Slashdot Mirror
Is the Golden Age of YouTube Over? (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Verge:
As YouTube battles misinformation catastrophes and discovers new ways people are abusing its system, the company is shifting toward more commercial, advertiser-friendly content at a speed its creator community hasn't seen before. The golden age of YouTube -- the YouTube of a million different creators all making enough money to support themselves by creating videos about doing what they love -- is over... By the end of 2016, when algorithm changes were creating headaches for some of the platform's biggest creators, people started announcing they had to take a break from the site they called home. YouTube wasn't what it was between 2011 and 2016... YouTube was exerting more control over what users saw and what videos would make money...
YouTube faced an escalating crisis of radicalization and sweeping conspiracy theories that had been ignored by executives for years. The company's first small efforts to address these serious issues -- promoting content from musicians, late-night shows, and recommending fewer independent creators -- would have huge secondary effects on the middle-tier creators who had once been the heart of the platform during its golden period. It pushed YouTube toward the exact same Hollywood content to which it had once been an alternative.... Even people outside of YouTube saw what was happening. "YouTube is inevitably heading towards being like television, but they never told their creators this," Jamie Cohen, a professor of new media at Molloy College, told USA Today in 2018....
Individual YouTube creators couldn't keep up with the pace YouTube's algorithm set. But traditional, mainstream outlets could: late-night shows began to dominate YouTube, along with music videos from major labels. The platform now looked the way it had when it started, but with the stamp of Hollywood approval.
It's a contrast from the earliest days of YouTube, the article argues. Rather than user-generated content, "it was something else that helped the site explode in popularity: piracy." But their pivot to user-generated content apparently slowed with what YouTube creators call the "adpocalypse" -- YouTube's aggressive demonetization of "problematic" videos. (A handful of creators had been making more than a million dollars a month, and some even quit their jobs to focus on making videos full-time.)
To be fair, by 2017 YouTube had a problem. Every minute users uploaded 27,000 minutes of new footage, making it difficult to pre-screen. But after adjusting their algorithm, "perceived, secretive changes instilled creators with a distrust of the platform."
The old YouTube "seemed to welcome the wonderfully weird, innovative, and earnest, instead of turning them away in favor of late-night show clips and music videos," writes the Verge. But the new YouTube is different, say two brothers who used CGI to re-create Mortal Kombat's most gruesome kills on their RackaRacka channel. They say the new YouTube now buries their videos for "excessive violence."
YouTube faced an escalating crisis of radicalization and sweeping conspiracy theories that had been ignored by executives for years. The company's first small efforts to address these serious issues -- promoting content from musicians, late-night shows, and recommending fewer independent creators -- would have huge secondary effects on the middle-tier creators who had once been the heart of the platform during its golden period. It pushed YouTube toward the exact same Hollywood content to which it had once been an alternative.... Even people outside of YouTube saw what was happening. "YouTube is inevitably heading towards being like television, but they never told their creators this," Jamie Cohen, a professor of new media at Molloy College, told USA Today in 2018....
Individual YouTube creators couldn't keep up with the pace YouTube's algorithm set. But traditional, mainstream outlets could: late-night shows began to dominate YouTube, along with music videos from major labels. The platform now looked the way it had when it started, but with the stamp of Hollywood approval.
It's a contrast from the earliest days of YouTube, the article argues. Rather than user-generated content, "it was something else that helped the site explode in popularity: piracy." But their pivot to user-generated content apparently slowed with what YouTube creators call the "adpocalypse" -- YouTube's aggressive demonetization of "problematic" videos. (A handful of creators had been making more than a million dollars a month, and some even quit their jobs to focus on making videos full-time.)
To be fair, by 2017 YouTube had a problem. Every minute users uploaded 27,000 minutes of new footage, making it difficult to pre-screen. But after adjusting their algorithm, "perceived, secretive changes instilled creators with a distrust of the platform."
The old YouTube "seemed to welcome the wonderfully weird, innovative, and earnest, instead of turning them away in favor of late-night show clips and music videos," writes the Verge. But the new YouTube is different, say two brothers who used CGI to re-create Mortal Kombat's most gruesome kills on their RackaRacka channel. They say the new YouTube now buries their videos for "excessive violence."
Double ads to watch anything and a "recommended" section full of crypto-fascist garbage, yeah, it's fucking over!
Youtube, and all the social media/market place tech companies are caught between those who want more freedom and less censorship and for them to behave as a passive neutral channel of goods and information and those who want more 'safety' and control and proactive regulation of content. Sometimes you have the exact same people demanding both. But you can't have it both ways, control of fake news inevitably will spill over to shutting down alternative news outlets, hysteria about pedos means no comments at all on any video with a kid walking into frame. Censorship of offensive content inevitably morphs into censorship of unpopular opinions. Forget net neutrality. This is what will determine what our future internet will look like. We as a society will have to choose, we can either have a bland 'safe' corporatized internet that is essentially an al la carte TV channel or we can have the wild west Internet and whatever it will grow into in the future it all its terrible glory and freedom. Google, governments, and the other companies favor the former option, are we going to stop them?
The 'golden age' of the Internet in general is long since over. Everything is tracked, monitored, monitized, and charged subscription fees for. Wouldn't at all be surprised if 10 years from now you're not only paying for basic access to the Internet, but every last thing you access on it charges a subscription fee one way or another.
Remember that this did not just randomly or organically happen. This was openly orchestrated. And everyone let it happen because they were too busy tweeting about Trump's moronic sound byte of the day to care.
Never forget how the Wall Street Journal freely admitted that they hired three people to spend weeks mining and deceptively editing PewDiePie's content, then sent it directly to Disney for the express purpose of starting a controversy where none existed. Never forget that mainstream media organizations like Wired and The Independent (along with a few "new media" news organizations, such as The Young Turks) parroted this story uncritically and did not truthfully describe the video in question (which showed a closeup of PewDiePie's face looking shocked and then saddened after the words "Death to Jews" actually appeared on the screen). Never forget that none of them followed up to tell their readers that the Wall Street Journal not only edited his videos to remove all of the context indicating that it was comedic satire but even edited a shot of him pointing at something off-screen and implied that it was a Nazi salute.
None of this is conspiracy theory. The Wall Street Journal was frank and open about their motives in helping to instigate this "adpocalypse". Just days later, they penned a story that basically explained how their intention was to not merely embarrass PewDiePie specifically, but to also start a moral panic amongst advertisers so as to compel Youtube and other new media giants to reel in ALL of this independent nonsense, ALL of this un-sanitized family-unfriendly content, all of this "let the viewers decide what they want to see" nonsense, all of this free speech nonsense.. They were so cheerfully open about this that they didn't even bother pay-walling that article.
Like I said time and time again when this happened two years ago, this is not about "forcing" Youtube or other corporations to host content, though partisans will always still seek to end the conversation by saying "free market at work; nothing to see here." Corporations like the Wall Street Journal were able to do this by leveraging the fears of advertisers, fears that are ultimately rooted in the desires and actions of consumers like you and me. We aren't just a part of this ecosystem; we are its keystone species.
So please never forget that this was not a natural or organic or grassroots thing that happened. Never forget that controversy was artificial, was intentionally created and cultivated by large corporations for cynical purposes. Never the day the tail wagged the dog and then bragged about doing it. Understand that this is NOT a shining example of free market supply and demand harmony. Understand how viewers and content producers were ignored in favor of what old media wanted to see happen.
This is not a fluid or free market sort of thing. This is monolithic and dictatorial. There is no fine-grained option (from my understanding) that allows individual advertisers to opt-in to specific videos that Youtube has deemed not politically correct enough, not vapid and conventional enough. And nobody (be they advertiser or producer or viewer) has the clout to roll their own competitor to Youtube. Anyone who doubts this doesn't understand how the Millennials, how these "Digital Natives" have grown up to think about technology. For them, Youtube IS online video (other than porn) and there is very little incentive for them to poke their heads outside of that walled garden.
Once again, there will be replies accusing me of being not just Trump apologist but a paid troll. I wish I didn't have to say thi
You do see the flaw with that, I would hope. As long as the political narrative is acceptable, or you didn't give someone booboo feelings you would get paid. Deviate from the straight and narrow, and you don't.
That's one of the most warped and entitled things I've ever read. No, nothing at all gives you a RIGHT to get paid for your speech.
I thought you far left people thought that companies are pretty amoral.
Yes well you would think that wouldn't you. You have no idea wht "left" even is, so you ascribe some mishmash bag of things to it then convince yourself that anyone who doesn't agree with you on everything must therefore believe all the things in your bag.
They need to use demographics, just like regular Television has so successfully. Takes a bit of work, but not that hard.
No you don't get it. It's their money, they don't need to do anything.
Why do you keep telling other people what to do with their money? Are you a communist or something?
SJW n. One who posts facts.