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.
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.
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"
Yes. Free publication, advertising, market reports, and even electronic storage of all data enabled the lowest and worst of humanity to recruit for death campaigns just as easily as as the scouting bake sale. There is now imposed user responsibility for user generated content. The company won't pay you to sabotage its market position to make money for yourself. Now you have to pay for your business, just like all real business always has, and you don't get to ride free while complaining.
"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?
"(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
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.
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
they actually sent me a FREE pair of physical socks!
They gave you clothing. You are now a free elf.
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.
"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...