Youtube Community Strike

[station240]

Don't know about you, but I'm also disturbed a bit by the fact that YouTube actually feels entitled to punish the account owners by restricting access to features like live streaming... I mean, sure, if someone is infringing their TOS just delete the video and close the account if the infringements continue.

But why do they think it's appropriate to actually punish people, like they are some sort of moral authority

Youtube wrote the punishment on the basis that the TOS breach was copyright violation related.
So if you say uploaded a video you ripped off a DVD, then they check every video you upload for 3 months before it can go live.
Disabling the ability to livestream is just to stop people broadcasting their plunder goods.

However it makes no sense when it's an honest mistake, or applied to a TOS rule which is "pro youtube" or 3 months is far too long.
Youtube should have written the rules as 1 week to 3 months, then clarified which ones are serious enough to get 3 months.

The 3 strikes = channel deletion is also insane, what power crazed idiot though that was a good idea ?
All it takes is for some crackpot to false flag a few videos and boom.

Recent events prove Google has little morals.

Andy Rubin is the creator Google's Android software. He reportedly received $90 million in severance pay in 2014 after he was accused of sexual misconduct.
Rubin denies the allegations.

"We're walking out in support of those who've been harassed anywhere in the workplace and to ensure perpetrators are not rewarded or protected," said one Google employee.

https://abc7news.com/business/enough-is-enough-bay-area-google-workers-walk-out-in-protest/4596806/

[cdev]

People contribute to their society, in the form of social capital - originally we created a vibrant community in the dissemination of, by means of a technology people- scientists working in pure science, created. The web. People build social capital by helping one another, sometimes that by sharing their knowledge with one another, and by raising the level of discourse which accelerates learning.

Corporations are a imaginary construct, an immortal and immoral 'person' who is not constrained by physical need to occupy a specific place, drink water, breeathe air or anything physical. It lives forever and often cannot really be held fully accountable for anything, this was originally done to protect the wealth of the wealthy from people they may have injured, who deserved compensation. The corporation was created to protect them.

Corporations had not even the tiniest part in creating the web, nor did they create Linux, Python, or hundreds of other enabling technologies. However, they want us to think they did, and let them take money from others for it.

This would be okay if it was done in a way which was compatible with their actual contributions to it and their contributions to society which are ambiguous. Not all good by any means at this point.

We need to check the power of these things. because they are amoral and should not be trusted. They are not people nor are they like people.

[bob225]

The 3 strikes = channel deletion is also insane, what power crazed idiot though that was a good idea ?

Some ex bbs/forum Mod/Admin in a office fighting for the control of power - drinking a monster while playing doom

All it takes is for some crackpot to false flag a few videos and boom.

Ah the Delboy vs The Workshop battle springs to mind (evans coolant) - It come down to the police being called for harassment (unfounded accusations)

There are plenty of crackpot's out there on the interwebs

[Beamin]

Well this sucks.
I hope you get this sorted out really fast.

If not, I think there are enough Streaming-Alternatives.

That's interesting I honestly can't even name one, just youtube or bust. I hate monopolies but only use google, youtube, gmail etc

[Beamin]

Doesn't sound "fair enough" at all.

Does anyone know how "the algorithm" works? I know I saw a video where they were fixing a TV without sound that had the simpsons playing on it for a  minute and the video was removed. Amazing that it could do that as the video was highly distorted out of focus and out of frame. Much harder to see then those shows they speed up and distort to get around detection certainly unwatchable if you tried to watch that as a substitute for a real video.

[drussell]

Does anyone know how "the algorithm" works?

No...  Nobody knows and they are always modifying and tweaking it.  (Well, except for a few people in Google ivory towers protected by NDA.)  As soon as people start to figure out what they're doing, they have to change it around to prevent people from artificially gaming the system.  Catch-22

I know I saw a video where they were fixing a TV without sound that had the simpsons playing on it for a  minute and the video was removed. Amazing that it could do that as the video was highly distorted out of focus and out of frame.

shango066

[timelessbeing]

I think the video title "How to download Youtube videos" might have shown up on the algorithm radar.

[Khaos]

Yeah I never argued YouTube isn't being shit or stupid or both.

I think there should be some "reputation" based system for channels offering at least a modicum of protection.

I completely agree and frankly don't understand how this is not a thing. (apparently)
How hard is it to prioritizes incoming support tickets by channel size?

[Mr. Scram]

Don't know about you, but I'm also disturbed a bit by the fact that YouTube actually feels entitled to punish the account owners by restricting access to features like live streaming... I mean, sure, if someone is infringing their TOS just delete the video and close the account if the infringements continue.

But why do they think it's appropriate to actually punish people, like they are some sort of moral authority while in fact they're just a shitty company that exists only because of content made by someone else?

Hopefully a better alternative will come around in a couple of years or, even better, hosting companies will start offering streaming services at a large scale and affordable prices.

Your house, your rules. It's like how Dave gets to decide what to do with people who are a nuisance.

It's only a problem because we all complain about it, but still flock to Youtube regardless.

[daniel5555]

Most of you overreact a little bit, because you feel like using YouTube is like this basic right and a public space.
YouTube is a business and can decide how to do business, under what terms and with whom, for whatever reason they decide.

They can ban you for not liking you, just like a store can throw you out and give you a ban.

No, we most definitely don't overreact. I don't recall anybody in this thread saying that using YouTube is a right.

The problem with YouTube is not that it has arbitrary terms and conditions that are enforced by algorithms. The problem is not even that YouTube doesn't give a shit about creators - people who make money for YouTube in the first place.

The problem with YouTube is that it is a market failure. Or, in other words, it is the only effective way to get your videos out there. Sure, there are other streaming services, like Dailymotion and such. But in terms of their effectiveness it's not that they're just a fraction of what YouTube is - they simply don't exist. It is a vicious circle of sorts - you absolutely must upload videos on YouTube if you want any visibility and by doing that you only increase YouTube's importance.

The reason why YouTube acts the way it acts is because they know well that either video creators will swallow their bullshit, or they effectively will have to cease to exist as video creators.

And there's no solution to this problem right now. That's why I hope that streaming videos will eventually become significantly cheaper, so most people will be able to self-host.

Don't know about you, but I'm also disturbed a bit by the fact that YouTube actually feels entitled to punish the account owners by restricting access to features like live streaming... I mean, sure, if someone is infringing their TOS just delete the video and close the account if the infringements continue.

But why do they think it's appropriate to actually punish people, like they are some sort of moral authority while in fact they're just a shitty company that exists only because of content made by someone else?

Hopefully a better alternative will come around in a couple of years or, even better, hosting companies will start offering streaming services at a large scale and affordable prices.

Your house, your rules. It's like how Dave gets to decide what to do with people who are a nuisance.

It's only a problem because we all complain about it, but still flock to Youtube regardless.

No, it's only a problem because you can't have YouTube-like functionality without YouTube. If you don't like Dave, you can create your own forum about electronics without spending too much money on that, and slowly make it popular somehow. But if you don't like YouTube, there's nothing you can do. You can't stream hundreds of videos for tens of thousands of viewers, which is what Dave uses YouTube for. That's completely out of reach for the vast majority of people and we are not even talking about YouTube's integration with Google, which is what makes your videos reachable in the first place.

So yes, I'll have to continue to use YouTube. But don't expect from me any kind of sympathy towards it. Just as they have a right to be assholes on their property, we also have a right to complain about them being assholes since we don't have any alternative to use.

The 3 strikes = channel deletion is also insane, what power crazed idiot though that was a good idea ?

The one that surely has a high opinion of himself.

[cdev]

Let me tell you folks something. Corporations are literally trying to take over the world and give themselves a free pass that supersedes democracy.

They are trying to make everything, including the very right to exist, revolve around money, just as jobs are going away, due to AI.

So, people are going to find one day that we've created a monster in the form of corporations.

Sure there is a way around it, build your own site and set up your own blog software to allow embedding of your content.

Compress your videos as best as you can. It isnt rocket science, you know.

BTW, a certain mega corporation whose name starts with an A seems to deliberately make their code and browser needlessly complex. No law says people have to use them. YET.

Just say "know"

Hell, nothing is stopping you from using the simplest HTML possible to do whatever you want.

Lots of good reasons exist for doing that.

People don't have to ask for permission to innovate.

[NiHaoMike]

You can't stream hundreds of videos for tens of thousands of viewers, which is what Dave uses YouTube for.

Bittorrent has proven its scalability for well over 17 years.

[drussell]

You can't stream hundreds of videos for tens of thousands of viewers, which is what Dave uses YouTube for.

Why not?

[cdev]

NOTE: I am talking here about making and providing ones own original content, NOT others. Do not upload other people's content to the net!


The argument people often make is based on bandwidth costs which were much higher in the past combined with file sizes that were also much larger. Modern compression tools are fast and can compress streaming content so very much smaller than they were able to in the past.

If you have a modern computer it seems that the file size now ends up with after compressing videos for streaming is not so super large. Compression is improving all the time. Maybe not if you upload very high res video or high bit rate but more modest requirements on the content side will compress to be much smaller.

So, maybe if you do it that way you cant get the huge volume and you do have to pay somewhat, but no law says that every content provider has to supply video, either.

More generally other kinds of content, even static HTML can be great to make and nobody is forcing people to use corporate services.

Frankly, as somebody who likes to see diversity on the net, it is distressing to see people thinking that corporate sites are their only option, they are not.

Its not that difficult - people should make their own web pages+ serve them.

[daniel5555]

You can't stream hundreds of videos for tens of thousands of viewers, which is what Dave uses YouTube for.

Bittorrent has proven its scalability for well over 17 years.

Well, just because you can download a copy of a recent Blu Ray release of some blockbuster in a couple of minutes doesn't mean you would be able to stream hundreds of videos by using the same protocol.

Bittorrent transfers files by little blocks and it usually does that without any specific order. So if there are a lot of seeds, each of them can just transfer slowly their share of blocks - so the overall speed will be incredibly fast.

Streaming works differently. Each seed would have to transfer with the speed that is equal or faster than the video's bitrate. A FullHD video with decent quality can have a bitrate of 10 megabits per second. That's quite a lot for a single seed. Assuming full-duplex 50 Mbps connection it could probably serve 3-4 clients before totally saturating the connection.

Then you have the storage problem - how many people would actually have a lot of videos from, say, Dave's channel, which currently has more than a thousand? Then what about monetization? A lot of video creators are only able to create because they receive some income from doing it, how you would provide it with Bittorrent?

And we didn't even start talking about initial distribution, video encoding, search engines...

Bittorrent is sure great for file sharing. Not so sure about video streaming. It can work in some cases. Probably not in general case, until 1 Gbps speeds or similar will become commonplace.

You can't stream hundreds of videos for tens of thousands of viewers, which is what Dave uses YouTube for.

Why not?

I'll try to be as short as possible... Basically, it just requires way too many resources. In order to make your own little YouTube, you have to provide the following:

1. Video encoding. It's a very costly task in terms of computation resources even right now.

You can try that at home. Just attempt to re-encode a FullHD movie on your home PC. You will quickly discover that in order to achieve a high quality/bitrate ratio you will have to use aggressive settings. Those will make the encoding incredibly slow even on modern CPUs. Soon you'll want to use a dedicated server for that task, with a specific CPU that has a lot of cores or some sort of dedicated hardware for video encoding.

Also remember that you won't have to do just one encoding. You'll have to make versions for 720p, 360p, etc., since there are people on slow connections and old devices.

Those kind of processing power is expensive. It's not a cheap VPS you can buy for $20 per month.

2. Video streaming requires lots and lots of bandwidth. Even if you find exaggerating that 10 megabits per second figure I provided earlier, even if you assume just 2,5 megabits, for example, it will still require insane amounts of bandwidth for any kind of significant audience.

The latest video from Dave already got >30K views in just 21 hours. I can safely assume that there could be a thousand of viewers watching this video simultaneously. Assuming it has a bitrate of 2,5 megabits and everyone watched it in that quality, it gives you 2,5 Gbps bitrate. This is not a usual speed. Most hosting services offer just 100 Mbps data links. Everything above that will surely cost additional money. Pretty sure it won't be cheap, and not every hosting provider is technically prepared for that kind of load on its infrastructure.

Also data transfer itself usually costs money. Those 30K views assuming the same bitrate for a 10 minute video would be ~5200 gigabytes of data. Not an insignificant amount. Definitely not the usual amount of data transfer that this forum, for example, has.

3. But assume you can deal somehow with tens of thousands of views per day... What will happen if one of your videos will become viral or simply more popular than the rest? Will your infrastructure handle hundreds of thousands of views? Millions?

When a video becomes viral or significantly more popular than the rest, it is a huge opportunity for a channel. It can bring a lot of new viewers and help to achieve additional notoriety. That is, if your infrastructure can handle it. Otherwise it will become just a missed opportunity and a service outage for the regular viewers.

4. Now think about how people find videos in the first place... Dave mentioned in one of his videos that around 50% of viewers come from searching. It's possible that I myself discovered his channel when I was searching for some specific topic on electronics.

This happens because YouTube is integrated with Google search. Will your own hosting service offer the same kind of visibility for your videos?

5. And that's not all. But let's forget about little details, I think what I described is already enough.

If you don't agree with my points, really you don't even have to argue. Just go and implement your own "YouTube" that's capable of reliably serving tens of thousands of views per day and offer it as an alternative to YouTube for Dave. I'd be really happy to be proven wrong and I would use that alternative instead of YouTube.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that it's possible to do that without spending an amount of effort and resources that is completely out of reach for most people.

The argument people often make is based on costs which were much higher in the past combined with file sizes that were also much larger. If you have a modern computer it seems that the file size now for many videos is not so super large. So, maybe if you do it that way you cant get the huge volume and you do have to pay somewhat, but I am also speaking more generally about other kinds of content, even static HTML. I find it totally depressing that people dont make their own web pages+ serve them.

Right now you can buy an inexpensive VPS for $5 per month that can effectively and reliably replace your mail from Google, host your own blog and website (not static HTML, but something more interesting, like Wordpress), which you can use as replacement for your social networks and do some other neat stuff, such as file hosting, code repository, etc. It requires some effort, but it can be done.

Video streaming, however, is still out of reach for the reasons I described above. Yes, technically you can do it... For 10 simultaneous viewers or such (discarding the video encoding and all other stuff). But for anything serious it just doesn't work.

[cdev]

I was not talking about Bit Torrent, or anything related to the sharing of copyrighted content.

Which I would strongly recommend against doing.


But suppose somebody wants to write their own content, whether its a web page or an audio podcast or a "gopher" server, or whatever. Or video, which tends to use up far more bandwidth than the others. Just do it.

Also, lets not kid ourselves here. Dave's content is popular but its taken him a long time to build up his brand. Thats not going to happen to most content providers and lord knows, its a double edged sword for some of the better known online people. I wouldn't want to be them.

Apart from people who are 'trending' and longtime consistent content producers like Dave, right after they upload a new video, I doubt if that many people are downloading most YouTubers content at the same time. Most people are just trying to contribute something to others and share what they know.

So, suppose you put up your own content on your Raspberry Pi or whatever, your pogo plug or your digitally enabled cheese board, via your home net connection.

(People don't need a VPS.) Or get a VPS. Either way its better than having to worry about arbitrary corporate policies.

Suppose you suddenly become popular and then it buffers a little bit. Or even gets a mention on some huge site and gets slashdotted. Ive had something like that happen to sites Ive been involved with. You'll survive.

Most likely scenario, viewers have to pause it until it catches up, who cares?

The important thing is you maintain your independence.

[daniel5555]

But suppose somebody wants to write their own content, whether its a web page or an audio podcast or a "gopher" server, or whatever. Or video, which tends to use up far more bandwidth than the others. Just do it.

Also, lets not kid ourselves here. Dave's content is popular but its taken him a long time to build up his brand. Thats not going to happen to most content providers and lord knows, its a double edged sword for some of the better known online people. I wouldn't want to be them.

Apart from people who are 'trending' and longtime consistent content producers like Dave, right after they upload a new video, I doubt if that many people are downloading most YouTubers content at the same time. Most people are just trying to contribute something to others and share what they know.

So, suppose you put up your own content on your Raspberry Pi or whatever, your pogo plug or your digitally enabled cheese board, via your home net connection.

(People don't need a VPS.) Or get a VPS. Either way its better than having to worry about arbitrary corporate policies.

Suppose you suddenly become popular and then it buffers a little bit. Or even gets a mention on some huge site and gets slashdotted. Ive had something like that happen to sites Ive been involved with. You'll survive.

Most likely scenario, viewers have to pause it until it catches up, who cares?

The important thing is you maintain your independence.

I don't have anything to object regarding what you have written... But the thing is, the problem exists for the actual content producers or the ones who aspire to become like them, or who seriously aims to share their content with a lot of people.

Those who just upload videos once in a while don't really care in general. If they get hit by YouTube policies, they tend to just upload their video to some file sharing hosting, such as Dropbox, and move on.

But I don't think we're generally talking about those casual uploaders. It's really people like Dave who have a problem with this and they can't really use any of those straightforward and simple alternatives.

[thm_w]

Most likely scenario, viewers have to pause it until it catches up, who cares?

That would kill 90% of your audience instantly.
What does dave have, 100mbps or so? You could handle ~25 simultaneous viewers at the most, after that it would tank and buffering would take forever.

[EEVblog]

For those that care, I've had my videos available and served from my own website since the beginning, knock yourself out:
http://www.eevblog.org/video
Reduced size and quality of course for practical reasons.
What happens when I release a video and just a few thousand people try to download/stream that video file at the same time, it slows to a crawl.
Anyone who thinks they can serve their own videos to a large audience has clearly never tried it.

And the entire point of being on Youtube (apart from the video CDN) is because that's the only place people go to search for and watch video.
If I or any other Youtuber leaves Youtube then their audience will eventually dwindle away to almost nothing, and growth would drop to zero instantly.
Like it or not Youtube is the only game in town.

[cdev]

These make an interesting read.

Note: I am not trying to draw or make any conclusion about any specific service providers, whatsoever.  I am just saying that the door should never be closed to new services and often monopolies are unhealthy.
 


There are a number of papers online about Internet filtering law and policy.

This was the first one I read, quite a few years ago.
 
The World Trade Law of Internet Filtering, by Tim Wu.

https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=882459

... more...

Access Denied

https://ia801902.us.archive.org/14/items/AccessDenied_201701/Access%20Denied.pdf

Also:

http://access.opennet.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/accesscontrolled-chapter-6.pdf

[Mr. Scram]

What does filtering have to do with a bandwidth problem? There seems to be a lot of noise.

[bitwelder]

Heck, that TV is running webOS, so probably there is a way to access it via ssh/terminal and run the diagnostics.

[cdev]

Although its rarely discussed, an important problem is the fact that neural networks are behind more and more Internet filtering. Its unfortunate enough that there are few real alternatives, as Dave stated, for a content provider. I have had similar experiences, elsewhere, and it left me similarly speechless at the bizarre and unpleasant situation which is developing, on a global scale.

There is a growing global dialogue about algorithmic discrimination.These community strikes seem to me to be a form of that. The corporations whose staff train these bots are unaccountable to anybody.

In some situations, we're losing a lot as a society because of the lack of transparency, so much that one has to ask the question, is this intentional? Most would say it isn't. If so, then we need to fix it, can't society do something to restore a better balance?

Re bandwidth: The country I live in is kind of in the grip of a sort of mercantilist obsession. What this means is that everything has its price. In an internet where everything can and is bought and paid for, some entities likely will get preferred delivery of their packets while others packets may be relegated to the fringes of the nets capacity, the end of the queue?

I like the Internet as common carrier model a lot more.

[SparkyFX]

There is a growing global dialogue about algorithmic discrimination.These community strikes seem to me to be a form of that. The corporations whose staff train these bots are unaccountable to anybody.

In some situations, we're losing a lot as a society because of the lack of transparency, so much that one has to ask the question, is this intentional? Most would say it isn't. If so, then we need to fix it, can't society do something to restore a better balance?

Most of the problem stems from the way the users use the system. If you have proper keywords in your video meta/description, users that actually search for them will still get them, algorithmic filtering or not, the filter can only choose from the base amount of data. They are not blocked in any way, it is "just" the suggestions for the available and limited space or attention span that is affected. Of course there are plenty of people that outright spam the meta for better search ranks - which means they kind of try to game the system.

The algorithms are most likely trained in favor of popularity, which is the meta-currency the whole business model is all about.

I despise how people prefer videos over written text or original documentation for some topics, and even then complain about a video in a non-constructive way. Imho it was their mistake to prefer the watered down abstract of the source in the first place, or they simply misunderstood it is better to not replace what they watched for a source. Nevertheless, there still is a huge benefit in guidance for knowledge, the expectations of the viewers should just match the intention of the content creator, which is why keywords (or whatever lead the viewer to the channel) need to match the content and should not be used to game the system. This is where re-uploads actually do harm as well.

So if someone wants to improve this system with and for society, what needs to be done is educate the users how to improve their google-fu, point out interesting & relevant sources directly instead of trying to become the middleman, express in a non-misleading way as much as possible and try to only add cognitive gain to a conversation. Might sound harsh to express it this way, but those are typical netiquette points most people here do anyway - unless it starts to get philosophical and therefore my word count per post explodes . That´s why i don´t really see a problem with such algorithms as long as users can still communicate about these things on a platform - in comments, forum posts or even in videos - and are able to modify the way they find the content themselves. Should this not be possible it really becomes a problem.

I like the Internet as common carrier model a lot more.

In short: you might have ordered an uplink with a certain bandwidth for a certain price, but the middleman decided he wants to charge money for the kind of content you transceive from third parties. All he needs to do is packet inspection and therefore a break of privacy rights to do that. Sounds fair, right? I reckon they don´t teach the details of the internet protocol or privacy rights at business schools - or there was some floating definition of it used in the reasoning... thats more likely the cause of the problem. The politicians here have equally floating definitions at hand sometimes... so it is not a local problem.

[justanothercanuck]

more news coverage

https://torrentfreak.com/banksys-own-video-shredded-by-youtube-following-canal-copyright-claim-181205/

looks like you weren't alone