Update: 3 hours after posting and being on the hacker news front page: Automated email out of the blue: "We’re pleased to let you know that we’ve recently reviewed your YouTube account, and after taking another look, we can confirm that it is not in violation of our Terms of Service. We have lifted the suspension of your account, and it is once again active and operational." Thanks hacker news for voting this up and…
Time to migrate your life off of youtube now, friend. Don't let them fool you twice
The problem is their monopoly power over video distribution on the internet: disgruntled users have nowhere else to go. All alternatives are stifled by the monopoly.
People have tons of alternatives. The problem is that ad subsidies pay more than most viewers are willing to pay after generations of internet users have been conditioned to think of content as free.
There's also:
1.) The discovery associated with YouTube and
2.) In addition to being convenient, you don't need to pay to host on YouTube. It would be pretty trivial for people to host their own content--much of which is never going to pay anything to speak of in ads. But then they'd have to pay for the hosting.
People have tons of alternatives. The problem is that ad subsidies pay more than most viewers are willing to pay after generations of internet users have been conditioned to think of content as free.
Nobody has been "conditioned" to think anything. If they opted to make things free at the start of the internet era then it's now their problem to figure out how to pivot to actually paying their expenses and turn profit. It's not the users' problem per se (unless they get aggressively pushed out but then they go to alternatives so that company still doesn't make profit out of them). Elementary psychology -- one that…
From what I read they made well over $19 billion in revenue in 2020. They are making plenty of money they can afford to put towards the problem. They just don’t want to take from their own bottom line.
I know losing a YouTube channel is horrible, especially after you dedicated so much time, effort and money - and for some people it may be a source of income as well. It is totally unfair. But my nightmare in here is that you lose access to your whole Google account and that would devastate me. Not only email access (and thus, access to every service I use because I have my Google account linked to it), but also Goog…
You have the power TODAY to change that. Do it before you lose access. Start with a Google Takeout and get your email out into your own domain as a starting point. Search "self hosting" for more details, even if you have no interest in running your own servers it gives you lots of good ideas to regain more control over your own data.
I even wrote a detailed step-by-step HOWTO for people in that spot:
Update: 3 hours after posting and being on the hacker news front page: Automated email out of the blue: "We’re pleased to let you know that we’ve recently reviewed your YouTube account, and after taking another look, we can confirm that it is not in violation of our Terms of Service. We have lifted the suspension of your account, and it is once again active and operational." Thanks hacker news for voting this up and…
I would only add that the same thing happened to me for entirely mysterious reasons, earlier this year, and my YouTube account was restored by the 'usual channels' [0] within about 3-4 hours, without the need for publicity.
There's Rumble, Odysee, Bitchute, Peertube, etc. Just post it there.
to be seen by whom? I'm pretty tech savvy and have heard of none of these. Not a single one.
Unless you have a following, probably no one will see it on YouTube either. I generally post on YouTube but, if I were concerned about being blocked, I'd probably just host on a VPS.
People have tons of alternatives. The problem is that ad subsidies pay more than most viewers are willing to pay after generations of internet users have been conditioned to think of content as free.
There's also: 1.) The discovery associated with YouTube and 2.) In addition to being convenient, you don't need to pay to host on YouTube. It would be pretty trivial for people to host their own content--much of which is never going to pay anything to speak of in ads. But then they'd have to pay for the hosting.
#1 is definitely true — I was thinking of that mostly as an artifact of the cost point. There's a really strong ratchet effect: YouTube gets a ton of content because they not only provide hosting for free but also incentivize a ton of creators to direct traffic to YouTube since they get paid that way, which further encourages people to think of YouTube as where they go for video. Even places which self-host tend to report much higher numbers from YouTube than their own website, and that's a very hard thing to compete against.