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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Regarding the video platforms, the only way is everyone hosts their own content and distribute via RSS… But then where is the money in it

    The same place a lot of it is now: patreon, merch, and in-video sponsors.

    Sure you lose the Google adsense money, but really, that’s pretty minimal these days after constant payout cuts (see: everyone on youtube complaining about it every 18 months or so) but the bigger pain is reach.

    If I post a video on Youtube, it could land in front of a couple of million people either by search, algorithm promotion, or just random fucking chance.

    If I post it on my own Peertube instance, it’s in front of uh, well uh, nobody.

    That’s probably the harder solution to solve: how can you make a platform/tech stack gain suffient intertia that it’s not just dumping content in a corner and nobody ever seeing it.


  • AI generated video ideas, AI generated thumbnails, AI generated comments from the viewers, AI generated comments from the creators…

    I mean, AI already gave me the ick but this is super extra ick.

    Youtube is going to be 100% over-run with absolute garbage, and there’s going to be zero way to determine which content is human and not and it’s going to completely make the platform utterly worthless.

    It feels like the most urgent things to figure out how to make viable are things like Loops and Peertube, even over 160-character hot-take platforms or link aggregation or whatever, since the audience is SO much larger, and SO much more susceptible to garbage.







  • Are content creators we already know expected to start their own servers? Or will there be a general mega instance for everyone to post to.

    Honestly - both?

    Good examples are going to be Floatplane and Nebula for the single-content-creator platform and the group of creators platforms.

    There’s no real reason you can’t build a platform and require someone to pay you to have access, and it seems to have been successful for both groups.

    Video hosting is expensive, but it 's not prohibitive and a group of creators could certainly come up with a useful platform and self-host it and still be profitable.

    Now, the question is, of course, if peertube is the right choice for that and if it offers anything they’d need, but that’s a different discussion.


  • They did it at their general direction, but almost certainly not at their explicit instructions.

    These takedown factories use ‘how much shit we got taken down’ as a metric, regardless of what it actually was, and LOVE spamming out thousands and thousands of reports at providers until providers do what they want and take shit down.

    My personal favorite one was a bunch of morons who didn’t understand how IPFS gateways worked, and would send literal, actual, we-counted thousands of reports over pirated ebooks that were “hosted” on the gateway.

    Except, of course, this isn’t how any of this works and while we did push back and argue over months and months about this, not every provider is willing to invest the time it takes to fight these shits.

    Also, if you want super giggles, you should look up the standard text that Web Sheriff sends, which claims all sorts of human right volations and human slavery offenses when someone infringes a trademark for their customers. Absolutely unhinged, and there’s dozens and dozens of these companies filling up your average provider’s inbox every day knowing full well that just being annoying ENOUGH will get them a +1 in the takedown metrics.

    It’s really got nothing to do with what Funko might actually really be after, and everything about how they can bill Funko more while just using automated scrapers, automated webforms, and people in the Philipines or similar making pennies to just reply to providers with pretty much the same script until the hosting provider gives up fighting and does what they want just so they’ll go away.


  • Reported by a worker at McD. Wtf, they’re the group that would benefit the most from a change in the healthcare system. Idiot.

    Or, and hear me out here, we can view this with a little sympathy: there’s $60k in rewards for anyone who turned this guy in, and the person who did it makes peanuts at McDonalds.

    Now, I don’t know if I would do it, but I can completely and utterly sympathize why someone who makes poverty wages would turn class traitor for what almost certainly life-changing money.



  • For Youtube I was very much talking specifically about how long and how little action they took on the kids-doing-gymnastics videos, even when it became abundantly clear that the target market was pedophiles, and the parents who kept posting these videos were, at the very least, complicit if not explicitly pimping their children out.

    (If you have not seen and/or read up on this, save yourself the misery and skip it: it’s gross.)

    It took them a VERY long time to take any meaningful action, even after the intent of and the audience to which it was being shown was clearly not people interested in gymnastics, and it stayed there for literal years.

    Like, I have done anti-CSAM work and have lots and lots of sympathy for it because it’s fucking awful, but if you’ve got videos of children - clothed or not - and the comment section is entirely creeps and perverts and you just kinda do nothing, I have shocking limited sympathy.

    Seriously - the comment section should have been used for the FBI to launch raids, because I 100% guarantee you every single person involved has piles and piles of CSAM sitting around and they were just ignored because it wasn’t explicit CSAM.

    Just… gross, and poorly handled.




  • Honestly, I’d contact their support and ask what their processes are and what timelines they give customers for a response/remediation before they take action.

    Especially ask how they notify you, and how long they allow for a response before escalation to make sure that’s something you can actually get, read, and do something about within.

    It might not be a great policy, but if you at least know what might happen, it gives you the ability to make sure you can do whatever you need to do to keep it from becoming a larger issue.


  • This new uh, tactic? of going after a registrar instead of a hosting provider with reports is a little concerning.

    There’s an awful lot of little registrars that don’t have any real abuse department and nobody is going to do shit other than exactly this: take it down and worry about it next week when they have time.

    It really feels like your choice of registrar is becoming as much or more important than your choice of hosting provider, and the little indie guys are probably the wrong choice if you’re running a legitimate business as you’re gonna need one that has enough funding and a proper team to vet reports before clobbering your site.

    On the OTHER hand, Network Solutions is just took down DigitalOcean for no reason, so maybe they all suck?


  • First: I’m not in any way intending to cast any negative light on the horrible shit the people suing went through.

    But it also kinda feels like a lawyer convinced a victim they could get paid if they sued Apple, because Apple has lots of money.

    If you really were serious about suing to force change, you’ve literally got:

    1. X, who has reinstated the accounts of people posting CSAM
    2. Google/Youtube, who take zero action on people posting both horrible videos AND comments on said videos routinely
    3. Instagram/Facebook, which have much the same problem as X with slow or limited action on reported content

    Apple, at least, will take immediate action if you report a user to them, so uh, maybe they should reconsider their best target, if their intent really is to remove content and spend some time on all the other giant corpos that are either literally actively doing the wrong thing, doing nothing, or are sitting there going ‘well, akshully’ at reports.