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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

> it's basically family videos of young girls, the same kind of videos my own sisters would shoot with our dad's camcorder.

Your family camcorder videos probably weren't made available for checkout at the public library, filed under "young girls doing gymnastics" in the library's card catalog. If they were, I imagine your family and many members of the public would be creeped out or upset.

> but what else do you do here?

Require (or maybe automatically force, if implemented well) those videos to be set to Visiblity: Unlisted. I don't think anyone would be upset with sharing these links with family.

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Not sure that analogy makes sense. YouTube makes it pretty clear you are publishing your video to the public when you upload the file. You actually have to confirm the video is going to be public. It's not like YouTube is raiding the family archives for the content

> YouTube makes it pretty clear you are publishing your video to the public when you upload the file

After working in tech for long enough, you realize that no one reads anything, even if its absolutely clear in the UI. And they will blame you for it.

Yes, indeed! : Myth #1: People read on the web https://uxmyths.com/post/647473628/myth-people-read-on-the-w...

I always have a hard time explaining to people carefully writing pagewalls that throwing out 90% of it would actually be more effective...

Things are not clear just because they have been spelled out in text. I don’t think this has anything to do with tech, except that tech tends to be full of abstract concepts that are difficult to understand.

As well they should, because (the hypothetical) you built and deployed something that relied for safety on users doing something you knew they wouldn't do.

So in your world, we should just never give users nice things because we know they're stupid?

No, you make the default safe and make the "dangerous" option hidden behind an advanced menu, so at the very least you can be certain the user can read and follow directions. Like a two-stage weapon switch.

What if not reading those things is smart as almost all of it is crap? Then you are banking on them being reasonable but stats still in your odds.

The tools you give them should come preconfigured to stop them hurting themselves, because you already know they will if you don't. It's not hard to go from that knowledge to questioning what it means if the defaults are harmful.

Non-rhetorical question: how would you build this feature? What if the user lies about their age to avoid COPPA? What if the user uploaded 100 videos in the past, but didn't want to make this video public? Should we bug them every single time to verify if they wanted to make the video public? How many times should we bug them about it?

This. Public videos should t be default. By I assume, this change would bring YouTube a lot less eye balls and hence revenue.

At the end it boils down to the truth that a Corporation is a hive mind, an intelligent machine ruthlessly optimizing for stock price and profits at the expense of sometimes human values.

The whole point of YouTube for m it's inception was to share videos with the internet. This isn't some shady hivemind hatching an evil scheme.

It's strange to assume that people think youtube is not a video sharing service.

What people see and viscerally understand is that they 1) upload a video and 2) get a link that they can share with others. Up to this point, it's the same as e.g. Dropbox.

What's not immediately clear is that the video (and channel) now shows up in search results. You won't be aware of that unless you either have a clear mental model of the platform, or try to search for the video title yourself (which implies a certain sort of mental model to be present already).

Upon opening YouTube the visitor is faced with videos published by others. Upon uploading there's one input dropdown right in front and center of the user, by default saying Public.

Sure, people only skim and headline-read articles, but because most articles are shit. That doesn't mean people don't ponder at least a bit when faced with a YT upload page. (And the upload through mobile app is probably more common for non-pro [first time, casual, accidental(!?)] youtubers, there the privacy: public field is pretty visible, legible and explicit.

They can mean anything in people's mind, public is that yeah anyone I send the link can see it, but that's not exactly YT's fault, that people don't make the connection, and somehow live in a fantasy world.

> no one reads anything [...] they will blame you for it.

And I cannot blame them too much. People are constantly bombarded with misleading messages (e.g. ads), clickbait stuff, terrible UIs, indecipherable contracts, countless pop-up notification and warnings, opt-out and other "dark patterns".

(disclaimer: personally, I read contracts and agreements and it's often pointless and frustrating)

Part of the problem is the publishers. They know what they are uploading and want it to be public. You are taking the analogy too far.

I don't think you can safely assert that people know that they "want it to be public". The last decade or so has demonstrated pretty adequately that people's brains have a lot of trouble with what "public-to-the-internet" means.

Sharing information with broad public is the whole point of social networks. People might not want all consequences, but they want some consequences.

No, the point of most social networks to most people is sharing information with people close to you. To witness, Facebook being more popular than Twitter.

> you are publishing your video to the public when you upload the file

Due to various cognitive biases most people fail to realize just how big and far reaching that public is.

To share an example from my own experience a few years ago. I wrote a blogpost. I love writing blogs and sharing them with The Public. That's why I write it.

In one of them I used an Xkcd comic. My entire audience, anyone I could ever imagine reading it, knows XKCD and loved it.

But then that blog got 100,000 views. Then 200,000. Then it spiraled. Suddenly I was flamed from all sides, called a disgusting human being and all sorts of things. Why? Because I didn't correctly attribute that XKCD comic.

"Yay my friends and their friends and liek 1000 people saw my thing" is a completely different "public" than when THE public sees your thing. Most people imagine the former when they think "Oh I'm uploading this and it's going to be public"

but in this example would you blame wordpress or whatever is hosting your blog?

I know. I just think it’s somrthing YouTube should implement, because people uploading videos of their family probably don’t intend on complete strangers searching for them and thus probably don’t worry about making them public.

I learned the hard way that youtube is not useful for sharing family videos with a limited audience (ie: immediate family. 10 people, tops.).

I uploaded my children's dance recital video, as an unlisted video, and earned myself a copyright strike because of the background music.

Since when is recording and publicly publishing a performance that includes copyrighted music licensed for public performance as part of a live event but specifically and explicitly not for rerecording and distribution (as would normally be the case for the type of recital described, assuming the dance studio was on the ball with licensing) fair use?

Just to take this a little step further

1) Purpose: to illustrate the efforts of my young children in a non-professional context, not to showcase the audio portion of the recording.

2) Nature: audio + video, with explicit permission to record from the show executive/directors (it was a rehearsal, professionals recorded the actual show) and focus on the visual and physical nature of the unique performance

3) amount: abridged songs, amateurishly cut and remixed

4) effect on potential market: There is no way this is a substitute for any of the original copyrighted audio, and I communicate this intent to youtube by requesting it remain unlisted.

It probably does pass the four factor fair use test, but fighting with the youtube contentid machine is futile, and their system doesn't care about fair use.

It absolutely is fair use. Let's consider:

- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

Which is non-commercial.

- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Which is to none.

There's also a question of if a video containing a bad transfer of a piece of music along with children dancing is "transformative." See Lenz v. Universal Music Corp, where Universal Music got destroyed all the way up to SCOTUS for ignoring Fair Usage when taking down a video of a dancing baby.

Your whole argument seems to be based on some fictional contractual agreement between the dance studio and the music's owners. That isn't relevant to the discussion at all, a parent recorded and distributed, not the dance studio themselves for commercial purposes.

While I take your point, the very act of uploading the video is akin to "going down to the library with a copy of the tape for anyone to rent" in this analogy, which does mitigate the degree of upset to an extent.

Mixing some metaphors here, but I've encountered a lot of people who view it like going to get your photos developed to share with family only, then finding that other people can order copies too

I mean, there are probably people who buy DVDs of gymnastics events to get their jollies on it. Even in the VHS days, there were pros that would video competitions for parents and kids to buy if they wanted. It's not a new idea, the medium is just new.

Ok, but we have new tools and they can be used to counter this unproductive negative trend. It’s not as if Google isn’t a leader in ML, what have you.

Those same parents might take a different view of the pro assembling an edited lowlights tape.

Which seems very close to crosslinking comments with timestamps on fully public videos, with advertising.

You're assuming that these people don't want their videos public. Even if it's true for some, clearly some of these uploaders do want their videos public, so your solution doesn't generally solve the problem.

> Require (or maybe automatically force, if implemented well) those videos to be set to Visiblity: Unlisted. I don't think anyone would be upset with sharing these links with family.

But, I mean, this takes away the use case of Youtube as a replacement for America's funniest home videos.

Not that that's a necessary thing for societty, but it is something to think about. The chances that some creep found AFV stimulating is non-zero and advertisers paid that show to have their ads. The only difference here is the openness of the comments, whereas those AFV creeps probably had to communicate in secret.

The whole thing is creepy and awful, but I'm not sure what the best solution is. Perhaps banning comments on those videos.

but what else do you do here?

Not attempt to monetize your family videos. Disable ads on your own videos.[1]

[1] http://orgspring.com/turn-off-ads-youtube-videos/

That solves the issue from the advertisers' perspective.

It doesn't solve the "pedos are looking at my kid" side of things.

Don’t use YouTube. Photos on Mac and iOS make sharing family videos dead simple. Not sure why anyone uses YouTube to share videos they don’t want to be public.

Nobody in my family has a Mac on an iOS devise.

It's possible to have family videos private on YouTube and only share them with a small circle of people.

> Photos on Mac and iOS make sharing family videos dead simple

That’s categorically false. Every iCloud user has their own photo library and you cannot create a collaborative one. So all my photos are in mine, all my wife’s are in hers, and we’ve resorted to uploading to a a joint (also paid) Google photos account for sharing with each other and family.

Shared Albums exist and they are collaborative. https://support.apple.com/kb/PH13690?viewlocale=en_GB&locale...

There's a quality downgrade so it's not suitable for sharing archive-quality photos, but for us it's adequately replaced Facebook for sharing photos and videos of our kid, vacations etc

However a shared album requires one to manually, selectively choose photos to share with people, as opposed to sharing all your photos with your spouse, which Google makes easy.

I thought the context was in contrast to sharing as unlisted videos on YouTube (the comment you were replying to)

Mac and iOS are prohibitively expensive for a large fraction of users.

I don't think a lot of parents are. It's more of people ripping (sometimes unlisted) family videos and posting them on accounts with large collections.

The videos themselves aren't really the issue. It's the context they're presented in.

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