- cross-posted to:
- justpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- justpost@lemmy.world
Odysee, a decentralised YouTube alternative focused on free speech, is officially ending the serving of ads on the platform, starting today. The post:
"Dear friends of Odysee, Starting today, we’re removing all ads. We don’t need ads to make money as a platform and we are confident in the development of our own new monetisation programs that will help creators earn a living and at the same time keep Odysee alive. Ultimately, sacrificing the overall user experience to make a few bucks isn’t worth it to us and nor is it even sustainable for a platform that wishes to make something truly open and creatively free.
As we take this decision, one thing is certain to us, media platforms (even ones that market themselves as ‘free-speech’) typically devolve into advertising companies and end up becoming beholden to their paymasters. It’s been that way for centuries and is never going to change.
As we see YouTube become more aggressive with their ad deployment and ‘Free Speech’ platforms try to build their own ad businesses it’s apparent to us that we’re building a model for Odysee that will keep it sustainable not only financially, but in its ability to provide an incorruptible user experience.
Our approach may be considered niche or unconventional, that’s fine by us. Odysee will be used by the world on terms that are agreeable to its users, and we know our users don’t like ads.
Best, Founder & Creator, Chief Executive Officer. Julian Chandra"
You must log in or register to comment.
deleted by creator
I remember liking the idea of Odysee, but that turned rather quickly
Yep. Use FastLBRY, not Odysee
Edit: huh… it might be dead now?
You just made an excellent point without realizing it. #mayflies
Didn’t know about its existence but as they were proclaiming free speech that immediately sets off alarm bells. Sad to see my suspicion is once again correct.
Most of advertisers don’t care.
Thank goodness we have Lemmies ensuring no alternative tech can threaten YouTube. I was worried people might actually be against Odyssey in the comments
deleted by creator
You know that’s exactly what people say about Mastadon and in some cases Lemmy right?
Just a thing to think about, free speech is always going to appeal to Nazis, just as it should for most other people. Freedom of speech in the American sense where certain speech is not protected (such as screaming fire in a movie theater when there is no fire) is a right that we should continue to attempt to protect, even from people we disagree with (within reason, as mentioned above).
screaming fire in a movie theater when there is no fire
This scenario always reminds me of the very first part of this speech on free speech from Christopher Hitchens.
(such as screaming fire in a movie theater when there is no fire)
This idiom comes from an analogy in a SCOTUS opinion arguing that checks notes it’s a violation of the Espionage Act to distribute flyers that oppose the draft. That case was later partly overturned in Brandenburg v Ohio and the standard is that speech isn’t incitement unless it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. To the point that “$SLUR should hang from trees” is probably protected speech (because the lawless action isn’t imminent), but “you guys, grab that $SLUR over there so we can string them up!” probably isn’t.
So defending free speech inevitably means defending white supremacists and the like because free speech doesn’t actually protect anything if it doesn’t protect upsetting, outrageous, or offensive speech (and likewise, the arbiter of what counts as offensive is not guaranteed to always be on your side). It’s why the ACLU has defended them on more than one occasion. H.L. Mencken put it best.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” ― H.L. Mencken
Thanks, said what I was implying 👍
Sure. And Nazism is a direct threat not protected by freedom of expression.
I don’t disagree in the slightest, hopefully you understood what I meant though.
We understood, it just didn’t contribute anything and appeared to actively defend nazis.
Lol k
The portion of the left that seeks to censor everything, removing people’s freedoms in a misguided attempt to stop terrible ideas from spreading are just shooting yourselves in the foot long term. I say this as a staunch lefty
Not that anyone here cares to see nuance evidenced by somehow turning my comment into Nazi apologism regardless of what I directly stated.
This Lemmy community is actually more pro-mainstream than Reddit and YouTube combined. Thank you for pointing this out. Time to go.
Focused on “free speech”?
When I see that used multiple times by a platform operator it invariably means they’re right-wing wingnuts and/or the platform will devolve into right wing drivel while silencing dissent.
Yup. And on descriptive grounds, the whole thing falls into a false dichotomy: treating free speech as an all-or-nothing matter, instead treating freedom of speech as a scale. And that giving someone complete freedom of speech always means restricting the freedom of speech of someone else.
(I typically exemplify this through a guy with a megaphone in an offline plaza. Telling him to drop off the megaphone reduces his ability to reach willing listeners, thus his freedom of speech; but if you leave him alone nobody else can be heard, so their freedom of speech is lowered.)
Thank you, you put it better than I could. It’s not binary, it’s not all or nothing. You can have some freedom of speech and yet still not really have freedom of speech if you’re silenced by those who disagree.
Yes, your megaphone example is a special case of the paradox of tolerance. In this instance, tolerance of loud voices means quiet voices are drowned out.
It’s related - Popper’s paradox highlights that you can’t compromise with some people, while my focus is that you need to impose some limits.
It’s easy to tweak the example though, to be more like the paradox - if the megaphone guy is telling people to kick off the plaza some people, or saying stuff to make them leave.
Yes, or if multiple people get into a megaphone arms race and are all noise blasting each other so hard that no one can hear anything anymore.
The only way free speech can survive is with decentralized platforms like email and lemmy. Any time there is central control free speech isn’t.
This isn’t even a true statement. Mods are human and can silence views they don’t like.
Go post some progressive and democratic views or criticize authoritarian support over on the grad.ml side. See how long it is before you’re shut down, blocked or even banned. There’s no free speech rule just because the platform is decentralized.
The only mitigating factors are that you can have a platform for opposing views, but even that isn’t a guarantee here because the instance can be defederated and effectively silenced.
It’s free speech in a federated environment because someone can’t remove your voice.
It doesn’t obligate anyone to listen to you. So federated instances having opinions about who they talk to doesn’t contradict free speech.
People who want to talk about The Second Coming of the Space Pope are free to do so and don’t require any third party to let them do so.
Couldn’t that argument of different instances and their opinions be said about different centralised companies as well?
That’s what I said regarding starting your own instance to say what you want. I’m not sure why you felt the need to reiterate that.
And you also repeated what I said that nobody is obligated to listen to you - the instance can be defederated or admins can ban you.
So you essentially agree?
I disagree with you saying my statement isn’t true.
Any system that is centralized, and requires a third party to “allow” speech will tend to not have free speech.
My argument is regarding the idea that the fediverse faces the same issues with control of who gets to see what you say because people are people and instances controlled by people that may not like what you say can ban you or defederate.
You want to narrow the argument to centralized control, but imo that isn’t relevant to the overall premise that people tend to equate “free speech” not just to saying what you want but also people’s ability to hear it, and the fact is that even on the fediverse people are still silenced whether or not you agree with what they’re saying.
The fediverse is a thousand little moderators on a thousand little hills, its distributed decision making.
Free speech is not having anyone stopping you from having your soap box, it has nothing to do with guaranteeing you a audience, as long as those who want to listen can get to your soap box then the speech is free.
You think Lemmy has free speech? Some major mods here are quite liberal in controlling exactly what speech and ideas they allow their uses to be exposed to, and that is how it will always be by those desiring power over others.
Yes, Lemmy is 100% free speech.
We can make lemmy.spacepope.org and nobody can silence us. It doesn’t prevent other instances from refusing to listen to the truth of space, but those who want to participate can.
eyeroll
Looks like you care zilch for free speech. If you and others with this opinion cared for free speech, you would promote your own alternative ideas on those platforms to even things out, instead of whining that there’s more opposing views to yours on the platform than not.
Did you specifically skip past the past where I said they silence dissent?
But thanks for telling me what I believe.
Do they? Do you have evidence?
Because I’m interested in YT alternatives. I pay for Nebula, and I’m interested in other platforms as well, especially if they champion free speech (like, actual free speech, not whatever Musk means by “free speech”).
Sure. Me. I’ve had comments deleted by admins when I criticized things like Russia feeding arms to Iran, operating misinformation campaigns, and generally trying to destabilize democracies.
That’s lame. Was that before or after LBRY’s bankruptcy? I’m wondering if they’ve changed their admins.
Dunno? It was about a half year ago.
“If you really cared about free speech you wouldn’t be using your free speech to call out Nazis”
Most such attempts fail when not enough people subscribe to paying tiers. Good luck to them nevertheless, I hope they succeed.
deleted by creator
Reading your comments is Nazis Nazis Nazis. I think you need some help.
Alright snowflake
Let the hate flow through you.
Freedom goes both ways. I hate nazis, but it’s better to have their bullshit out in the open to be criticized, than have them group up on shady underground places that would only make it worse.
deleted by creator
The opposite is “the illusion of safety because of moderated platforms”. One might think a platform that removes fake news would only have real news, but that’s obviously not the case and creates an even worse landscape.
deleted by creator
You’re doing the same as what others are trying to do to any open platform. You’re claiming that me trying to defend absolute freedom of speech is the same as me asking why we don’t hear them out. And as long as you believe that is the same, I’d rather not waste time discussing this.
Absolute freedom of speech goes both ways, indefinitely. If a platform is too heavily moderated and hides stuff like this, not only does it create the illusion that it does not exist, it also sets a precedent for abuse by the platform owners. The biggest example at the moment is how Musk uses X to suppress arguments that don’t fit his narrative.
Filter bubbles are a very new concept and are much worse than coming across people spreading hatred and being able to tell them to suck it.
deleted by creator
I agree with you but so few people think so today. They think censorship is the answer because if they don’t see it, they feel better and can forget it exists.
Fuck no.
If anyone does want to support them, even by a small amount, and don’t have much money, I personally recommend subscribing for a month or two to the Premium+ subsciption, which is only $2.99/month. It’s all I can afford atm personally, so that’s what I’m going to be doing. They deserve support just for this action alone.
I don’t understand how that’s much different than YouTube. If you pay for YouTube then you don’t get ads either.
The difference is your favorite channel won’t be destroyed by a corporate abusing copyright strike, they won’t have to self-censor themselves from saying fuck or shit. A platform making money from ads means every content creator on that platform is a slave to the advertisers
they won’t have to self-censor themselves from saying fuck or shit
…or “non-white people are degenerate inferiors”.
Fuck Odysee.
My favorite channel wouldn’t have millions of subscribers and a somewhat steady recurring income because of this.
It’s a classic catch 22: Without viewers, no content creators. Without content creators, no viewers.
I think it’s great that they try to get rid of what makes YouTube suck but I don’t see that content creators are leaving YouTube anywhere soon.
They don’t need to leave YouTube at all. That’s because Odysee provides a YouTube sync feature, that syncs every upload from YouTube with the Odysee channel. They can set the sync and never touch Odysee again if they want to. Plus, if we collectively ask our favourite YouTubers to join Odysee, and actually make them realise that Odysee exists, more of them will eventually join. Once more have joined, it will be easier to convince even more YouTubers to join again. The cycle continues, and Odysee grows.
I’m sorry to be the guy that tried to ruin your party, but “if we collectively…”… How many people are you talking about?
100, 1000, 10000, 100000 ?
This is business. We’re talking about someone’s livelihood. Peace on earth is nice but it doesn’t guarantee food on your table.
Syncing is an alternative as long as it doesn’t mean that a view pays less on Odyssee than on YouTube. If it does, then the creator would not gain anything, just kidding income.
What is your selling argument for a YouTube creator with 100000 views on average to move to Odyssee?
I’m sorry to be the guy that tried to ruin your party, but “if we collectively…”… How many people are you talking about?
100, 1000, 10000, 100000 ?
As many people as are willing to do it. If you’re not; that’s fine; I’m not telling anyone they have to; it’s just an encouragement.
Syncing is an alternative as long as it doesn’t mean that a view pays less on Odyssee than on YouTube. If it does, then the creator would not gain anything, just kidding income.
Syncing is up to the YouTuber, it’s not hard to do, and requires no channel management after initially set up. They may not have a reason, depending on who they are, but it’s better to get some people on board with it than none.
What is your selling argument for a YouTube creator with 100000 views on average to move to Odyssee?
There is no “selling” point other than that it’s easy to set up and may earn them some extra cash, even if it’s not much in comparison to their YouTube pay. Other than that, there’s the fact that YouTube false copyright claims videos all the time, and if the YouTuber can’t get their video back up, their viewers can still at least view it through Odysee where the synced video did not get removed. If the channel is automatically taken down by false copyright issues, as has happened before, the video’s aren’t suddenly lost forever. Not all YouTubers keep a backup of all their videos on their own drives, and if their channel is taken down completely, “bye bye content”. I’m not trying to say that these reasons are much for most YouTubers, but with dozens of millions of YouTubers out there making good money, there are bound to be at least hundreds of thousands of them who would sync with Odysee if they knew about it.
The point of the post is that Odysee no longer has ads. I’m not trying to say you needed the subscription to remove ads. That’s how it was previously, until today. Free users don’t see ads anymore.
The difference between YouTube Premium and Odysee Premium is mainly in it’s reason for existing. YouTube Premium exists for the sole purpose of providing features that used to be free, with some extra things that most people don’t givea hoot about and never use; and, you know… to make themselves richer. It exists so that people buy it for the value it specifically brings them.
So essentially; people buy YouTube premium for the features, while people buy Odysee Premium to support the growth of the platform, help fund the platform, and support free speech. The extra features they get are just a little bonus as thanks. Not only that, but the features Odysee provides are “Early-Access” features, which means that most, if not all of those features will become available for free users eventually. At that point, I’m not sure what Odysee Premium will provide if all the features become free; they’ll have to figure something else out to give it more incentive. But as it currently stands, Odysee Premium is more like a donation than a service; which gives you extra features as thanks.
You’re reading obnoxious levels of goodwill into the actions of a company that doesn’t deserve it. This is just the video platform equivalent of “critical support to Russia.”
Profits for big tech is never enough, and they will raise prices and introduce more ads forever. This is because in modern economy, having a quarter where the profits don’t grow is punished severely on the stock market.
Is this not a neo-Nazi/far right platform? I only ever see them linking antivax and evropa content on Odysee. That’s where I’ve heard of it.
deleted by creator
If one Nazi is allowed into a bar, it’s a Nazi bar. I’ll continue to steer clear.
something something if there’s a nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 nazis
deleted by creator
I don’t really think that’s true, so long as you stay off the tankie instance. I have it blocked.
deleted by creator
To be honest, I’ve been using the website and I notice nothing of this. I can click a few links and get to said content, yes, but my feed and some of the categories I check are on par with YouTube. The only big difference I experience is that there’s much more content of smaller content creators.
Great description, I may have to go chock this output. Any good android app for it, or is the mobile site a PWA?
I ain’t a fascist, Neo-Nazi, far-rightist, or any of the things Odysee is falsely marked by people as being, and I fit in just fine with my fellow Odysee users. Stop attacking one of the only companies who are truly trying to be the change they want to see in the world.
deleted by creator
I agree with most of your points, but “anti physically and mentally disabled”? Really? Your source describes how they reuploaded unsubtitled lectures for the sake of preservation. This is hardly a villanous move and has nothing to do with “not caring about deaf people”. Let’s keep the arguments honest, you have plenty else to stick them with that’s actually substantial.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Far right content is more common than on YouTube because of the guidelines, but in my experience the largest parts are crypto, privacy and similar, also a decent amount is gaming (at least that’s what I upload)
I’ve noticed that the Linux and open-source community is pretty big there, too; with a lot of them being part of the privacy community. I’m a part of this community on Odysee.
In my experience the Linux people are considerably more on peertube compared to its site, but this may just specific to the channels I watch
I don’t use PeerTube much, but I plan to. This is probably why I didn’t know it was bigger with Linux users. Though it makes sense since I tend to see PeerTube mentioned and linked to far more often on the internet than Odysee.
Its a mix of both in my exp. A deciding factor I think is money source for the creator. If it subscription (librepay, opencollective, patreon, etc) peertube is fine for them. If the primarily get paid more directly odessy is more enticing (because of its built in payment system).
I mirror my stuff from youtube over there and I do not fall into these categories. To be fair, I have the tiniest of audiences anyway, so… doesn’t really matter either way.
Haven’t checked in on Odyssee for a while though. Not sure if the auto mirror thing still works.
I mirror my stuff from youtube over there and I do not fall into these categories
Same.
And I’ve noticed that there seems to be a very small user base there.
My videos and most in my niche only get 10s of views on Odysee.
When I go browsing around outside of my niche, I tend to find quite a bit of right wing conspiracy stuff. Not really who I want to be associated with, but it’s not nearly as bad as some of the other (now failed) "free speech " video platforms that came before it.
I found your channel, and yeah, your latest YouTube uploads are still being synced to Odysee.
Thanks for checking :D that is pretty cool.
Cool. What’s your channel? I have a gaming channel for no-commentary playthrough’s. It’s not synced from YouTube, though.
no-commentary play-throughs
🤤👌 The best content.
Honestly, I might just have to think about getting into that type if thing. I am not one for editing anyway.
Go on!
Pretty much, unfortunately. And the people who run Odysee have repeatedly, time and time again, defended Nazis, white supremacists, far-right conspiracies, videos calling for genocide, etc.
Although in fairness, to my knowledge they haven’t done what Musk has done for example and said “free speech [Unless you disagree with dear leader, then it’s an account ban]!” Left-wing content is left alone (not that there’s much of it on Odysee)
Ya that’s exactly what I would like to NOT support.
There may be content generators on there you can label that way, but that doesn’t make the platform neo-nazi.
You take all of the stuff excluded from a big platform and put it on a small platform, and it’ll swamp every other topic out. If as a platform runner you feel that you should not censor others, then this can happen.
On the flip side, there’s nothing stopping other with less controversial opinions to post there as well. Nobody is going to be told their channel about supercars isnt racist enough, or their politics channel is too-left communist.
Strongly disagree with you. If you have a bar that tolerates Nazis, you’ll find that bar becomes a Nazi bar over time. To commingle with Nazis is to accept them and their ideology.
I’d have a very hard time sending people to my videos if they sit next to a white replacement theory video.
I think Odysee has created far fewer Nazis than sites with addiction exploiting algorithms that say they remove such topics.
You sometimes see that stuff on Odysee because they don’t censor it, unless it promotes violence or hatred to individuals. They do have community guidelines after all, since they can’t legally host… illegal content. In that sense there is censorship because they can’t not censor things to some extent; but the free speech and large lack of censorship is their goal regardless. As an Odysee user for over 2 years, this is the minority of content on the platform. Where you do see that content that breaks the rules… that’s what the report button is for.
You sometimes see that stuff on Odysee because they don’t censor it, unless it promotes violence or hatred to individuals.
All neo-nazi /far right content promotes violence and hatred to individuals, since groups are made up of individuals.
My understanding was that Odysee served the purpose to upload videos that could no longer be uploaded on YouTube due to YouTube’s community guidelines. The time I checked out that website the front page was full of manosphere types and the Evropa documentary and anti vax crap
That was never the purpose of the platform, otherwise it would have been marketed that way. The platform allows more content than YouTube does, so it’s not far-fetched to assume that people would use the platform for that, and tell others they should use the platform because of that. What random people on the internet promoted the platform being good for is not the same thing as the platform owners themselves creating the platform for that very purpose. If you really care about the “purpose” of the platform, just watch some of LBRY’s oldest videos on the platform from before the Odysee frontend even existed yet for LBRY; where they were first revealing their visions for the platform and the progress they had made.
Also note that plenty of people upload stuff to Odysee for their preservation efforts. Just because some documentary that talks about medical misinformation or promotes a conspiracy theory (for example), exists on the platform; it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s there to promote the idea; it’s simply there so that people who want to see the video can see it. I’ll watch content that was censored from YouTube and other big-tech social media platforms because I just want to see what was said. People have the right to that level of freedom; Odysee provides it because they should.
Well I never happened to see anything related to these topics on Odysee. I mostly used to follow tech stuff as my other hobbies like cars and basketball aren’t really present on the platform.
If you have some favourite YouTube channels from the cars and basketball world, you should try contacting them personally and asking them to sync their channel with Odysee. Even if they choose not to; at least they’ve heard of it now, know at least some of their audience may want them to, and may consider it in the future 🙂.
It might not work asking in YouTube comments though, but it’s worth a try. The reason I say this is I’ve personally tried it multiple times over the past year, and strangely I’ve been noticing that YouTube appear to be switching between banning the word “Odysee” spelled specifically that way, and not banning it. I would comment something with the word Odysee, and no matter what happens, it would immediately disappear the moment I refresh the page – commenting anything else would work fine. A few months later, I tried it again and it worked. Some time after that, it stopped working again, and it was like that for quite a while. Fast forward a month or two, and I again checked it a few days ago, and it seems to be currently working again; and all my previous comments from the past about Odysee have reappeared in my comment history, when they previously would not appear in my comment history. So now could be a good time to comment. It wasn’t a glitch with my account, because I tried it with two separate ones.
I can see my favorite channel now “I have zero interest in learning a new platform to have to figure out, I have a hard enough time with the mainstream sources” lmao
we went over this with Twitter, “I am not learning another social platform, when Twitter dies I will just not have any SM Presense except discord”
What are you quoting? I didn’t say any of that.
I’m quoting what the last streamer who I followed stated when asked whether they would jump off Twitter when Twitter went to shit and everyone jumped ship.
“Associate your personal brand with the fringe-right/antivax/Nazi YouTube! What could possibly go wrong?”
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Most of those videos are also found on YouTube. I would expect that you don’t see those videos suggested to you because the algorithm has learned what you like to watch.
If you open up YouTube with a VPN and in a private tab you’ll likely get search results that include a mix from both the right and the left.
I’d rather not link to them, but from the ones you circled, these are the videos that I found on YouTube while doing a quick search:
- The Babylon Bee video
- The Paris Olympics opening ceremony video
- The Assassins Creed video
Now please excuse me as I purge my history…
I’m there because some of my favorite streamers, like MentalOutlaw, are there. I know there will be people who hold an opinion or view that i disagree with but the same is true here. I’m not saying that there is hate speech here but i can’t expect every site i visit to be sunshines and rainbows just for me.
deleted by creator
I used to like Odysee until I saw them clearly promote conspiracy theories and far-right, almost Nazi rhetoric on the homepage.
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.
They never even made a single attempt to help others develop alternative frontends too, so the decentralization there was more akin to decentralization theater.
Unfortunately that’s one of the problems with a lot of alternative platforms.
You would think there’d be some decentralized video hosting thing popular with us Fediverse types but in practice they’re all the low spots in the gutter in which the densest shit gathers. Most of the audience is on Youtube, and you only migrate to an alternative site if you’ve been banned from Youtube, and the folks who haven’t been banned from Youtube don’t tend to want to go stand next to the people who have so it’s difficult for legitimate content creators to adopt those alternative platforms.
Dailymotion still exists and I think you can still upload there but I know of no “dailymotioners.” Vimeo seems to have gone in a b2b direction, Twitch is mainly for live streaming, Tiktok succeeded where Vine failed, Nebula was some Youtubers starting their own Netflix with blackjack and hookers, Floatplane was LMG starting their own Netflix with blackjack and hookers, then you’ve got the several porn sites of varying dubiousness, and then down in the sump you’ve got the likes of LBRY and Odysee.
There are a few creators out there that publish multiple places. If it doesn’t cost to publish, we could start encouraging more people to publish more places. The biggest problem is you do actually have a chance to get paid on Youtube. Most of the content worth watching is only doing it because they can make money
See that is what I think would eventually allow another platform to take off, is publishing to two sites at once.
Google’s Adsense…I guess there are people making useful amounts of money with it? A lot of Youtubers seem to prefer having their own sponsors and do the ad read themselves and/or have some service like Patreon to allow their audience to fund them directly. Especially since that revenue won’t just disappear on the whims of an algorithm like Adsense money will. “We’ve demonetized and age restricted this video. Reason? coin came up tails.”
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.
They never, ever stated the content on Odysee can’t be removed; this is a misunderstanding spread by both people who don’t use the platform, and even a lot who do use the platform but haven’t properly done their research about how the platform works. They can’t not have content removed since they are still legally required to remove illegal content, such as that which breaks copyright law, for example, pirates uploading full-length movies. Than when people find out that content can in fact be removed, they call Odysee a lair for something they never claimed.
They never even made a single attempt to help others develop alternative frontends too, so the decentralization there was more akin to decentralization theater.
Fair complaint.
As if Youtube didn’t promote conspiracy theories and almost Nazi rhetorics that serve the country it’s based in. They do, which they don’t call as such. Everything else they’ll call conspiracy theories and propaganda.
So that makes odysee’s behaviour OK?
Nothing. But mentioning it, don’t forget to mention Youtube as well.
I have no idea why you’re being downvoted since you’re 100% correct. I watch one video about gaming and YouTube’s recommendations are all alt-right anti-feminist stuff with Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
Google surely knows enough about me to know I lean far-left but the algorithm is determined to feed me that slop.
I have no idea from a technical perspective if Odysee’s algorithm is independent from or worse than YouTube’s, but the criticism of YouTube is completely valid.
They’re being downvoted because one platform being shitty doesn’t excuse another from it.
See: Tu Quoque
I didn’t read the argument as saying one platform’s behavior excuses the other. I saw it as saying that both are bad.
It certainly doesn’t come across as a defense of either platform to say they’re both infested by Nazis.
I have watched super progressive content on Youtube but also watched conservative content as well. It’s possible there are a lot of progressives who also watch content from the other side so the algorithm pushes it.
that’s why you should be logged out of Google and also delete your cookies periodically :) To reset the memory of Google
The thing is that I do want to have my subscriptions and favorite channels, and as long as UBO blocks ads, I haven’t fully made the switch to a different front-end.
But it still bothers me that it serves me far-right, religious, and conspiracy theory content given that I’ve never once engaged with any of those topics.
The difference between Odysee and YouTube is that YouTube doesn’t claim to be a free speech platform that allows any possible statements on, and does often take down a lot of the harmful content. You only see the remainder, not the whole.
Odysee is quite small, and as such, could relatively easily moderate much more of the content on its platform, if they actually cared about doing so.
Odysee explicitly tries to allow as much speech as possible, claiming that they totally won’t allow any bad content, while in reality, platforming LGBTQ+ misinformation, white nationalist rhetoric, anti-immigrant propaganda, etc.
All of those violate their Community Guidelines, by the way. But remember, it’s guidelines, not actual policy as to what they remove.
Fox news seems to own YT’s algorithm as far as I can tell.
Never a click from me, but 6 of the top 10 news vids every time.
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Did you mean can be modified? Or what does this have to do with Nazi rhetoric? Maybe you have a different idea about the word “frontend”?
Sorry if my wording was unclear, let me rephrase.
Odysee is the platform, the site, the frontend, and the company. LBRY was the backend, the blockchain-based system that actually stored the videos themselves.
Odysee was the main interface to interact with the videos stored on LBRY, to essentially act like YouTube, but the videos were technically available to anyone.
Odysee then used the justification that the backend was decentralized to say that they had to remain entirely neutral to any content on Odysee, because a decentralized system inherently cannot have its content censored by one party.
This ignored the fact that they could choose to modify which videos their frontend would show to users. They acted as if this was not possible, even though it was.
Thus, a decent YouTube alternative with some good creators on it refused to censor any nazi content that started making its way there because YouTube rightfully deplatformed its supporters, and let it infect the platform without doing anything to stop it, pretending as if they had no choice, while in reality, it just brought them more revenue.
It’s a shame because the thing that kills alternative platforms is getting flooded with racists to the point that they drive everyone else out.
A lot of “free speech” platforms box themselves into a corner by declaring themselves “free speech” platforms while intending that to mean they won’t ban users for mild wrongthink, but then white supremacists show up, and if they get banned then they start causing a massive shitstorm over the fact that the platform isn’t truly supporting free speech. Then they drive out all the normal people who don’t want to be associated with them and the platform is forced to shutdown.
Then you have morons like Tim Pool who will endlessly attack “free speech” platforms if they ban white supremacists.
Oh right, so you were talking about the content, that’s not what I understood under “frontend”. Thanks for clearing it up.
I don’t have any experience with the platform, so I’m not in a position to judge their decisions, but it’s always tricky when you present yourself as censor free. There’s things you obviously don’t want on your service, but if it falls within the legal realm, it is no longer a matter of “will we block Nazi material” but whether from that point onward you start taking a moral and political stance.
Things get incredibly tricky and cumbersome if you choose that route, not just from an administrative perspective but also technically. I can understand why the people who operate the platform would prefer to primarily use legality as a deciding factor, as not every ideological issue that you open yourself up to if you take the other route is as straightforward as fascism.
the ideal path would be to censor nazi stuff on their frontend and also support others making their own frontends. that way they’re truly free speech, everyone can use the backend, but they don’t promote the bad shit
This is exactly what they should have done, and one of the main reasons I got annoyed with them. There was one single public RPC endpoint for the LBRY blockchain that was publicly available. one. (and then it went down shortly after I found it)
Compared to other blockchain-based systems, with tons of free public RPCs (click on the arrow below Ethereum Mainnet), LBRY was absolutely terrible.
It meant there was almost no tooling or resources for any developers to start their own site, and essentially killed the very idea of doing so.
Compare that to something like Lemmy or Mastodon, where I’ve personally seen numerous different moderation policies on different instances, and Odysee just stopped feeling like a good alternative to YouTube.
I think that Chandra has a point - media platforms do often devolve into ad companies, once they rely on advertisement money to survive. Because once someone is paying for a platform’s continued existence, they can dictate the terms, by simply threatening to stop paying for it.
And, granted, Odysee is a Nazi and crypto bro haven, but the point still stands - let us not be fools saying “Hitler ate bread so bread bad”, and ignore a message that also applies to environments that [correctly] tell the Nazi to fuck off.
Nobody here is saying that ads are good. We’re saying this disingenuous fascist is only saying these things because he can’t make any money from ads. If he was making ad money he’d be saying exactly the opposite of all this. Fascists don’t have any morals but power for power’s sake. That’s what fascism IS.
Regardless of why he’s saying that ads fuck up media platforms, the reasoning itself is sensible. And, while nobody in this thread is saying “ads good”, plenty people across Lemmy see advertisement as some sort of necessary evil when it comes to supporting online platforms, and they’re willing to compromise, even if that would be a bloody mistake.
If he was making ad money he’d be saying exactly the opposite of all this.
Then he would be saying something idiotic. (It wouldn’t be noteworthy.)
Fascists don’t have any morals but power for power’s sake. That’s what fascism IS.
It’s actually worse than simple lack of morals: they have fucked up moral premises, that are immoral for anyone with a shred of dignity.
And even a broken clock is right twice a day. In this case, since Chandra got no financial support from ads, he stumbled upon a decent reasoning, regardless of doing so for moral or immoral reasons.
As a youtube premium member i wish youtube could cut out all ads for everyone and just keep the premium advantages for members. But i’m sure it’s not that easy to keep the boat afloat. Hopefully they can get to a healthy balance of income for watch time and reduce ads for free viewers. But we all know they just want to see the line go up for the greed and would never reduce ads if people still watch with as many ads as possible.
But we all know they just want to see the line go up for the greed and would never reduce ads if people still watch with as many ads as possible.
Exactly - there’s no such thing as “we got enough income, so maybe we should be kinder to our users”, when it comes to Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
Alphabet?
Google’s parent company.
Damn (thank you)
You’re welcome!
The parent company is little known, because it’s relatively recent (from 2015) and keeps low profile, so I’m not surprised that you didn’t hear about it. I think that its main goal is to make it harder to sue Google for enforcement of vertical monopolies, given that other subsidiaries deal with AI and with broadband internet.
I’ve had a YouTube premium subscription for a long time as well, what advantages are there besides no ads that are actually worth having?
Youtube music comes with youtube premium wich i use a lot, listening with the screen turned off wich i use a lot for music and asmr, i saw that they added some kind of upscaling on some videos that i think are under 1080p to 1080p with increased bitrate or something like that, they added games recently wich i could not care less about. There might be other stuff but i’m not sure what else could be premium.
Yeah, I use YouTube music a lot. In terms of YouTube itself though, it’s basically no ads, and the creators you do watch get a bit more coin than thru otherwise would.
I just noticed a new premium feature. I had a button pop up on screen to skip a sponsored segment in a video XD
Ooh, neato.
Adding to what has already been said, offline viewing in the mobile app, while still synchronizing the status of watched videos when you go back online. Already existed with new pipe, but now the creators get rewarded.
Good luck to them
Sure looks full of MAGA garbage. Conceptually it’s a good idea, but I’ll be passing since I don’t need that trash in my life.
I completely understand not wanting to see that there, and you don’t have to see it, and besides, I see that all over YouTube too when I’m not signed in receiving good recommendations based on what I like.
I suggest reading my comment response to YTG123 (which is the other person who just replied to you), since you probably weren’t notified of it. Sorry to not reply directly, but I understandably don’t want to write another few hundred words, and the comment is relevant to you.
Thank you for this reasonable response.
Perhaps when things mature, I’ll give it another look. YouTube for me, when not signed in, does not have the sheer plethora of MAGA nonsense like this site does. Maybe it’s some regional algorithm, I don’t know, though I live in the south where MAGA idiocy runs rampant.
I take the path of least resistance when it comes to filtering out lies and garbage from my life. For now it’s simpler for me to just not browse the site than to weed out such content.
It definitely is, but it doesn’t try to force recommendations on you like YouTube. You can mostly just subscribe to channels you like and view their content.
It doesn’t force recommendations on you, and channels you don’t like can be muted or blocked. I’ve only blocked a handful of channels (Most of them were synced from YT too). Than there are sections: if you only want to see content you like to see, use the respective sections. If you want to see technology content, you aren’t going to click on the spirituality section.
Furthermore, recommendations aren’t actually a free feature (yet), as it’s still in early access and comes with Premium. 99.99% of the people who are upset about the “recommended content” being stuff they strongly dislike aren’t actually even being recommended anything to begin with. The videos that appear on the side are “Related” videos. Their system for determining related videos isn’t extremely comprehensive yet, so some other random content can slip through the cracks. For example, I was listening to a no-copyright music track called Icelanding Arpeggios, and I was shown a “Related” video along the side; a video synced from YouTube, which was of a man’s voice reading aloud Psalm 4 of the Old Testament with Icelanding Arpeggios playing in the background. The reason it was classified as “Related” wasn’t because some system was able to listen to the music in the video, but because the exact words “Icelanding Arpeggios” appeared in the description of said video about that Psalm. Here’s an example of “Related” suggestions. In this case they are working well and as intended, showing more video’s related to Solid-State batteries.
So the current unfortunate reality is that a video about, for example, how gravity works, occasionally may suggest “Related” content on the side about gravity not being real, that the earth is flat, and that the sun is 3,000 miles in the sky. Because, you know, it’s about the sun and gravity. The video’s are technically related in some way, but most people who are learning about the universe don’t want to see that, because it has no real scientific basis, is not widely accepted, and gravity and the ball earth has already been proven to be true.
After all, Odysee is still being developed, and their system’s for suggested “Related” content is still not fully matured.
Internet is full of MAGA garbage. Bittorrent DHT is full of MAGA garbage. What’s your point? There are ways to filter out what you don’t want to see.
If you can’t see the point, then I cannot help you.
The point of course is that if you don’t want to see it, you refuse to use any platform that allows others to see it. Which must make it awfully hard to use the internet. Surprised you manage to even use Lemmy.
Free speech is protection from government oppression. Last I checked, I’m not the government, neither is Lemmy, neither is any other site on the internet that doesn’t end in .gov (typically), and this isn’t a free speech issue despite what MAGA idiots would have people think. If the platform wants that shit there, so be it, and I won’t use it when it’s painted on their front page. I use Lemmy because I was here (on another instance originally) before the MAGA weirdos decided to join to spread their bullshit, so I’ve had time to curate – apparently I have to do it again, or simply leave this instance. I was also alive well before the MAGA weirdos decided to spread their fascist Nazi propaganda all over the place. There was once a world war about that – and they lost. I guess they don’t like being losers.
Just because I use the internet (which I have been doing since only a few years after the WWW was invented), doesn’t mean I have to tolerate bullshit when I see it. Perhaps if everyone was like this, the internet wouldn’t be the shithole it has become.
And I’m done responding now, because clearly you and many others in this thread will never understand, or even care to understand.
Free speech is protection from government oppression. Last I checked, I’m not the government, neither is Lemmy, neither is any other site on the internet that doesn’t end in .gov (typically), and this isn’t a free speech issue despite what MAGA idiots would have people think. If the platform wants that shit there, so be it, and I won’t use it when it’s painted on their front page. I use Lemmy because I was here (on another instance originally) before the MAGA weirdos decided to join to spread their bullshit, so I’ve had time to curate – apparently I have to do it again, or simply leave this instance.
This appears to be an argument against a position I wasn’t taking. You just appear to be upset that alternative video streaming sites don’t ban people you disagree with. Good luck with that.
Just because I use the internet (which I have been doing since only a few years after the WWW was invented), doesn’t mean I have to tolerate bullshit when I see it.
Hey, you may been around longer than I have. Only had the internet since the mid 90s. So it depends on how you define “a few”. It was a very different beast back then, and I for one miss the relative lack of concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness.
Perhaps if everyone was like this, the internet wouldn’t be the shithole it has become.
I chalk that up to said concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness, but then I don’t think it’s become a shithole because people I disagree with also have a voice, but because of aggressive monetization and the enshittification that that inevitably entails.
And I’m done responding now, because clearly you and many others in this thread will never understand, or even care to understand.
No, you are well understood. You are opposed to alternative video platforms (and apparently some other unnamed Lemmy instance) because those things do not necessarily reinforce your echo chamber, and you consider that reinforcement a vital feature. I’m waaay over on the far end of the spectrum, and chose my instance specifically because they do not defederate, they keep everything available and leave it up to the user to decide what they do or do not wish to see (and I to date have nothing blocked - no users, no communities, no servers).
I can see it, I just want you to spell it out that you are a fascist douchebag (everyone who wants to censor other opinions is that).
So…being anti-MAGA makes me fascist. Got it. And I never once said I wanted to censor opinions. Stop making shit up, you sound like a MAGA moron.
Good lord, they’re everywhere. Literal morons, everywhere.
Good lord, they’re everywhere. Literal morons, everywhere.
Its worse than that, maga are literal terrorists at this point, and supporting a convicted criminal trying to elect him king so he can get away with all those crimes, makes them partially culpable for all his crimes
If you can’t see the point, then I cannot help you.
That’s you.
Which other point can be made then?
If there’s a system containing MAGA stuff, but you won’t see it if you don’t want to, it’s as fine for any situation as a system without MAGA stuff for any goal which is not censorship of MAGA stuff.
deleted by creator
Isn’t this the crypto bro, far right haven site? No thanks.
It split from LBRY, which originally pushed a cryptocurrency system kind of like Brave’s BAT. They’re now trying to go decentralized, but it’s with a blockchain system, so I guess we’ll see where that goes (blockchain isn’t a problem, provided they’re not pushing a currency).
I’m interested to see where it goes, so I sub to a few channels I’d otherwise watch on YouTube. But I’m not giving them any of my money until they earn it. I’m currently paying for Nebula because a few of my favorite channels are there, and I’d be willing to pay for Odysee if there was a decent value proposition.
Blockchain is innately stupid. There is no scenario where it would make sense to use blockchain over another technology.
I disagree. I think it makes a lot of sense for something like a distributed authentication system. Or perhaps a distributed voting system. Basically, if you want a distributed system with some sort of consensus, blockchain is your best bet.
Why not do proper research about the platform before attacking one of the only platforms trying to create the change they want to see in the world?
Please be aware, Odysee was recently purchased by a Crypto company that also acquired an NFT company.
For more info, see my comment here: https://slrpnk.net/comment/9749921
I would not recommend investing any time or money into the platform, as it will inevitably crash and burn as the owners walk away flush with cash while everyone else is left holding the bag.
Peertube is not ideal, but it is currently the only alternative that isn’t tied to a shady crypto scheme.
Nazi NFTs you say?
Not interested.
I attack them because the change they want to create is not one I want. You can keep your Nazi and crypto trash to yourself.
deleted by creator
You know what’s interesting to me? People only screech “free speech!” when they are trying to say something shitty.
Freedom of persecution from the government for speech criticizing that government is a good thing.
But “freedom of speech absolutism” is only ever used as an argument by shitty people trying to say shitty things. Free speech doesn’t mean you should be free from repercussions from your peers.
Nazis don’t need a platform, and they don’t need Devil’s advocates like you.
But “freedom of speech absolutism” is only ever used as an argument by shitty people trying to say shitty things. Free speech doesn’t mean you should be free from repercussions from your peers.
Me commenting on Odysee that LibreWolf is a great browser for privacy, or that SuperTuxKart and Veloren are good open source games is me saying shitty things, is it? You don’t even know the things that are said by the people you are talking about who advocate free speech absolutism. Further, Odysee inherently does not allow an absolutist level of free speech (it legally can’t), which is the whole reason they have community guidelines that must be followed.
Edit: I accidentally seemed to be implying that I was a free speech absolutist when I am not. I do not believe that people should be allowed to promote violence or hatred of any kind; Odysee doesn’t allow this either. What I DO believe, is that those people should be allowed to express through speech what their own views are; even Nazi’s; as long as they aren’t promoting Nazism, violence, hatred or similar. So no, I am not being a devils advocate, because if the platform was completely 100% free speech to the point where it actually allows true hate speech, promotion or encouragement of violence and hatred etc., I wouldn’t be supporting the platform and defending it at all. If it were like that and I was still promoting it, than fair… calling me a devil’s advocate would make sense.
deleted by creator
Unfortunately, it’s probably the latter.
Executive Julian Chandra wrote to Odysee site moderators that “a Nazi that makes videos about the superiority of the white race” was not grounds for removal from Odysee.
They have actively defended far-right content, even videos that have openly called for genocide.
For balance, though, they haven’t purged left wing content like some “free speech” people do (not that there’s much of that there anyway)
Do they also suppress left/socialist content?
If they did, then yeah it’s a shit service.
I am by no means defending Nazi content. But if they are allowing any speech, I’d say this is closer to being “free speech” than Twitter currently is.
Speech doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and all ideas aren’t equal. The libertarian idea of absolute free speech is a half-baked notion that holds that Nazi philosophies are equal to Humanist philosophies, and they each deserve the same megaphone and chance to thrive.
Fuck. That. And fuck anyone who thinks that or platforms Nazis. Libertarian free speech is a myth that only benefits Nazis and other bad actors.
Yes, it goes both ways. And they aren’t using the platform to push any of their personal believes either.
Why does that always end up being the case?
deleted by creator
Are you seriously telling me that you think videos on YouTube and other mainstream platforms aren’t being censored? People need to stop calling it a “right” platform. People of all political ideologies are on the platform, you are just picking out the stuff you don’t like; the platform isn’t even political or meant for that purpose; it’s meant for all forms of content creation.
Why do you think they have the categories in their sidebar, "Pop Culture; Artists; Education; Lifestyle; Spooky; Gaming; Tech; Comedy; Music; Sports; Universe; Finance 2.0; Spirituality; News & Politics; Wild West – in that order… Notice Politics is second last?
deleted by creator
Sorry… I apologise for the misunderstanding and mini-rant.
You appeared to me to be asking a rhetorical question in a sarcastic manner and implying that they aren’t really committed to free speech, and the reason I was frustrated was because I’m quite sick of this platform being labelled as right/far-right when it isn’t. YouTube was just an example one mainstream platform that censors content.
If you’d like to see an example of how committed they are to free speech, I can’t really easily provide a direct source to a question that broad, but I do recommend taking a look at some of LBRY’s earliest posts on Odysee which you’ll find will highlight some of their original goals and vision (LBRY is the protocol Odysee used to use, and Odysee was created by the same team as LBRY). Otherwise, maybe just take a look around the platform, and try to see what kind of opinion or political-related content is on the platform that you don’t tend to see on others which have greater censorship.
Edit: Accidentally commented early, so had to edit it to finish typing. Edit 2: Clarified info about who LBRY is.
deleted by creator
Well I know there’s a lot of right-wing content on there, but I also know there’s a lot of other content there, too. So I don’t think it’s okay when people call it a “right-wing” platform, just because it appears to have more of it on there compared to other platforms.
The creators of the site allow Nazi content and say that doesn’t break their terms of service. On every other site, Nazism and promoting that ideology is not allowed.
This is what you are arguing for. A site that differentiates itself from other video hosting platforms by giving Nazis a safe space.
While we are at it, lets cancel the postal service since they allow Nazi’s to send newsletters.
Why is it not okay to call it what it is? If you openly allow nazis into your site, you have a nazi site. I’m sorry but there’s just no way around it.
Either you nip that garbage in the bud or your site is overrun by far right nut jobs, which is what happened with odysee.
Of course nobody wants to use the site. Why would they?
It’s the nazi bar problem. You allow one nazi to enter your bar, then that nazi brings his nazi friends, and before you notice it you have a nazi bar and no one wants to visit.
Odysee doesn’t “appear” to have more right wing content, it objectively does. The majority of people who migrate to it are wackos who got banned in other places for their extremist views.
deleted by creator
Can you recommend me more than a few hardcore leftist content creators exclusively releasing content on Odyssee?
- Install watch on odysee extension.
- Make a odysee account
- Continue your normal habits of watching YouTube but being redirected to odysee when creators have posted there.
- hurt YouTube just a little bit.
I’m so sick of hearing that odysee is only a nazi crypto scam. That content exists on every platform but by shitting all over every option that comes out and then whining when YouTube does more anti user crap is just ridiculous.
You don’t need to just use odysee. You can use YouTube for your recommendations then be redirected for the content. Eventually when recommendations are there it will be an easy transition for the majority of people but until then, at the very least don’t step on the face of a working competitor that has good intentions.
P.s. You don’t need to use the token, it was mostly just given to viewers and creators for free.
- Read stuff like this and love the idea.
- Never share this information anywhere.
- Check out the site but feel like creating an account is too much. I’m busy.
- Continue to never share information online.
- Complain about minor things on the site that I’d like improved.
- Hate that cool ideas never spread.
❤️
Exactly. Another awesome thing the extension provides is the ability to migrate all your YouTube subscriptions over to Odysee. You also have two options with the Watch on Odysee extension. You can 1: Make YouTube links immediately redirect to Odysee (default option), or 2: Have a “Watch on Odysee” button appear to the left of the subscribe button on every YouTube video that also exists on Odysee (Example screenshot). Choosing the latter option means you don’t need to disable the extension every time you want to comment on a YouTube video.
Another thing people keep doing is acting like Odysee is a free speech absolutist platform, in that they allow you to say and post absolutely anything. This is not true, because they have community guidelines which do not allow hate speech and promotion of violence (two examples). It’s just less strict and more fair in it’s moderation practices than YouTube.
Some Links: Firefox extension (can’t find it for Chrome, for some reason); Community Guidelines
Edit: If you want the extension on Chrome, you can get it directly from GitHub. You may need to view a guide if you don’t know how to install extensions manually.
I’m so sick of hearing that odysee is only a nazi crypto scam.
It’s like 98% uncontrolled extremist garbage. I can take or leave the crypto but the actual content is just so awful. We have better options.
Odysee is is one of the few alternative platforms with a decent left wing audience. The only other majority progressive platforms are Mastodon and Lemmy, though Lemmy has a lot of neo-progressive tankies and angry conservative tankies.
TIL Odysee had ads. UBO FTW
Edit; tbf, I haven’t been on it in a long long while. Generally too extremist for me.
That’s kinda the issue for a platform like that, at least in the early stages. You’ll get all the people who’ve been kicked off YouTube, and not the mainstream content.
Very true! Lemmy wasn’t super like that, but then again, reddit allowed nearly anything (apparently including csam to a certain degree). Then the API debacle, and that crap came here. Yt is more strict on certain things, which pushes those scourges of society to these platforms that are in their early stages, giving them an abysmal reputation.
I mean Lemmy was like that though. After the exodus from Reddit most major instances defederated from hexbear which is like the OG Lemmy instance
This is ahistorical. The original Lemmy instance is lemmy.ml, and it was hugely tankie literally from the beginning - the .ml referring to marxist-leninism, years before Reddit’s API changes. It’s nothing to do with people being banned from Reddit, it’s just that the concept of a federated message board platform was appealing to communist software developers, who created and guided the project. If anything, the anti-tankie sentiment which is popular on instances like lemmy.world is what came to lemmy after the Reddit exodus.
Tankies have never really been regularly banned on Reddit in any real extent.
Lemmy got like that after the exodus. No? I mean, I saw some BS here and there, but not nearly as much as right before the hexbear nonsense. Granted, I wasn’t on here much, and using a now defunct username, but I still didn’t see nearly as much.
Lemmy sort of started with people that got banned from Reddit
You can get banned from reddit?? That doesn’t bode well haha
You can get randomly banned on reddit.
Yeah, just endorse punching Nazis, a friend of mine got banned from Reddit for that.
I got perma-banned from a (mainstream, ordinary) sub for — and I’m really not joking here — criticising the “Caravan of Death”, which was a fascist death squad used by Chilean dictator Pinochet to assassinate political opponents in 1973.
I asked the mod team if they could specify the rule I broke, and then clearly they asked a Reddit admin to block my entire account, because that’s what happened.
Maybe I could appeal and get the account back, but I don’t really care that much.
Yeah, there wasn’t much that didn’t fly on Reddit, and banning a subreddit usually meant those users spread their bile elsewhere on the platform. The platform was self policing to an extent, in the fact that anyone too extreme became a topic of mockery elsewhere and weren’t really taken seriously.
Honestly, after all the shit YouTube is pulling with their ad systems, I wouldn’t mind those old tiny banner strip ads that used to occasionally pop up at the bottom of a video. Compared to the current standard of 3 minutes of unskippable ads interrupting every other video, those little banners are downright unobtrusive.
Don’t forget that ads used to be context aware instead of user aware. Which was perfect for privacy.
Hell, I never minded those in theory, it was only how obnoxious they were made that was the problem.
That’s the issue with online advertising in a nutshell, isn’t it.
Oh wow I forgot about those
“free-speech” ❌ “you can say shit uncontrolably” ✅
You cannot say things “uncontrollably” as there is still a community guidelines set of rules that just aren’t as strict as YouTube’s, plus the ability to report is there too. Despite being a free speech platform, it is still legally required not to host illegal content, and so these community guidelines absolutely must be there. If the comments or videos directly promote violence or hatred (just two examples), they are grounds for removal by site moderators. They are usually only removed when people report them, though, since the moderation team likely isn’t very large at this point in time.
In my 2 years with Odysee, I’ve found one person earlier this year directly promoting extreme violence in a comment section. That’s one time too many; but it’s still a long time. I reported them, and they were removed. I don’t know how long it took for them to remove it though, because I only checked if the comment was still there after a couple of weeks; and it wasn’t; so I can’t speak for the swiftness of the moderators in their actions yet.
One problem is when sometimes reporting doesn’t work, and the shit stays there possibly forever, even after “human” review.
Well if you report a video about a conspiracy theory for example, it won’t be removed unless it directly promotes or incites violence or hatred toward a particular person or group(s) if people. You may not like the content, but if it does not break the rules specifically laid out in the guidelines, it is not grounds for removal. The platforms goal is to allow as much free speech as is reasonable (and legal), not to allow people to say absolutely anything they want with no repercussions.
