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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

I totally understand that youtube doesn't want people replacing video files. That feature would be abused like hell.

What's wrong with uploading a new video "Original Title [Update Nov 2018]", and linking to that in the description?

What kind of argument is that when machine learning is extensively used to prosecute DMC and copyright violations? Why not detect video similarity as well and determine a cutoff under which a newly uploaded video is "too altered" and cannot be used to replace an existing video?

You don't need machine learning to do that. Even something like p-hash of every frame and if more than some threshold aren't the same, then it can't be replaced. I guess over the course of dozens of replacements you could replace the whole video, but you could always just store the p-hash of the whole original video, or even some sample of it, and always compare against that and not the most recent version.

Absolutely, I was just saying that a lot of effort is already put into pattern analysis for videos so that licensing partners can be pleased. It's not like it's technically impossible. The real reason is that Google doesn't have the incentive because it simply doesn't care about its users' happiness. It merely wants to lock them in. What other service will people migrate to when they are annoyed by YouTube?

Right.

> That feature would be abused like hell.

It would if done naievely; one seemingly-simple fix for all the problems I've seen in this thread: have multiple video versions as an explicit part of the API. You can link to a specific version, youtube can clearly show a flag saying "there's a newer version of this video available, do you want to watch that instead?", it can show comments and likes for all versions in one place (with a badge saying "this comment was made on an old version" if appropriate), etc

View counts, and any learning 'the algorithm' has done to understand how popular the original title was, get lost.

I think that's part of the problem. Does a new video, which may have nothing to do with the originial video, really deserve the views and popularity of the old video?

But if it was allowed, view counts & popularity learning could be assigned to a completely different video that is uploaded as an "edit"

How is that different to just allowing editing of the video content itself?

They're saying you could upload a pirated episode of Game of Thrones, get 100k views, switch the content and title to "My Newest Vlog!", and keep the views.

How is that different from uploading half a pirated episode of Game of Thrones and replacing the other half with your newest vlog? People could try it, but I think they'd notice that lots of views can be a bad thing if most viewers react negatively.

If it happens anyway, view counts could be disaggregated into "total" and "since last update".

But you can do exactly that on your own website, and for some reason we don't have an epidemic of bait-and-switch blogs. Why would it be different on YouTube?

YouTube tracks views and other popularity / credibility statistics for videos. Your personal blog doesn't -- it's even easier to just put up "My Newest Vlog!" with a little number claiming to have 100,000 views. Why would you need to do a bait-and-switch?

Scale and network effects.

> for some reason we don't have an epidemic of bait-and-switch blogs

I've seen a number of social network groups being sold for their audiences and then rebranded to sell questionable things. I've even seen something similar done to some YouTube channel I once subscribed to: its owner (new or not, can't really tell this time) changed its name/images/whatever, removed all the videos and started publishing things that I never wanted to be in my feed. Things will only get worse the moment YouTube allows to change videos under the same URL.

I'm led to believe this is also common on Reddit; someone (or a bot) will repost to karma farm, then the account with high karma is sold off. I'm not sure how much there is to gain from that since you don't see users' karma unless you specifically view their profile.

Reddit "trusts" accounts with high karma in various ways.

I don't think it is different? I think even allowing edits to the video content would open up the door to replacing a video with something unrelated but retaining the views & popularity etc.

Agreed, YouTube shouldn't allow arbitrary re-upload. If they did, then 1) upload a popular song, 2) disable comments, 3) wait for it to get millions of views and tens of thousands of likes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XycBLF6kWuY), 4) re-upload the video to now be a product pitch for your startup, 5) show potential investors how many millions of people are enthusiastic for your product.

And if one's reaction is, "re-uploading a video should reset all views and likes to zero", then re-uploading now has little advantage over making a new video.

Also link rot.

The description is not visible by default and is not shown at all in embeds.

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