Forums / Media / Websites

You guys seem awfully quiet about this event. If you don;t believe me here’s a new article for it:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/the-ftcs-2020-coppa-rules-have-youtube-creators-scared/

This is another trend of using "protecting children" as an excuse of censorship. That or overestimating the "what kids see online" threat yet again.

It seems everything Youtube claims to do to "protect someone" or "something" has massive collateral damage. Has been like that since audio muting and content id thing.

By the way, I'd consider Youtube like Twitch: A zombie that exists only because of people's previous investment on that website.

I can see purposefully avoiding G-rating to be practiced by at least handful of channels to keep the user engagement.

According to Youtube, Drawn Together is suitable for kids lmao

But wait!… it gets better!

Youtube go home you're drunk and your platform is a mess.

YouTube fucks up big time, so any actual new news?

Has anybody made a timeline of all bad decisions Youtube has done in its years and the effects they had?

Branch 1: Copyright enforcement.

Has affected tons of users who have had their audio muted, videos removed, demonetized etc.

Branch 2: Protecting children

Family vloggers and their audience has been most affected even prior to COPPA.

Branch 3: "Hate speech", "extremist content" and "conspiracy theories".

You cannot talk about certain war crimes, a lot of the "potentially offensive" content has been hidden etc. People documenting war crimes have had their videos removed etc.

That's just a few. And these have affected people negatively for years.

If youtube actually falls, 2020 will be a good year

Where the hell have you been, people have been talking about this for months

And the only way Youtube will die is when people actually get fed up and leave.

Pretty sure people said Youtube was gonna die because of the adpocalypse but look how that turned out. Youtube has a monopoly on video sharing, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Unless another video sharing platform can somehow upstage YouTube, they're just going to keep shambling on and find new ways of ruining your day and extinguish that little bit of hope you never know you had

Basically, what we have is a dumping-equivalent effect to end-users. Basically, everyone flocked to Youtube at first because of its quality and when Youtube had no real competitors, it could afford to do tons of bad decisions to end-users because it's hard to start a new video hosting site (and transfer all the material to that site).

This shit makes fucking tried but I might as well move on I guess. We’re just ants.

And the fact that it's the best effectively makes it a monopoly. Lego isn't the only company that makes building blocks, but a hell of a lot more people are gonna buy legos before they buy megablocks or playmobil.

Why doesn't Youtube communicate with its userbase, especially when not replying to complaints of its bad decisions?

They don't even reply to completely legitimate complaints(for an example "There's already Youtube kids app"). Or if they address these, then in the most superficial way without actually answering the question.

You know, all of this would have been fine if users themselves, not jsut the creators could Mark if a video was for kids or not rather than requiring machine learning for that..but knowing youtube they think robot moderators are the fucking future. I'm starting to get really missed the more I think about it.

Also Youtube is actually a major loss for Google and has never made a profit but because its Google they can afford to keep it up.

What ever comes next either has to be made or bought up by a billion dollar corporation or do what Uber does and take a loss for several double digit years and just stay alive via investors and just kind of hope they figure it out.

Content creation is a billion dollar industry so making something like SAG for Youtube is probably the most realistic option for change, and is actually proactive instead of sitting around going gee I hope a competitor comes out of no where.

I hope YouTube crashes and burns down to its foundations someday, so that we may get a second roll of the die and see if the next big video hosting site is any better or worse

Shoot you're right. I forgot about extremely popular sites like Vimeo and Dailymotion. Youtube better watch out for them or it's gonna go out of business!

COPPA is pretty brain-hurty but it might not be enforced in the dumbest possible way. The consequences will somewhat depend on whether the feds actually sue any creators for "tempting kids to watch".

With any luck YouTube itself will eventually find a smarter way to segment their audience, but in general the unreliability of ad revenue has already pushed most ppl to rely on merch, patrons, and sponsors. Which is potentially a good thing since they don't have to worry about whether their content is being scrutinized.

@Mike

But what makes things worse with that is that Youtube/outside companies will demonetize your video and put THEIR ads on it, so you're left screwed either way. So unless youtube actually fucking stops that, even if you don't put ads on your videos, it might be left screwed anyways.

…

Unless I'm reading/hearing about that situation all wrong and that has nothing to do with it at all-then ignore me.

Question is: How much does this law actually protect children? In a way that it has positive effects on a child.

Also, even more bad news. Copyright extortion has become even bigger as it abuses copyright system to demand money from owners of channels.

It does nothing to protect children. It's the legislative equivalent of a clickbait article.

Also, copyright was a mistake.

Problems what I'm seeing are fourfold:

1. Automated system mistakenly labels things not made primarily for kids (Fortunately, cartoon reviewers generally are safe but there are a few exceptions.) as kids content. It even falsely flags some of the age-restricted videos "for kids".
2. Some Youtubers misunderstood and marked their content "for kids" despite their videos being not just for kids (instead being meant for general audiences).
3. Since comments are turned off, you can't notify the video host. It's worse when the channel has been inactive for months and years. Only the channel owner can remove the "for kids" flag.
4. It further turns "you" off Youtube.

Youtube owners probably won't realize that every bad decision they make affects the daily lives of a lot of people.

This actually isn't true anymore. There are no hard numbers, but I've not heard of any analysts from the past few years suggest they don't make money off youtube.

By the way, from now on, if you want to make a kids channel, you're out of luck if you want these to become popular as your videos won't show up in recommendations list or end cards.

You hit the nail. While I can imagine Youtube claiming that having people mark what videos are for kids would have some trolls using the system to mark NSFW as child friendly, the machines won't do it better. It really would of been better to have a users mark what's child friendly and what's not.

Also if people really think robot moderators are the future, they're liking inhaling too much gas and not getting enough oxygen to realize what sort of flaws are in machine learning and what's really just a fantasy rather than a reality.

Even if the the algorithms were perfect, we'd have that "100% enforcement of a rule that only a minority supports." problem.

Meanwhile in reality, random videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmZblIKOROQ) have their comments disabled and can't be saved, to the benefit of no one. It pays to be well-informed.

All my favorite random clips from animated shows, even from 14+ and MA rated series, are now flagged 'children's content' and have their comment sections disabled by YouTube's outstanding artificial "intelligence". Fuck, man. YouTube's really losing grip on reality.

youtube comment section is meme'd as being the worst place on the internet. I don't think a few random videos without comments is going to be doing much harm.

I only see Youtube really start to die if people start to move in masses to other sites like BitChue or Vlare. But just like when Vid.me was alive, people didnt really care to do that. Plus YT has army of kids who love to watch all the crap there, even if its not oriented for kids.

This is SCARY AF https://youtu.be/EMRLxqYCcUQ