This sounds like you're describing an evil AI rather than a bunch of humans. I think a simpler explanation might be that they either don't understand that youtube-dl isn't a threat to them, or that OC is wrong and it actually is a threat in some way. I don't think they're sitting at a board room table saying "We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do".
Yes, they're called "corporations". We used to have software that helped keep their incentives aligned with those of the species, or at least those of Americans, but the Citizens United decision and the end of Glass-Steagall EOLed that stuff without an upgrade path - I blame Google lobbyists, that's just their style - and we've spent the last couple decades finding out why that maybe wasn't such a great idea.
The more likely explanation is that they originally formed teams to address this problem, teams that are now left with a choice between twiddling their thumbs and this.
Yeah, they really jumped the shark with that release. The meta has been changing drastically, and I don't know if the dev team really is interested in patching it back up.
Corporations have no minds and have no hands. They cannot think, decide, or act. Every action undertaken by a corporation was performed by a human being (or programmed by a human being).
Corporate "speech" is still just human rights to free expression. Corporations have nothing to say without humans.
I'm really interested in this view. I suspect that at a large enough size, organisations can absolutely have an emergent... "nature", which is not only characteristic of that organisation, but largely independent of its constituents (the humans). I introduce into evidence the Roman Catholic Church. It is so large, so entrenched in its ways, that it is extremely highly unlikely that an individual within it (including the pope) can substantially change the character of the organisation.
I have a personal belief that humans are to very large organisations (incl. nation states) as cells are to higher-order creatures. Once a large enough organisation has "matured", humans entering the organisation adapt themselves to it (probably subconsciously), and the organisation's unique culture survives.
It's different from culture. A culture makes everyone think in a similar way, there is one role: a participant of it. A corporation doesn't have to make everyone think the same, because it has many roles and written processes and KPIs which modulate anyone taking a role into a gear that rotates accordingly to the big schema. Corporations may have culture and it may be definitive, but it's not only that.
You should just google the definition of culture. Lots of work has been done to study culture at numerous levels from nations to corporations to small communities. It's called anthropology.
If you're actually curious, you should actually read papers and studies. This HN trend of ignorantly waxing philosophically about some topic adds no value to anyone's mind.
I'm not actually curious about definitions out there. And it's not HN trend, it's me. I see and experience both everyday cultures and everyday corporations, whatever meaning these words have for me, and compare them to each other. It doesn't require anything special beyond comparison skills. If you don't agree, fine, if you don't want to message a key mistake I maybe made, okay. If you want to take a complex definition and stretch it over a non-phd one to get my non-phd answer, okay. But you should know that patronizingly referencing to "lots of work" never works in a discussion or as an explanation. Maybe there is a work on such discussions, if you actually care.
But anyway, I just googled it:
- the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively
- the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society
- all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation
- an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups
It has little in common with what I described, namely written (managed, on purpose, situational) processes and KPIs, which force people to act as they do, and are not inherent to them.
If you have a specific interest, you should just research it. The world is a very big place and lots of smart people have already gathered evidence to answer questions about pretty much anything. Talking on a forum is fun but collectively, we're idiots and we're not going to teach you much of anything.
It's great that you have questions, but you actually have to follow it up with research and learning if you care. From the comments you posted, I get the impression you haven't spent 1 hour googling answers to your questions. That sends me the impression, you don't really care, you just like hearing yourself think.
Maybe, but it's more complicated than that. I was pissed off yesterday, sorry if my tone sounded worse than it should have been.
My reluctance against your suggestion is based not on my interest or lack thereof^. I've had this sort of discussions many times before, and usually people split into two categories: those who correct or argue directly, in short and precise argument, and those who refer to unnamed sources throughout the thread. From the first group you learn quickly, and consistently, and they leave no aftertaste, even if you feel "defeated", because their argument sends a strong educational message. The second is a potential time spoil. I've read "some works" before, and in most cases (or it's perceived as such) it turned out that that guy meant just a slightly different meaning, or an interpretation of that author, which is different from a common sense around a specific term, or simply they missed a big chunk of a message and pressed on a non- point, or were primarily just a narcissist troll. I can remember the last time I constructively "just went" and read a book on some Buddhism downstream, after an argument with one guy who claimed that it's very rational and isn't just a cool story (the topic was that one of their prophets arrived in my country). I downloaded it, read a preface and 20 minutes later it already narrated magic forest experiences and spirits who messaged truth to the prophet. Same story with Islam followers, sometimes they are talking nonsense and refer to Qur'an, which I've already read in seven translations, including interpreting one, with cancelled ayat remarks, and often I know surah and ayat range they're talking about right away. (Edit: I just noticed that both cases are about religion, which is known to be "hot", but it doesn't end with religion, it just happens to bring brightest examples.)
I'm not saying that you're not right, but it's statistically nonsensical to follow your vague suggestions to go read on a field. That is why it will never work, and you will think that these lazy careless STEM guys portray some trend. It's a trust issue, not an issue with my desire (or lack of it, which is the case) to learn something regardless of who my opponent is. I simply can't trust few hours of my life to every other guy on the internet, if they don't provide a good enough argument to do that.
^ which I already claimed non-existent, it feels like you don't like to read comments at all
Humans have no nucleus, no mitochondria, no golgi apparatus. They cannot transcribe RNA or respirate or activate neurons. Every action undertaken by a human was performed by a cell (or an agglomeration of cells) within it.
Human "action" is just the emergent properties of cells. Humans can do nothing without cells.
There is a fundamental difference in the concept of an entity that exists as a whole, and a legal construct that is purely an economic allocation abstraction.
There is an interesting talk 'Dude, You Broke the Future'[0] in which speaker compares corporations to 'paperclip maximizer' AI which could destroy us with their sole gole of maximizing profits (or paperclips)
A group of people takes on a hive mind aligned with the interest of the corporation and the corporate bureaucracy manages the hands that act on its behalf with an incentive structure.
This constitutes a separate person, legally, with liability that is not on the individual because they cannot individually control the agenda and actions of the larger corporation.
But a corporation is a legal construct, and ownership of one isn’t anymore a right than having a drivers license. I believe it’s totally within the governments rights to regulate them differently than the individual citizens comprising the corporation.
Most people in a corporation aren't doing what they personally would like to do, but what's on the interest of the corporation and what the corporation incentives then to do. This might be at odds with the personal preferences. People's livelihood depends on the rest of the corporation remaining positive towards them and thus this bar gets moved quite far over time.
This is an oversimplified take, and completely glosses over macro social effects beyond "individual choice".
This is the social science equivalent of reasoning about human behavior and focusing on the behavior of individual neuron connections, or the behavior of an OS by focusing entirely on the I/O drivers - wrong scope of analysis.
I think there is a naive assumption to it that nothing other than humans had ever been proven (smarter && autonomous && self-sustaining) than a human, thus a corporate cannot be alive. I’m not sure how is this proposition remains supported and for how long.
> I don't think they're sitting at a board room table saying "We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do".
That's pretty much what they said. Not with those words but that's essentially their thought process.
> With the software, which is available on the code sharing platform Github, YouTube videos and music files can be downloaded without a web browser.
They literally want to control how you view the videos. Maybe you think YouTube sucks and would rather use mpv with youtube-dl. According to these guys, you can't because reasons nobody really cares about. It's honestly offensive enough that they think they have any say in the matter.
If you download the videos, they can’t inject ads into them, they don’t get ad revenue, earnings decline, shareholders sell their stock, value of the stock decreases, shareholders get even more upset, stock price decreases further, execs can’t take out loans against their stock because it’s not worth enough … the cycle continues.
I don’t really think it’s about control—it’s about increasing the value of the corps stock so employees and shareholders with stock can sell it or use it as collateral for loans to buy nice things.
Their stock price and shareholders are nobody's problem but theirs, none of that justifies in any way what they are doing. It's simply not acceptable to me that these people think they can decide what my computer does and doesn't display, much less what goes into my mind. Every single ad they send me gets deleted. I won't even see them because they will get filtered by uBlock Origin. They are not entitled to my attention, it is not for sale and it most definitely is not the payment for whatever content they're sending me for free. They sent me the content hoping I would look at ads but that hope failed, they need to accept that and move on, not try to destroy open source projects and own my machine so that it becomes impossible to not look at ads.
It does justify what they are doing for their shareholders, which they’re legally beholden to.
I’m not debating wether it’s moral or ethical, but if you were in their shoes trying to juice revenue to increase the value of your equity, you’d either charge a monthly fee for users to remove ads or fight like hell against people who are trying to download videos without ads.
That’s exactly what YouTube is doing.
FWIW, I can’t stand ads and I think it’s complete bullshit that they’re suing to take down youtube-dl, but they’re acting complete rational for the incentives they’re optimizing for. The problem is that optimization is at odds with users like ourselves.
This is just a conjecture, but I suspect that the number of people using YouTube DL is a tiny fraction of those using YouTube proper. Like less than 1%. The potential for revenue recovery here is tiny. And the corporate execs are surely aware that most people who use YouTube DL are likely running adblock. So I disagree that this is about revenue and support the notion that this is about control and sending a message.
This is about whether it's moral and ethical though. You can maximize revenue selling drugs, it's a quite effective method I might add. Nobody considers that acceptable.
I think copyright, advertising and surveillance capitalism are completely unacceptable practices that ought to be banned straight up. They are directly and indirectly responsible for everything that's ruining computer and internet freedom today. If we can't ban them, we should all be aiming to minimize their revenue so that they cease and desist on their own. I'd rather have the entire copyright and advertising industries implode than cede control of my computer to them.
That's what's at stake here. Computing freedom. They need to own our computers in order to stop us from doing basic things like copying and deleting data. If we don't stop them, we will lose something I think is far more valuable than a bunch of industries. We will lose computing freedom.
I don’t see a lot of ads these days, but I do find it intriguing where this technology-economy disconnects go. It feels like the triad of freemium, ad-support revenue model and adblock is slowly causing obsolescence of currency-quantized measurement of value.
Maybe this is just me getting old, maybe this is just I finally realizing the obvious that is that currency was always proof of stake and never were value representations of goods. But kind of interesting and worrying.
It's not just about ads, it's also about marketing data and privacy: if people are able to watch a local copy whenever they want, they don't even know how often it's viewed, or by whom. (Unless they're watching on a TV that has automatic content recognition turned on.)
They totally can, just not at a moments notice. Putting a car ad into a car video-> works. Shoutout to sponsor -> works.
Putting the scam ad of the day -> doesn't work (or needs some effort).
I draw the line before SponsorBlock though. While they are repetitive and irritating after a while (if I was going to join skillshare I'd have done so some time ago, kindly bugger off, etc.):
* They do directly pay the people making the content
* That income can't be taken off them by the medium (youtube usually) deciding to demonetize the content
* YT isn't even taking a cut, in fact
* Those ad placements aren't trying to stalk me around the Internet and storing every tiny bit of information about me they can glean
* Sponsorship bit are usually there because they have at least some tentative relevance to the content and the people consuming it, without the need to stalk us as we travel around the Internet
At least until such time as the video carries like youtube start inserting ads directly into video streams, then I'll reconsider. I don't block ads to block ads: I block adds as a side effect of blocking stalking behaviours, wasted bandwidth from auto-playing video, 3rd party code on otherwise half-reputable sites trying to access my camera & mic, slowing my devices via poorly optimised animations, pop-ups that may interrupt other app use away from the browser, pop-unders too, battery drain from CPU use when mobile, being forced to interact because I can't just look around or scroll past as the ad is over the content, ... If the stalky inserts start to happen then I'll react by using sponsorblock or similar.
Online ad serving is a 100 billion dollar market and it is entirely dependent on control of the client, or at least the default behavior of the client, to make it show ads and to not save the media, requiring repeat visits to show more ads. It is vital to their industry that ad systems can display ads on browser clients by default.
This is a huge part of the push toward apps - more control over clients.
If they could go after ad-block extensions in browsers they would, but this is difficult for historic and technical reasons.
Youtube-dl is a separate client with no ad-displaying ability at all. It saves the media. They're going to do their best to portray this as somehow improper because their business depends on it.
The "Evil AI" description is more accurate. Of course, individual humans aren't in a board room being evil -- but the incentives in place -- high paid lawyers, little targets that won't fight back, the ability for the little wormy people inside to show off "wins," and no clear incentive not to.
The behavior will much more resemble the "Evil AI."
Is it so far fetched that there are people, especially in groups, who act in extreme ways? I’m sure they are saying exactly “ We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do”, because it is optimum for them to do so.
