28 comments

[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 65.8 ms ] thread
[flagged]
Not every video site has to be as robust as YouTube.
Who said anything about YouTube? This is just HN. This site is probably known for media consumption without paying full media prices just like Reddit. How do they expect to make money with this audience at least
Not everything needs to exist to serve a huge user base. If you bother looking at the archive.org capture linked elsewhere in this thread, you'd notice that this looks like a small little "fun" project hosted either by someone or a small group of people. They probably expect a certain level of traffic on average and planned accordingly.

So for them to go down one time because of a massive influx of traffic (something that is statistically very common to happen to sites of this size linked to from HN) and then have someone jump all the way to asking whether or not they even have "the business" existing?

Yeesh. Chill.

I’m not worked up over this but the instant negative strikes me as odd for a purely technical question related to how they plan to support traffic for a video site with free videos if they can’t handle a surge in traffic.
i mean GP is right. what's the point of a media sharing website that can't sustain the traffic?
They provision resources to match their growth and average audience (plus some obviously). No need to judge them by some massive temporary spike due to a frontpage post that'll be gone in hours.
(comment deleted)
This may be a bad take but I'm always a bit surprised at how difficult it seems to be for people to host something that can take an influx of traffic. Are auto-scaling servers futuristic technology or something? Just about everything besides on-prem servers should have auto-scaling abilities, so why does it still seem so common for this type of thing to happen? I can't help but laugh at the irony when a software engineer's blog crashes from the HN hug of death.
I know next to nothing about devops, but I could spin up a docker container that serves a website and related videos. Trying to figure out how to get k8s to work for me while working on a side hustle sounds like a headache that would get in the way of actually pushing out a project.
4000+ titles for streaming (abyss.to ?) is pretty decent. I appreciate how series are organized together

A favorite source is docuwiki.net (20k+). No streaming though (torrents through related forum)

Has anyone else observed that YouTube's enforcement of copyright seems lax on old TV docs? Is it the case that TV channels simply don't bother ?

Depends what you call 'old'. In most cases anything from 1953 or older should be fine.
The popup on load saying this is a curated site with only good documentaries makes me want to know more. Who are you? What do you think is good or bad? But there's no "about us" that I can find.
Maybe they go by rotten tomatoes or imdb scores or it's just whoever runs the site's opinion and that's ok too
And immediately shows the Steve Jobs documentary.
And yet I see on the home page

* 50 Shocking Facts About Diet and Exercise * How Much Water Should I Drink a Day? * Cheating Death The Natural Way

Personally I'm really unsure about the curation

yeah i don't like that. don't censor what i watch please. who are you to tell me i can't watch conspiracy theory docs?
I can't figure out if they're legal or not
From the footer

> Disclaimer: This site does not store any files on its server. All contents are provided by non-affiliated third parties. > This is a community managed collection, hosted offshore.

So I would presume it's a mix of legalities, trending towards the not side

Yes I saw that, and imagined the same unfortunately
(comment deleted)
this is awesome, i hope they will add dark mode one day
I highly recommend watchdocumentaries.com
(comment deleted)