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I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

gamefromscratch.com

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Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#301

Post by woodrowbarlow »

young_unixer wrote: post #239
xmprt wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that. It's pretty common knowledge that YouTube isn't the endgame for a lot of content creators. If instead, YouTube supported their users more (especially the larger ones) they would have potential to be in the loop for other services like livestreaming, merch, and donations instead of having creators resort to using services like Twitch, Squarespace, and Patreon.

The overlap between Twitch-able content and Youtube-able content is rather small, and the Twitch audience is much smaller (and different) than Youtube's audience. Patreon and Squarespace are not competitors to Youtube, they're in completely different races. There is no real competition to Youtube when it comes to UX (specially loading speeds and availability of different resolutions) just due to the sheer number of C…

the overlap _used to be_ huge. "let's play" was the single largest genre on youtube for a while. then they all moved to twitch.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#302

Post by Applejinx »

mcv wrote: post #264
colechristensen wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're living in fear go find a paid platform where you are the customer instead of the product. If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the so…

Sometimes it would be nice if you could pay extra to get better customer service. Especially when your income depends on it. In a case like this, I'd much rather pay the $50 to Google to make sure this gets fixed, than to the blackmailer. Of course that might create another incentive for Google not to provide any customer service at all until people pay.

Yup. Similarly, I'm now assuming the base Amazon shipping is 'pay ten-twenty bucks or so for super fast delivery, which will be about what the previous free shipping was'. Because since coronavirus, they claim to be so busy that normal stuff takes months: therefore, I don't think that will ever change. They will continue to have the free tier take months, making it more impractical and motivating the choice of 'fast' shipping, and since it's a global change I figure they get to keep it (in practical terms).

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#303

Post by Applejinx »

Noos wrote: post #138
colinmhayes wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube has locked viewers in. If a content creator leaves youtube no one consumes their content, so this isn't really an option.

If viewers would actually pay for content they like, this wouldn't be an issue. The problems are that tech companies are 1. dumping product well under cost while 2. training customers not to pay anything. At some point, people need to realize what constantly wanting things for free is costing them and the people they watch.

Much of the population isn't economically able to purchase all the media they watch. The Silicon Valley 'everything free' experience doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's in an environment where there's an overwhelming majority of people who are only able to pay with their time and attention.

Which is the Star Trek model. It's the future of 'nobody has to work to eat, and so now people go insane trying to pursue popularity since survival's a solved problem'.

That makes it interesting in its own right, and we can already see both the possibilities and the 'race to the bottom' factor that ensues.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#304

Post by Mirioron »

tekkk wrote: post #59
gkoberger wrote: post #12

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem. I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1] It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge…

I don't think they are really doing their best. If other Google's support forums are any indicator of their effort, they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this. Which makes sense from the SV software engineer perspective, but really is unfathomable to the normal user who then has to live in fear if some malicious teenager decides to ruin their channel. I…

What baffles me is that the Games From Scratch YouTube channel has likely generated over $15,000 in revenue for YouTube. Is it really so difficult for them to have a human that the youtuber could turn to?

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#305

Post by Applejinx »

craigds wrote: post #80
jdminhbg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three hundred hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute [0]. There's no amount of "excessive profit" that can scale humans to review it all. [0] https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/

No one's saying not to have algorithms involved at all. Humans don't have to review all of the content, just the stuff the algorithms are unsure about, as well as takedown/review requests.

The latter is more important, I think: there is no reasonable way for a bad actor to set out to spam the REVIEWING of takedown requests. You could even make spamming takedowns more likely to trigger human review. So you can target a person on YouTube, you can try to do things to harass them, but it's not really feasible to try and attack the entire YouTube 'takedown review' process just to protect your attack on an individual.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#306

Post by crazygringo »

chongli wrote: post #279
crazygringo wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not blasphemy, just elementary economics. Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss. It will go out of business no ifs ands or buts. YouTube clearly cannot survive if its customer service costs exceed its advertising revenue. It has absolutely nothing to do with speed of growth, and I don't know why you think it does. Are you saying free user-generated vid…

Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss. If that is the case then Google is helpless to stop these attacks from growing out of control. How long before the long tail of YouTube is clipped off?

Well that's another false extreme.

That's what algorithmic detection (together with user flagging) and removal at scale is for. That prevents them from growing out of control.

The combo of algorithmic detection at scale, combined with small amounts of manual intervention and customer service where most needed, is how YouTube is able to operate.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#307

Post by dkdk8283 »

jimnotgym wrote: post #26
kemonocode wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only ever resolved favorably if you have enough clout. I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases, but the balance seems to be so heavily skewed towards automation (which still does a very piss poor job at it) that just feels like there's no human element vetting the final decision at all, and that's the approach which so many people have gripes about, rightfull…

> I understand there simply not being enough manpower on Earth to manually review so many cases This has made me wonder, 1) how many people would this really take to review appeals manually? 2) should a publisher be allowed to run a platform that they are unable to curate?

> 2) should a publisher be allowed to run a platform that they are unable to curate?

Absolutely. I’d prefer to see it go back to the old days - where there was no moderation and they had safe harbor.

Of course we shouldn’t permit illegal content but everything else absolutely should be fair game. If you don’t like it then don’t watch it. Someone else might.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#308

Post by XCSme »

Communitivity wrote: post #288

You can also mirror on PeerTube, https://joinpeertube.org/ . PeerTube is a more distributed clone of YouTube, and this site explains what it is well: https://framablog.org/2019/11/12/peertube-has-worked-twice-a... . Technology used includes a HLS video player, and WebTorrent. Like Mastodon it also uses the ActivityPub protocol.

PeerTube sounds interesting, but going to their website I am lost. Why all those promotional videos and descriptions and confusing links? I expected to just see the videos in their directory and be able to search for videos, something like the YouTube interface. And I'm a technical user, I imagine the average user would close the page instantly.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#309

Post by chamakits »

More incredible is that they don’t seem to have a system for “this account is being actively targeted” because even after this somewhat public attack and “fix”, the same creator just got attacked again with the same thing on another video.

Tweet 4 hours ago from that creator: https://mobile.twitter.com/gamefromscratch/status/1265579494...

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#310

Post by fenwick67 »

gkoberger wrote: post #12

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem. I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1] It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge…

> I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly.

Sadly the situation is only resolved because the person gets traction on Twitter etc. You shouldn't have to kick and scream and demand action on Twitter to get baseline levels of support from a human.

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