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YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

engadget.com

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Re: YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

#61

Post by tyingq »

bognition wrote: post #2

Its about time. The Youtube UI has become a disaster over the last few years. It all started with the ability to let uploaders "annotate" their videos. I've disabled the setting to show annotations probably a dozen times and they keep coming back. I can't figure out if the setting is poorly implemented or if youtube is deliberately switching the setting back.

Nice that they are getting rid of an irritating implementation.

But they aren't replacing the legitimate need. Some videos do benefit from background material. Or a patreon type link to support the content creator.

Google should address the need. Otherwise it just looks like a tactic to keep people on YouTube.

Re: YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

#62

Post by arca_vorago »

tehwebguy wrote: post #21

YouTube still hasn't stopped the hordes of fake accounts that spam every top creator's new videos. Ex. PewDiePie video has a dozen comments from fake PewDiePie accounts (name, avatar) posting about "contest" link.

It drives me crazy how much this clutters search results. For years I would almost always sort by >20mins/upload date for whatever I was looking for (usually lectures/talks, hence the >20mins) but over the past few years where I used to get the most recent talk from $person, now I get a full page of reuploaded content from 1994, half of which is from the same spam user. Now my search of choice tends to be viewcount/I now prefer mps-youtube for the majority of my youtube interaction. It's a gplv3 cli client, and then I just have VLC open up the video. No ads, no popups, no links.

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

You know, a long time ago when google bought youtube I remember thinking to myself that it meant it was never going to be the same. After things like the google+ name fiasco, etc (Jawed Karim's first comment on youtube was: "why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment on a video?"), and many other scandals, and not seeing hardly a dent in their userbase, I wonder what it would take to get the users to another platform?

Re: YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

#64

Post by CodeWriter23 »

andyjsong wrote: post #40
falcolas wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you shouldn't be trying to be monetize when you have that low of a view count anyway. Urm, why? Not everyone is in it for the advertisement money. Want to direct someone to a charity instead of supporting you? Not unless you're 10k+ Patreon? 10k+ Blueprints for the table you just built on screen? 10k+ Not to mention one of the requirements to be a partner is that your content is advertiser friendly. If you make vid…

Because 10K total public views is a vanity metric and people can just pump out total crap to get there. This to prevent a spam account from stealing content and monetizing immediately with external links vs. the grind of maximizing your view count. Last I heard 1 million views is about $2,000 in ad dollars from Google. Google has made it unfavorable to compensate based off of view count because there is so much inven…

Ironic how your answer to nullifying the “evil” spam is to force everyone else to create “good” spam. I mean “total crap”.

Re: YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

#65

Post by colejohnson66 »

lovich wrote: post #24
noitsnot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand how they have made it to this point.

The government doesn't try to prevent monopolies anymore, and once you're a monopoly you have more than enough power to stop competitors if you pay even a modicum of attention to them

The problem is that YouTube isn’t a monopoly. There’s other video sharing sites available such as Vimeo. Also, everyone uses YouTube and private companies don’t have to respect the freedom of speech ideal.

Re: YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

#66

Post by wdr1 »

norswap wrote: post #47
bognition wrote: post #2

Its about time. The Youtube UI has become a disaster over the last few years. It all started with the ability to let uploaders "annotate" their videos. I've disabled the setting to show annotations probably a dozen times and they keep coming back. I can't figure out if the setting is poorly implemented or if youtube is deliberately switching the setting back.

The answer to excess of marketing is censorship of the small accounts? This does not make any sense.

It's not just small accounts. It's also big accounts that are abusive.

Re: YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

#67

Post by anyfoo »

Mithaldu wrote: post #59
taneq wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annotations (in the sense of small snippets of text that display briefly to add info) are fine. What YouTube had in many cases was a poorly implemented MySpace page overlaid on the video. And as one of the parent posters said, the setting just kept turning itself back on no matter how many times you turned it off (on the video, or in your settings page).

"Many cases" is subjective and anecdotal. Maybe my set of youtubers i followed was particularly high quality, but almost all uses of annotations i have seen were to provide corrections to information found wrong in the video, or additional information learned after the video. In some cases such things were applied quite heavily too. And thus the point of my previous post is that for people doing serious work with the…

I don't know why you got downvoted so much, I share the same experience.

Re: YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

#68

Post by Mithaldu »

anyfoo wrote: post #67
Mithaldu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Many cases" is subjective and anecdotal. Maybe my set of youtubers i followed was particularly high quality, but almost all uses of annotations i have seen were to provide corrections to information found wrong in the video, or additional information learned after the video. In some cases such things were applied quite heavily too. And thus the point of my previous post is that for people doing serious work with the…

I don't know why you got downvoted so much, I share the same experience.

I expect it's a side effect from casual youtube users who've mostly experienced abuse of the feature and think i'm lying.

Re: YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

#69

Post by lovich »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #65
lovich wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government doesn't try to prevent monopolies anymore, and once you're a monopoly you have more than enough power to stop competitors if you pay even a modicum of attention to them

The problem is that YouTube isn’t a monopoly. There’s other video sharing sites available such as Vimeo. Also, everyone uses YouTube and private companies don’t have to respect the freedom of speech ideal.

The colliqual usage of monopoly does not mean that the group described as a monoply has 100% of the market as seen here[1]. Having nearly all of the market is sufficient to be described as a monopoly. Once you are able to unialterally affect the market as you wish, because you control such a large portion of it, you are exercising monoply power.

As an example Microsoft didn't control 100% of operating systems when the US government went after them, but they were still found to have been absuing their monoply power. Google putting their reviews above the search results when you search for a restaurant, which always made them appear before Yelp's, is pretty much the exact same situation as Microsoft forcing IE to be the default browser on Windows but you don't hear anyone in the government even hint at going after Google nowadays

[1]http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monopoly.asp

Re: YouTube is cracking down on external links in videos

#70

Post by taneq »

Mithaldu wrote: post #59
taneq wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annotations (in the sense of small snippets of text that display briefly to add info) are fine. What YouTube had in many cases was a poorly implemented MySpace page overlaid on the video. And as one of the parent posters said, the setting just kept turning itself back on no matter how many times you turned it off (on the video, or in your settings page).

"Many cases" is subjective and anecdotal. Maybe my set of youtubers i followed was particularly high quality, but almost all uses of annotations i have seen were to provide corrections to information found wrong in the video, or additional information learned after the video. In some cases such things were applied quite heavily too. And thus the point of my previous post is that for people doing serious work with the…

I don't really have a "set of youtubers" that I follow and so most of the stuff I watch is from random sources. I think you're right that it depends hugely on who you're watching - random hobby / extreme sports videos seem to be particularly bad, but technical and engineering videos are usually fine.

I don't think they should take it away completely, just limit it so avoid the aforementioned 'myspace page' overuse.

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