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YouTube Algorithm Can Decide Your Channel URL Now Belongs To Someone Else
An anonymous reader writes: In 2005, blogger Matthew Lush registered "Lush" as his account on the then-nascent YouTube service, receiving www.youtube.com/lush as the URL for his channel. He went on to use this address on his marketing materials and merchandise. Now, YouTube has taken the URL and reassigned it to the Lush cosmetics brand. Google states that an algorithm determined the URL should belong to the cosmetics firm rather than its current owner, and insists that it is not possible to reverse the unrequested change. Although Lush cosmetics has the option of changing away from their newly-received URL and thereby freeing it up for Mr. Lush's use, they state that they have not decided whether they will. Google has offered to pay for some of Mr. Lush's marketing expenses as compensation.
Never belonged to you in the first place.
No, they wouldn't expect that. They'd never go to those links under normal circumstances, unless they saw it written down.
Would you go to slashdot.org/macdonalds and expect a page about hamburgers to come up?
The only people that go to youtube.com/lush are people that have seen it written down or who have bookmarked it, which means, essentially, only people visiting this blogger.
URLs should not change meaning except in extreme circumstances. Google's inability to understand that is baffling given their position as the web's defacto gatekeeper.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Since when did we decide that it's OK for computers to make those type of decisions--and not allow human beings to reverse it?
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
He's still accesible at youtube.com/user/lush just like every other channel is. youtube.com/lush just happened to be a shorter URL that apparently isn't always unique to you.
Thats quite a feat, subtracting 2005 from 2015 and getting 8. Hope you don't do IT for a living.
It's an off-by-one error.
You think there is only one company by the name of "Lush" in the whole wide world? Or even in America?
Who decides which company gets this nice short URL and which doesn't?
This is usually solved on the first come first served basis, and Google should to the same.
And since this guy was the first and has the right to us his name (he didn't go for "lushcosmetics" nor "whitehousegov") he should keep it.
This decision by Google is stupid and sets a bad precedent.
Not counting the fact that their argument that this can not be reversed is certainly an outright lie.
Yup, the canonical URL for a channel is and has always been youtube.com/user/[channel name]. It just so happens that youtube.com/[channel name] defaulted to redirecting to that if there was nothing else of interest there (there will be other subdirectories with specific purposes there that may be valid channel names but would not redirect) - I would be very surprised if this was ever documented as something to be expected, it was just being liberal with accepting URLs. It yields a redirect, so it's immediately clear that your intended destination is elsewhere, and nobody should be copying and pasting a naked URL like that unless they're doing it deliberately.
It seems Google is now inserting more things into that namespace, effectively using it as a shortener, adding aliases for other channels.
This is just a case of relying on an undocumented feature. You should always be prepared for that to bite you in the ass unexpectedly. It sucks for Matthew Lush, but unless he can point at official documentation that stated that the shorter URL was a valid way of referencing a YouTube channel persistently, he really can't blame Google for this one. Nobody took away his actual channel URL, they just changed an undocumented shortcut that he was relying on.
Well, this was his username on YouTube, and even if YouTube changed their URL structure, the channel registered in his name got taken away, assigned to an entity who didn't ask for it, and marked as now being the property of someone else.
This isn't like making a reference to something which should be changing ... this is saying "my channel on YouTube is Lush, and even if YouTube changes its URL, my channel is still Lush".
When YouTube basically exists to make money from showing the content other people have created, suddenly deciding after ten freaking years that the channel should be arbitrarily given to someone else is basically bullshit.
This is entirely about Google being assholes, who are preemptively trying to maximize the branding for people who didn't ask for it, and suddenly deciding that the 10 years he used that account and placed content on YouTube doesn't matter.
Sorry, but this is stupidity on behalf of Google, and has nothing to do with URLs which change. They took away his frigging account name for NO other reason than some algorithm said so.
Basically they picked the entity who they felt deserved the name, instead of the one who had been using it and had a legitimate claim to us.
It's just another example of how Google is full of shit and no longer following their "do no evil" thing -- because this is an asshole move.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
is that the rule of no thumbs?