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!
And the ads and the ads and the ads. Then some more ads. The content has become corporate and did I mention the ads?
Corporatism != Free Market
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?
Absolutely right. But, now apply this logic to the internet writ large. RIP the internet. I remember the first time I searched for something with few to no results, only to find that there were now many more results. The internet was growing! I remember the first time I found something blackholed, lost to never be found again. The internet is now shrinking. It's dying.
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.
I agree that there is(was) a problem with new modifications in recommendation ML routines, but the bias is not as described, in my case, as such I would think twice before saying that developers are explicitly pushing certain materials, but they are pushing material which is not fitting to viewer preferences.
However last two or three weeks, things are getting better. After months of Bollywood recommendations and some strange pop music videos popping up, interestingly both videos and advertisements got meaningful and related to my interests recently. I do not know how much of this is due to manipulations on my history, and how much is due to a new modification in algorithm.
Amen mofo.
Yeah, they keep moving the goalposts just when I get to the 5-yard line. I had just gotten monetized a couple of years ago, and had racked up a whole 43 cents in revenue, when they changed the rules so you needed 10k views. Some time later, just as I was getting close to 10k views, they changed it again, so now you need 1000 subscribers (I currently have 76). Meanwhile, my analytics page still shows that 43 cents of revenue... along with 28k views and 5k hours of view time.
I'll keep working on it for now, but if they screw me over again I might have to bail out.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Next thing you know, they remove monetization from channels that didn't have acertain number of followers.
Next they demonetized channels when people complained about the content. A lot of Men's rights and MGTOW challis were hit because of women who didn't want their content on Youtube. Firearms channels were hit people people demanding that sort of thing not be shown on Youtube.
Figuring that what was good for the goose was good for the gander, the recently demonetized or disgruntled started complaining about the likely people complaining about their favorite channels. Chaos ensues.
Google has some real problems these days. At the same time they are administratively full blown Social Justice Warriors, they have sexual discrimination Lawsuits against them, and have revolting employees because they apparently aren't Socially and politically pure enough.
Protip: Social Justice Warriors are never placated, they just find something new to be outraged at.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
("tech people" love parroting the meme that a private corporation can't censor somebody. I don't understand where that comes from.)
It comes from the fact that it is true.
YouTube is a private business, not a government organization. They can delete or prohibit anything they want, for any reason they want. They don't even have to give you a reason. They can just delete your video because they don't like you.
From a Public Relations standpoint, it's probably not a good idea to do that, but, they can if they want to, and if you don't like it, you are free to go somewhere else.
If you come into my house, I can tell you to get the fuck out. If you go into YouTube's house, they can do the same.
It's not censorship.
links and publishing is not "abusing its system".
People want to find and share the content they are interested in.
Not what ad brands want.
It will not always be the same politics a brand expects to see.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's almost like "fighting radicalization" can only take place in a paradigm of censorship-by-default that only allows massive rights-holders to distribute content.
Me too. I just checked my YouTube home page and of the first 50 suggested videos, 4 of them were from traditional broadcasters or "big players" such as NASA. All the rest were from independent creators such as Scott Manley.
Also, it's pretty hard to take anyone seriously when they say YouTube is dead. Wikipedia lists it as the 2nd most popular website in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites). You may not like where it's going but to say it's dead is simply denying reality.
It's almost as if people thought there were no other video hosting sites!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Youtube and all social media are exactly the equivalent of war profiteers, and are just a step above the arms traders that sell rocket launchers and anti-personnel mines to children."
Laying the hyperbole on rather thick, aren't you? I didn't know children have the cash to buy rocket launchers and anti-personnel mines. When I was I kid I couldn't scrape up enough cash to buy a BB gun, let alone an RPG or mine. Who do the kids use them on? School teachers? Other kids who called them ugly names? School district administrators?
I agree with Lady Gaga who said that social media is the toilet of the internet. As far as YouTube goes, I only partake of it as a consumer, not a participant or creator. Sure, there's a lot of conspiracy and extremist garbage on YouTube, but so what? I don't actively look for it, so I rarely encounter it.
No. I take it you have never heard of child soldiers? They are supplied by the military forces that kidnapped and conscripted them. This happens every day and all over the world. That you are not familiar with this shows your world view as overly sheltered, and at least artificial if not alien to the real world. What I means is this: The death campaigns in Rwanda in 1994 began with radio broadcasts, in Thailand last year it started with facebook posts by a radical cleric. They are the same, and have the same responsibility for what is disseminated.
and had racked up a whole 43 cents in revenue,
You're doing it completely wrong. I comment on Google Maps (I'm a level-7 something) and they actually sent me a FREE pair of physical socks!
Sorry dude, I'm WAY ahead of you.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
No. That the Russians colluded with the president.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The goalpost seems pretty reasonable to me, it's probably in there only to prevent spam, so the thresholds are adjusted to spam levels. I get monetization offered almost all the time (8 years old channel), and all I do is just upload random crap and low effort clips/amv edits/obscure playthrough caps every few months.
Never took google on the offer because the numbers (something like 100k views a year?) are miniscule for it to make any sense and annoy people with ads.
The way people get "youtube career" is when some random crap on their channel suddenly explodes, and they seize the opportunity to entertain the audience. Channels where people "work on it" from the start seem comparably rare.
I too get a lot of recommendations from content creators that are far from "mainstream media". Some are fairly large in their own right like LinusTechTips but many are still fairly small and definitely "indie". (channels like LGR or 8BitGuy).
"(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.)"
No shit? Who wouldn't quit their job to earn a million dollars a month making YouTube videos?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
LOL, yup... "random crap" is a pretty fair description of the 19 (I just counted them) videos I've uploaded in the last seven years. What I should have said was that I'm still going to put some actual work into it one of these days... ;-)
That said, I agree with your assessment for the most part. But I figure if I can get four times as many subscribers as videos on my channel without even trying, it might be worth putting a little effort into it, and see what happens.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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
Comments have always been useless trash on YT.
I know about child soldiers. Obviously my attempt at humor was too subtle. You said "...sell rocket launchers and anti-personnel mines to children." Taken literally (which is what I was doing), you're saying that children are the ones who buy the weapons (where do kids get the money? Selling lemonade and pencils?). Joking aside, of course the reality is that children don't buy weapons. It's the scum adults who do and then supply the weapons to the kids.
As for media inciting violence, I partially agree. In the case of Rwanda, the radio stations' owners are responsible and should be held accountable. Facebook shouldn't be in the position to censor and decide who can and can't post (except obviously illegal things such as graphic violent imagery, child porn, etc.), nor should any government be a censor as well. When anybody can exercise mass communication for zero cost, is proving to be a challenge to our democratic institutions of freedom of speech and freedom of the press and I have no idea how the situation will play out.
Double ads to watch anything and a "recommended" section full of crypto-fascist garbage, yeah, it's fucking over!
Pretty ridiculous having two ads at the start. Ads that are sometimes minutes long. If I pause it for too long (sometimes overnight) it won't resume without forcing more ads.
YouTube is not worth watching without an ad blocker.
And who died, made you king and let you dictate what I may or may not see?
If you want to protect your kids from "seeing stuff", maybe don't use the internet as some cheap babysitter?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
YouTube had a golden age?
AND I MISSED IT?
Shit.
I miss everything.
if they screw me over again I might have to bail out.
In the story you tell, you never get screwed over. You just don't understand the challenges of a small business, and you have unrealistic expectations about the world staying the same from one week to the next.
In your case, you didn't make a bunch of money and turn into an entitled shit; you merely dreamed of making a bunch of money, and that was enough for you to become an entitled shit.
Child soldiers don't buy rocket launchers. If you give the money to the kids, they're going to take a bus home or something.
The adult soldiers buy the rocket launchers while the kids wait outside.
Just like cigarettes.
Are you sure you actually read those links?
Or did you just spew your rant, google the subject, and spew whatever showed up to make it seem like your rant was paraphrasing something?
You just don't understand the challenges of a small business
Sorry if my imprecise use of language led you to believe I was trying to run a "small business" on my YouTube channel. If it helps, feel free to substitute the phrase "screw over" with any of the following: vex; miff; annoy; frustrate; or bebother.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Slashdot is definitely the target for practice with troll bots, and whether human powered or computer programs the method is the same. Basically random text generators fed google search results run from terms picked up on the target pages. They have advanced a bit over Eliza, but they are all still really obvious.
they actually sent me a FREE pair of physical socks!
They gave you clothing. You are now a free elf.
What the world needs to see is the actual source code. Someone needs to drag Big Brother Google's secret algorithms out into the light of day. Let the world see just how corrupt they really are.
In my reality, the top news on Slashdot is "14-Year-Old Earned $200,000 Playing Fortnite on YouTube". In my reality, a lot of tech news has sadly moved to videos on YouTube, and new tech YouTube channels appear almost daily. My kids watch YouTube, not TV.
Good to know even 5 and 6 digit slashdotters don't fucking read what they're replying to any more. It was the next logical step in the progression-RTFA, RTFS, now RTFP. If you care to check the article I linked to, you'll see that I was the submitter of that story from 2 years ago.
I even commented in the post that the length was a negative, but if I didn't cover several of those points, it was just inviting the same tired shitty anti-communist replies that usually get modded up to +5.
I don't have the time or energy to craft a short-enough-to-be-easily-readable-but-still-pertinent post these days. Brevity is hard when you know the morons are right around the corner with their non-sequiturs unholstered.
Ha. If you felt like checking, you might notice that I'm the submitter of that the story from two years ago with 920 comments. No worries; I know reading is hard. Like I told the other guy, I guess we've gone from RTFA to RTFS to RTFP now. I even commented in the post that shorter would've been better but I just don't know how to make it short any more, not when the ignorance is so deep and the nonsensical propaganda replies are so well-rehearsed.
It's been well over a year since I read that stuff but read it I did. (I didn't include *all* of the relevant links because I figured the post would probably be little-noticed. I didn't expect to get mistaken for a spam bot, though, I must admit.) The Wall Street Journal was all very open about this, the reporters all bragging about what they'd done. Youtube's crackdown happened immediately afterwards and was also very public and open about it. For those who were paying attention, it was and is common knowledge that this event was one of the major catalysts for Youtube's policy shifts. But you can go on and believe it's a conspiracy theory if you must. I did use a lot of words after all. All the conspiracy nuts like words, therefore, etc.
Specifically--and I just remembered this--one of the reporters bragged about it with additional details on Twitter. Just remembered that. He was really quite candid in his comments and overall gung-ho attitude. There are also a couple other relevant WSJ articles around the same time period that *are* paywalled that I have saved somewhere. I don't remember what was said where, exactly. Other people have it all cataloged, I'm sure. Two years ago plenty of other slashdotters checked the links and chimed in with their astonishment and agreement. If you cared to check.
Meh. It doesn't matter, though. None of it does. Just running low on drugs tonight and accidentally started thinking too much again. Blinked and two years slipped by. I mean it is pretty funny on one level... how we can be in exactly the same place, how Trump can say the mainstream media was fake news and that's reason enough for everyone to believe that anyone who calls out the mainstream media on anything is a lying conspiracy nut. Governance by reverse psychology. Although the evidence is all right there, right there in the open for anyone to pick up and put together with only a very very small amount of deduction required, there's no way of actually getting any significant fraction of people to go to all that trouble.
Are you in it for the money? You said in another comment you uploaded 18 videos over 7 years, most of "random crap", so it sounds like you are just doing it for fun, not for profit.
It would be nice if YouTube paid you for that, but would you really give up this hobby if they didn't? And is a few bucks really what people need to upload a few hobby videos to YouTube?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'll keep working on it for now, but if they screw me over again
They aren't screwing you over. You're behind the ball game in the most general sense while competing against others. It's no different than your rent raising faster than your income. That's not you being screwed over, that's you not keeping up with the demand being generated, and if you stay on the same trajectory then you won't ever get ahead.
Life is not a game with fixed goalposts.
I was never in it for the money before, but I'd like to at least have that option. In particular, I was PO'd because they took away something I already had. Originally, anyone could get monetized, but they wouldn't start paying out until you earned your first $100. I had just barely gotten started down that path when they pulled the rug out. If I'd applied a few months earlier, I might have gotten grandfathered-in before they changed the rules.
In the long run it doesn't matter that much. If I ever hope to earn much of anything from YouTube, I'll need way more than 1k subscribers anyway. It's just the principle that's annoying... they're putting up unnecessary hurdles. From their POV, they might argue that it's too much hassle to keep track of all those 43-cent accounts. To which my reply would be: "Yeah, you'd probably need a computer to keep track of all that."
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
"maybe we don't need" and "we don't have to" are weasel words that are the hallmark of censorship czars. We don't "need" violent videos, but by the same token we do not "need" hate speech, nor do we "need" right-wing conspiracies nor left-wing agitprop. We don't "need" to see any argument between opposing viewpoints at all, nor unsettling images of natural disasters or chemical spills, or anything else at all that might upset the precious snowflakes we have created by "thinking of the children" in everything we do. In fact why show anything on TV at all except videos of kittens?
The common good? Freedom of speech is one of the most important common goods that we have. Cherish it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
28k views isn't terribly many. I've had 20k in the last month, 375k lifetime.
I consciously chose not to monetise, although the 1000 subscribers requirement would prevent me anyway. My audience isn't the type to subscribe.
That's kind of weird. Being repetitious and non-educational doesn't mean that your content lacks an audience, and it's the audience that advertisers pay for.
There may indeed have been a dislike for your content but the reason you cited is demonstrably bollocks.
Not that you can do much about it. Tried bitchute?
Hosting a single video is trivial. Reaching an audience for it can be achieved.
Hosting a thousand videos with an audience of millions takes infrastructure. Youtube lets you start small and scale up, and offers network effects to boost your audience.
There aren't many sites offering that.
I'll keep working on it for now, but if they screw me over again I might have to bail out.
I don't get it. Before they moved the goal posts on monteization, you racked up 43 cents in 2 years. It sounds like you're in it for the fun of making videos not the money so why do you care if they move the monetisation goalposts?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Oh, I know I _can_ host my own video site. I just can't be bothered, and it would cost more than I want to spend.
So yeah, I do give a shit about Youtube. If they fail me I'm going to be exposed to an irritating level of effort and cost.
Yeah, that's the bit that pisses me off the most. I have around 1200 videos that the music cartels have monetised because of incidental background music.
Sadly UK law leaves me no options.
It comes from the fact that it is true.
That depends. If a private media organization is in a monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic position, and the government has extensive influence over that organization, then the government may get it to act as unofficial censor without breaking any anti-censorship law that prevents the government itself from censoring.
That also works with a few layer of indirection added, so that it doesn't look so obvious. For instance, the government may have influence over private companies, who in turn have huge ad budgets and thus have influence over private media organizations, and then approve laws preventing ads from companies it doesn't have influence over, so that these lose the influence they had over the same private media organizations.
19th century laws aren't meant to deal with this kind of scenario.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Ok, while there are many issues with the YouTube algorithm's and monetization of videos, this article is very skewed and doesn't seem to address the core issues of social media self regulation, and paying for good content that's in demand. The "Golden Age", as it's been dubbed here, is not well define. I get plenty of content from YouTube and find it quite helpful. If a content creator provides videos that I like, then watching a few ads is no big deal to me. The problem, for many, is watching so many ads gets old, when I simply want to learn about something. I believe that the educational value in YouTube is there best selling point. That said however, I get what I'd like to call, Ad Burnout: watching so many Ads, my head explodes. I constantly hit the skip button for those dumb surveys, and mute until most video ads have ended; have you noticed the ads getting shorter? Another problem is the demand for content. There so much content, and the demands are always changing. Could one of the big colleges or universities perform a study on content and demand trends have gone for the lest ten years? I think that would help both YouTube, creators, and viewers to get the most out of the platform. Finally, YouTube, doesn't answer to anyone really, except maybe the advertisers and viewers. We need competition is what I'm saying here. Without competition, you end up with Skynet. And no one is going to tell Skynet what to do. While I agree, there are some issues with the algorithms, and favoritism; There's also plenty of good content beginning to emerge. That said, Alternatives drive innovation. My guess is that this article was put together from someone terribly upset with the platform. Could this have been written by some folks over at the verge? Hell, the first link point to a damning article, longer the most people want to take time to read. Perhaps this is fallout from all of the bad press that the Verge has received over the past six months or so? Are you guys still bitter about the Bad PC Build? Get over it, and provide some better videos. And maybe do some better research about the things you're complaining about, with studies to back your claims. Not claiming that YouTube is problem free, but the Author could do a better job at organizing key data points about trends in content, Ads, and monetization in order to paint a picture, rather that regurgitating frustrations. Just my two cents.
Back in the day, you would put your video on YT, but then you would embed it into your own site and link to it from places you think people would like to see it. YT wasn't a destination, it was a place to host videos.
That shit died with monetization, not with changing algorithms. YT put themselves in this position by providing a revenue share.
YouTube is a private business, not a government organization. They can delete or prohibit anything they want, for any reason they want. They don't even have to give you a reason. They can just delete your video because they don't like you.
If they hold patents that prevent competition, that creates government suppression of alternative platforms of the same type.
It could be argued that government courts enforcing those patents for them, while the censorship is in progress, against operators of an alternative platform that shows content they reject, constitutes a first amendment violation and thus invalidates the patents in question.
It would be interesting to see an alternative video platform take that tack - even without a court case. The operators could announce that they are allowing the rejected content explicitly to make the claim that they have to carry it in order to head off the suits.
And if it ever came to court they could also argue that there was no case because the patent-holder's business is not be harmed by others hosting content they won't carry, and with the algorithms secret the alternative video company can't be expected to determine which subset of the content that is.
"But while we're at it, let's get those algorithms by the discovery process, to see how much damage they might be entitled to if the court rules for them on content they would carry." (Then, if the court rules that carrying content YouTube wouldn't reject IS an infringement, ask for the algorithms to be made public, along with any future changes, so the creators can know what to send to the alternative providers and the alternative providers can know what's safe to carry.
Fat chance? Maybe. But the law is a tricky thing and there's no way to be sure how a court will rule on an argument until it does. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
YouTube shot itself in the foot. I've had a YouTube account for *many* years and was one of the very first YT Channel Partners (ie: monetized my vids). Here is the timeline:
1. YouTube starts -- no ads, virtually no censorship
2. YouTube sold to Google
3. YouTube fixes some stuff but in the process, breaks a lot more
4. YouTube introduces "Channel Partners" who can monetize their vids and thus ads start appearing on a very few videos.
It is worth noting that at this stage it was *very* difficult to qualify for monetization. Although there was no minimum subcriber or view count, you did have to be creating reasonable quality content on a pretty regular basis. As a result there were probably only a few tens of thousands of "monetized" channels and YouTube was, as a result, still largely ad-free. Also, because there were so few monetized channels, ad-rates were pretty damned high so those who did get "Channel Partner" status were able to earn a reasonable amount of money for their efforts.
5. YouTube realised that there was a growing demand for ads on YT so they decided to let *anyone/everyone* monetize their channels.
As a result of this move, the laws of supply and demand kicked in -- which meant that the CPM (Cost Per Thousand) for ads fell precipitously. Those hard-working Channel Partners had their income severely reduced by the sudden abundance of ad-space. The supply of ad-space now exceeded the demand so ads sold for a song and in the months/years that followed, quite a few formerly active channels withered as their creators had to go back to getting a day-job to pay the bills.
In short, YouTube/Google got greedy. Previously they were selling what was effectively premium advertising on channels which had been carefully hand-selected for monetization. This selection process ensured that the content was of sufficient quality and met community standards. When they opened the doors to let everyone monetize, they devalued the ads and lost control of the content against which they were shown.
6. Someone noticed that brand-name advertisers were appearing alongside rather unsavory content. -- enter the first adpocalypse!
A very sizeable chunk of brand-name advertising revenue dried up overnight, as big names pulled their ads from YouTube for fear of appearing alongside terror videos, violence or other content with which they did not want to be associated. This meant a further hit in the pocket for those of us who had committed to becoming full-time YouTube content creators. The result was more really good channels disappearing or going quiet.
7. YouTube's response to the adpocalypse was to fire up some AI to try and determine whether uploaded videos were suitable for monetization.
Epic fail. Many channels had huge swathes of their back-catalog demonetized and some genres of content (such as firearms videos) were finding that videos had been demonetized before they'd even been published on the platform. Once again, legit, hard-working content creators were now paying the price for YouTube's greed.
8. YouTube decided that most of the problem channels (from an undesirable content perspective) were small ones -- so they totally removed monetization from those which did not meet a minimum viewcount and subscriber-count threshold.
Suddenly, YouTube was headed back to the old days of fewer (but higher quality) channels carrying ads -- except they had still lost the confidence of those big-dollar advertisers.
9. In an attempt to get back some of those advertisers, YouTube began some more AI silliness by turning off comments on videos featuring kids, effectively stigmatizing many completely wholesome family channels.
In short... YouTube had a really good thing going but they got greedy and, ever since, have been paying the price for that. Now if Google/YouTube was the only one affected by the fallout from that greed then I wouldn't give a toss... but they're not. With YouTube's encouragement, a lot of people have given up th
Which is why I see the future of user-generated video content being served via "web/video server appliances". A small, cheap, pre-configured SBC that plugs into your broadband modem/router and allows you to serve content up directly. That content would be indexed and curated through a "video search" site that provided the front-end but didn't host any videos and thus needed far less iron and bandwidth than YouTube needs.
Remember the whole tenet of the internet and networkign in general -- distribute the load!!!
With Facebook and YT in decline, I think we'll see a return to the days when people hosted their own content rather than relying on a social media giant to do so. This gives you full control and ensures the right to free speech is maintained without "shaping" by corporations.
That's what Patreon and the like are for. Ad money is a fucking meme, people hear about giant sites raking in ad revenue and don't think about the huge number of impressions these places generate. Most creators on YouTube are making their money with Patreon, GoFundMe, and other crowd funding services. SuperChats are another huge revenue source, and with the YouTube Premiere feature you can rake those in on pre-recorded videos instead of just live streams.
Quit waiting around for a pittance of ad revenue, get yourself a Patreon and run the e-begging racket.
No censorship, no ads (unless the video creator included them in their videos), no risk of being shut-down without notice for some faked copyright claims or community standards violations -- in short, the ability to sleep soundly at night without worrying about what YouTube is going to break tomorrow.
Until the big copyright holders start using that video search engine to find copyright violators and along with the big ISP's, start blocking you.
Both big content and big ISP, who are often the same today, don't want you hosting content and competing or using bandwidth.
It's ideas like yours that make net neutrality important though copyright is always going to trump net neutrality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
only about one video a month, but her content's solid and incredibly interesting if you're into retro games, especially if you'd like to learn about the British gaming scene in the 80s and 90s.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
uBlock + NoScript FTW
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Nobody cares to read the article that you didn't read before you shitposted it.
I wish I had mod points to mod you up.
Again, I not only read it but I was the one who submitted it (along with an associated response video) to slashdot two years ago. You can see my user name attached to that article. It received 920 comments, none of which provided any evidence to the contrary, whereas plenty of slashdotters looked at the same articles and watched the same videos and came to the same conclusions I did.
It is common knowledge that Youtube's policies changed as a direct result of this incident. But please, don't let that stand in the way of your own brainless shitposting.