And then you run into the challenge of moderation.
If it’s possible to be handed random videos to seed that you’ve never watched, criminals would take advantage of that to upload illicit content that no one wants hosted…
It may only work to seed videos that you’ve explicitly whitelisted. Ex. Maybe “liking” the video also automatically volunteers some of your bandwidth to seed it. But then you will still open yourself up to legal disputes from copyright trolls. Just like YT, they would still be able to go around spamming C&Ds at everyone, and who is going to have time or money to fight it? Most would just take the video down immediately.
And that’s all assuming that exposing your IP directly to the public doesn’t leave you vulnerable.
On top of all of that, one of YT’s biggest values is that you can view most content in a browser while not logged in. Which I’m guessing is where a huge number of views come from. The core users would just be footing the bill for a bunch of freeloaders. But assuming everything else is solved, maybe it’s worth the tradeoff…?
And then you run into the challenge of moderation.
If it’s possible to be handed random videos to seed that you’ve never watched, criminals would take advantage of that to upload illicit content that no one wants hosted…
It may only work to seed videos that you’ve explicitly whitelisted. Ex. Maybe “liking” the video also automatically volunteers some of your bandwidth to seed it. But then you will still open yourself up to legal disputes from copyright trolls. Just like YT, they would still be able to go around spamming C&Ds at everyone, and who is going to have time or money to fight it? Most would just take the video down immediately.
And that’s all assuming that exposing your IP directly to the public doesn’t leave you vulnerable.
On top of all of that, one of YT’s biggest values is that you can view most content in a browser while not logged in. Which I’m guessing is where a huge number of views come from. The core users would just be footing the bill for a bunch of freeloaders. But assuming everything else is solved, maybe it’s worth the tradeoff…?