouTube?

      • Re:Uh, what? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @12:14AM (#59255408)

        Judging from your average "YouTube star" that has been "censored" by not getting free money any more

        It's "free money" just as payments for your work are "free money".
        Most video streamers and bloggers are tight-lipped about this, but it's a very taxing job.

      • It's not just about demonetisation -- which by the way is a very serious deal, as they're taking away someone's livelihood for vague and nebulous reasons. It's not just about Youtube not sending notifications for channels they don't like. It's not just about abrupt and permanent takedowns of channels with zero strikes, either, i.e. Youtube not following their own rules.

        Lately there's also been incredibly explicit censorship in search results. Wherein searching directly for popular videos and channels with m

      • mostly hearing is, "YouTube won't give me money for my video any more!

        Your calling it "free money" gives away your bias here, but what you are claiming is not true. In many cases where YouTube demonetizes a video they also remove it from all promotion and search results. This essentially limits the ability to find it to either finding it on the creator's video list or having someone send a direct link.

      • Who wants to use a p2p when they have a data cap? Watch and seed a few popular cat videos that go viral and the next thing you know you owe a $10k in overage fees.

        (more than half US services have data caps though many offer unlimited plans for an extra premium)

      • Actual YouTube videos being censored is pretty rare.
        My videos have been censored and I don't use ads at all - I don't make any money *or desire to make any money* with youtube, but nevertheless a good couple of my videos have been removed. Censorship on youtube is *rampant*.
        • by dbreeze ( 228599 )

          True. For those who are only interested in mainstream establishment-approved content there won't be much censorship to notice. For anyone who seeks out alternative content or politically incorrect information the censorship is obvious. Life is good for the conformists on Youtube, not so much for real truth seekers...

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      As long as the user gets to view a video without censorship...
      The site looks like a video-sharing website to the user.
  • *NEWSFLASH*

    This just in: Money is a thing.
    People all over the globe are reporting that they expect money for work. It seems there is a wide spread belief growing that when people aren't given money for work the quality of that work significantly decreases or ceases entirely. For more on this, we turn to...

    • What is it with delusional old boomers and expecting everything to be like TV and ad driven? Assuming you're not 60+ like you sound, you're probably already paying for content via a service like Netflix or (if you're a moron) cable TV. It's only a step further to give money directly to the creator via something like Patreon (but not Patreon because fuck Patreon).
      • > or (if you're a moron) cable TV.

        How do I watch the local sports games on streaming?

        How do I watch the current season of sports (F1, MotoGP, etc.) on streaming without a VPN?

        Streaming is great if:

        a) ALL your content is available on it but, sadly, not all content is available via streaming services. It's getting better but the harsh reality is that it's still not possible and too complicated at times.

        b) you have a good, fast, stable, internet connection. Broadband quality can and does vary by location.

        D

      • Netflix, yes. But I consume WAY WAY more content than I pay for directly in a Netflix style business model. In fact, the number of websites I pay directly for content is very few. I do donate to a few Patreon content makers, but few of them make enough to live on (none that I support), you would have better luck just paying the lottery than trying to make a living on YouTube and Patreon.

        In the end, I consume content BECAUSE ads pay for them.

  • Remember the original design of the SlingBox? It connected to your home TV box, and then moved it over your home connection. Wait a second, it's easier to get you a feed from TV Everywhere now, with the only thing missing are your local access channels that really shouldn't be leaving your hometown.

    Basicly, the way this is designed is bad for your home peeps and your neighborhood. It's the reason why YouTube has to pay its bandwidth bill, it's throwing a lot more out that is coming in. Right now, @Home conn

    • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @09:28PM (#59254974)

      Good points about residential networking not built to handle this. But

      This invites shows like The Broken which is career-ending for those involved because there was no censor stopping them... let's not do this again.

      'Those involved' seem to be doing reasonably well. I guess most of the world really doesn't get their panties in a bunch over what everyone else is watching. That said, if P2P turns out to be the way to go, then broadband providers will have to modify their business models (and systems) to handle it.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The Broken was released in 2008 and Lena Headey's career seems to have done just fine since then.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @09:12PM (#59254936)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Yep, there's already planned this-empire-only solutions from Disney/ESPN and NBC.

      Xfinity sometimes brags that their cloud DVR is able to capture every channel on the system going backwards for a few weeks.. shows time out by copyright/DRM, not Xfinity running out of space.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'm still hoping that Jordan Peterson gets out of rehab and launches his service.

  • pied piper lol
  • by jythie ( 914043 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @09:40PM (#59254994)
    The problem with a lot of these hard core anti-censorship ideas is that the very thing that make them interesting to people who have some benevolent or honorable intention also make them appealing to spammers, scammers, and others who will just flood them with noise. Add to this, they are not really all that useful for the vast majority of cases, but will be slower and more difficult to search, so they usually end up spiraling downward pretty badly unless they have some kind of closed core community that curate them and thus maintains 'selective' free speech.. meaning censorship their membership benefits from and is not bothered by.
    • Absolutely incorrect.

      On LBRY for instance you download videos from others when you want to watch them, and then if you like the video enough you can continue serving it and keeping it alive. Spam doesn't gain as much traction as legitimate videos because nobody wants to host viagra ads or whatever.

      Man, the people on Slashdot today really have no idea what they're talking about, they're stuck in the 90's
    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Search would work.
      Why would it be slower? A video file is a video file of a set file size.
      The user has their own ISP bandwidth.
      With the plus side of not having to wonder about censorship.
    • by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @08:39AM (#59256440)
      I don't think a significant number of anti-censorship activists are arguing that all speech should be unrestricted; I think that's a strawman. Even US free speech protections have a few narrowly defined exceptions and the US system is often referenced as the model for what a free speech platform should look like. I think what most free speech advocates want is for people to be able to speak their mind and discuss their views on the world without restriction even if those views are unpopular, something which can be done in the US system.
  • Let's hope so. We can do the same for search engines [yacy.net] too.

    Ultimately your ISP will do deep packet inspection, but this is a start in defeating censorship permanently. Soon we will make the internet P2P, untethered to a service provider.

    • Soon we will make the internet P2P, untethered to a service provider.

      You want to bounce a signal off your neighbor's Wifi out to the Internet? We're always going to need the ISPs.

  • .... like ZeroNet and their Islamic State terrorists..... got it.
  • First, live streams are a thing on YouTube, twitch.tv, etc., and that you won't be doing over P2P.

    Second, a lot of content creators are doing this for a living and like to get paid so they can keep a roof over their heads and be able to take their kids to a doctor when needed. You'd need to establish mechanisms for advertising, revenue allocation and payouts, which is a whole infrastructure largely incompatible with the anti-censorship-I-want-everything-for-free types that use P2P.

    • by beepsky ( 6008348 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @11:50PM (#59255358)
      Again, you have no idea what you're talking about.
      On YouTube today there are tons of channels that have been 100% demonized yet still manage to turn a profit and make videos full time as a career because THEIR AUDIENCE GIVES THEM MONEY.
      Why is it so hard for you boomer fucks to understand that just like you give cable companies or Netflix money you can give YouTube creators money?
    • by Misagon ( 1135 )

      Live-streaming over peer-to-peer exists. It is called P2PTV [wikipedia.org] and it works, and in modern browsers.
      It does use different algorithms from peer-to-peer sharing of video files, and playing them back as they arrive.

      A decade ago, I worked with algorithms for streaming video files similar to Bittorrent video, and we did so commercially with a million users.
      You are right that server infrastructure is needed even for P2P, which someone has to pay for. The problem is not just about monetary distribution, but the P2P

  • by Z80a ( 971949 )

    If there is anything that have any potential at all to threat youtube it is the webm technology itself, the capability of playing well compressed videos by simply hosting a file.
    There are many, many ways to host those, some with cloud solutions, some with P2P, classic servers.., but it's just a file now, not some sort of bizarre stream protocol that requires a shoddy proprietary video plugin.
    It even made places such as the imageboards places where you can actually host small videos.

  • by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Monday September 30, 2019 @10:46PM (#59255206)

    The very fact that its "anti-censorship" and therefore presumably doesn't have filters (either for copyright or for things like child porn or extremist content or other banned/restricted/bad content) means it will be heavily targeted by both governments (who will want to stop it because of whatever "bad" content might be there such as ISIS beheading videos or mass shooting videos) and media companies (who will want to stop it because of all the dodgy "video-camera-pointed-at-the-cinema-screen" copies of the latest Hollywood blockbusters).

  • The problems with virtually all of the YouTube alternatives on offer so far are that they still have a single-point of failure and/or they offer no effective way to monetize content.

    P2P and BitChute may distribute the hosting but how do you *effectively* monetize content via these systems?

    Other options also provide distributed hosting but generally have a single access-point which provides the indexing and can thus be crippled, censored or whatever (having stuff online serves no purpose if it can't be very

  • I called 1999 and asked if it would take its technology back, but it said no.

  • Unless you truly beleive Pepe is a hate symbol (and you are absolutely not being trolled by the kids at 4chan) or you want to read the lunatic manifesto of a mass shooter (but never acquired the literacy skills)

    Call me old, but conspiricy content was way more fun before the white supremacists were booted from the mainstream platforms.
    • Thst's what happens when the "censored" network censors lightly and in a way that any decent person who could get along with Western liberalism would agree with (copyright madness aside).

  • Hey guys, I work for LBRY and we have a solution for this. It's a blockchain-based, P2P alternative, that has discovery and monetization baked into the core protocol as well. We've been around since 2016 and slowly building up our apps and content - there are tons of YouTubers and other awesome content on the platform! Learn more: https://lbry.com/faq/what-is-l... [lbry.com] Web Preview: https://beta.lbry.tv/ [beta.lbry.tv] Download: https://lbry.com/get [lbry.com] Learn about the tech: https://lbry.tech/ [lbry.tech] Have a YouTube channel? We can sy
  • So, this will be where all of those revenge porn sites, white-supremacist-fluffers, and generally reprehensible unscrupulous dickbags will move to in order to keep making money.
    • not to mention the *millions* of other people banned from sharing media on other platforms, if it works, which so far it hasn't.
    1. tribler [tribler.org] has had streaming video for awhile, though I've never seen it work. And now its prerequisites aren't in debian so...I haven't been able to find time to audit them.
    2. I've used bitchute for my podcast. I'd upload a video and it wouldn't show up for days. Then they upgraded their system and i haven't for the life of me been able to figure out how to log in to my account. I think I had 1 view - the audience wasn't there, the UI was clunky and all part of the javascript trap, and most importantly:
  • by Tom ( 822 )

    Platform doesn't matter, content does. I just checked out this site and found not a single video I'm even remotely interested in on quite a bit of scrolling down the main page.

    The content creators and their channels are on youtube. You need to give them incentives to add you and post on your site as well (you won't get them to post on your side instead, additionally is the best you can hope for at least until you're as big as youtube).

    If you can't get that done, nothing else matters. It'll be another niche

  • If Youtube insists on censoring the speech of users like me we have no choice but to seek alternatives. My YT account was suspended for merely posting links to qmap.pub in a live chat. The MSM/Big Tech control of information for the public is very real and very evil.

  • Yes, it's inevitable. Just like how everyone self-hosting their own web sites will mean the death of Facebook. Viva la revolucion!
  • It's based on ActivityPub. You can have your own node with your own rules, limits, ... and join other instances.

    Will it replace Youtube someday? Probably not but you will have the control over YOUR videos.

  • This seems a lot like peertube [joinpeertube.org] but proprietary.

    No thanks.

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