The fact that Google/Youtube has zero support infrastructure should be evidence that they are a monopoly and engaging in monopolistic activity.
If Google/Youtube were NOT a monopoly, they would have invested significant amount of money in customer support. However, there is zero. The only reason they get away with this is because they have a monopoly. They are saving hundreds of millions in support costs by not delivering any support. Unlike more overt monopolistic actions like raising prices, etc, what they do instead of increase their profits by taking away functionality that their customers should be receiving.
The fact you can get all your work taken away because of fraud, and have no recourse is unacceptable. Yet there really is no viable alternative. I hope content creators band together and form a class action lawsuit against Google and break up their monopoly. It's disgusting.
I think so too. If they were not a monopoly they'd have content creators fleeing the platform for how they handle these type of situations but for many youtube provides a decent source of income. Content creators respected their part of the bargain and worked hard to build their channels and Google benefitted quite well. But they're not only not equal, one zero power and the other one has all of it.
They do have support infrastructure for their customers. Youtube content creators are not customers, they’re more akin to contractors (when paid) and volunteers (when not). In fact, google is the customer in this relationship, and they are within their rights to stop buying the product without having to explain why.
It is on content creators to diversify their business. If a contractor has only a single customer because that customer is the most profitable, would you pity them when they are fired by that customer? Or would you call them bad at business for failing to diversify?
Google has a support infra structure, but it's only for big and/or paying customers.
If you don't pay Google anything, you are not a customer. You are either a supplier, delivering content, or a user, consuming (free) content.
They have customer support. Their customer is an advertising company or brand. Hosting video from anyone in the world at up to 8k resolution is expensive. The product is your eyeballs. They revenue share with content creators who bring you eyeballs. They have lots of content creators. They use automation to manage the content at scale so they can be profitable.
There has got to be a better word than Monopoly for companies like Google or YouTube. The barrier to enter the market is relatively low and there is almost no inherent lock-in to the platform. Everyone could stop using Google and YouTube today and switch to another platform. However, creators won’t because of the viewers and viewers won’t because of the creators.
People could stop using Google today but most don’t, because Google is just so much better than everyone else as searching.
Should Google/YouTube be regulated because people dislike what the company is doing, but just not enough to actually stop using their products.
Why get so far with the proof? Looking at market share is far easier.
Great point, though. They are saving millions - in order to provide actual customer support they would have to hire a lot of people from all around the world.
I wonder - but I'm sceptical - if a competitor internet giant will come to the fore that offers similar services that google and youtube does, but whose USP would be better support, less aggressive copyright enforcement (it HAS to have copyright enforcement else they'll be torn apart in court).
Anti-trust laws (and the concepts that are based upon) do not apply to free services, and portions of YouTube that do collect subscription fees do have a full support structure.
Your assertion that Google has a monopoly in this market is wrong for several reasons. The first is that there is no market for Googke/YouTube to control. Ad revenue which covers less than their overhead makes them a non-profit and YouTube in particular is closer to meeting the requirements for being classified as a government protected service than an anti-trust concern.
Second,nobody makes money in the free media hosting and distribution product domain. This is well known and is a large part of why they have virtually no competition.
Third, YouTube wouldn't even have a system that automatically takes down channels except that laws were written that required them to do so.
Google doesn't make money from YouTube, and they only acquired it for the good will providing a free service generates for them. Recently the head of YouTube has been making weird even retarded decisions, but it's still a free service that operates in an application domain that basically can't make money by definition.
I'm not a lawyer, and I definitely think the whole copyright system needs reform, but I believe there could be legitimate issues with the legality of publicly posting guitar covers as this person is doing on their channel.
I'm not very familiar with the channel, but from the little I've seen, I believe the educational nature (and thereby fair use defense) could be debatable. Even if some of his videos are clearly educational, it seems that some videos are just covers of popular songs. And even if he's not using published sheet music to play the songs, he may still be required to have mechanical licenses, and possibly also sync licenses.
Most published music has three licenses that could be relevant here: the mechanical license (covering the combination of notes, rhythms, and/or lyrics that make the song distinct and "recognizable"), the sync license (using the song along with images/video), and a master license (covering a specific recording of the song). From my limited experience (and confirmed here [1]), it appears that many of these videos probably require at least a mechanical license to be performed publicly on the channel.
That being said, I absolutely agree with the sentiment that YouTube's handling of these issues is extremely problematic. They really need to start treating content creators with more respect and assume innocence until proven otherwise. There also needs to be more transparency into the process (and claims) so creators aren't left in the dark, along with improved ways to respond to erroneous claims.
> I run a YouTube channel that is over 10 years old, has over 770,000 subscribers, almost 600 public videos, 120,000,000 views
When writing software involved in managing a live, public, massively multi-user system, the traditional unix-style commands that are immediate, often silent, and capable of damaging effects become a really easy way to shoot yourself in the foot. Worse, some commands might let you accidentally shoot everyone's foot on a typo. The traditional example is accidentally typing something like "rm -f * .bak" (note the extra space after the star).
For a good discussion of this type of problem, I highly recommend Bryan Cantrill's talk[1] about the time an operator accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter with a single miss-typed command.
The general solution to this is building sanity checks into the software. The user just asked to reformat 500 hosts, but almost all previous uses olf the 'reformat' command affected less than 10 hosts. Maybe we should ask for verification from an actual human if they really intended to run this unusually destructive command.
Why doesn't YouTube have this kind of sanity check in their automated takedown/strike/channel-deletion tools? Google wrote automation that can decide to delete a channel with a long history and many successful videos. Why doesn't that automation have basic sanity checks that ask for operator input when asked to do an unusually destructive action like deleting a 10 year old channel with a huge history?
It sucks that Google doesn't offer better support, but are they really to blame here? Isn't the root of the issue IP and copyright laws and this very nebulous notion of "fair use" that seems extremely easy for IP owners to dispute and win?
I see people in this comment section posting alternatives to Youtube but I really wonder if, should they become equally as successful, they could end up behaving any different.
When you get thousands of videos uploaded at any given moment and probably a huge amount of DMCA takedown requests what choice do you reasonably have? If there's one thing Google doesn't want is to be sued by the copyright owners, so they always take the defensive stance of taking the content down until proven innocent, which seems cynically reasonable to me.
That guy makes song covers. He claims it's non-profit, he claims it's fair use. The IP owner disagrees, issues a takedown. At this point Google either takes the content down, or starts a lengthy and risky legal battle on behalf of third party content that they do not control. I can't really blame them for not bothering.
BTW, IANAL and all that but I'm not entirely convinced that his "non-profit fair-use" defense would even hold up in court. Surely he monetizes his videos on top of asking for donations and putting ads on his website. Given his number of subscribers he probably makes a significant amount of money from these videos.
To be clear, I think ethically what he does is perfectly fine, but as we all know IP laws have very little to do with ethics. Focusing on big bad google is a bit simplistic here IMO.
The thing is, this is not only a YouTube channel, it's a small business. Google is literally shutting down a small business without any proof. You could think that it's somewhat illegal to do, but apparently it's not.
I've seen this on Twitter, Reddit and now HN, so I assume there will be enough buzz for Google to do something. I expect his channel to be undeleted, then a Twitter apology, then to repeat this all over again with another channel with sufficient clout in 5-6 months.
> It’s important that creators always have detailed knowledge about who is claiming content in their videos, where it appears, and what they can do to resolve the claim. That’s why all new manual claims will require copyright owners to provide timestamps to indicate exactly where their copyrighted content appears in videos they claim, and we’ve updated our editing tools to make it easier to automatically release a claim.
Is it a bug with Youtube or do they not follow this policy (consistently)?
Youtube has had a scam video ad up for 3 days now advertising fallguys for mobile where it's just a page that forces you to install other apps. It was blatant and I reported it but YouTube can't be bothered to dispatch a human to look at it.
I've seen more promoted Livestream scams in the last 6 months promising crypto giveaways than ever. They're equally blatant and impersonating tesla, spaceX and even Steve Wozniak.
If Google can't be bothered to properly pay humans to moderate this they shouldn't be entitled to the billions in profit that comes from it.
More than 25,000 YouTubers now publish to the LBRY protocol, with more coming over every day, for reasons just like this. The total reach of these creators is more than 400,000,000 people.
We're just rolling out our mainstream video product explicitly designed to compete with YouTube @ https://odysee.com
To learn more about the protocol itself, check out https://lbry.tech
There isn't a fair use defense to playing cover songs. Moving to an alternative site isn't going to help. This person still needs licenses to distribute even if he is doing covers for free.
If you know how, or are a serious youtuber and have the money to pay for IT people, setup a PeerTube instance. There are scripts that will copy your YouTube or Vimeo library to a PeerTube instance:
Queue the responses of how people don't or won't use it because it's too small, but they will complain YouTube has a monopoly.
I don't know what you guys expect to happen if you just keep using YouTube... Do you expect some benevolent spirit to fly down on a fairy chariot and "break up YouTube"?
So, of those sites, I had only heard of dailymotion. The others I had never visited before, so they will have no history on me, and will get clean recommendations. Upon going to each one, here's what I got:
lbry.tv - Shows 6 videos on the front page above the fold. 3 are appear to be strongly political, and 1 is pushing a far right conspiracy. NEXT.
bitchute.com - Front page appears to be entirely far right propaganda and conspiracy theories. Lots of race baiting. NEXT
diive.tv - Front page appears to indicate this is a streaming site ala twitch.tv. Mostly game videos on front page, along with 3 race riot videos. Due to titles about "no-go zones", I assume they are all going to be far right propaganda.
bittube.tv - Half of the videos on the front page are not in English. Not a bad thing, but surprising to me. The rest of the videos seem to be focusing on bitcoin scams, bill gates vaccines, and videos calling the corona-virus a left wing conspiracy.
Based on what I have seen, I now assume most of these sites are for people banned from Youtube for spouting far-right propaganda. Would not recommend any of them, and will likely not be back.
Imagine if you showed up to a self-storage facility one day and find a different lock on your unit. You go to the manager and ask what the hell is going on.
> Oh, you? Yeah, your unit was full of stolen goods, so we seized it and changed the lock.
> There was nothing stolen in there! What about a bunch of banged up furniture and old cans of paint made you think it was stolen?
(the manager stares blankly)
> Well?!
(crickets)
> Can I at least take back my stuff that you didn't mistake for being stolen?
> We burned it all and sunk the ashes in the Mariana Trench. There is no recourse. As far as we're concerned, you don't exist. Have a nice day!
> Gee, thanks... ᵃˢˢʰᵒˡᵉ
---
If we ever come up with a digital bill of rights, one of the amendments should include being given a grace period to retrieve all of the data that you stored with a service in case they decide to terminate your account. It's absurd that you can store your data with a service one day, and in the next it's all gone because reasons.
It's not entirely fair to blame YouTube exclusively for the complicated mess that is copyright laws. In fact most of this video & thread are misdirected blame.
Per the video it sounds like he received 5 DMCA copyright strikes to which he issues counter-claims. That's not youtube's system and youtube is bound to follow the laws outlined by the DMCA. YouTube didn't issue the copyright strike, so why would YouTube know what was or wasn't at issue?
So yes the system is broken, but moving somewhere else doesn't fix it. The new system will still have this exact same set of circumstances happen because that new system will still be governed by DMCA & US copyright law (in this instance being US-based).
The only part of this that has anything to do with YouTube itself or being in YouTube's control is the channel being deleted. But that policy is clear - 3 copyright strikes and the channel is deleted. Too harsh? Maybe. Ambiguous or unclear? No. And if the channel does what it should as a business & lawyers up to respond to the DMCA notices & issue counter-claims, if those counters are successful then the channel remains at 0 strikes and isn't deleted. But there the part that's shit is DMCA. Want to fix that part? Stop blaming YouTube for it and go try to get the law reformed. YouTube isn't going to be your lawyer. Nor will Vimeo. Nor will any video hosting service.
It does indeed feel like they supplanted regular television in some sense, and is catering to "the establishment" more and more each year.
Before the focus felt like it was more on exposing people to new up-and-comers, or random viral stuff. The viral stuff is still there, but so algorithmically driven, and catering to the lowest common denominator that it just feels off.
I have no clue how to find new channels with interesting concepts anymore.
This is just the general trend with things running on Google owned services. I don't think I've ever had to deal with a more customer/user hostile company. I've had an Android app get payments blocked and had to deal with repeated back-and-forth resending of the same documents over and over before they unblocked it. I never did get an answer on why any of that was necessary or why it was impossible to ever speak to anyone about the details related to the issue.
It's bad enough they just wholesale kill services that people love and rely on. The whole "the algorithm has decided to kill your account with no explanation" risk makes it feel like we're already dealing with a dystopian reality in some respects.
I do have my personal email in a Google Apps, but have a @gmail account for other stuff. I decided to try to set up a family account for my kid. After testing it I decided at this point it's still not needed so I deleted the account.
Next day I received a notification Google was terminating my account with the message "It looks like it was being used in a way that violated Google's policies." Had to appeal the decision and they restored it, no explanation given.
Google customer support is awful. I decided to move my professional email from Google Apps. I don't feel comfortable using a company that can decide to lock your out from your personal stuff without warning and a proper explanation.
This is not atypical for YouTube. I had a full on paid gsuite account and when they lost my channel there was “nothing we can do”. I had the video backed up, but lost all the links, views, and subscribers.
Ok, rant time. I used Google Drive to back up photos for several years, but after moving to somewhere with a different currency I naturally wanted to avoid those extortionate fines banks charge for multiplying two numbers together.
I tried to use their web site. No option to change currency. Then I tried contacting support. What a shitshow that was:
- They claimed it was trivial, but the web site just wouldn't cooperate. "You can't change your country because one or more Google services you're using does not allow you to change your country." Google Support were never able to tell me which service that was.
- They suggested and I tried the usual restart, reboot, reinstall, clean cookies, try different browsers, login from an incognito window, etc. etc.
- Then they asked me to delete all registered payment options and finally to cancel my Drive subscription, after which point of course I lost access to my files and I was no longer able to pay to reinstate access.
After several months of support assuring me that they had "our specialist team working on this" not a single thing happened.
Thankfully I had a big enough hard drive to store all the photos, so I just found another service (which has been rock solid ever since) and made a mental note to move off of Google ASAP.
[+] [-] jennyyang|5 years ago|reply
If Google/Youtube were NOT a monopoly, they would have invested significant amount of money in customer support. However, there is zero. The only reason they get away with this is because they have a monopoly. They are saving hundreds of millions in support costs by not delivering any support. Unlike more overt monopolistic actions like raising prices, etc, what they do instead of increase their profits by taking away functionality that their customers should be receiving.
The fact you can get all your work taken away because of fraud, and have no recourse is unacceptable. Yet there really is no viable alternative. I hope content creators band together and form a class action lawsuit against Google and break up their monopoly. It's disgusting.
[+] [-] tartoran|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeri|5 years ago|reply
It is on content creators to diversify their business. If a contractor has only a single customer because that customer is the most profitable, would you pity them when they are fired by that customer? Or would you call them bad at business for failing to diversify?
[+] [-] bestnameever|5 years ago|reply
I'm not sure one has anything to do with the other.
[+] [-] y42|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gogopuppygogo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbj|5 years ago|reply
Now thats a keen insight and not a warning of a monopoly I was aware of. You're dead right.
[+] [-] jasonlfunk|5 years ago|reply
People could stop using Google today but most don’t, because Google is just so much better than everyone else as searching.
Should Google/YouTube be regulated because people dislike what the company is doing, but just not enough to actually stop using their products.
[+] [-] aleksjess|5 years ago|reply
Great point, though. They are saving millions - in order to provide actual customer support they would have to hire a lot of people from all around the world.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pndy|5 years ago|reply
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Google/YT TOS saying that by uploading materials user gives away its rights to these (or at least some rights)?
[+] [-] scotty79|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plazmatic|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tikiman163|5 years ago|reply
Your assertion that Google has a monopoly in this market is wrong for several reasons. The first is that there is no market for Googke/YouTube to control. Ad revenue which covers less than their overhead makes them a non-profit and YouTube in particular is closer to meeting the requirements for being classified as a government protected service than an anti-trust concern.
Second,nobody makes money in the free media hosting and distribution product domain. This is well known and is a large part of why they have virtually no competition.
Third, YouTube wouldn't even have a system that automatically takes down channels except that laws were written that required them to do so.
Google doesn't make money from YouTube, and they only acquired it for the good will providing a free service generates for them. Recently the head of YouTube has been making weird even retarded decisions, but it's still a free service that operates in an application domain that basically can't make money by definition.
[+] [-] dperfect|5 years ago|reply
I'm not very familiar with the channel, but from the little I've seen, I believe the educational nature (and thereby fair use defense) could be debatable. Even if some of his videos are clearly educational, it seems that some videos are just covers of popular songs. And even if he's not using published sheet music to play the songs, he may still be required to have mechanical licenses, and possibly also sync licenses.
Most published music has three licenses that could be relevant here: the mechanical license (covering the combination of notes, rhythms, and/or lyrics that make the song distinct and "recognizable"), the sync license (using the song along with images/video), and a master license (covering a specific recording of the song). From my limited experience (and confirmed here [1]), it appears that many of these videos probably require at least a mechanical license to be performed publicly on the channel.
That being said, I absolutely agree with the sentiment that YouTube's handling of these issues is extremely problematic. They really need to start treating content creators with more respect and assume innocence until proven otherwise. There also needs to be more transparency into the process (and claims) so creators aren't left in the dark, along with improved ways to respond to erroneous claims.
[1] https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...
[+] [-] pdkl95|5 years ago|reply
When writing software involved in managing a live, public, massively multi-user system, the traditional unix-style commands that are immediate, often silent, and capable of damaging effects become a really easy way to shoot yourself in the foot. Worse, some commands might let you accidentally shoot everyone's foot on a typo. The traditional example is accidentally typing something like "rm -f * .bak" (note the extra space after the star).
For a good discussion of this type of problem, I highly recommend Bryan Cantrill's talk[1] about the time an operator accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter with a single miss-typed command.
The general solution to this is building sanity checks into the software. The user just asked to reformat 500 hosts, but almost all previous uses olf the 'reformat' command affected less than 10 hosts. Maybe we should ask for verification from an actual human if they really intended to run this unusually destructive command.
Why doesn't YouTube have this kind of sanity check in their automated takedown/strike/channel-deletion tools? Google wrote automation that can decide to delete a channel with a long history and many successful videos. Why doesn't that automation have basic sanity checks that ask for operator input when asked to do an unusually destructive action like deleting a 10 year old channel with a huge history?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30jNsCVLpAE
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
I see people in this comment section posting alternatives to Youtube but I really wonder if, should they become equally as successful, they could end up behaving any different.
When you get thousands of videos uploaded at any given moment and probably a huge amount of DMCA takedown requests what choice do you reasonably have? If there's one thing Google doesn't want is to be sued by the copyright owners, so they always take the defensive stance of taking the content down until proven innocent, which seems cynically reasonable to me.
That guy makes song covers. He claims it's non-profit, he claims it's fair use. The IP owner disagrees, issues a takedown. At this point Google either takes the content down, or starts a lengthy and risky legal battle on behalf of third party content that they do not control. I can't really blame them for not bothering.
BTW, IANAL and all that but I'm not entirely convinced that his "non-profit fair-use" defense would even hold up in court. Surely he monetizes his videos on top of asking for donations and putting ads on his website. Given his number of subscribers he probably makes a significant amount of money from these videos.
To be clear, I think ethically what he does is perfectly fine, but as we all know IP laws have very little to do with ethics. Focusing on big bad google is a bit simplistic here IMO.
[+] [-] edgartaor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemothekid|5 years ago|reply
It's a complete shitshow.
[+] [-] throwayws|5 years ago|reply
> It’s important that creators always have detailed knowledge about who is claiming content in their videos, where it appears, and what they can do to resolve the claim. That’s why all new manual claims will require copyright owners to provide timestamps to indicate exactly where their copyrighted content appears in videos they claim, and we’ve updated our editing tools to make it easier to automatically release a claim.
Is it a bug with Youtube or do they not follow this policy (consistently)?
[+] [-] masswerk|5 years ago|reply
Proud times!
[+] [-] tgtweak|5 years ago|reply
I've seen more promoted Livestream scams in the last 6 months promising crypto giveaways than ever. They're equally blatant and impersonating tesla, spaceX and even Steve Wozniak.
If Google can't be bothered to properly pay humans to moderate this they shouldn't be entitled to the billions in profit that comes from it.
Edit: there you have it, 345k views and it's still up: https://youtu.be/hEI0McfLF9Y
[+] [-] kjaftaedi|5 years ago|reply
Is he legally allowed to make a guitar cover of any song he wants to and distribute it?
It's also not clear if there were ads on the videos. Would that play a role?
[+] [-] totaldude87|5 years ago|reply
770,000 subscribers 120 million views 600 videos
all gone in 4 days!!!!! keep rocking youtube!!!
Google is now a monopoly with Search, Youtube and probably gmail be right?!
[+] [-] kauffj|5 years ago|reply
We're just rolling out our mainstream video product explicitly designed to compete with YouTube @ https://odysee.com
To learn more about the protocol itself, check out https://lbry.tech
[+] [-] deadalus|5 years ago|reply
https://lbry.tv/
https://www.dailymotion.com/
https://www.bitchute.com/
https://dlive.tv/
https://bittube.tv/
[+] [-] ainar-g|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CryoLogic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athms|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wlll|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|5 years ago|reply
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/moving-from-youtube-to-peertu...
[+] [-] worldmerge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LockAndLol|5 years ago|reply
I don't know what you guys expect to happen if you just keep using YouTube... Do you expect some benevolent spirit to fly down on a fairy chariot and "break up YouTube"?
Y'all just want to complain but do nothing else.
[+] [-] CyberRabbi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmeredith|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _fs|5 years ago|reply
lbry.tv - Shows 6 videos on the front page above the fold. 3 are appear to be strongly political, and 1 is pushing a far right conspiracy. NEXT.
bitchute.com - Front page appears to be entirely far right propaganda and conspiracy theories. Lots of race baiting. NEXT
diive.tv - Front page appears to indicate this is a streaming site ala twitch.tv. Mostly game videos on front page, along with 3 race riot videos. Due to titles about "no-go zones", I assume they are all going to be far right propaganda.
bittube.tv - Half of the videos on the front page are not in English. Not a bad thing, but surprising to me. The rest of the videos seem to be focusing on bitcoin scams, bill gates vaccines, and videos calling the corona-virus a left wing conspiracy.
Based on what I have seen, I now assume most of these sites are for people banned from Youtube for spouting far-right propaganda. Would not recommend any of them, and will likely not be back.
[+] [-] TeeMassive|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teh_klev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vaccinator|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ravenstine|5 years ago|reply
> Oh, you? Yeah, your unit was full of stolen goods, so we seized it and changed the lock.
> There was nothing stolen in there! What about a bunch of banged up furniture and old cans of paint made you think it was stolen?
(the manager stares blankly)
> Well?!
(crickets)
> Can I at least take back my stuff that you didn't mistake for being stolen?
> We burned it all and sunk the ashes in the Mariana Trench. There is no recourse. As far as we're concerned, you don't exist. Have a nice day!
> Gee, thanks... ᵃˢˢʰᵒˡᵉ
---
If we ever come up with a digital bill of rights, one of the amendments should include being given a grace period to retrieve all of the data that you stored with a service in case they decide to terminate your account. It's absurd that you can store your data with a service one day, and in the next it's all gone because reasons.
[+] [-] Ashanmaril|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kllrnohj|5 years ago|reply
It's not entirely fair to blame YouTube exclusively for the complicated mess that is copyright laws. In fact most of this video & thread are misdirected blame.
Per the video it sounds like he received 5 DMCA copyright strikes to which he issues counter-claims. That's not youtube's system and youtube is bound to follow the laws outlined by the DMCA. YouTube didn't issue the copyright strike, so why would YouTube know what was or wasn't at issue?
So yes the system is broken, but moving somewhere else doesn't fix it. The new system will still have this exact same set of circumstances happen because that new system will still be governed by DMCA & US copyright law (in this instance being US-based).
The only part of this that has anything to do with YouTube itself or being in YouTube's control is the channel being deleted. But that policy is clear - 3 copyright strikes and the channel is deleted. Too harsh? Maybe. Ambiguous or unclear? No. And if the channel does what it should as a business & lawyers up to respond to the DMCA notices & issue counter-claims, if those counters are successful then the channel remains at 0 strikes and isn't deleted. But there the part that's shit is DMCA. Want to fix that part? Stop blaming YouTube for it and go try to get the law reformed. YouTube isn't going to be your lawyer. Nor will Vimeo. Nor will any video hosting service.
[+] [-] NegatioN|5 years ago|reply
Before the focus felt like it was more on exposing people to new up-and-comers, or random viral stuff. The viral stuff is still there, but so algorithmically driven, and catering to the lowest common denominator that it just feels off.
I have no clue how to find new channels with interesting concepts anymore.
[+] [-] nfriedly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bilalq|5 years ago|reply
It's bad enough they just wholesale kill services that people love and rely on. The whole "the algorithm has decided to kill your account with no explanation" risk makes it feel like we're already dealing with a dystopian reality in some respects.
[+] [-] burai|5 years ago|reply
Next day I received a notification Google was terminating my account with the message "It looks like it was being used in a way that violated Google's policies." Had to appeal the decision and they restored it, no explanation given.
Google customer support is awful. I decided to move my professional email from Google Apps. I don't feel comfortable using a company that can decide to lock your out from your personal stuff without warning and a proper explanation.
[+] [-] perakojotgenije|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
[+] [-] dundercoder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l0b0|5 years ago|reply
I tried to use their web site. No option to change currency. Then I tried contacting support. What a shitshow that was:
- They claimed it was trivial, but the web site just wouldn't cooperate. "You can't change your country because one or more Google services you're using does not allow you to change your country." Google Support were never able to tell me which service that was.
- They suggested and I tried the usual restart, reboot, reinstall, clean cookies, try different browsers, login from an incognito window, etc. etc.
- Then they asked me to delete all registered payment options and finally to cancel my Drive subscription, after which point of course I lost access to my files and I was no longer able to pay to reinstate access.
After several months of support assuring me that they had "our specialist team working on this" not a single thing happened.
Thankfully I had a big enough hard drive to store all the photos, so I just found another service (which has been rock solid ever since) and made a mental note to move off of Google ASAP.