Live data from Hacker News

Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

jayd.ml

611–620 of 728 posts

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either: I watch ten creators. I divide $10 per month between them evenly. They each get $1 per month. Or: I pay for YouTube premium. It costs $10 per month. I watch ten creators. The $10 goes to YouTube. I make the following assumptions: * YouTube only takes a portion of that $10 * YouTube divides the remaining money evenly across the creators I watch (10) Each creator gets less than $1 per month Which gives the crea…

> I watch ten creators. I divide $10 per month between them evenly. They each get $1 per month. No, they don’t. How are you magically sending them this money? They all signed up for that method? And it doesn’t charge a minimum transfer fee? You’re unserious.

By the same method I'll be alternatively sending to YouTube.

That's not the point and you know it.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube's censorship is one reason I won't pay for it. Rumble is a legitimate site even as people decry its existence (it would be less necessary if Youtube didn't decide on being the world's opinion police)

Which opinions are you trying to access?

A non-comprehensive list of things youtube tells you to self censor or you will be financially punished, or punishes you for showing or telling despite not being listed in their community guidelines in any way

Swears (recently backed down somewhat on this)

Anything to do with guns at all, whether you are right wing or vocally and loudly left wing.

Mummmifying a chicken on a science channel gets you demonitized.

Chemistry that results in an explosion.

Fucking any footage of any war ever so no WW2 history videos, no videos educating you about previous genocides or war crimes or crimes against humanity, you can't show pictures of the holocaust or Armenian genocide no matter how educational your content is.

A highlight reel compiled exclusively from clips pulled from your previous videos that were not demonitized will get demonitized, and when you reach out to your dedicated account manager because you are that big, they say "that shouldn't have happened" and promise you to fix it and that it will never happen again, which you take to hear, and then you produce a new highlight reel the next year following the same procedure it again gets demonitized so you reach out to your account manager again and they apologize profusely and say they will fix it and then every single video on your channel gets demonitized and your account is suddenly in peril for doing something that your account manager told you to do.

You are a channel that shows pictures of planes and documents and talks about the development of these aircraft. One day your channel is suddenly scheduled for deletion because you are a "content mill". This is an utterly baseless accusation that would take five minutes of watching your content to dispel, but you still are left waiting until T-1 for an actual human to look and turn off the "Purge you" schedule.

It's just absurd. Sure, the racists are pissed they can't put hate content on youtube, but lets not pretend they should be the only ones. "Forgotten Weapons" is just a gun centric antiques roadshow but "selling guns" is explicitly against policy, and all the things with guns that aren't against policy "weirdly" also get demonitized all the time.

A reminder that "demonitization" on youtube is also what gets your video not recommended to anyone to watch, including your literal subscribers (yes even if you clicked the fucking bell)

Note that Youtube provides an entire set of tooling and functionality to automatically A/B test thumbnails and titles, yet claims in their community guidelines that you should not use "A thumbnail that misleads viewers to think they’re about to view something that’s not in the video" so they just DGAF

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. Honest question: Why? You do pay for toothpaste, right? If you have a gym membership, you pay extra for the convenience not to do cardio in the woods (which is great in late May, much less so in late November). You tend to pay more for nutritious food as compared to things you get at a fast food joint. What makes a health concern related to $genericOnlin…

This is less like paying for a gym membership and more like paying some kind of fat-fairy not to come inject you with fat while you’re sleeping every night. Paying for things that help you is good. Paying someone not to try to scam you is… fucked up.

[deleted]

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#614

There are 0 videos on my YouTube homepage, just a screen asking me to turn on history. Just the way I like it. Here’s what I did: Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the history tab hit Delete -> delete all time. Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says “pausing…” Hit Pause, and Got it. It’s been exactly 3 mon…

This was one of the most relaxing things I’ve done. Recommendations are so bad so useless, despite paying for premium for peace, it’s just hassle to interact with the platform. And shorts, just let us turn them off in the subscription page exactly like the posts. It’s utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video empire doesn’t provide much of an option to their users in terms of settings.

> It’s utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video empire doesn’t provide much of an option to their users in terms of settings.

In a better world with an actual open web, we would not have to rely on the graces of the hosting company to offer us a better UI. Our browsers would act as true "User Agents" and render the web page in a way that is best for the user.

Browsers should be able to by default pick and choose what elements of a web page get rendered, without having to reach for extensions. Browsers should be able to render things in a different order, and easily allow the user to override things like styling, size and so on. Browsers should provide this kind of flexibility by default! They should not just be canvases following orders, for the web developer to program against the user's interests.

Instead, we just punted, and handed over all of the control to the web developer. Now they decide what gets shown and not shown. They decide the layout. They decide everything!

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It's not piracy. 2. I don't care. I choose what code runs on my machine, not Google. Google can run their own code on their own machines, that's fine. Once data is in my processor, I'm going to do what I want with it. Google doesn't have to concern themselves with what I'm doing on my own computer.

> 1. It's not piracy. Simply re-asserting your opinion doesn't lend any extra weight to your argument. If both sides just repeat their opinions, that's not a discussion.

You don't seem to understand. Allow me to clarify. I'm not interested in winning some silly argument on Hacker News, I'm interested in using the internet without being spied on or paying out the ass. I just want all of the Very Good Boys and Girls who are doing unpaid public relations work for Google to understand why the rest of us don't care what they think.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has the right to put things on my screen that I don't want to see, first of all. Second, I'm never going to "convert", so I'm actually saving them money by blocking their ads, because now the ad will go to someone else who doesn't block it who might buy whatever Temu nonsense is being forced on them. Edit: oh, I see you work at Google.

You mean DoubleClick. It's clear which business model took over after the merger.

I keep forgetting that they bought DoubleClick. Google has been a surveillance company for so long now that I've kind of forgotten there was ever a Before Times.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads + videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads. Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back the now ad-free one. If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.

You can rationalize this any way you want, but at the end of the day you're screwing over not a faceless corporation - but the very people who put out videos on YouTube. It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.

The Youtubers I like don't make any money from Google ads, because Google's draconian content policies and un-auditable "demonitization" system prevents them from making any money on such objectionable content as "Literally talking about how bad slavery was" or "Showing pictures of people who died in the Holocaust" or "mummifying a store bought chicken carcass"

Are you watching creators who don't share such sentiments? You should consider that the creators who make large sums from youtube ad rev are the absolute worst quality you can find. People like Mr Beast or Logan Paul. It primarily means you are slinging garbage every single day and literally hurting people for money, because that's what google's algorithm optimizes for. Google wants to burn you out churning out slop despite the fact that youtube is already significantly overfilled.

Meanwhile, all those youtube creators who made their living doing high quality animation a couple decades ago? Youtube killed their business by fiat because different content was more profitable for them. Multiple very prominent and influential animators who go all the way back to the early Newgrounds days were forced out of their job by that change.

The entire reason Youtube creators started taking sponsorships is because Google has repeatedly reduced their advertising payouts, by staggering amounts. Several times Google killed entire swaths of the smaller content industry simply because they felt like taking more of the money. They can do this because there are no alternatives.

The reason Floatplane and Nebula and friends exist is entirely because Youtube constantly punishes you for making Non-Mr Beast content, and repeatedly cuts how much money you get per hour of watched content, with no warning or justification even offered.

The creators I watch do not want me to watch them on youtube. They want me to watch them on Nebula, Floatplane, and Patreon. This includes many channels that predate Youtube being bought by Google, and ads existing on the service at all.

Several of these creators, especially the animators, were prominent on Newgrounds, and made zero dollars from their work. Most of them have day jobs or other avenues of monitizing their talents, like touring or merch or music.

Youtube added a feature to compete with Patreon where you can pay to be a "member" of a channel, and that channel can produce "members only" videos that you can only watch if you pay that channel money. Just recently, Youtube, without any warning or checking with creators or asking opinions started forcing those videos in front of users who are not members, and cannot see them, polluting feeds and making it harder to select the next video you want to watch and creators, including LTT, are adamantly against this and do not want it

Youtube does not GAF what creators want, never has, and is almost always a hostile and adversarial entity in the relationship. I am not screwing over the creators by blocking ads, Google is screwing over the creators to take more profit from those ads.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#618
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy. That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is…

Also, Youtube pays out more to creators than anyone else on the web, they dwarf Patreon 10x. People who make youtube videos rely on ads to get paid.

This is frankly wrong. All the creators I watch make their money from Patreon and use Youtube basically as a way to advertise Patreon to people.

This was such a problem for Youtube that they flirted with banning linking to Patreon or suggesting viewers go to it. Not because it was taking money from google, but because it was money being paid not to google.

Then Google competed by adding their own form of Patreon built into the system, and creators liked that and embraced it, and recently Youtube abused the membership system to pollute non-member's screens with videos they could not watch without paying, and creators did not want this, but Youtube does not care what creators want.

The people who make most of their money from Youtube ad-rev are the worst the platform has to offer. They are beholden to the algorithm, so they have to put out slop every single day, and make the most aggressive A/B tested clickbait they can manage, and even pay to advertise their video on other channels and videos, and they are all better off on TikTok anyway.

It's things like Five Minute Crafts and their made up videos.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't care about right and wrong, only what they can get away with. They don't deserve to be treated as a moral subject by you, because they will not reciprocate. You're free to be as shameless as they are in your interactions with them if you can get away with it, you're just playing the game at the same level as they are. I'm paying for Youtube Premium, but its a plain utilitarian decision after they start…

what do you think of people making videos, they deserve to be paid right?

Why is it automatically assumed that just because you post a video on youtube that you deserve to be paid? None of my videos made me any money and I’m fine with that.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing that obligates looking at in-store advertising. Deaf and blind people are allowed to enter despite their inability to see and hear adverts and jingles. Fully able people with headphones that avoid looking at ads are not ejected. You have a very weak position here that isn't advanced by this analogy.

[flagged]

Grocery stores offer free samples and if you walk in, take a free sample, and leave, you are violating no laws, you are not morally depraved, and the store does not consider that a problem.

This is true even when that free sample has "rules" like "not for adults" on a jar of cookies.

Grocery stores often purposely price things below cost to get you in the door. If you go to your local grocer, buy a hundred subsidized Turkeys and nothing else, you have again committed no crime or moral violation even though you have explicitly cost the company money and they wanted you to buy other things.

Terrestrial FM radio and TV broadcasts have existed for decades and both provide ample case law. You are just wrong, and Google knew that when they bought Youtube.

Google also regularly reduces the ad pay out to Creators and increases their own take. Google can fuck off.

Post reply on HN