To Beat YouTube Censorship, Well-Known YouTuber Experiments With WebTorrent
YouTube without any doubt is a true giant when it comes to being the most influential websites on the planet. The video-hosting platform is the second most popular site on the Internet behind its ownerโs Google.com.
With over a billion of visitors every month, people visit YouTube to view the original content uploaded by its contributors. On the other hand, with great power comes great responsibility and for YouTube that means making the advertisers happy.
Therefore, YouTube has rules in place over what kind of content can be monetized, for which it received criticism lately.
In short, if you are unable to make content that is almost entirely โappropriate for all audiences,โ (without references to drugs, violence, and sex, for instance), your content is at risk of making no money. But, YouTube goes even further, by flagging โcontroversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies.โ Strange, right?
While this refusal to monetize content is looked upon by several YouTubers as a form of censorship but they are aware that they need to abide by its rules, as long as they are with the company. This means evaluating alternatives for some.
Popular YouTuber Connor Hill (Bluedrake42 โ 187,026 subscribers) is no stranger to YouTube flagging his videos. In order to take control of his content and avoid third-party censorship, he decided to experiment with โWebTorrent.โ
To those unfamiliar, WebTorrent brings torrents to the web. Instead of using standalone applications, it allows people to share files directly from their browser, without the need to configure or install anything.
At the beginning, WebTorrent creator Feross Aboukhadijeh recognized โpeople-powered websitesโ as a ground-breaking application for WebTorrent.
โImagine a video site like YouTube, where visitors help to host the siteโs content. The more people that use a WebTorrent-powered website, the faster and more resilient it becomes,โ he told TF.
Bluedrake is excited precisely because of this application for the technology. Bluedrake says he can take back control by using his content, implanting it in his website, and then using his own fans for distribution.
โThis solution does not require torrent clients, this solution does not require torrent files, this is a seamless video-player hosted solution, with a completely decentralized database, supported by the people watching the content itself,โ Bluedrake says in a new video. โAnd it worksโฆREALLY well.
In order to ensure that older content is always available, all torrents need seeds. According to Bluedrake, the servers already financed by his community will have backup copies of all videos ready to seed, whenever it is required.
โThatโs literally the best of both worlds. A CDN and a TVDN โ a Torrent Video Distribution Network โ at the same time. It will be community-funded and community supportedโฆand then weโll have truly censorship-free, entirely impervious video content, in a network. That gives me chills,โ Bluedrake adds.
There is no intent to break the law even though this solution provides the chance to avoid censorship. The freedom of peer-to-peer will only be used for speech, not to invade copyright, insists Bluedrake.
โAll I want is a site where people can say what they want. I want a site where people can operate their business without having somebody else step in and take away their content when they say something they donโt like. Weโre going to host our own content distribution network within a peer-to-peer, web-socketed torrent service,โ he says.
WebTorrent creator Feross Aboukhadijeh is quite excited with the development.
โThis is just one of the extremely creative uses for WebTorrent that Iโve heard about. Iโm continually amazed at what WebTorrent users are building with the open source torrent engine,โ Feross informs TF.
โWhen a video site uses WebTorrent, visitors help to host the siteโs content. The more people that use a WebTorrent-powered website, the faster and more resilient it becomes. I think thatโs pretty cool. Itโs something that traditional CDNs cannot offer.
โThe magic of WebTorrent is that people can use it however they like. Itโs not just a desktop torrent app but itโs a JavaScript library that anyone can use anywhere on the web.โ
While using the technology by one YouTuber is no doubt a modest beginning, the prospective to get much bigger for this is possible, if Bluedrake is able to make it a success.
โThe way that we get P2P technology to go mainstream is simple: make it easy, make it better,โ Feross says.
โThis is part of a larger trend of decentralized protocols replacing centralized services, as weโve seen with Bitcoin and blockchain apps.โ
Source: TorrentFreak