YouTube faces creator backlash
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Copyright claims is a perfect example. That system is abused by large companies who know how to exploit their algorithms and they know it is worth it because there will be no humans in the loop to stop them.
If YouTube wants to remain viable, they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
Yep.
One of my favorite subscribers to watch is some guy (Harald Baldr[0]) who travels around remote areas of the world and vlogs it.
But he's said a number of times how even 10 seconds of background music can cause his video to get demonetized and then all ad revenue for the video goes to the record label who owns the copyright and there's absolutely nothing he can do to combat it.
This happens even if his video is 30 minutes long and has nothing to do with the music at all -- it just so happens he's walking past a store or hotel lobby that has music on.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKr68ZJ4vv6VloNdnS2hjhA/vid...
One of my more popular videos could never be monetized because I added a song (via the old YouTube editor interface) that turned out to have a copyright claim but the interface doesn't allow me to remove or change the background music in post. So I'm given the option to delete something with 911k views and annoy my viewers with a duplicate upload or just cut my losses.
It's long overdue but they do seem to be making some strides to help creators at last.
News/educational - likely okay as incidental.
Everything else is up to the courts to decide.
Under this example, I’d argue that this is not incidental usage. The audio could be considered integral to the “scene” that is being recorded. It gives the audience an idea of what place x looks, feels and sounds like. And this is certainly not news/educational content.
Issuing a DMCA takedown that is both false and meant in bad faith is an act of perjury. In theory the copyright holder could get jail time.
A interesting case is the video of a toddler dancing on youtube, 29s long, to a song. The Ninth Circuit held that copyright owners must consider fair use before issuing take-down notices. The case got settled afterwards.
This difference between DMCA takedown and ID claim is often discussed by youtube creators as both a boon and a curse. The good thing is that id claim does not impact any future standing with google or legal punishment beyond the loss of revenue from the video that get claimed. The bad side is that they get abused.
Real case that happened to my friend(with maybe 2k subscribers):
1. Film a seaside with normal sea breeze and wave sounds (recorded at the same time) no music added.
2. Some Sony Music subsidiary claims that video infringes on their song from a different region which apparently contains similar sea sounds(facepalm here). Ok stuff happens algos are only human..
3.This is where the evil of Youtube comes in:
You file a dispute, point out the obvious in a professional manner -> YouTube seemingly reviews your dispute and claims that the video is infringing still!! It is obvious to anyone that the response was automated.
4. The only way to win this nonsense is to escalate to the next level of dispute which most normal humans are loathe to do (scared of lawyers, scared of YouTube, etc).
Again, the YouTube is evil for taking out the humans out of the review process while faking the review process.
We know they do it for everything else and that is Google modus operandi - to automate everything requiring human interaction.
But I don't think their goal is to have the videos removed. It's to collect any ad revenue generated from the video.
If they collect all of the ad revenue then the last thing they want is for the video to be removed because now it's free advertising for them. If 100 people upload a song and those songs get millions of views, the record label keeps all of that ad revenue.
I believe that's why you can find nearly every song ever made uploaded by many people on Youtube. The record labels and Google love it because they get paid.
It's not that AI needs to replace empathy alone, it needs to replace culturally and legally nuanced judgement about copyrighted works, among other things. That's hard to teach fast to a mechturk type workforce, and staffing a team of people competent enough to understand that nuance at youtube's scale has to be prohibitively expensive if it's even possible.
Humanizing operations buys quality at the expense of putting a upper bound on scale. Few companies are willing to accept that ceiling for fear of losing market share.
Do they have to do this? Of course not. Being a private company, they can do whatever they want.
However, by not doing things like this:
- they are constantly losing public support and trust
- they are setting a track record of evasive and non-transparent behavior, that could be used in potential future government legislation
- they run the risk of a cashed up honest/transparent competitor suddenly bringing a new, honest platform to market, catching them with their pants down both technically and ~morally (in the high ground sense of the word). This may sound impossible with the scale of YouTube, but think about this: what if someone brought a platform that only publishes (and maintains) quality (for some definition of the word) content? Like a YouTube for ~serious content? This way, they could leave the expensive hosting of nonsense to YouTube, and cherry pick the quality content, upon which a future self-sustaining business model will likely be very dependent. I think there are probably a number of people in China who have both the money as well as understanding of human nature (including deceitful abuse of legislation and limitations of human intelligence) necessary to make this happen. Whether it's worth the risk I have no idea, but some day user-produced content is going to be a huge cash cow, not to mention the propaganda power inherent in owning the #1 platform.
On the one hand, it seems a bit unjust that smaller creators should be snuffed out for things that wash off the back of established players. A two tiered justice system isn't just.
On the other hand, it's a reasonable (and more cost effective) way to do more than nothing.
A bit gross, but it would probably work in YT's favor to suppress cries of injustice early. Would this even be a scandal if it only hit small creators?
There are simply too many people, and they don't make enough even on the big channels to justify that sort of individual attention. In fact, the only way they can make ANY money is to have so little human attention.
https://socialblade.com/blog/youtube-milestones-four-channel...
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/even-youtube-stars-with-14-...
The question I find interesting is: is this assumption correct? Is service scale the dominant factor in market share, or could you win a significant piece of the pie with a "Smaller YouTube by Humans"?
In theory, a more human touch could attract content creators, who in turn could bring their audience. Whether that would translate to significant market share, though, dunno.
At least so far, the answer to your second question has been "no," at least if you define "significant" as "that which attracts significant VC investment." (I'm not suggesting that's the best metric, but it's what an awful lot of tech companies use in practice.) This is because the answer to your first question is demonstrably yes: when it comes to services that heavily rely on network effects, service scale is the dominant factor in market share.
It's possible that you could carve out a sustainable niche if you really leaned into the "by humans" part, but it'd still be a niche. I don't think that's necessarily a reason to avoid it.
There are other similar online "TVs", like https://www.mall.tv/.
Here is one stat I found from 2019:
- 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
So if videos were reviewed at 1x speed, they would need 24000 humans working 24x7. (Not sure how to scale that to actual jobs, but seems manageable)
Related: "Facebook had more than 30,000 employees working on safety and security — about half of whom were content moderators." Not a fun job:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
YT probably doesn't make money. We don't know because Alphabet doesn't put it as a separate line item in their earnings reports. Insiders say it about "breaks even".
granted, this is not exactly apples/apples, but it's not far off
One could also argue that if YouTube's takedown fitler wasn't as "good" (where good doesn't actually mean objectively good, but aggressive) as Google made it be, then EU's upload filter wouldn't have passed either, because then there would have been no example of anyone "doing it right" (read: taking down anything that smells like a cousin of a copyrighted work, including stuff like public works, bird chirps, etc -- just to be sure).
My point is, YouTube wouldn't have needed as many humans to check if people's taken down stuff was needed to be taken down, if its algorithms weren't designed to be so aggressive in the first place.
Google dug its own grave here. Now it's stuck between the creators who increasingly see it as a hostile/too risky service, and the people who keep calling for YouTube to censor stuff that "offends them", and who will never ever be satisfied with whatever censorship regime YouTube puts in place, just like the copyright trolls never will be either.
It's dangerous to become the arbiter of taste, I can understand Google's aversion to more human involvement beyond just the problems with scale.
What's frustrating is that we don't have many ways to find out what's true.
Youtube's algo is an arbiter of taste whether they're happy about it or not. I'm not sure it's possible to be apolitical here.
Curation is terrible too, when it comes to kids content. I won't let my kids use YouTube kids anymore, it's awful. It used to have mostly appropriate kids content, but now people have gamed it.
Not sure if anyone has refuted this person's points but they are pretty alarming no matter what side of isle you sit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8 (What 40,000 Videos Tell Us About The Trending Tab)
Eg, the copyright claim system seems fundamentally designed for abuse. You can't throw humans at it and expect it to work properly, it's working as designed now. You could change it, have humans handle the decision making or w/e - but if you are going to change it you could also "simply" write a better contract. Something not so flawed and easily abusable; of which there have been many ideas, discussions, etc.
They can hire more people, but they will (and should) never let you call them up and tell at them after your video is demonetized.
Facebook has 30000 moderators.
Even looking away from the human aspect a second, it means these 30 000 are not stable employees but contractors needed to be replaced very frequently, burning through the pool of potential workers. And people are not even happy with the current number and clamour for way more moderation on facebook, so the 30 000 number is by cheaping out.
Then Youtube need people both for moderating and copyright/monetarization support so multiply by 2, and for facebook and youtube we’d need close to a roster of 100 000 people rotating every year or less, burning through a million people in a decade.
All of that just for two video platforms on the internet.
I can’t stop myself from wondering if it’s a good use of people.
A big corp could take a mixed approach. For every paid admin you can have dozens of volunteers whose authority and actions are supervised by the paid admins, and the admins and moderators would also have access to the AI tools to see flags on the content.
This could be a good model for Youtube Kids - whitelisting channels and individual videos as age-appropriate. If the admin sees a moderator abusing the privilege, let them revoke it and revert their entire history.
> they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
This issue is not specific to Youtube but to all platforms where users can post. I don't see how Facebook or Twitter or Reddit can hire enough people to review their communities.
"More Than 500 Hours Of Content Are Now Being Uploaded To YouTube Every Minute".
Do that math. Filing copyright claims can be completely automated. Humans can't keep up with that.
In my opinion, YouTube should enjoy Safe Harbor laws. When someone wants to make a Copyright claim, they should have to post a bounty. If their claim is found to be without merit, they forfeit the bounty to the person who created the video in question. And this should be resolved by a governmental judicial group, who also gets a cut of the bounty.
> If their claim is found to be without merit, they forfeit the bounty to the person who created the video in question.
That would mean there needs to be an appeals process and humans who do the reviews, right?
I think that was utterly fascinating. A long hard look at the dark side of the psyche.
Not even this, but the algorithms are designed in way that is bias towards the person making the copyright claim. It isn't like neutral algorithm and the companies just figured out how to leverage it better than creators, it is literally built in their favor.
Not really a Youtube problem, but Google Problem. Google and Apple seems to operate at completely opposite end of spectrum. There is nothing Human about Google's Product and Services, even if they did try, it is as if it was designed by Data Mining and Algorithm. But it was fast, efficient, and instantaneous. Apple on the other hand is far too human, literally having a hand on every step of the process, which means it is very slow, and sometimes bureaucratic. But they do seems to care way beyond what a normal persona and other companies would do.
“Abused” in a similar way to how YouTube existed for (something like) 10 years without paying a single iota of money to anyone for copyrighted material? I’d call that abuse of copyright law myself (neglect can be a form of abuse).
Copyright claims is YouTube finally existing within the scope of the law. There are implementation issues - rerouting all money on a first come, first served basis is wrong - but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
And, from what I know of large record labels, they don’t know how to exploit the algorithms themselves. Most of them work in Microsoft Excel. Beating the claims system is beyond them.
They have software that they’ve bought to do that for them!
I completely agree, but that's against everything Google wishes for, which is a world where everyone is 100% online 100% of the time with their data 100% in the cloud and decisions being made by AI 100% of the time.
Pushing for human intensive operation inside Google might as well be career suicide, this is why they would much rather keeping spending large amount of resource on "improving the algorithm" instead of just hire more humans and make more progress with a fraction of the cost.
As usual, how many ?
In particular if we are talking copyright claims abuse, could you give a ballpark number of the number of humans you think youtube needs to hire ?
That's a really rough one. Not only do I not have an algorithm for a computer to determine if something is copyrighted, I don't have an algorithm for a human to determine if something is either.
Since you're probably going to be stuck with an adversarial system based on claims and counterclaims anyhow, I'd submit the problem is probably more related to a lack of symmetry. The content creators put stuff up, then there are thousands of entities that can analyze their stuff automatically and make automated claims with no apparent consequences for being wrong. The individual creator then gets notified of a claim, but they know nothing about the claimant, whether they make routine fraudulent claims, whether they have legit ownership, etc., and have to address them relatively individually, by appealing to an opaque system that tells them very little about why the ruling is what it is, and where all the penalties appear to fall on the content creator rather than the claimant.
Something needs to be a bit more symmetrical there.
This is something where a "YouTube union" might start really being dangerous to YouTube; suppose the union puts up a page where they ask all the members to record exactly what claims are made on what content, with all the (meager as it may be) metadata YouTube gives them on the claims. I betcha some patterns would emerge. (I believe there's already some word-of-mouth about certain claimants but I bet this would make it even worse for YouTube.)
But I suspect the number of copyright claims would go down significantly once they have a bunch of people reviewing them, because the erroneous claims would become unprofitable, assuming they punish entities that make too many erroneous claims.
Imagine making a mistake that favors a pirate, lawsuits. Make a mistake that favors a copyright troll, endless hate?
I'm fairly sure that most of the content watched on youtube was uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder, at least historically. Having an algo people have to actively thwart, can be unaware that the particular content is copyrighted, and/or generates a significant enough number of false positives that google can claim that they're trying hard enough to damage a portion of their legal business is a tool in and of itself.
Not using an algo makes it clear you're doing editorial, and once you're doing editorial, oversight follows. Anyway, even with the algo you can do as much editorial you want through training and dispute resolution. By slow-walking some disputes and fast-tracking others, you can change the shape of your business to hopefully be more independent of legally fragile stolen content.
The Trump/Russia conspiracy was a boon to all of these algorithmically filtering DMCA carriers, now they can actually explicitly filter points of view. I decided that point was inevitable anyway after I heard of the first facebook censoring of an anti-wingsuit post. IMO humans + that degree of editorial = worst case scenario, at least laundering it through the AI means that editorial requires some cost and degree of engineering skill.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/features/why-ar...
> “The post got deleted by Facebook, and I pissed off the entire community,” says Lewis. “My message was followed up by the most fatal month in BASE. I just painfully sat back and watched my friends die one after the other.”
There's Vimeo, but you either keep paying a monthly fee, or they drop your content due to the 5 GB maximum limit for free accounts. So if you want to publish stuff and no longer worry about it, you need to make sure that you have a subscription going with a valid credit card.
Vimeo is only worth it if you're looking to host video content behind a paywall.
Also for website owners Vimeo drops tracking cookies with no way to turn the behavior off, whereas YouTube has a -nocookies mode that doesn't drop any cookies. On the other hand YouTube has started to serve ads on embedded content as well and in the -nocookies mode they can't notice Premium accounts either.
These are technical issues that could be solved by alternatives, but aren't. We aren't even talking about the lockin effect of YouTube having the huge audience that it has. Nowadays it's more lucrative to host videos on YouTube even if they are meant for embedding it on your website.
Also TikTok is cool, but it's very niche and it's in no way competition for YouTube. There's also the issue that if you're worried about privacy and ads, the fact that TikTok is free (and therefore ads or data driven) and owned by a Chinese company ... is a problem.
Also known as "paying for hosting". Seems pretty reasonable. If creators want to upload and broadcast unlimited hours of HD video onto the internet for free they need to accept the consequences of this arrangement (i.e. they aren't entitled to anything). The rest of us have to invest capital into our projects so that we can ensure a stable digital foundation in-line with our own prerogatives.
I understand that some people want to use it to get into show business, but man, Youtube is not the biggest impediment to that, nor the worst predatory company they'll deal with along the way.
So if the solution is Vimeo versus not hosting video at all, I might go for the later. Therefore free to host services like YouTube win.
That's fine, YouTube offers the service for free, but it's not reasonable to have any particular expectations of quality or service from a free offering.
Twitch could have been a competitor, but they surprisingly don't seem to care about that market ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I do wish they would do better with organizing the VoD section though it's so hard to find particular VoDs even for simple things like Critical Role's once a week show that happens at the same time every week much less a less scheduled streamer.
Linus Media Group has Floatplane, CGP Grey and friends have Nebula... YouTube, like Netflix, doesn't have a special sauce. It has creators, and those creators are happy and eager to leave.
But they do have the eyes. If you want your videos to be seen, there's no Youtube alternative. Twitch would be, but they seem to be banning people for political reasons too.
Network effect is real and very strong. It will be very hard to create real YT alternatives.
We have Bitchute and PeerTube, but they severely lack content and the viewers.
I'd say it's real, but weak. The value to me of the next incremental YouTube content provider isn't very large. If one of my favorite providers leaves, I won't find it hard to follow them.
What they have is the only practical advertising-based monetization platform. That's the real moat. You can use YouTube to build enough of a base to then create a backup monetization base with something like Patreon, but I don't know how to get you to that point without starting on YouTube first.
And they look terrible
Also, peertube result on google (of course), leads me here: https://joinpeertube.org/en/
Which is not a video portal. So, not going to work for wide audiences. They don't care about how your site is coded, what instances are, etc...
If not, what deep-pocketed company would be able to keep a competitor afloat?
I will not be downloading TikTok
And unfortunately, there's no real alternative to Youtube. Let's say I'm a content creator, where would I upload my videos? Vimeo is not free, other sites similar to Youtube closed, so...
This completely. I've never used TikTok, but my understanding is that it is more akin to SnapChat for lipsyncing. I'm sure there are a lot of people who use YouTube for that type of content and have been pulled to TikTok for it, but it does not seem like an alternative to me as someone who almost exclusively goes to YouTube for content that is at least 10 minutes or longer and more like a replacement for television.
I have done no research into this at all, so maybe I'm just an asshole repeating hearsay, but I've heard YouTube is not even remotely profitable for Google. Owning the huge site definitely benefits them in a lot of ways beyond just ad revenue/profit, so I'm assuming from Google's point of view, until some other site can actually challege YouTube's dominance, it's totally worth it to have this stream of publicity gaffes to lose a tiny amount of viewer revenue than to throw even more money down the hole trying to fix the site's issue. It's like a wooden row boat that keeps springing leaks, as long as YouTube has free fingers to plug them, that's what they're gonna do rather than actually fix them.
they've pivoted to aiding businesses create video ads
I appreciate that TikTok is the "new hotness" but I don't see its relevance to this conversation about YouTube or why the author felt the need to shoehorn it into every paragraph.
Think of the amount of writing that goes into a single 20-minute TV sitcom episode. The most popular ones have 24 episodes a year. Youtubers are expected to come up with 10-minute episodes 1x/week if not more frequently. The quality of the videos take a nosedive, the creators burn out, and subscriptions and views fall as a result.
TikTok's shorter videos can arguably be more entertaining as there's no arbitrary length requirement that incentivizes filler.
This is inaccurate. It is suspected, but not confirmed, that the YouTube recommendation algorithm favors videos longer than 10 minutes because they increase the amount of time users spend on the platform. Videos need not be 10 minutes long to be monetized.
Actual reality is incredibly boring. I'd say that's what networks learned a long time ago.
They'll also need their own copyright detection system when lawsuits start coming their way. Then we'll have come full circle.
Or they can get TikTok to the height of popularity and slowly kill it by adding more and more ads ... the 'YouTube Way', one might say.
While this is true, what's the gain of that? YouTube has it, are they making money? If not, will they in the future?
Content creators deal with an opaque algorithm that demonetizes videos based on how the wind is blowing, or it would appear. Weeks or months of work can be wiped out by an arbitrary demonetization preventing content creators from getting paid for their video's views.
JonTron discusses this [1]. It's very easy to violate the "advertiser-friendly" guidelines. They're vague: "violence", "harmful content", "controversial or sensitive issues". Under profanity: "strong profanity used in video even if bleeped for comedy, documentary, news, or educational purposes". ??!
It has been obvious for a long time that daily content uploads are better for the algorithm than longer, quality videos uploaded less frequently. If you look at the LinusTechTips network of channels, they produce at least 5-7 videos per week.
[0]: An analysis of 7 months worth of trending tab videos, or roughly ~40k videos that reached the trending tab. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDqBeXJ8Zx8
Wow, the whole Youtube system is a mess. I had no idea it was that bad
- Craziest COPYRIGHT STRIKE from YouTube ever?! (Paul Davis) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvH77m_3MVU
- What I want to teach, but can't, thanks to Universal Music Group. (Adam Neely) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nryFmUjtwEY
- Why Record Labels STILL Suck! (Rick Beato) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoTl9V8cjH0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rRKBXQotnA
His comments:
https://twitter.com/adamneelybass/status/1124722129495306240
https://twitter.com/adamneelybass/status/1124840588543713285
I'm constantly amazed that this company does not invest more in human copyright legal reviews when their product is pretty much just obtaining rights to share copies of other people's work.
I have a YouTube channel. My first video will be five years old on September 14. I kept putting out content for a number of years, content which I thought was funny and would surely be well-received.
But people never watched my videos! I get 20ish views per video. They never get recommended to anyone because I'm a smaller channel, and then I never become big for that reason. (Or maybe my videos just suck. Some of them definitely do, but I've made some that I'm proud of.)
I joined TikTok, YouTube's 60-second-max competitor. Out of boredom I made a video synced to one of those songs. Fifty views on my first one. Eventually I started making more content. I've clocked around 150K views on my videos combined, 40K likes, and 1200 followers. I made my first video around February and my second around June.
While YouTube discourages small creators, non-celebrities, and those that don't have massive amounts of cash to throw around on sets, TikTok lets whoever's talented become at least relatively popular.
TikTok's algorithm is pretty well-documented by its community: When you post a video, TikTok shows it to a certain amount of people. If enough people who see it "like" it, it moves to a larger amount of people, and so on until everyone on the app sees it. This is easy, straightforward, and transparent (for the most part, there are special cases and such).
YouTube's algorithm is: [redacted]. It's amusing to me that a Chinese company would be more transparent about this. YouTube doesn't understand its community and it's probably too late to save it, it got a monopoly and stagnated. My story is one of many others.
Off Topic but from what little I saw, the content on TikTok is pure cancer.
That is understandable, but the diversity of content makes it so that YouTube can't just reccomend videos to everyone. I just hope that a place remains online for the weird niche stuff that is avaliable there, but Tiktok definitely isn't a place for that. It's fine for memes, but that's about it.
I know their contentID and copyright system is hopelessly broken and biased towards stealing from original content creators at the behest if established and larger publishers and this has been a real thorn in the side. Someone literally posted random white noise and it was claimed by multiple people automatically within seconds. That's a failure on YouTube's part that borders on facilitating cooyfraud. I'm surprised they haven't been sure over it yet.
Here's a primer on tiktok for those unfamiliar: https://slate.com/technology/2018/09/tiktok-app-musically-gu...
If by cancer you mean people having fun in ways you don't approve, then yes.
The point is it's a bit too quick to label a new medium pure cancer. Given time, people will find ways to create amazing things using any format.
Clever. Also, I think you nailed it.
YouTube is trying to curate their content. Any site that stays around for a while and wants to attract top advertising dollars does it. Reddit curates to an extent. Facebook is in all kinds of trouble for not curating.
It seems like the best way to get around the business physics is to switch from a business model to a federation model. Something like Mastodon where hosting costs are distributed and the algorithm can be tweaked for exposure rather than dollars earned for the hosting company. Of course there you have a chicken and egg networking problem and an ease of use problem.
> I don't know how to get around the business physics of this. Not sure anyone does.
Sometimes I think to myself that if their is less reliance on angel/VC funding from the very beginning, then founders could stay true to their vision. Like how Elon Musk refuses to make SpaceX a publicly traded company as it would squander the ultimate goal of colonizing mars. However, given how resource intensive it must be to process and store petabytes of video every year (exabytes in total), there is just no way around acquiring investment dollars.
I'm cool with friends seeing my stuff and not interacting or not liking it because it's not likeable. That's democratic. But I'm NOT cool with Facebook not even showing my content to my own friends.
The external link hating algorithm also extends to important news and events. Recently there was an arson attack in Japan on Kyoto Animation where the arsonist doused gasoline throughout the building and lit it on fire. 33+ people died, 37+ injured. I posted a link for my friends to donate to the official charity event on GoFundMe to help the survivors and victims. After 1 hour, ZERO interactions, ZERO comments, ZERO angry reactions.
I then deleted my post, and re-posted a text-only status with the same message and asking people to Google for the donation link. Within 1 hour, 25+ sad reactions and friends donating. Victims got helped, because I removed the link.
I see the same of friends' accounts as well. Links to blog posts about sexual assault encounters and racism get a fraction of the exposure they used to unless they are already viral, so they often never get seen. While on the other hand someone who posts a photo to Facebook directly about their amazing boba while #livingTheCaliforniaLife gets 100 likes.
Zuckerberg talked about changing the algorithm to "bring people closer together" and promote "meaningful interactions", but the algorithm really just promotes content uploaded to Facebook and down-ranks external content. It's not bringing people together at all.
And it's hurting independent creators even more, who increasingly depend on social media to spread their word.
That's funny, in my LinkedIn circle people have been doing this for more than a year, even marketing people recommend putting the link in a reply... apparently Facebook caught up with that.
But I guess it's a matter of time before FB starts fighting that too.
This is the problem of any platform.
What happens when the platform gets so big that you have thousands of videos competing for the same feed position because they are all getting likes?
I see the same thing happening with the dev.to platform. I used to syndicate my blog posts there. I got something like 7,000 followers in a few months while posting a few articles I picked from my site. They got thousands (10k+ on some of them) of views and every article I posted got tweeted from their main account which then got RT'd sometimes hundreds of times, etc..
But for the last few months not 1 of my articles have gotten tweeted and the posts have like 100 views (but have thousands of views on my own site).
So it's the same pattern. It's just a platform getting large enough where unless you get special treatment it's nearly impossible to be visible. In my case I'm probably not going to re-post on dev.to anymore because it's not worth the hassle to manually port those articles to their platform (which takes time).
It sounds like your reason for preferring TikTok's approach is tied to an underlying aspect of their business that currently does well for you, but which could very easily (dare I say very likely?) change as their business grows and needs evolve.
What if this is simply what they've determined is the best approach for acquiring content creator market share, and once they feel secure enough, they shift it towards a more monetization-focused blackbox approach? Would you still create content for it? Or are you platform agnostic and you'll go where the views and subscribers are?
I think the take away from the OP should be that there are other possibilities. We shouldn't think that the current state of YouTube is somehow optimal or the peak of video sharing simply because it is owned by a behemoth like Alphabet. Too often people assume that because Alphabet employs a lot of highly educated people who often happen to be very intelligent that the products they produce must be the pinnacle of creation but they're not. Their products are often just good enough or designed in such a way to make switching difficult.
You've correctly identified the underlying issue here -- misaligned incentives. As the dominant player in this field YouTube can no longer increase user count so they instead want to maximize per user revenue and the ways to go about are that produce a sub-optimal user and content creator experience.
Tik-Tok and Youtube before it are guilty of a common thing today which is basically business model bait and switch. Cool, Hip tech companies offer one thing to entice new users and once they get established they switch to a model that locks you in.
The solution isn't to just tweak content selection algorithms it's to move to a decentralized content distribution system so that we can't be lured into these kinds of bait and switch traps again.
You can't host the same type of content on there. Honestly people should just use PeerTube; either set up an instance or pay for a hosted one.
Youtube could be built on an old paradigm where a video is on average 1 hour long.
A carefully crafted minute will beat most longer videos. Applying frugality to the use of our very limited time seems like logical evolution.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
No user generated content meritocracy ever lasts. Not steam greenlight, not the app store, not new grounds, not YouTube etc.
The problem with your "transparent algorithm" is when the supply of content starts to outpace the supply of 50 users to test it on. Then content will inevitably get unfairly unviewed and the only thing left to do is implement some dodgy [redacted] process.
Don't believe me? Consider this. Your one clip takes 30*50=1500 seconds of user time to categorize (according to your algorithm). If a user spends 1 hr on tiktok per day, they effectively volunteered 3600 seconds of work towards categorizing clips as good or not. Meaning if you post a moderate amount (2, sometimes 3 times per day), you've just cancelled out that entire user and you only spent 90 seconds of your own time to do it. If more than half the people on the platform are moderate posters and 1 hr a day consumers, the system breaks.
If it did become a problem, TikTok could change rules so that you must review X clips for every one you post. It wouldn't put off most creators.
The reason user-generated recommendation systems don't last is not because they break down under a flood of content. The reason is that the platform finds it more profitable to promote content based on a different algorithm (whether that is pay to play, sponsored posts, optimise for user engagement/clickbait...).
They never get recommended to anyone because I'm a smaller
channel, and then I never become big for that reason.
No mention of actively promoting their content, not even in the comment itself.
Not relying on the whims of the platforms own algorithms seems like the first step.
I briefly worked on the recommenders for a fare sized fashion site. TLDR: the entire effort was a waste of money.
About the time I left, they were trying to pivot to a personalization based system. Think StitchFix. (With $1.5b/yr sales, they're doing much better than I thought possible.)
Long neglected is search and discovery. Somehow supporting casual foraging behavior online. We internally had long discussions about how to improve. I know exactly what I want and I worked for the company. Yet, I still couldn't find a likable shirt that fits. Pathetic and unforgivable. (I half considered moving to the search team, but stopped caring first.)
YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc. are all the same in this way. While I love YouTube content, it's terrible for finding new stuff.
PS- There's a phrase or term for preferential attachment leading into a (search space) local min (or max) sinkhole or dead end. Not recalling it right now is killing me. Any one know it?
I would guess it's mostly human-based selection, supported by algorithms.
This was super obvious when PewDiePie's videos were snubbed from recommended list for months at a time.
There was also this one instance where CEO promised to boost one rapper's channel (even though supposedly it's all done algorithmically).
How many people will be ever interested in a random topic in a random language? If I was provided with a sample of new uploaded content, I'd be interested in approximately 0% of it. Even if I'm subscribed to 30 or so varied channels right now.
I think you are correct that YT caters to the big names, but I can hardly blame them. It makes money for them. The platform is not about being fair: it's about making money for Google. I have no problem with that, really. They host my content for free, make it available to almost anyone, retain it for who knows how long... The fact that you have to do advertising and marketing for your content yourself is not really something that bothers me.
I think YouTube could do more to expose people to more small channels (especially when you run out of videos from subscriptions if you are lucky enough that they will even deliver them to you).
I'm hoping to get a bunch of YouTubers involved, since they want to get their stuff out there, and I think we can do better than YouTube at that. Notice that we won't be serving the videos, but we will embed them in a site.
The goal is to have something to put up on HN within two months.
If you want to join, let me know: rjbrown at gmail
So the question really is: If YouTube's algorithm is more sophisticated than TikTok's and TikTok is trying to do the same, would they still be as transparent about it?
(Runs off to check TikTok)
....
(After checking out some videos)
That was actually refreshing. Many of the videos were fun to watch and put a smile on my face. Not bad TikTok!
Works great for me.
Never even heard of tiktok and if it’s better for creators, great, but as a YT consumer I’m good
I stopped reading. YouTube is a completely free platform. It will even pay you to host your content there if it's popular enough. You're free to go else where.
TiKTok does not pay you. Your subscribers are just a number, and you have no evidence that most of them are even real and you offer no evidence in your post that any of it matters.
In today's times human attention is arguably the most valuable 'commodity' there is. And YouTube is using their peasants to produce it in unprecedented quantities. In exchange they return a small share of the returns produced, a free place to host, protection from attacks, and a [heavily biased] conflict resolution system.
It's of course technically correct that it's free, but the connotation is entirely wrong. Few would idealize for the "free housing" of feudalism, and I think in the future we'll have few that would idealize the "free hosting" of today. In the present? People are simply greatly undervaluing their own worth, much as the peasants did. It took the black death emphasizing their relevance for them to finally understand they were the ones running the show all along.
At the very least, YouTube can offer a service your video can go into limbo before it's sent out to your subscribers, where all of these "mistakes" can be ironed out.
Perhaps the platform is de-monetizing video based on mass reporting - leaving the system open to be gamed by anyone who is okay with the ethics of brigading/report bombing. This is a VERY common thing these days.
The other possibility is that the AI is generating false positives and de-monetizing as a result of it.
Whichever the case may be, it ought to be possible for content creators to publish a video that is not mistakenly de-monetized for the vast majority of their viewers.
I would say the “angry mob” is one of the biggest threats to free speech in our generation. If you can’t get the government to silence those you don’t like, try and get them deplatformed everywhere.
Counterpoint - it didn't cost you anything, it's just lost opportunity. Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days and literally no ones watches the videos you produce. You have no cost, but also no revenue.
I understand why people want to criticize YT, but if you are using a service that will gladly pay the costs for your distribution with no upfront obligation and no on-going payment, then what do you expect?
I mean this is why unions exist. Not suggesting that unions are the right answer here. In fact, I really don't know what the solution is, but I don't think either side of the table has a solution that will solve everyone's problems unilaterally.
Sorry I guess I should have provided the context - the context was you are a YouTube user with a subscriber base of regular viewers. I figured that came across when I quoted the viewership numbers. Monetization is only offered to users who meet some thresholds.
This has existed for some time. You can upload your video as "unlisted" and then later make it "public."
(N.B. "unlisted" != "private")
De-monetized videos do not show ads or earn revenue, so that actually hurts Google as well (of course it has indirect effects that are beneficial for Google overall).
When a video gets flagged, it supposedly is queued up for manual review. Upon manual review, if the YouTube employee deems that the video has broken one of its rules, it will take the video down and it will notify the uploader that they have received a strike.
That's all fine, but the problem is really in how they handle this interaction. They tell the user which "set of rules" they've broken (e.g. "Hate speech, discrimination or other forms of bigotry based on race, gender or religion"), but they get no more specific than that. They do not offer a timestamp for the exact moment in which you violated their rules. The result is as you'd expect. I'm sure many terrible videos are rightly taken down this way, but there are plenty of people who don't believe their video violated any rules and are seeking clarification on what they did wrong.
It would also be beneficial for the relationship between YouTube and its creators if there was an opportunity for restitution. For example, maybe YouTube informs the user that their video has violated a rule and if they don't take it down within some period of time, they will receive a strike and it will be taken down automatically (of course, with the knowledge that some types of videos should be taken down immediately). Maybe when YouTube takes a video down, they could timestamp it and tell the user that they can re-upload the video without that specific part.
As it is now, there are people who make their livings on YouTube, and these somewhat vague rules and the nebulous enforcement of them does not instill creators (I'm talking about creators who post about divisive or controversial things - could be something as simple as viewpoints on modern political news) with a feeling of security and the end-result may be that they simply move to a different platform.
If YouTube listens to the complaints of this 'FairTube' group and engages them, I think that'd be best for everyone.
Also if you make all your living just being on youtube and no other platforms, in my opinion you are setting yourself up for failure. Youtube is a business with shareholders. They do have a responcibility for creators bringing in the money, but just like facebook, when you are a creator on youtube your ARE the product. One does not have to like someone calling them a product, but it is still the truth.
So in other words, smaller channels can easily get stuck producing worse content because the risk of investing significant amounts of time into a single video is too great. And even when channels don't rely on monetisation, lost exposure can limit their reach and harm their growth.
I've seen a handful of primitive tech guy's videos, they are some of the most enjoyable videos on Youtube. There are very few videos where using someone else's music is a must, most videos are better off without these bad actors' music
For example, footage used in a review (say a clip of a TV show) necessarily comes with any background music. If the TV show is using licensed music in that scene, it then shows up in the Youtube video.
Even real-life, vlog-style footage can have unsolicited music.
There's also a full spectrum of Content ID claims that are frivolous because of over-matching. Even public-domain footage (especially video) can be claimed. For example, if a news agency uploads its own news report to the Content ID system for matching but that news report contains public-domain material such as a NASA video, that raw video itself can be reported as 'matching' in other uses.
Whether this effect is malicious or unintentional is a subject of debate.
My original video of an art exhibition got taken down because clapping in the video matched some rapper's song that Universal Music owns.
What do you recommend me to do to "not poke" Disney/Sony/etc?
youtubers are getting strikes for background music, using famous chord progressions, teaching music snippets, mentioning songs etc.
Ebay used to be a great garage sale / thrift-store place where individuals could sell their stuff, no hassle. Then they started catering to Ebay stores, and then finally they wanted to become Amazon 2.0, almost pushing individual sellers away. They're now basically geared toward large stores that act and operate like any big amazon store - you're pretty much expected to eat any losses that may come up, and write it off as "cost of doing business".
Same with Youtube. Used to be a great place for small individual creators, but now it's basically just a stream of memes and high-production vids that are the equivalent to visual fast-food.
Sure, you can still post as a small-timer, but there will be no help, and you're at the mercy of the big companies and their relentless search for copyrighted material. Or if you're not in the creative space, there's still a chance you'll get screwed by arbitrary tripping the controversial content-wire.
All that kinda narrows down the scope of what one can create, and thus we see the rise of low-effort content farms .
(It's not that there's no good content - there's a ton of good high-quality content, but as we've seen the past years, even the good channels with a decent amount of followers can get demonetized at the drop of a hat)
What are you talking about? Youtube is full of great high quality content from individual creators. So much so, I'd wager youtube gives "real tv" a serious run for their money. Almost all my video-based content consumption is youtube these days.
https://www.mic.com/articles/157977/inside-the-secret-meetin...
The difference of course is we don't really have active and vocal "followers" in the way YouTube creators do, so for the most part, when a website owner like myself gets penalized for some abstract and out of my hand reason, or a algorithm change destroys your business overnight, it happens silently, beyond the headlines.
I can't stress this enough -- Google has been a powerful, often positive force for the wider Internet. But they're also a cruel, heartless, and often maniacal source of pain and sorrow.
People want YouTube's captive audience of billions and the pre-existing monetization network. But they are upset that there are arbitrary rules for accessing that audience/money. I am pretty sure that 99.9% of Youtubers wouldn't exist if there were no possibility of ever making money from their videos.
Wherever YouTube stands right now, it's still better than the situation 20 years ago where a few network executives controlled what sort of video programming would be produced. It might not be perfect, but there are plenty of people who started from nothing that are making money from their creative work; something that wouldn't have even been possible just a few years ago. So maybe it's not all bad.
* use Ublock Origin
* use youtuble-dl if you intend to watch something multiple times to save bandwidth
* SUPPORT your favorite creators on Patreon and/or via donations
I'd personally want to see rise an alternative made of peertube and micro donations, where users would chose to pay for infrastructure and content creation, but I don't know how to make this happen.
Patreon is probably the best current system that's out there, but it doesn't provide a good way to get eyes on the content. I'm trying to create an open source reddit meets patreon system, with the model described by this interactive prototype: https://syd.jjcm.org/soci/
I've got the frontend sorted, an API fully specced out, and some rough backend code created, but I'll be honest in that I'm not a backend guy so I could use some help. If anyone is interested in trying to solve the problem send me a message at j@jjcm.org. I've got an active job ad in the who's hiring page with more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20331491
I'd also be open to just paying someone remote to help out. At the end of the day I just want there to be a better system available for creatives.
The social media giants' problem is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the editorial control, and they want to be absolved of any liability when they host terrorist propaganda (think ISIL), pedo bait, and other garbage.
There's also the recent court decisions regarding politicians' usage of blocking. That ruling creeps right up to the line of recognizing "private" social media providers as a public square of sorts. The situation we're in is not tenable for much longer.
I am over 40 years old and I am unable to find regular employment. For the last 6 months, I am learning to program and trying developing 3 web apps. I am hoping that one of them will reach ramen profitability.
For example, I'm not a fan of how the algorithm seems to prioritize clickbait (clickbait is the cancer of the internet) and longer videos. This leads people to load up their videos with filler to hit that 10 minutes length, and then sensationalize their titles, often into "questions" that the video will then fail to subsequently answer. I've had a video get a false copyright claim - it sucked, and it steered me away from making the kind of political videos that use news clips.
But there are no viable competitors, I guess because hosting video content is expensive and network effects. Facebook is probably the closest competitor, but there's too much noise and it's not really much of a search engine for videos. Tik-Tok is not a competitor - it serves an entirely different market (the one formerly served by Vine and Music.ly) of short mobile clips.
Until Youtube starts shadowbanning channels and playing a "Big Brother" censorship role, I'll continue to post there. (I've heard rumours of Youtube shadowbanning channels, but I'm not convinced that they're legitimate, though I haven't really looked into it)
Even as a semi serious history buff, I learn new stuff. But they have been demonetized, seriously hurting their ability to put up videos.
He put up an extensive view on this and states there is no rhythm or rhyme on what gets restricted or not.
I have no idea what exactly they changed but from my perspective as a casual viewer it had a large and negative impact.
But they can do that as they are a private company. They don't owe anyone anything. If you rely on YouTube for a living without a backup plan then you are dumb.
YouTube is no longer the only player in online video. If you don't like what YouTube is doing then look at alternative platforms.
Worse, like I'm trying to sleep, and I turn on some ASMR or meditation video, and if I forget to turn off the "auto play" feature (it's annoying to turn off from the TV interface), then I'm hit with what can only be described as used-car-guy-volume ads. "BUY NOW! LOW LOW PRICES!"
Now I just use a video scraper to download the videos I like so I can watch them while I sleep. Nobody wins when they don't tie ads to content, or ads to users.
But to be more sympathetic, in this case it just sounds like YouTube should have done most of its automated content scans before posting the video in the first place.
- YouTube is owned by Google.
- Furthermore, the world's most popular browser is owned by Google.
- Furthermore, even the other popular browsers will forward your location bar text to Google as default behavior.
So if I am a content creator, my platform decision is guided by these realities plus:
1) Most folks type what they are looking for in their browser's location bar.
2) The result of this action is most often a Google search result page
3) Google search results seem to favor YouTube over other video platforms
So if I want to publish a video review of the iPhone 12, and I decide to go with Vimeo. I am doing so despite all of the above.
Let's say I stick with YouTube. What if Alphabet buys 30% stake in Engadget.com and their AI mysteriously starts to "bug out" and de-monetize all the independent phone reviewers. Is there any transparency? Is it illegal?
You can also argue that there's no compulsion to depend on YouTube for monetization, but YouTube's very existence is owed to content creators. Folks were on places like LiveLeak and other platforms until YouTube essentially "bribed" everyone into switching over by offering monetization. Now YouTube has a monopoly over the audience. YouTube has the power to hand-pick the next big star by just "tweaking" their visibility. They could even hand-pick the next President. This kind of power ought to concern anyone.
Besides YouTube, some other platforms that many people's businesses/livelihoods depend on in one way or another: Google AdSense, Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Associates, Steam, Patreon, Square, Uber, ...
https://www.city-journal.org/html/platform-or-publisher-1588...
Note this article is more about speech but you get the idea.
I don't think it's entitlement but the creators want to know the "rules".
Not really. If the discussion was about weather a video should be allowed to exist, or be taken down, then yes it would be publisher vs platform. But this is a case of monetization vs non-monetization. I think YouTube, Twitter, ect. should be treated as "Platforms" and that nothing should ever be deleted/banned/taken down unless it is strictly illegal. That said, monetization is entirely a different beast, YouTube as a business can pick and choose which videos to monetize and which ones not to. Restricting content is a violation of the 1st amendment, refusing to pay creators is a business decision.
The article you linked does not refute the claims in the eff article, but the eff article does refute the claims in the city-journal article.
Kings used to own the land and serfs work it with no rights.
Platforms as Youtube own a new kind of land and Youtubers work on it with no rights.
This analogy stinks, sorry.
Sure there is a lot of crap on there but there are some real gems on YouTube.
If youtube suddenly stopped supporting user content we would see youtube shutdown like google+.
There are enough places for studios to provide content and many more streaming options coming your way shortly.
Now if youtube decided to copy netflix and started pouring in billions for new self produced content yearly that might be an option.
They could do Patreon, make their own products..etc.
These people should think of Youtube as one distributor only, and just like a TV show can move from NBC to Netflix, they should open to change distribution channels whenever it benefits them.
I know the community/audience is on Youtube argument makes this a difficult problem, but I feel like this has been somewhat solved. You can still advertise on Youtube. You can still promote teasers of your brand on Youtube.
Look at Russel Brand right now, he levered iTunes to create a new Podcast, which then became a Premium product that is only accessible from the Luminary app. But that doesn't mean he can't still benefit from iTunes and use it as a sales channel to move his audience over.
First you must spend years, to the exclusion of much else, to even have a chance to become one. And even if you succeed you're very likely to be just an average athlete. Most won't earn enough money in their ~20 year career to live on for the rest of their life, so you still need to make a big career shift late in your life.
And you're always at the mercy of facing a career-ending injury, similar to how Google can wreck your channel for whatever reason.
Tim Schmoyer for example talks about this a lot, of how he was making over 10k usd a month in a channel with 10k subs or less, because he built a business model around the channel and not just based himself on addsense.
Well, it's safer than playing poker.
Would "platform risk" matter that much ?
Then maybe copyright law would be molded into a better system. Which is exactly what these copyright cartels DON’T want. They want to avoid any judicial review whatsoever of their actions.
My monitor is only 1080p but I set the quality to 1440p or 4K if the video supports it, as those resolutions allow a higher bitrate and I can enjoy videos without noticeable distortion. I prefer my computer to downscale the image instead of Youtube butchering the whole thing by limiting the bitrate to an extreme.
I understand that Youtube has to optimize their storage and bandwidth, but still, if I see a video with too many compression artifacts I just close it.
It’s not insta-death, but it’s not going to be like it was for a while.
That said, I feel that a reminder about the nature of YouTube monetization, AKA the YouTube Partner Program is in order. The YPP puts ads in and around your video and gives you part of the profit from running those ads, but what does that mean? It means YouTube is: >Finding advertisers >Persuading them it can pick content (yours) that is profitable to advertise on >Handling the entire negotiation and payment work behind implementing that advertising >Handling the entire technical aspect of adding those advertisements to your video
That is an enormous amount of work YouTube is doing for its content creators for free. You are not in any way entitled to YouTube doing that work for you. Having your videos categorized as not eligible for the YPP is not in any way depriving you of the ability to make money from them, just the ability to automatically make money from them with no effort on your part. Without access to the YPP, you are still free to find sponsors, find advertisers and run your own ads, receive donations, or rely on patronage services like Patreon. That means you have every single avenue of revenue generation (aside from paywalling your content) available to you that you'd have if you were hosting the videos yourself on a personal server. Hell you can even do that if you want to set up some kind of script that uploads your videos as Private and only adds viewer usernames to the whitelist after they pay you.
It would be a terrible idea, but YouTube would be entirely within its rights to charge content creators for the bandwidth consumed by their viewers and offer no assistance at all for making money off your content. YouTube owes you nothing.
You give rights to your content to Youtube only for purposes of operating and promoting Youtube, which means that it won't eventually become remixed by third party and put behind paywall without you having anything to say about it. And this license which you grant to Youtube ends if you remove your videos. Also it doesn't have indemnification clause. Compare it to virtually all other services which request irrevocable right to do pretty much anything with your content and also demand indemnification.