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
they actually sent me a FREE pair of physical socks!
They gave you clothing. You are now a free elf.