top | item 30177256

YouTube: Due to limited creator history we're limiting the number of views

205 points| wylie39 | 4 years ago |reddit.com

73 comments

order

PragmaticPulp|4 years ago

Does anyone have more context? Or a link to a video showing this issue? This Reddit thread only seems to have a screenshot (though I didn’t scour the entire comment section).

I’ve never seen this in the wild, and technically without a link I still haven’t seen it live at all. I’m wondering if the channel triggered some sort of anti-spam mechanism.

EDIT: The only source I can find is from screenshots of right-wing Twitter accounts suggesting something about YouTube censoring anti-vax protests: https://m.imgur.com/dh1kU1q Until someone can link to an actual video showing this issue, I’d approach this with an extremely high degree of skepticism.

EDIT 2: Appears to only apply to live streams from new accounts. Seems like a reasonable limitation to clamp down on the spread of copyrighted material rebroadcasting (people live streaming sports and such from throwaway accounts) and cryptocurrency scams.

jsnell|4 years ago

According to the Reddit comments, this is only for livestreams not for videos in general. I'd guess that the problem with livestreams in particular is that any kind of abuse prevention / moderation needs to be done in realtime, vs normal videos where it can reasonably be done either as a pre-pass or with a delay.

How does limiting the number of viewers of a stream by a small channel help? Well, it means that stream with a large number of viewers is done by somebody in good standing and with something to lose (i.e. their popular channel) if they break the TOS. You can't just create a new channel for the purposes of abuse.

jffry|4 years ago

I found this tweet from Jan 8 in reply to somebody who was livestreaming a dogsledding race, complaining about the same error message: https://twitter.com/Cami5320/status/1479893333480599555

The account that streamed it on YT had some livestreams a year ago with 10s of views, and nothing recent except the stream in question which lists 1400 views.

So this does seem to fit the pattern of restricting livestreams from suddenly popular accounts. My best guess is that this has been done to combat scams and fraud, and that politically charged livestreams are collateral damage.

kotaKat|4 years ago

Mobile live streaming requirements: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9228390

Over 50 subs and under 1000 subs == streaming is limited via mobile.

It doesn't matter how old your account, either -- I have an account with only 28 subscribers (somehow?) for several years and I get the same limitations on mobile streaming, namely that I can't even stream.

Technical workaround would be to set up a stream via desktop and use my phone as an RTMP source... but that's just a kludge.

tjansen|4 years ago

My guess is that the purpose is to prevent people from creating throwaway accounts that re-broadcast sport events, movies and so on.

fortran77|4 years ago

According to comments on reddit, it was on an anti-vax livestream that was pushing a line of products from a brand-new account. This message only shows up on live streams.

33ultra|4 years ago

From other [dupe] thread:

I think the answer is still related to censorship. Streamers with lots of history also got throttled.

So, ask yourself, why would YouTube need to throttle in the first place? Who is giving all these protest-streamers their first 300 viewers, making them rise in the live-streaming rankings and exposing millions to anti-mandate protests?

I think YouTube is under attack. I think they learned from live-streams during George Floyd protests, which, incidentally, I also was exposed to, even though not caring too much about that. I think throttling is an attempt to avoid the artificial boosting of divisive and polarizing content.

I really do not want to turn this into a conspiracy theory, though Mark Zuckerberg did offer for Facebook to make some changes, with the rest blacked out under "secret weapon" technology. After experiments done on Facebook on emotional contagion, surely, they must have ways to, instead of rile up an entire populace, calm them down. We are at an age where a single out-of-context video of alleged police brutality can shut down the economy.

Edit: copyright - and ad fraud make little sense to me, since the videos could still be viewed when subscribing to the channel or logging out. If detected as fraudulent, the stream should go offline without warning.

tzs|4 years ago

OT: I'm curious why that is the thread that got marked [dupe]. That was the one that was posted first.

hnburnsy|4 years ago

From Google support...

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9228390

>Requirements To live stream on mobile, you’ll need: At least 50 subscribers. No live streaming restrictions within the last 90 days on your channel. To verify your channel. To enable live streaming. You may need to wait 24 hours before you can start your first live stream. An Android 5.0+ device.

>Why is my mobile live stream’s audience limited? To help aspiring creators while protecting the community, we've created safeguards to limit the spread of potentially harmful content.

Will they implement the same rate limiting for apps in the Play Store or sending emails from new Gmail accounts?

New support articles coming soon...

Why is my app's audience limited? Why is sending emails from Gmail limited? Why is sharing my Google Doc limited?

causi|4 years ago

So basically a big old "fuck you" to anyone witnessing a noteworthy event. No citizen journalism allowed.

aquova|4 years ago

First off, I'd like to see some additional proof that this isn't a hoax. There's other people in that thread claiming it's real, but I have yet to see anything other than the image posted.

Assuming it is real however, this is another baffling decision Youtube has made in recent months. I assume the thought behind this is to try maximize their walled garden in some way, but unlike other sites Youtube has such a long history of being embedded in external sites that they can't block all external access all at once. However, the main continued success of Youtube is arguably the emergence of new viral videos that boost new blood into a position of becoming a long-term profitable creator. This is being done in the name of "small creators" but it seems apparent this will have the opposite effect.

Rebelgecko|4 years ago

(full disclosure, work for Google but not on this)

>Assuming it is real however, this is another baffling decision Youtube has made in recent months... This is being done in the name of "small creators" but it seems apparent this will have the opposite effect.

A few months ago, people with under a thousand subscribers couldn't livestream at all. I think for 99% of situations, "livestreaming with limitations" is going to be a step above "no livestreaming" (unless you think livestreaming in general is bad, and I can see the merits of that viewpoint)

PragmaticPulp|4 years ago

> However, the main continued success of Youtube is arguably the emergence of new viral videos that boost new blood into a position of becoming a long-term profitable creator.

This appears to only be for live streams, not uploaded videos.

The livestream feature has been heavily abused to promoted cryptocurrency scams and rebroadcast copyright material (sports games), among other things. Livestreams are also likely the most computationally expensive videos (on a per-viewer basis) and tend to run for hours, unlike a 10-minute cacheable video.

Honestly this seems reasonable. They don’t want the platform to become a livestream free-for-all and they’re already under fire for hosting scams and misinformation content. Limiting the reach of livestreams from new accounts is fair.

zo1|4 years ago

I don't see why we can't have trusted reporters or researchers to have access to Youtube's platform or source code or software documentation to confirm this? How many hours (of us commenting, debating, discussing, people struggling on Reddit, hearsay, fake news, conspiracy theories, etc) are wasted on something that should be a simple "yes/no" response from Youtube? This is a huge waste of human-time and it's such a small one compared to other such examples that I'm surprised no one is looking to tackle it.

015a|4 years ago

My guess is far more benign: YouTube operates one of the world's largest CDNs. It takes time to saturate that CDN, but it's necessary in order to serve many of the largest content creators. If a small video, from a historically small content creator, gets too popular, too quickly, they likely, simply, aren't ready at an infrastructure level to serve the video.

And, a moron of a product manager was responsible for trying to word that into an error message that a billion people can understand.

dukeofdoom|4 years ago

I read a streamer from the Truck protest in Ottawa was getting hit by this.

Hope Youtube doesn't become just another mouthpiece for only government approved narratives like TV.

tomschlick|4 years ago

> Hope Youtube doesn't become just another mouthpiece for only government approved narratives like TV.

This is already the case. Things like the lab leak theory were getting people banned for months before it suddenly became ok to talk about once the mainstream news channels started talking about it. This is why the label "misinformation" is dangerous. Anything can be deemed misinformation depending on who the fact checker is or the sources they use.

MomoXenosaga|4 years ago

I always loved YT as this immense archive. Twenty year old videos are still up. Anyone can upload anything regardless if it makes Google money.

It is inevitable that YT is changing. Shareholders need to be payed.

nickdothutton|4 years ago

Done to prevent live-streaming of terrorist activities/suicides etc?

zelag|4 years ago

I think it's for those crypto giveaway scams.

RicoElectrico|4 years ago

Do we have any numbers on how many subs does the channel have and how much is the viewer limit?

I have a small YT channel for local OSM chapter with 15k views & 300 subs, good to know they could fuck me over if I ever try to make a live stream that would blow up... Not that I ever had more than two dozen viewers, but social media engagement has proven to me to be very unpredictable in both upside and downside.

monkeybutton|4 years ago

Was it really the bitcoin giveaway scams that instigated this, and not events like the Christchurch terror attack that was live streamed?

svnpenn|4 years ago

This is fine. This is YouTube trying to curb antivax bullshit, which is a good idea

> protests, since they were organized by truckers opposed to Covid vaccine mandates.

https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-capping-viewer-limits/

33ultra|4 years ago

Which is a good idea for you. Maybe create or install a nanny-filter.

It is not a good idea for me. If I want official information, I know where to find it.

If I want to read about young men getting a heart attack one week after taking a vaccine, if I want to see how the pandemic is forming in China before going global, if I want to know how Indians combated flu epidemics with flavanoids, then I need to pass by the gate-keepers, and the experts who do not care about my personal health, just that as much people are vaccinated as possible.

But according to you that is not a good idea. I am not allowed to form my own opinion, because you think that opinion is damaging (perhaps even to you). It is a fact that all vaccines in existence increase miscarriages. But, especially after 2020, increasingly hard to find. Please do not think it is a good idea to tell a white lie, so less intelligent people go along with the government. It is not a strong-man, but to me, that is your position. Trying to curb that with feedback and debate, not censorship.

deadalus|4 years ago

Youtube Alternatives :

Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller

Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube

PragmaticPulp|4 years ago

This limitation is only for live-streaming. It doesn’t apply to uploading videos. Most of your alternatives don’t have unlimited mass live-streaming features.

The number of platforms that allow free live-streaming to huge audiences is much smaller because it’s a relatively expensive thing to do.

sylware|4 years ago

That would be so much abusive from youtube that I don't believe it. And since I use yt-dlp I don't think I'll be able to see the text of such blockade.

rjmunro|4 years ago

If this is about people broadcasting sporting events unauthorised, I wonder if the fact that the Olympics are currently happening is making this worse.

tpoacher|4 years ago

> "Due to limited creator history we're limiting the number of views. Subscribe to this channel to help the creator"

Better yet, do so on peertube.

margofx|4 years ago

I don't get the whole point, so we should just subscribe to the channel so that we can continue what we're watching?

webspaceadam|4 years ago

Nah this seems to be fake, right? Haven't seen anything like this besides screenshots

Aldipower|4 years ago

I for myself had this on a live stream some days ago. This is not fake, but I think it only applies to live streams.

kumarm|4 years ago

I see negative comments on this on here and (mostly) reddit.

But the reality is this is simple and yet brilliant approach to stop misinformation and policy violators. May be even lazy approach to avoid doing the hard work. What does any policy offenders usually do? Create new accounts and post the same misinformation slightly modified.

Between Youtube and PlayStore, google has seen enough of this trends. I am surprised it even took them this long to limit virality of new accounts.

WrtCdEvrydy|4 years ago

On the one hand, kinda scummy, on the other, do we really need more "Elon musk crypto scam live streams"?