It was allegedly an overzealous automatic filter. As of late, Youtube has been behaving very aggressively towards any content creators who were, in YT's eyes, earning YT less-than-optimal money. Even if it is just an automatic filter in so many cases, their apparent complete apathy regarding the issue is very telling...
Interesting. From the linked contract between Google and Blender:
"4. ADVERTISING
"4.1
Delivery, Ad Revenues, Payments, Reports.
"Google will have the right, but not the obligation, to serve
advertising in any and all Google Services, including but not limited to the display of ads on the Playback
Pages and within the YouTube Video Player in conjunction with the display or playback of Provider
Content and Monetized Content. Provider will receive 55% of Ad Revenues recognised by Google
. If one
or more Google content providers claim a portion of Monetized Content for monetization through the
Content ID system, Provider will receive a pro rata share of the Ad Revenues that would otherwise be
due, with such pro rata share to be determined by Google in its reasonable discretion
. Recognized
revenues do not include items listed in clause 4.3 or taxes. Payments to Provider for Ad Revenues will be
sent by Google within approximately sixty (60) days after the end of any calendar month,
provided that
Provider’s earned balance is $100 or more in the aggregate. When Provider’s monthly earned balance is
less than $100, there will be no payment and the balance will accumulate until it exceeds $100, at which
time it will be paid to Provider in accordance with the preceding sentence. Any payments to Provider will
be made in the manner that Google pays its partners.
Google reserves the right to retain all other
revenues derived from Google Services, including without limitation any revenues from ads that may
appear on any search results pages. Within thirty (30) days of the end of each month, Google will provide
Provider with usage reports in the form generally made available to partners at that time
. Google may
create an account for Provider to access information about payments owed to Provider. To ensure proper
payment, Provider is responsible for providing and maintaining accurate contact and payment information
associated with its account."
The interesting statement is the first sentence: "Google will have the right [...] to serve
advertising in any and all Google Services, including but not limited to the display of ads on the Playback
Pages and within the YouTube Video Player in conjunction with the display or playback of Provider
Content and Monetized Content."
"Monitized Content", judging by other parts of the license, appears to be those videos that have "allow ads" checkbox; "Provider Content" are those without that check.
Yeah, I could see them demanding adding ads to the videos / pages. YouTube is a business and expecting them to host and stream videos worldwide for free is unrealistic. This seems like they would have the right to run ads anyway so I'm not sure why they would need to force them to select that option. (I can also see blenders desire to not have ads but I don't think youtube is at fault for not wanting to actively wanting to lose money on their videos. If that is really the problem it might be interesting to have youtube open a paid option for the cretors to pay for the service and not have any ads / user tracking stuff.)
Some companies that make copyright claims against YouTube videos request a cut of the ad revenue instead of having the videos taken down. I'm pretty sure that "monetized content" is Google's term for these videos that you upload and Google has decided you don't really own.
I can't believe this has been going on for three days. YouTube seems like it is actively sabotaging its independent content creator's channels. But in this case it's not just some random kid living with their parent's. MIT and Blender are both respectable orgs.
I'm pretty annoyed, I was planning on using a bunch of MITOCW video series to level up some on some computer science and information theory this summer and I hadn't even gotten through the first lecture of the first series on my list (6.001 with Sussman from 1986, classic and awesome) when this stopped me in my tracks.
I've been waiting patiently hoping it comes back, but at this point I feel like I'm going to have to use archive.org or download directly from them.
I was slowly warming up to the idea of paying for Red for commercial-less music and maybe checking out some other paid content, but this has been a bucket of cold water on that notion.
I know this has been posted before but youtube-dl is a godsend when it comes to archiving content. Considering how quickly youtube is taking down educational channels, it's prudent to create a backup just in case.
They've been pissing off their content creators for quiet a while now w/ completely arbitrary, machine-driven demonitization. Many of these creators are far beyond the "kid in a basement" category; they're celebs, have employees, and make $$$.
It's crazy and really sad how YouTube bloomed into this awesome, independent alternative to all the crap coming out of hollywood and cable TV, but now they've decided to kneecap the independents, promote the shit out of establishment stuff, and push actual, real-live cable really hard.
I mean, that only happened because advertisers learned that the "independent" creators were all assholes. Like this started after advertisers started pulling out when PewDiePie didn't just apologize and admit he was wrong with the Nazi stunts. He threw a fit and advertisers realized that YouTube isn't really as good as they thought it was.
I honestly don't believe this. I think YouTube used this as an excuse to crack down on channels they didn't like, for whatever reason. (And also a lot of other channels, because the flagging is poorly done. I know some people who run a very popular skateboarding instruction channel, and they've had huge problems with demonitization. The content is utterly inoffensive.)
I think if all you were concerned about is advertisers, you'd just let them pick that as a criteria: "Would you like to advertise on channels flagged by our system as potentially offensive?"
Some would, some wouldn't. Problem solved, you don't piss off creators, you make more money.
(Maybe the counter-argument to that is advertisers wouldn't want to appear on any YouTube channel because some other YouTube channel had offensive content, as though all of YouTube were a tainted brand, but that is frankly laughable.)
+ 1 flagging is extremely poorly done.
Have a friend with gaming channel and he showed me how it is easy to get video demonetised, just add "fetish", "cannibal", any religious phrase... The fun and insanely frustrating part is that you can reupload same video with same description, tags and titles second(or maybe more) times and it will be monetised if algorithm will think you are lucky... wtf. And you can't appeal if your video has less than 1k views for the last week. I know it's not much, but appeal process takes 1 week and usually most videos get majority of their views in that 1-st week, so it is easier to just reupload...
It's fine if new videos get flagged, you can reupload them, but youtube bots flag old videos and there is no notification whatsoever. Even their own "Video manager board" not showing them as demonitised, because they still get money from youtube red and considered as claimed, you have to enter "edit video" to see the notification. You just have to manually search them... And for gaming channels with 1-2k videos it's a pain.
Why would YouTube willingly run fewer ads? They were hardly profitable as it was, it doesn't make sense for them to "crack down" on channels all of a sudden by continuing to host them, but not running ads on them.
Not to mention part of the problem was YouTube not enforcing their content guidelines to begin with. Hate speech has always been against their content guidelines, they just never actually enforced it.
A whole of that can be traced back to leadership change at YT. Since S.W. took over, the culture at YT has changed profoundly, and most of the blunders in the last few years (this is just one in a long series) can be traced back to the culture change she fostered.
Actually it’s much worse when they hit the random kid living with parents who might be relying on it and who won’t get through to support like orgs like MIT and Blender can.
4 days now (since the 15th at least) and nothing out of YT. I realize that the portion of their viewers interested in MIT OCW or Blender is small, compared to the portion interested in FNAF and dental surgery on characters from Frozen... but it's also probably the portion they want to piss off least as an internet company.
The hope for many, perhaps a vain one, is that negatively impacting technical organizations (open source projects or MIT's ability to host computer science course videos) will have a disproportionate effect on the developers of youtube who on average might care about about these sort of organizations more than others. It could hurt youtube developer morale and/or their ability to recruit.
More basically, I only see their ads because there are non-ad videos that draw me to the site and give me a reasonable average impression of the combination of content and ads I see. Remove non-ad videos from YouTube and you would need to cut ads down by 50% to retain viewers like me.. the lower split of sharing on all content and/or lower viewer numbers will further dustress people with ads enabled on their content.. pushing them further into a death spiral of low profitability, poor content and inadequate incentives for the commercial content they apparently want.
I am pretty dismayed to be this right. I didn't think YT would be nearly this aggressive in service of the ideas I outlined.
Basically, they take a cut off that activity. In some cases they could take most of or all the money, which is a clear win for them, but even when they pay out they're earning revenue on the transaction. It's been their core business model, so the problems with advocating an adfree behavior become obvious.
I would add that this becomes more urgent if they're in crisis. Makes me wish I could get the master copies I'd uploaded back, but there's no chance of that.
Bottom line: shots fired. You must work with YouTube the way they want you to work with YouTube, or you'll get punished.
Well, they picked the wrong org to gamble on strongarming in the case of Blender. Instead of getting them to monetize they've just compelled Blender to move platforms.
It seems like Google is pretty conscious of their own PR, presumably actions like this alert Youtube employees that everything they do isn't in the best interest of humanity.
I agree with the first sentence but not the second.
I think a lot of employees are just not taking a step back to look at the sum of the parts they are helping to build, or maybe they have optimism/trust in their leaders to not fuck everyone over, and others might just draw their line further down the sand (e.g. no Pentagon contracts).
I imagine a brave few are also working to change it for the better from within. I'd definitely choose to work at Apple instead though, Google seems fundamentally creepy these days.
Nothing. They gain by use of a chilling effect: most of the seemingly negative actions and expectations they're known for, tend to rebound in favor of their core business.
It's all meant to be Logan and Jake Paul and PewDiePie and whatever will drive low-quality mass views so long as the viewer quality isn't so low that they're losing advertisers. At a scale like this, it's just pure statistics.
This is not damage. This is benefit, in terms of getting other content creators in line. The message is clear.
Funnily enough, PewDiePie is no longer on YouTube's good-side, and virtually all of his newly uploaded videos get demonetized by YouTube. He's no longer "advertiser-friendly"
It is likely that PewDiePie has a negative enough image that YouTube believes that associating a given brand with his content will not generate ROI for the advertisers. By demonetizing these videos 1) the advertisers win because their ads are shown more frequently in "profitable" spots, 2) YouTube wins because they build trust with their advertisers, and 3) YouTube wins again because they don't have to pay out to the content creator for valueless ad spots.
No. It's much like the music business: they need new PewDiePies, though it's cumbersome to create them. Once you're PewDiePie for a while, you have more resources and access to lawyers and managers, and you come around looking for a better deal.
From YouTube's point of view, that's bad, so they need a replacement. It's quantity of views they need, they don't actually have a stake in the success of any one creator.
Is it possibly because you're a nerd, and the internet is no longer for nerds? It's now a platform for mass consumerism, and what interests the masses, and is thus good for advertisers probably shares little overlap with your interests?
While there are certainly benefits, I can't agree that YouTube loses nothing here. PeerTube is a potential competitor in an ecosystem that's currently functionally monopolistic, and even in a vacuum, having a nontrivial community move to that platform will immediately increase awareness and provide legitimacy.
Perhaps more importantly, the FOSS and tech communities are not a vacuum. Google and YouTube in particular have been getting increasing amounts of negative press recently, and this strongarming of Blender further drives home how far they have gone from the era of "Don't be evil." Additionally, the precedent of changing platforms rather than giving in to Google's pressure has now been set; While there will be no mass exodus, it is easier for entities to follow in Blender's footsteps than it would have been to set the lead, and we may hope that this move turns out well in order to further encourage others with similar inclinations.
I will be watching carefully for another group to make this switch, because the most important person in forming a crowd isn't the leader, it's the first follower.
They lose high quality content and have indirectly caused the promotion of a competitor. Also exposes their inability to answer basic questions, giving rise to questions from creators about their value and longevity on the Youtube platform.
That is potentially the real story here, IMO. Ton has a track record of doing amazing things with impossibly small amounts of money. Given that his interests are in (video) content production, I'm not sure YouTube really thought through how this could play out...
Blender serves as an optimal test case for other large non-profits with online video content that Google may push off YouTube (would love to see PyCon move their archives off as well).
Discovery and subscriptions will need to be solved, but that’s not insurmountable (ie RSS). CDNs can be plug and play in front of nginx (if P2P torrent isn't your cup of tea), backend storage can be whatever is cheapest.
If only things were so simple.
This reminds me how not too long ago, how everyone was trying to make a clone of HN and Reddit within 24 hours in x programming language.
It's one thing make a service for few 100 users, it's a different beast to serve millions of users. In case of Online Videos, it is not only extremely difficult, it still remains very expensive. There is literally a handful of companies who can financially and technically pull it off at youtube-scale. After more than 10 years, youtube either makes very little profit or still not profitable.
I don't disagree. Consider that perhaps you can't serve videos online and expect it to be entirely free. Can you run your compute for free? No. Can you host your database for free? No. Why would serving videos be any different? (Let's ignore limited free tiers for this argument).
The more popular the content, the cheaper per unit it'll be to serve (based on bandwidth/transit costs and how they scale, and that you most likely can serve it out of RAM with Varnish, a very inexpensive CDN, or peer to peer), but there will still be a cost, and either the producer or the consumers of that content will need to pay for it.
Pure p2p networks scale by O(log n). This means if the popularity of your video scales with n then your infrastructure just scales with log(n). The idea is that leechers become seeders. So with every new layer of distribution the coverage increases exponentially.
Pure p2p networks can’t ensure a base level of quality service; you’ll always need your own infra to fall back on (which is as simple as a few dedicated servers or a CDN), but I agree p2p peers can offload some costs.
Youtube is anything but centralized, they literally pioneered distributed video content with their GGC nodes, with at least 10s of thousands of nodes all over the world. They may not be the first, but almost definitely the largest.
I don't understand why you are mentioning peer to peer technology? What does that have to do with anything? Youtube is not a cute side project where your viewing experience depending on how many peers your video has. Peertube depends on webtorrent, you literally have to host and seed every single video on your platform and duplicate it multiple times by others. Good luck doing it over petabyte scale. Google does something similar, but popular videos are hosted at users-end point on GGC nodes, distributed over 10,000s of servers all over the world.
> I don't understand why you are mentioning peer to peer technology? What does that have to do with anything?
The super-seeding / swarming approach developed for the BitTorrent protocol is quite interesting. One original seeder just needs to upload to a few leechers. Then this leechers become seeders themselfs and start to upload to a next layer of leechers and so on. This approach scales exponentially meaning you can cover the whole internet in just a few steps. Further more you can start uploading yourself even before you have completed receiving the file.
E.g. if every node just has 10 uploading connections then you just need 8 steps to cover 100 million = 10^8 peers. Remember the traffic on the original seeder (and every other node) is just 10 uploading connections.
I really want a competitor to YouTube. But when it works, the experience as a user is Really Good (tm).
1. YouTube Red so I don't have to see ads
2. Queuing and casting from my phone to my TV.
3. Fast loading and buffer-free streaming (as long as your bandwidth is good enough). Note I'm in Australia - Mixer and Twitch often aren't smooth for me even though I'm on 100 megabit fibre. Sydney or Melbourne PoPs will beat Hong Kong and Singapore every time.
I watch Pycon and LCA videos on YouTube because it's easier than going anywhere else.
What will stop Google to buy the next big video platform, US and EU did not stop them buy YT or FB to buy Whats App, if a competitor would show up the only way it could survive would be to be bought by MS,FB or other large company, this could lead to bad products or bad customer/user relations since this big companies are not known for their good customer support or caring for the users experience.
I watched your video and you made some great points.
As an aside, I have to wonder if you've thought through your desire to serve your website over HTTP instead of over HTTPS.
You noted that you use ad blocking software because ad networks are a common route by which malware propagates. HTTP websites comprise another salient target for malware. If I am at a coffee shop with a compromised wifi router and I load your HTTP website, that compromised router can inject malware into your page and my browser will run it, just like it would have run malware served by an ad server. If your website were served over HTTPS, the router wouldn't have been able to do that.
I imagine you knew all of that, and you're right that HTTPS does have some problems, but trying to avoid those problems by opting for HTTP is exchanging those problems for (imho) much bigger problems.
It's simpler than that. I'm hosting websites on Hostgator, my income is that Patreon I mention in the video, and though I have a little knowledge on webmastering it's not much compared to what I make content for. I don't know how, and I'm seeing high prices for getting HTTPSed up, though I have a mental note that using Cloudflare might be a way to do it. That said, a service like that seems like it would cost a bunch of money too. I think I can't afford to use HTTPS, and I think this may be a feature not a bug to some people out there controlling things.
I could well be wrong. I'm hoping for the reasons you mention that some benevolent hacker people work out how to bring this to people for free and make it simple to do.
You made a video about YouTube criticism and host it on YouTube? Either that's being optimistic about them, or the dominance is so large that it outweighs everything else...
...wouldn't that be a logical place to post your YouTube criticism? Do you think Martin Luther weakened his message by nailing his criticism of the church to the door of a church? Do you think picket lines are misguided for surrounding their targets when they could picket unrelated areas farther away?
It has become a pretty common complaint lately that people should only have their protests in places where the only people that will see them are the people that already agree with them.
Does this still have any relation to my post earlier in the tread, or is this some different topic you're talking about? Because it sounds as if you're saying that I'm arguing everyone should stop criticising YouTube.
Nailing your complaints about X to the door of X, does not support X. Uploading it to YouTube makes the network effect bigger because anyone who wants to hear what you want to say will have to go to the site. It works more like vouchers, where you get a discount (technically worse for the store because they get less money) but because you'll have to go to the store to redeem it, and you'll probably buy more, it's worth it.
Eventually this is going to get them in trouble with the Sherman Antitrust Act.
From Wikipedia:
> "Innocent monopoly", or monopoly achieved solely by merit, is perfectly legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not. The purpose of the Sherman Act is not to protect competitors from harm from legitimately successful businesses, nor to prevent businesses from gaining honest profits from consumers, but rather to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses.
It's pretty clear that Google used their dominant position(s) in web search and web advertising to then dominate the user-generated video space. And now they're engaging in the type of abuse of customers that the Sherman Antitrust Act was designed to mitigate.
Sure, its clear to you and I. But we on HN aren't whom you have to convince.
Do you believe the US DOJ or more powerful states would go after Alphabet/google? That's the ones that count. I just can't see our current administration going that avenue.
Yeah I don't know. With this administration, anything is possible. There's lots of bad blood between silicon valley progressives and the Trump admin, too.
Silicon Valley progressives? Are you talking about RMS or something?
Are (American) liberals automatically progressive even if they collude to lower salaries, pay less taxes, and contribute to housing bubbles? Not to mention selling to the DoD and ICE.
I fail to see how this behavior helps artificially preserve their status as a monopoly or constitutes a nefarious dealing to create a monopoly, and the fact that Blender is using this opportunity to switch to another provider is not going to reinforce your point about YouTube being a monopoly.
No you're right, this particular behavior doesn't help to preserve their monopoly. It's evidence that they already have one.
Companies who have to survive in a competitive marketplace don't typically go around driving away customers en masse. This is like something from 1990's Microsoft.
Well, strictly speaking, this is a legitimate dictionary definition that doesn't involve money:
> a person of a specified kind with whom one has to deal
[edit] Youtube has 3 kinds of customers (or users, if you wish): publishers, viewers and advertisers. It makes sense to separate them like that, but not based on a "pays/ does not pay" criterion. If PewDiePie is a customer, then most definitely Blender Foundation is a customer too.
If money is the criterion of being a customer then they are one by driving traffic to other monetized videos, via recommended feed, or via follow up searches, that would otherwise not happen.
Anyone having a YT channel will tell that ‘suggested video’ is a dominant traffic source so it’s not an edge case.
In sum, YT was already making money thanks to Blender videos.
Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Using monopoly powers in certain ways is, and this isn't one of those ways.
And yes, companies who have to survive in a competitive marketplace drive away non-paying customers all the time. Because they're not paying, and so the slight chance of turning them into paying customers, or benefiting existing paying customers, is worth the loss.
> It's pretty clear that Google used their dominant position(s) in web search and web advertising to then dominate the user-generated video space.
That's not particularly clear to me. YouTube was already pretty huge when Google bought them in 2006: according to Wikipedia, the fifth most popular website, albeit of a far smaller Web. Google, meanwhile, had their own video-uploading service, Google Video, which launched three months before YouTube but was not nearly as successful. Sure, there's no doubt that YouTube has benefitted massively from Google's resources in the decade since, including their willingness to let it run without a profit. But based on that history, it seems far from inevitable that Google would be the one to dominate video.
It also doesn't seem like YouTube's growth is all that directly linked to Google Search's monopoly status, other than in that the latter powered Google's profits (but there are plenty of sources of money in the world). Google Search's video results have always shown videos from all websites rather than being YouTube-specific; who knows what they might have done if there had been more serious competition, but there wasn't, so they don't have that particular blood on their hands. You could argue that Google used its Search leverage to promote Web videos in general, as opposed to some other form of media, but I don't know what other form would be or why it would be preferable to video. (Perhaps live video? There might be another universe in which justin.tv was successful early on, rather than waiting most of a decade for the unexpected explosion of Twitch. But I think that given the state of Internet connections at the time, it made more sense for YouTube to happen first.)
The internet today vs 12 years ago seems heavily biased towards video content. Different landscape, where Facebook and Google/YouTube now account for a majority of all internet traffic. If YouTube manipulates people, they’ll lose support and maybe risk a lawsuit. I’m not very familiar with the specifics here, but YouTube is the dominant video platform. If Facebook cleaned up their design and embraced an open web with public links, they could probably destroy YouTube.
Don't forget that Google owns the backbone that Youtube videos transit on for free. By leasing that dark fiber, they get peering agreements that effectively makes their ability to send bytes to the internet free. No one else has that ability.
Yes they do; you could buy it yourself if you wanted to. Nobody else having the scale or cash & willingness to do so is not the same thing as being unable to.
No that will absolutely never happen, ever. Sorry to burst your bubble. It isn't even in the realm of possibility, spotting Bigfoot riding the lochness monster is more realistic.
Honestly no. It's incredibly obvious. There is no need for a detailed explanation of why Google will never face a 1930's antitrust lawsuit. It's simply not in the realm of reality. It was barely possible in the 90s.
I'm surprised why anyone is surprised by this or thinks it should be any other way. Google is running YouTube as a business and they're running it the way they believe will be the most profitable.
For some reason, people are still hanging onto a belief that Google cares about its users in ways other than to profit from them.
Of course, it could well be that people aren't surprised and are just highlighting the Google's behaviour towards certain channels.
It's not particularly surprising given how shitty youtube's behaviour has been towards its content creators lately. It's just a reminder that nobody should accept it.
Kind of like sometimes a president's behaviour isn't surprising, but still deserves to be highlighted and nobody should accept it.
A fair comment. The only way people can refuse to accept their behaviour is by not giving YouTube their business (by either visiting the site or submitting content) and who's going to do that? It's YouTube :-/ It's their way or the highway (or Vimeo)
Here's an idea: if you want to drive home the point that you don't do it for the ad money, and if you want to force yourself not to depend on that money, you could give it all to FOSS foundations.
You could publish your YouTube check every month, as small as it may be, on your blog or website, alongside an equivalent donation to, say, the FSF, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Archive.org, Blender, EFF, or whatever foundation you like.
If you publicize it on YouTube and here, you may even start a movement of sorts.
> So this seems to have happened because Youtube wants The Blender Foundation to agree to have their videos monetized.
But that doesn't seem to make sense. There are lots of popular channels that don't have advertising and Blender's videos are popular but not that popular.
I haven't looked at the contract they posted, but they seem to have the same interpretation as you. Maybe it's just an updated contract that includes new rules if you monetize?
(that aside, the communication chain from google posted there is just atrocious. I wouldn't sign a 6 page contract based on those robo-emails either)
> There are lots of popular channels that don't have advertising and Blender's videos are popular but not that popular.
It makes sense if it's staged rollout. I'm assuming all unmonetized good actors (ie not stealing other people's content) will see this ultimatum eventually.
The contract looks like a regular monetization contract, so the cause-effect relationship between blocking and monetization is not made clear.
Why would Google single out Blender for this? Unless they had copyright concerns and needed to revshare with copyright holders, or they want to go "freemium" and make all high-view/quality videos monetized.
Did you see this after already taking the 3 months before? I subscribe to Red (now premium, grandfathered price) and they seem to give this popup to every user.
It's pretty irritating. I'm a Red subscriber, so whatever bullshit Google has going on with their advertising monetization policy doesn't -- or, rather, shouldn't -- affect me. Yet the MIT OCW videos are blocked from my account the same as they are for everyone else.
Get your act together, Google. This is just stupid.
I'm curious what YouTube's real numbers are for YouTube profitability. Are these channels at such high subscriber rates that they're cutting into YouTube's ability to sustain themselves?
They recently demonetized all of the Salad Fingers videos, causing David Firth to remove all those videos from YouTube and only allowing them to Patreon subscribers via Vimeo.
I hope this pushes towards more independent, distributed toob sites. YouTube is simply too big a monolith.
I think that the single search box with consistent UX is the killer feature. Subscription is too, in another way. Alternatives need to address these; I believe federated video services / toobs are the only way to aim for the first. Subscriptions should be replaced with RSS.
I stopped using the YouTube site long ago. I only subscribe via Feedly/RSS and watch the videos I want directly with 99% no ads even without an adblocker via the embeded video player.
Not op, but op may be using the Youtube Subscription RSS feed. Go to https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager and scroll to the bottom. You should see a section labeled "Export to RSS readers".
I currently receive email notifications for subscriptions, but I've noticed I don't always get emails for all the uploads of some of those channels. A direct RSS feed should solve that problem too.
They're all still on YouTube, but I just subscribe to the YouTube rss feed. Also since they don't get ad revenue, I pay ~$15/month to assorted creators.
I just made the mistake of watching a single Salad Fingers video, and it was a waste of bandwidth, and I want those precious minutes of my life back, but I can't make that happen.
It's not spam, but it certainly is worthless.
There's something to be said, regarding platforms having a need to project an image of depth and variety, and there was a time when it might have been useful to have something like Salad Fingers hanging around, to fill out the infinite scroll playlist, but let's not pretend that Youtube has a gap like that, needing occupants anymore.
Youtube is eye-to-eye with (or far ahead of) Netflix and Amazon, in that they are active content producers now, and it's out-of-touch to imagine them as a DIY empowerment engine, providing a means for nobodies to bootstrap themselves out of obscurity scribbles we all might hypothetically fawn over for thirty seconds, while checking to see if the infinite scroll will crash our browsers.
That's a very good question. Supposing YT is still unprofitable after all these years, isn't that evidence of dumping? In other words, evidence of Google/Alphabet illegally pushing in to take over this market?
It makes sense that YouTube would do this. I've been expecting YouTube to go after channels that are primarily supported by Patreon donations with full teeth and claws for awhile now, and still expect it is coming. Channels not running ads reduced YouTube to a free video hosting service and cuts them out of the revenue loop completely. Their main goal, as I see it, is to transition into a centralized and much more controlled content platform run much more like a traditional TV network used to be. This will enable them to achieve Eric Schmidt's stated goal of taking the reins of human culture to protect the poor from themselves (which he states, though not in those words, in his book 'The New Digital Age'). They also think it makes them more attractive to advertisers (although there is abundant proof now that no 'adpocalypse' ever occurred and YouTube has only grown as an advertising platform... they see this as 'in spite of' niche content being present, not 'because of').
So if there are large channels that have milquetoast content that is non-controversial (for now, it won't take long before all educational content beyond elementary school level is de facto controversial) but aren't monetized, that really leaves YouTube out in the cold. Paying the hosting costs AND they don't have any increased leverage to regulate those channels contents? Worst case scenario as far as they're concerned... but they also don't want that content hopping to a different platform. Google didn't run YouTube at a staggering loss for a decade for nothing, they did it to suppress competition in the video space and guarantee no one could afford to compete with them unless they also had a search engine advertising business that could prop up the titanic losses.
> I've been expecting YouTube to go after channels that are primarily supported by Patreon donations with full teeth and claws for awhile now...
An alternative solution would be for youtube to compete with patreon, allow sponsorship directly and take a cut. They have in fact been testing this on select channels. On some big channels you see a "sponsor" button next to the "subscribe" button.
Yeah, but much like with live streaming, that ship has already left port. Twitch.tv (aka, Amazon) has like 80% of the market. YouTube's streaming has only recently been good enough to use.
Patreon's also got inertia for crowd funding and donations. Twitch has had paid subscriptions for a fairly long time and you still see Twitch streamers talking about their Patreon. Twitch only recently added multi tier support, but their bits for donations has essentially killed PayPal (largely since PayPal's service isn't very good).
There are people throwing cash at the screen, and YouTube is taking the slow road and they're going to end up as far behind as IBM was in the 90s.
> It makes sense that YouTube would do this. I've been expecting YouTube to go after channels that are primarily supported by Patreon donations with full teeth and claws for awhile now, and still expect it is coming. Channels not running ads reduced YouTube to a free video hosting service and cuts them out of the revenue loop completely.
No. This doesn't make sense. The channels that are primarily supported by Patreon donations could still be monetized by YouTube, even with ads. The real motivational structure is contaminated by politics and a desire by actors within YouTube to engage in the exercise censorious power using the YouTube platform. Otherwise, YouTube would be running it's own version of Patreon and letting non-mainstream advertisers buy ads on channels not suitable for mainstream advertisers.
Beware of authoritarian mindsets taking over your corporate culture. This can result in a corporate culture incapable of "hands off" policies which can be necessary to foster an ecosystem, and let the company organically adapt to the true direction of the market.
Actually, that's an interesting thought. I have a Gmail account I don't use much, but I almost never access it from the web. I only use it with a mail client. I never see any of the ads they would show if I accessed it through the web. I do wonder now if they'll cut it off. I've been trying to move away from using them at all anyway, so no loss if they do, but certainly an interesting idea.
Side note: PeerTube is part of the same federated network as Mastodon. You can follow Blender's PeerTube account from Mastodon by entering @blender@video.blender.org into the search bar and clicking follow on the result!
This is why I'm hyped about the fedi. This is what it'll finally take to break our dependence on a centralized web. Essentially, the email model. I wish we followed this model earlier in the web 2.0 days.
A good replacement for Twitter. Where "good" means:
- Decentralised. Anyone can run their own instance, but instances are federated so everyone on any instance can see your toots (Mastodon's tweets). So if you're paranoid about privacy or hate Nazi bootboys, you can run your own instance with complete control.
- A nice progression of feeds from only people you follow; to all toots of your instance; to toots from all instances.
- Polite discourse, at least on the mastodon.social instance which I belong to. Different instances have different rules, so maybe there is one for Nazi bootboys.
- Open, so if you don't like the interface, you can make your own. The stock web interface is fine for me.
- No ads!
- Trump isn't on it.
If you enjoyed Twitter more in the past when real people tweeted about real things, Mastodon is definitely worth checking out.
Don't worry, either your Eternal September is coming, or it will never take off.
Unfortu steely I think there's no way around that at this point, as I suspect any growth curve that actually allows a group to keep a culture will never be growing fast enough for the vastajoriry of people to put up with for long enough for it to grow sizable enough. :/
Very true, but the federated instances architecture means there will always be small instances. You can choose to migrate from an instance if it gets too big.
With your help, we can get PeerTube to its first stable release, its v1, planned for October, 2018. You will finance the development of:
○ Interface localization, to support multiple languages;
○ Video subtitles, to facilitate video accessibility for diverse audiences;
○ RSS feeds, to follow instances, users and channels through RSS protocol;
○ Video import from URL (YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc.) or torrent file;
○ Improved and advanced search feature;
○ Software stability (bug fixes) and scalability.
45 000 € stretch goal: PeerTube Deluxe v1
There are important features we dream of including into the v1. We hope you will contribute so far as to helping us finance:
○ Video redundancy (to share bandwidth between instances or as fallback if the original instance is down)
○ Subscriptions to users & channels throughout the federation (for users to subscribe to whatever they want regardless of their instance federation settings)
75 000 € stretch goal: let's pave the road to v2!
PeerTube isn't a quick and easy fix to data-centralization through video platforms. It's an alternative that will grow and emancipate internet users on the long run. At this point, your contributions will help us:
○ Finance the development of a webapp that will be available on Android and iOS app stores;
○ Contribute to the ActivityPub community. ActivityPub is the groundbreaking federation protocol that runs PeerTube's federation and also Mastodon's (a federated Twitter alternative);
○ Secure PeerTube's lead developer employment after the V1 release (oct. 2018);
○ Pave the road to V2, where our priority will be a plugin system to facilitate the development of personnalized features and displays.
I know ISPs have a bad rep in the states but where I live in europe we still trust some of our ISPs. So I'd like to see a world where ISPs offer mastodon and peertube instances to off load privately hosted instances.
I'd be more likely to trust someone I'm already paying monthly for internet access to keep my social media data safe, than a "free" service.
I don't think it should be ISPs that should offer such services. I got bitten once back in the days when I had an AOL email address. Changing ISP then became a complete mess, and unlike changing mobile phone provider you can't port your email address to a different hosting company.
So I think whoever provides these services (Identity, email, Fediverse node) should be independent from the ISP, and allow you to use your own domain so that you can change provider one day
I know that is an obvious issue but the reason I even mention ISPs helping out is because video streaming requires a lot of bandwidth.
Micro blogging is something society can easily take over from big corporations because it's basically like e-mail, but even more optimized compared to those old days.
But video uploading and streaming is where bandwidth becomes a major factor, and bandwidth=money.
I sent feedback from the YouTube app while on a blocked video. It gives you the options to contact them via chat, phone or email (the last one is composed all within the app, not in your email client).
Wait, am I reading this right? If you're a particularly popular channel, you're required to monetize and YT will block you if you don't?
That's ridiculous, and it's totally shooting yourself in the foot. The vast majority of creators with many views do want to monetize, YouTube is losing almost nothing by allowing people not to if they choose. They must be really be desparate for revenue over there.
If I skipped Hanlon's Razor and jumped to assuming your speculations are right, then I'd say Google wants to head off a future where people specifically donate to those who aren't doing ad-monetizing (i.e. the only ones who actually deserve donations!!)
Google wants creators funded, but they want the system to push their ad-focused approach. The last thing Google wants is a future where the (unethical, horrible, destructive) surveillance-capitalism-ad-tech economy goes away…
Really? Is that what you've taken away from the Maven debate?
It's a number of observations. It's only natural that a company like YouTube would seek to monetize and shift towards the mainstream. It's what they are doing with the long tail and the creative margins which is suspect.
They should set up a way for viewers to fund creators through YouTube itself instead of through a third-party crowdfunding service. That way, they can take their cut for keeping the lights on. Since they know what videos you watch, they could automatically distribute teh monies the same way they already do, but just not show you an ad.
What would be really nice, from a viewer standpoint, would be if it was done on a flat subscription rate, like Sirius XM and the BBC do it. Basically make a premium version of YouTube, but I'm sure their marketing department will try to give it a cooler, but less useful, name than YouTube Premium.
And they shouldn't freaking block videos because the creators flipped a switch. That's just stupid. If they're not willing to offer the videos without ads, then offer the videos with ads.
They are happy enough to get into that world if it's part of keeping everyone on YouTube where they still get to be the dominant ad system overall.
Google's strategy as they offer patronage options will be to make it a ransom that removes ads. That way, the ads are still there for non-patrons and Google gets to keep their primary business model.
What I'm saying is that patronage should go to those who treat the public better by not showing ads to anyone. We shouldn't reward bad behavior through ransoms that make the bad stuff go away just for those who pay up.
There are channels that have direct sponsors, I think sometimes the deal with the sponsor is to not monetize the video, so if I get sponsored by Intel I would have to turn off the ads in case an AMD ad would show up.
This is a speculation of mine from what I observed on some tech channels I am not familiar with YT Terms and Conditions.
If you get third party sponsors and not allow monetization is YT getting nothing? If yes then we can see what they are trying to make here.
If its not monetized, then YouTube has no way to make money off the views; no way to recoup the costs associated with hosting those videos. History, morality, and good will aside, its in their financial best interest to not allow videos which are not monetized.
Then they run the risk of ostracizing creators. Creators bring viewers to YouTube. In many ways YT is like Pandora. The "product" of YouTube is other people's creativity.
YT is free to block whatever content they want for whatever reason. However, creators will follow the path of least resistance and viewers will follow creators.
Push the creators away and there will be no viewers to show ads to.
Sure, but YouTube gives the option to not monetize your videos. You can't give your users and option and then be upset when some users pick that option.
If people picking that option is causing problems for your business, you take that option away.
Other than using them as loss-leaders, people watch a blender foundation video then deep dive into the multitude of monetized tutorials on the YouTubes.
I'd venture to say most people learning blender will spend a significant time on YouTube, blender isn't the easiest thing to learn by a long shot.
That's kind of like saying it's in a restaurant's financial best interest not to give free refills. Running a profitable business is not simply a matter of directly reclaiming every dollar you spend.
The company could realise the goodwill generated by allowing some limited channels to run video without ads, and the badwill generated by blocking those videos.
More like if you're a particularly popular channel with revenue and a budget. YouTube isn't a service for nonprofits to use to offload their bandwidth costs. If you have money to pay for your other expenses, it's not reasonable to expect this one supplier to do it for free. Morally, Google deserves some kind of reimbursement here.
Advertising is certainly one way to square that. Honestly I don't see what the big deal is here.
Aside from the fact that Blender is a non-profit backing a free, open-source application -- you're right. YouTube does have that right. And I have the right to think holding the dissemination of free educational material hostage to make a quick buck is reprehensible.
Also don't forget that YouTube gave them the option to not advertise on those videos. It's so arbitrarily capricious I was convinced it was a technical mishap when the news first broke.
> Aside from the fact that Blender is a non-profit backing a free, open-source application
The Blender Foundation isn't "Blender", though. It's a financial entity with income (there's literally a giant "donate" link on their home page) and expenses. They pay for all sorts of stuff that they need (obviously I have no clue what their balance sheet looks like).
And no one whines that they don't get free conference admission or airline tickets or printer paper or whatever. Why is their video hosting any different?
> And no one whines that they don't get free conference admission or airline tickets or printer paper or whatever
Those are terrible analogies. YouTube offers free hosting with the ability to opt out of monetizing your videos -- features that they will apparently punish you for using. That is absurdly user-hostile.
Meh. And we've come full circle. It seems to my eyes that they only "punish" you for not advertising if you have the means to pay other expenses but want to freeload on youtube specifically. And I don't see why I should care about that.
It's very likely that Blender is going to have the same problem with Dailymotion and Vimeo too. No one wants to (or has the means) to be a dumping ground for hosting other people's content. We all have to share in this world. As it happens advertising is the mechanism YouTube offers for sharing revenue.
Same reason a coffee shop might offer to let you charge your phone/laptop batteries for free and then take that away when they see you are running an extension cord to your office.
It's for you. And me. And any person or organization that wants to put up a video for the public to see.
But it's not for people and organizations who are being funded to put up those videos. If you are deriving revenue from that video stream, whether or not it's a "profit" legally, then it's not unreasonable for you to be expected to pay for it. Advertising with shared revenue is the standard mechanism for paying for youtube videos.
> If you are deriving revenue from that video stream
By opting out of ads you're also opting out of your share of the revenue so by definition you're avoiding a potential profit stream. I think you'd have a fair point if it was a publicly-listed company complaining about ads hosted for free on YouTube but come on -- these are free, educational videos hosted for the explicit purpose of democratizing knowledge.
Again, you're not wrong. YouTube is within their rights to do this. I just think it's an incredibly disappointing move from Google.
> hosted for the explicit purpose of democratizing knowledge.
That's outrageously spun. They're Blender evangelism. Having those videos out there helps Blender get users and visibility and (here's the important part) donations, that they can then use to make Blender better by paying for stuff that Blender needs to get better.
Except for video hosting. You think they shouldn't be required to pay for video hosting the same way they are for member reimbursements. Because... I dunno, Google is evil or something.
You make fair points. The biggest issue here is YouTube's recurrent communication problem. Blender and MIT Open Courseware, I am almost sure, were blindsided by this change. They would have worked out a plan ahead of time otherwise. Just like so many other Youtubers blindsided by all the new rules, so were they. That, fundamentally, is user hostile.
Actually, tech conferences are expensive to attend, and there's been a growing movement the past few years for conferences to at least comp the ticket of someone who's scheduled to speak.
Wait, am I reading this right? If you're a particularly popular channel, you're required to monetize and YT will block you if you don't?
That's ridiculous, and it's totally shooting yourself in the foot.
People using power over the private YouTube platform to push political agendas through censorship crossed the "ridiculous, and it's totally shooting yourself in the foot" threshold awhile back. It's just that it's leaking into the monetization realm.
This is what happens when you let authoritarian mindsets take over your company's culture. You wind up with a company that can't keep its hands off the ecosystem it's supposedly fostering.
I can't see anything in the linked contract that says YT is forcing them to monetize it. Other than one email months ago that hasn't been confirmed I see nothing to suggest this is a policy change YT have actually made.
Yes, for free. You can create an account and upload as many videos as you want without paying absolutely anything. Even more, without handing over any personal information.
But hey, feel free to upload your videos elsewhere.
Wait, are you suggesting that it should be forced to continue to distribute your videos for free (to you) even if you don't agree to their terms of service?
No, I'm suggesting that you can't change a contract (ToS) after it's been accepted without consideration.
Blender already had an account and videos hosted on Youtube. Blender did not change their videos. YouTube changed their rules - and is holding Blender's videos hostage until they accept NEW terms.
These aren't terms already part of Blender's contract - which is why Youtube is literally trying to force Blender to sign a new contract and refuses to execute their original ToS.
It's a bit of a stretch to call it a contract I think. Terms of service may in fact be a contact, but IANAL, but calling it a contract might imply that there are things to be gained on both sides. If a contract is no longer providing value for one of the contractees then it is fair, and should be provisions for such, to renegotiate or terminate the contract.
I do agree that they are abusing their position, but I don't agree that they shouldn't be allowed to act the way they are acting. Are they being unreasonable? Maybe, but it's not my, or your, place to decide that.
Well, it's not my place because I don't put videos on Youtube and rarely if ever watch them. Sorry, I may have assumed too much. We also don't know all the details as to why they are doing this. We can only assume it is unreasonable. We shouldn't assume anything.
> No, I'm suggesting that you can't change a contract (ToS) after it's been accepted without consideration.
Of course you can, as long as that is specified in the contract.
> These aren't terms already part of Blender's contract - which is why Youtube is literally trying to force Blender to sign a new contract and refuses to execute their original ToS.
A contract in the US can't override tort law. Material change without consideration is de facto no go.
This is pretty standard torts 101. You can say whatever you want in a contract but that doesn't mean the clause is valid. Furthermore ToS fall under sticker contracts which have a different level of scrutiny especially in regards to material changes post facto.
YouTube knows this. This is why they are trying to get Blender to sign a new contract. If your claim above was correct, YouTube would of simply already monetized the channel and unblocked the videos.
There was no material consideration to begin with. If I agree to paint your house for free, and put it in writing, and then later decide not to (or decide not to unless you agree to some post-hoc rule), you have no tort against me -- there was no consideration to begin with.
But you can't agree to paint my house for free, decide you would rather be paid halfway through and then prevent me from entering my house until I pay you.
That's a bit of a clumsy analogy, but the issue here is the immediate blocking of content and then demanding of pay. If Youtube instead said "Hey, you have 90 days to remove your content or let us monetize it" that would be a bit different.
> The YT ToS does not create an obligation on YT's part to serve your videos.
Correct. The issue here is that they blocked the videos (not plain removal) with no warning or stated limit, and then demanded monetization to unblock the videos, thus creating a duress situation.
If YouTube had a stated policy saying "Videos getting over 250k views must be monetized" or sent a 90 day warning the situation would be different.
Instead YouTube blocked the videos without warning and then demanded a new monetization contract to restore service. That reeks of a duress case.
As much as I’d like to buy into this interpretation, isn’t the fact that youtube is an ongoing developed and supported service that consideration?
As in, their consideration here is “we continue to, without any pricetag, host your videos for free on a website receiving ongoing updates and development, AND FURTHER allow you to continue to upload and store new content, despite either and both being complete deadweight cost for us?”
The consideration being the right to indefinitely add more to the platform and benefit from those updates
I would say that if you want to run a platform for communication and expression, you shouldn't run rampant across it like a bully. There's a limit to what any company should be able to get away with in their terms of service. Push far enough, and the customers will leave with a bad taste in their mouth.
You can start running a platform for free expression, then start bullying people into adherence to a monetization policy. You're within your rights. However, that's a stupid level of bait and switch, like billing yourself as a vegan restaurant, but telling everyone they can only eat burgers.
Do you live in a socialist country? The infrastructure has cost does it not seem fair to recoup that cost? If not how would we have a resource like YouTube?
YouTube has a monopoly partially because social networking aspects like search, recommended, etc.
However, another reason competitors haven't cropped up is because copyright law in the US and elsewhere highly favors publishers over hosters or creators. Publishers will sue the crap out of you the moment you get big enough to make a difference. If Google hadn't dumped money into YouTube, they'd probably have gone under years ago when Viacom and others sued them for copyright infringement.
Why not switch to Vimeo, a well-established and stable video hosting platform? There's no advertising and no shenanigans of ads being forced on your video. The hosting is not free, but at least you have control over your videos and privacy issues.
Peertube, d.tube, and other federated/decentralized streaming service are really not that reliable, at least from my experience.
Vimeo only accepts content that it deems "artistic". Way back in 2008, a site called stage6 shut down, at the time it was the only streaming site that allowed 1080p videos and was the go to site for video game content creators to upload videos. After it shut down many of those users tried out vimeo since they were allowing 720p videos compared to youtube's 480p. Vimeo then deleted the videos and disallowed the content. For a period, things went back to direct downloads instead of streaming, but youtube increased quality and the content shifted over with it.
As someone who recently started learning Blender I recommend the YouTube channel Blender Guru. They guy makes great tutorials for both beginners and more advanced users.
Look up the "Humane Rigging" set of tutorials. Its the best Blender tutorial I've found so far, but it only covers rigging. (To an insane level of detail, but its ONLY about rigging).
I learned Blender almost a decade ago. Instrumental in my learning the application was competing in informal speed-modeling contests.
They were conducted from an IRC channel, and ranged from 5 minutes to a couple hours, with random-ish topics: a chair, a pair of binoculars, boombox, etc.
I am fairly certain this experience also contributed to well-developed spatial skills (mentally representing and manipulating objects). I hope you encourage your daughter along this path. :)
Blender is the epic example of free software slowly eventually eating the big proprietary guys' lunch. Volunteers spending countless hours writing software, because they were fed up with the very high pricing point of the alternatives (Maya, 3DS). Now hopefully they can kick off the eating of large internet incumbents like Youtube, maybe using some decentralized free video sharing like PeerTube. I love watching blender tutorials. I hope this creates more competition in this space (online video hosting).
I really hope we will be looking back at this moment in 3 years or whatever as the beginning of something big. We are long overdue to "myspacifiy" some of the current regents of the web.
Remember that Blender started as proprietary software created by a Dutch company. The software was close source from its inception until 2002 when the parent company went bankrupt and the creator started a crowdfunding campaign to buy and open the source from the holding company's liquidation sale.
Yeah I watched an interview. It was cool how he says most of the major modeller refactors, and other very important code contributions were donated by volunteers.
Yes, and then it was able to start slowly taking over the world. I see the value of a proprietary cash-fueled kick start, but it wasn't the driving factor in blender's adoption, and other projects show it's clearly not necessary in the general case.
I'm just pointing out it was originally proprietary and that's where it built a reputation that made it worth opening and supporting. Software doesn't know if it's proprietarily licensed or not. Great ideas are only GPL. OSS is great, but it doesn't mean proprietary software is bad or evil.
Blender is actually my favorite example of a beautifully made, professional-level OSS tool. The way the interface renders, the way the interface is thought out -- it's truly a pleasure to use. Given the Python backend interface and graphics/game engine, I've considered using it for completely unrelated projects -- I could see it being used for video/display jockeying, or aerial survey flight control, for example.
YouPHPtube could be a nice option for the Blender Foundation if they don't mind paying for their bandwidth usage. It is pretty easy to install (the hard way). I'm going to make a docker container for it and the encoder sometime. One advantage is that it can use amazon s3 storage and there are instructions for setting up live streaming. AFAIK, peer tube doesn't have a live stream capability (though I realize that the blender foundation may never use such a feature).
> This Software must be used for Good, never Evil. It is expressly forbidden to use YouPHPTube to build porn sites, violence, racism or anything else that affects human integrity or denigrates the image of anyone.
If you're interested in Blender, but come from a ${'insert your favorite creative tool'} background, and want less cognitive load (adaption to quirks that only exist within Blender), check out Bforartists! It's a fork of Blender with better, more familiar UX and behavior.
The Blender team is working on Blender 2.8 which will bring a lot of new features, including a lot of UI changes.
There was an article about some of these changes a while ago on their blog [1], and more recently a video showing a lot of these UI changes... available on the Blender Developers Youtube channel (how ironic!) [2].
Excellent performance on all videos but one (Elephants Dream). That video hangs forever strangely reporting a total length of 10:50:04 in the lower left corner, that is, over 10 hours which is of course incorrect. Maybe a problem during upload?
All other videos start immediately even in full HD; so far I've watched a couple in their entirety with no glitches at all.
One of the huge problems with YouTube etc is the centralised nature means normal methods of telling good from bad are limited.
Recently the Peppa Pig shock videos thread started up again. As a parent it does worry me - but if we had to visit "grot-peppa-porn-1234.com" before viewing the video instead of choosing "bbc.com" I think managing the problem would be easier.
So, peertube is nice. Perhaps it's not the right solution still?
Correct me if I am wrong, but if content creators take their content off YouTube and use PeerTube, does this mean that there will be separate instances of PeerTube (e.g., video.blender.org) for each channel/creator? Another example could be if ol' Pewds decided to also do this - would his content be hosted on something like video.pewdiepie.org?
Each instance of peertube is like youtube. There can be many users and users can have many channels. You can choose which instance you want to upload to, since different instances will have different storage limits, user limits, content policies, content focus, moderation, site layout, etc. Or you can run your own instance if you want full control over your content and the site as a whole.
Different instances of peertube can follow each other (doesn't have to be mutual - think twitter follow) and essentially share content to improve discoverability (think twitter timeline showing content from all the instances you follow).
When it came to searching for all content across all instances (in a way like how we can search all content on YouTube) is this something that would be possible?
> The administrators of a PeerTube instance can follow each other. When your PeerTube instance follows another PeerTube instance, you receive the videos preview informations from this instance. This way, you can display the videos available on your instance and on the instances you decided to follow. So you keep control of the videos displayed on your PeerTube instance!
You would need to find an instance of peertube that is following all other instances. There are several peertubes that try to follow as many other instances as possible, but there will always be private or unadvertised instances. If nobody knows a particular instance exists, then nobody can follow it and its content won't be discoverable.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] threadBasically, overzealous automatic piracy filters
"4. ADVERTISING
"4.1 Delivery, Ad Revenues, Payments, Reports.
"Google will have the right, but not the obligation, to serve advertising in any and all Google Services, including but not limited to the display of ads on the Playback Pages and within the YouTube Video Player in conjunction with the display or playback of Provider Content and Monetized Content. Provider will receive 55% of Ad Revenues recognised by Google . If one or more Google content providers claim a portion of Monetized Content for monetization through the Content ID system, Provider will receive a pro rata share of the Ad Revenues that would otherwise be due, with such pro rata share to be determined by Google in its reasonable discretion . Recognized revenues do not include items listed in clause 4.3 or taxes. Payments to Provider for Ad Revenues will be sent by Google within approximately sixty (60) days after the end of any calendar month, provided that Provider’s earned balance is $100 or more in the aggregate. When Provider’s monthly earned balance is less than $100, there will be no payment and the balance will accumulate until it exceeds $100, at which time it will be paid to Provider in accordance with the preceding sentence. Any payments to Provider will be made in the manner that Google pays its partners. Google reserves the right to retain all other revenues derived from Google Services, including without limitation any revenues from ads that may appear on any search results pages. Within thirty (30) days of the end of each month, Google will provide Provider with usage reports in the form generally made available to partners at that time . Google may create an account for Provider to access information about payments owed to Provider. To ensure proper payment, Provider is responsible for providing and maintaining accurate contact and payment information associated with its account."
The interesting statement is the first sentence: "Google will have the right [...] to serve advertising in any and all Google Services, including but not limited to the display of ads on the Playback Pages and within the YouTube Video Player in conjunction with the display or playback of Provider Content and Monetized Content."
"Monitized Content", judging by other parts of the license, appears to be those videos that have "allow ads" checkbox; "Provider Content" are those without that check.
If yes, YouTube should have notified the affected channels first and ask them to change their settings or leave.
I've been waiting patiently hoping it comes back, but at this point I feel like I'm going to have to use archive.org or download directly from them.
I was slowly warming up to the idea of paying for Red for commercial-less music and maybe checking out some other paid content, but this has been a bucket of cold water on that notion.
You can not stream videos from the website though as streaming links are from youtube.
It's crazy and really sad how YouTube bloomed into this awesome, independent alternative to all the crap coming out of hollywood and cable TV, but now they've decided to kneecap the independents, promote the shit out of establishment stuff, and push actual, real-live cable really hard.
It feels like a hostile takeover.
I think if all you were concerned about is advertisers, you'd just let them pick that as a criteria: "Would you like to advertise on channels flagged by our system as potentially offensive?"
Some would, some wouldn't. Problem solved, you don't piss off creators, you make more money.
(Maybe the counter-argument to that is advertisers wouldn't want to appear on any YouTube channel because some other YouTube channel had offensive content, as though all of YouTube were a tainted brand, but that is frankly laughable.)
It's fine if new videos get flagged, you can reupload them, but youtube bots flag old videos and there is no notification whatsoever. Even their own "Video manager board" not showing them as demonitised, because they still get money from youtube red and considered as claimed, you have to enter "edit video" to see the notification. You just have to manually search them... And for gaming channels with 1-2k videos it's a pain.
They already do this. People need to stop being angry at things they know nothing about.
Not to mention part of the problem was YouTube not enforcing their content guidelines to begin with. Hate speech has always been against their content guidelines, they just never actually enforced it.
ed: see below comment from OscarCunningham
I'm not clear if they want that because of bogus copyright claims, EU legislation etc, or just because they favour making money over not making money?
Edit: Either way looking for alternatives seems like a good idea.
I am pretty dismayed to be this right. I didn't think YT would be nearly this aggressive in service of the ideas I outlined.
Basically, they take a cut off that activity. In some cases they could take most of or all the money, which is a clear win for them, but even when they pay out they're earning revenue on the transaction. It's been their core business model, so the problems with advocating an adfree behavior become obvious.
I would add that this becomes more urgent if they're in crisis. Makes me wish I could get the master copies I'd uploaded back, but there's no chance of that.
Bottom line: shots fired. You must work with YouTube the way they want you to work with YouTube, or you'll get punished.
I doubt most of them care. Even if some engineers care, I really doubt that the product team does in a circumstance like this.
I think a lot of employees are just not taking a step back to look at the sum of the parts they are helping to build, or maybe they have optimism/trust in their leaders to not fuck everyone over, and others might just draw their line further down the sand (e.g. no Pentagon contracts).
I imagine a brave few are also working to change it for the better from within. I'd definitely choose to work at Apple instead though, Google seems fundamentally creepy these days.
It's all meant to be Logan and Jake Paul and PewDiePie and whatever will drive low-quality mass views so long as the viewer quality isn't so low that they're losing advertisers. At a scale like this, it's just pure statistics.
This is not damage. This is benefit, in terms of getting other content creators in line. The message is clear.
I remember the headlines, but had to go to wikipedia to see why they abandoned ship.
From YouTube's point of view, that's bad, so they need a replacement. It's quantity of views they need, they don't actually have a stake in the success of any one creator.
Perhaps more importantly, the FOSS and tech communities are not a vacuum. Google and YouTube in particular have been getting increasing amounts of negative press recently, and this strongarming of Blender further drives home how far they have gone from the era of "Don't be evil." Additionally, the precedent of changing platforms rather than giving in to Google's pressure has now been set; While there will be no mass exodus, it is easier for entities to follow in Blender's footsteps than it would have been to set the lead, and we may hope that this move turns out well in order to further encourage others with similar inclinations.
This is unlike other content creators, who migh not have the technical skills to try a new platform, or might rely on youtube to get views.
Discovery and subscriptions will need to be solved, but that’s not insurmountable (ie RSS). CDNs can be plug and play in front of nginx (if P2P torrent isn't your cup of tea), backend storage can be whatever is cheapest.
It's one thing make a service for few 100 users, it's a different beast to serve millions of users. In case of Online Videos, it is not only extremely difficult, it still remains very expensive. There is literally a handful of companies who can financially and technically pull it off at youtube-scale. After more than 10 years, youtube either makes very little profit or still not profitable.
The more popular the content, the cheaper per unit it'll be to serve (based on bandwidth/transit costs and how they scale, and that you most likely can serve it out of RAM with Varnish, a very inexpensive CDN, or peer to peer), but there will still be a cost, and either the producer or the consumers of that content will need to pay for it.
Only a few companies that can do it centrally. Peer to Peer technology was doing it before youtube existed.
I can give you a list of torrents that are dead and never coming back. Other than takedowns, there's some very old YouTube videos still around.
I don't understand why you are mentioning peer to peer technology? What does that have to do with anything? Youtube is not a cute side project where your viewing experience depending on how many peers your video has. Peertube depends on webtorrent, you literally have to host and seed every single video on your platform and duplicate it multiple times by others. Good luck doing it over petabyte scale. Google does something similar, but popular videos are hosted at users-end point on GGC nodes, distributed over 10,000s of servers all over the world.
The super-seeding / swarming approach developed for the BitTorrent protocol is quite interesting. One original seeder just needs to upload to a few leechers. Then this leechers become seeders themselfs and start to upload to a next layer of leechers and so on. This approach scales exponentially meaning you can cover the whole internet in just a few steps. Further more you can start uploading yourself even before you have completed receiving the file.
E.g. if every node just has 10 uploading connections then you just need 8 steps to cover 100 million = 10^8 peers. Remember the traffic on the original seeder (and every other node) is just 10 uploading connections.
1. YouTube Red so I don't have to see ads
2. Queuing and casting from my phone to my TV.
3. Fast loading and buffer-free streaming (as long as your bandwidth is good enough). Note I'm in Australia - Mixer and Twitch often aren't smooth for me even though I'm on 100 megabit fibre. Sydney or Melbourne PoPs will beat Hong Kong and Singapore every time.
I watch Pycon and LCA videos on YouTube because it's easier than going anywhere else.
As an aside, I have to wonder if you've thought through your desire to serve your website over HTTP instead of over HTTPS.
You noted that you use ad blocking software because ad networks are a common route by which malware propagates. HTTP websites comprise another salient target for malware. If I am at a coffee shop with a compromised wifi router and I load your HTTP website, that compromised router can inject malware into your page and my browser will run it, just like it would have run malware served by an ad server. If your website were served over HTTPS, the router wouldn't have been able to do that.
I imagine you knew all of that, and you're right that HTTPS does have some problems, but trying to avoid those problems by opting for HTTP is exchanging those problems for (imho) much bigger problems.
I could well be wrong. I'm hoping for the reasons you mention that some benevolent hacker people work out how to bring this to people for free and make it simple to do.
From Wikipedia:
> "Innocent monopoly", or monopoly achieved solely by merit, is perfectly legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not. The purpose of the Sherman Act is not to protect competitors from harm from legitimately successful businesses, nor to prevent businesses from gaining honest profits from consumers, but rather to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses.
It's pretty clear that Google used their dominant position(s) in web search and web advertising to then dominate the user-generated video space. And now they're engaging in the type of abuse of customers that the Sherman Antitrust Act was designed to mitigate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act
Do you believe the US DOJ or more powerful states would go after Alphabet/google? That's the ones that count. I just can't see our current administration going that avenue.
Are (American) liberals automatically progressive even if they collude to lower salaries, pay less taxes, and contribute to housing bubbles? Not to mention selling to the DoD and ICE.
Companies who have to survive in a competitive marketplace don't typically go around driving away customers en masse. This is like something from 1990's Microsoft.
> a person of a specified kind with whom one has to deal
[edit] Youtube has 3 kinds of customers (or users, if you wish): publishers, viewers and advertisers. It makes sense to separate them like that, but not based on a "pays/ does not pay" criterion. If PewDiePie is a customer, then most definitely Blender Foundation is a customer too.
Anyone having a YT channel will tell that ‘suggested video’ is a dominant traffic source so it’s not an edge case.
In sum, YT was already making money thanks to Blender videos.
And yes, companies who have to survive in a competitive marketplace drive away non-paying customers all the time. Because they're not paying, and so the slight chance of turning them into paying customers, or benefiting existing paying customers, is worth the loss.
That's not particularly clear to me. YouTube was already pretty huge when Google bought them in 2006: according to Wikipedia, the fifth most popular website, albeit of a far smaller Web. Google, meanwhile, had their own video-uploading service, Google Video, which launched three months before YouTube but was not nearly as successful. Sure, there's no doubt that YouTube has benefitted massively from Google's resources in the decade since, including their willingness to let it run without a profit. But based on that history, it seems far from inevitable that Google would be the one to dominate video.
It also doesn't seem like YouTube's growth is all that directly linked to Google Search's monopoly status, other than in that the latter powered Google's profits (but there are plenty of sources of money in the world). Google Search's video results have always shown videos from all websites rather than being YouTube-specific; who knows what they might have done if there had been more serious competition, but there wasn't, so they don't have that particular blood on their hands. You could argue that Google used its Search leverage to promote Web videos in general, as opposed to some other form of media, but I don't know what other form would be or why it would be preferable to video. (Perhaps live video? There might be another universe in which justin.tv was successful early on, rather than waiting most of a decade for the unexpected explosion of Twitch. But I think that given the state of Internet connections at the time, it made more sense for YouTube to happen first.)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
Alphabet/Google/Youtube will just pay the fine, as a cost of doing business.
https://twitter.com/AnneMunition/status/1008852515629105152
YouTube preventing Linus Tech Tips from advertising their non-YouTube videos/streams.
In other words, like you said:
> Bottom line: shots fired. You must work with YouTube the way they want you to work with YouTube, or you'll get punished.
For some reason, people are still hanging onto a belief that Google cares about its users in ways other than to profit from them.
Of course, it could well be that people aren't surprised and are just highlighting the Google's behaviour towards certain channels.
Kind of like sometimes a president's behaviour isn't surprising, but still deserves to be highlighted and nobody should accept it.
Here's an idea: if you want to drive home the point that you don't do it for the ad money, and if you want to force yourself not to depend on that money, you could give it all to FOSS foundations.
You could publish your YouTube check every month, as small as it may be, on your blog or website, alongside an equivalent donation to, say, the FSF, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Archive.org, Blender, EFF, or whatever foundation you like.
If you publicize it on YouTube and here, you may even start a movement of sorts.
"Don't be evil."
But that doesn't seem to make sense. There are lots of popular channels that don't have advertising and Blender's videos are popular but not that popular.
Their blogpost about it is here: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
I haven't looked at the contract they posted, but they seem to have the same interpretation as you. Maybe it's just an updated contract that includes new rules if you monetize?
(that aside, the communication chain from google posted there is just atrocious. I wouldn't sign a 6 page contract based on those robo-emails either)
It makes sense if it's staged rollout. I'm assuming all unmonetized good actors (ie not stealing other people's content) will see this ultimatum eventually.
https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1009010581549060097
> Google sent a contract to Blender Foundation in which we have to accept monetizing our Youtube channel content.
and link to contract:
http://download.blender.org/institute/Contract%20between%20G...
The contract looks like a regular monetization contract, so the cause-effect relationship between blocking and monetization is not made clear.
Why would Google single out Blender for this? Unless they had copyright concerns and needed to revshare with copyright holders, or they want to go "freemium" and make all high-view/quality videos monetized.
Seems there are some changes going on.
Get your act together, Google. This is just stupid.
They recently demonetized all of the Salad Fingers videos, causing David Firth to remove all those videos from YouTube and only allowing them to Patreon subscribers via Vimeo.
I hope this pushes towards more independent, distributed toob sites. YouTube is simply too big a monolith.
In fact there are individual channel feeds (https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<>) and this is a wrapper around that. That's great!
I currently receive email notifications for subscriptions, but I've noticed I don't always get emails for all the uploads of some of those channels. A direct RSS feed should solve that problem too.
It's not spam, but it certainly is worthless.
There's something to be said, regarding platforms having a need to project an image of depth and variety, and there was a time when it might have been useful to have something like Salad Fingers hanging around, to fill out the infinite scroll playlist, but let's not pretend that Youtube has a gap like that, needing occupants anymore.
Youtube is eye-to-eye with (or far ahead of) Netflix and Amazon, in that they are active content producers now, and it's out-of-touch to imagine them as a DIY empowerment engine, providing a means for nobodies to bootstrap themselves out of obscurity scribbles we all might hypothetically fawn over for thirty seconds, while checking to see if the infinite scroll will crash our browsers.
The blog post mentions 1M views [1]. At €1 per TB [2], and assuming a video of 100Mb which are roughly 1GB, you end up with 1000TB a €1000.
Even if Google just pays a fraction like $0.1 per TB, they still have to earn $100 somewhere else to break even.
[1]: https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
[2]: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
1. The bad press generated is easily worth more than $100.
2. Youtube exercises the option recommend other videos. Blender gave them 1M opportunities to attract attention to other videos that are monetized.
3. Blender's videos were probably much larger than 100MB. I remember watching several that were over 30mins.
So if there are large channels that have milquetoast content that is non-controversial (for now, it won't take long before all educational content beyond elementary school level is de facto controversial) but aren't monetized, that really leaves YouTube out in the cold. Paying the hosting costs AND they don't have any increased leverage to regulate those channels contents? Worst case scenario as far as they're concerned... but they also don't want that content hopping to a different platform. Google didn't run YouTube at a staggering loss for a decade for nothing, they did it to suppress competition in the video space and guarantee no one could afford to compete with them unless they also had a search engine advertising business that could prop up the titanic losses.
An alternative solution would be for youtube to compete with patreon, allow sponsorship directly and take a cut. They have in fact been testing this on select channels. On some big channels you see a "sponsor" button next to the "subscribe" button.
Patreon's also got inertia for crowd funding and donations. Twitch has had paid subscriptions for a fairly long time and you still see Twitch streamers talking about their Patreon. Twitch only recently added multi tier support, but their bits for donations has essentially killed PayPal (largely since PayPal's service isn't very good).
There are people throwing cash at the screen, and YouTube is taking the slow road and they're going to end up as far behind as IBM was in the 90s.
No. This doesn't make sense. The channels that are primarily supported by Patreon donations could still be monetized by YouTube, even with ads. The real motivational structure is contaminated by politics and a desire by actors within YouTube to engage in the exercise censorious power using the YouTube platform. Otherwise, YouTube would be running it's own version of Patreon and letting non-mainstream advertisers buy ads on channels not suitable for mainstream advertisers.
Beware of authoritarian mindsets taking over your corporate culture. This can result in a corporate culture incapable of "hands off" policies which can be necessary to foster an ecosystem, and let the company organically adapt to the true direction of the market.
I find the service is actually quite good, but I'm currently investigating moving to protonmail instead.
- Decentralised. Anyone can run their own instance, but instances are federated so everyone on any instance can see your toots (Mastodon's tweets). So if you're paranoid about privacy or hate Nazi bootboys, you can run your own instance with complete control.
- A nice progression of feeds from only people you follow; to all toots of your instance; to toots from all instances.
- Polite discourse, at least on the mastodon.social instance which I belong to. Different instances have different rules, so maybe there is one for Nazi bootboys.
- Open, so if you don't like the interface, you can make your own. The stock web interface is fine for me.
- No ads!
- Trump isn't on it.
If you enjoyed Twitter more in the past when real people tweeted about real things, Mastodon is definitely worth checking out.
Unfortu steely I think there's no way around that at this point, as I suspect any growth curve that actually allows a group to keep a culture will never be growing fast enough for the vastajoriry of people to put up with for long enough for it to grow sizable enough. :/
Everything is polite at first, until it gets big. This has been true of all social media platforms in history.
20 000 € goal: PeerTube v1, clean and simple
With your help, we can get PeerTube to its first stable release, its v1, planned for October, 2018. You will finance the development of:
45 000 € stretch goal: PeerTube Deluxe v1There are important features we dream of including into the v1. We hope you will contribute so far as to helping us finance:
75 000 € stretch goal: let's pave the road to v2!PeerTube isn't a quick and easy fix to data-centralization through video platforms. It's an alternative that will grow and emancipate internet users on the long run. At this point, your contributions will help us:
I know ISPs have a bad rep in the states but where I live in europe we still trust some of our ISPs. So I'd like to see a world where ISPs offer mastodon and peertube instances to off load privately hosted instances.
I'd be more likely to trust someone I'm already paying monthly for internet access to keep my social media data safe, than a "free" service.
So I think whoever provides these services (Identity, email, Fediverse node) should be independent from the ISP, and allow you to use your own domain so that you can change provider one day
Micro blogging is something society can easily take over from big corporations because it's basically like e-mail, but even more optimized compared to those old days.
But video uploading and streaming is where bandwidth becomes a major factor, and bandwidth=money.
I think if enough people write in, they’ll change their mind.
What happened to people liking technical solutions because they could remove rent seeking middle men?
That's ridiculous, and it's totally shooting yourself in the foot. The vast majority of creators with many views do want to monetize, YouTube is losing almost nothing by allowing people not to if they choose. They must be really be desparate for revenue over there.
Google wants creators funded, but they want the system to push their ad-focused approach. The last thing Google wants is a future where the (unethical, horrible, destructive) surveillance-capitalism-ad-tech economy goes away…
Because the corporate culture of Google/YouTube has changed into one of authoritarian adherence. This is the natural result.
Really? Is that what you've taken away from the Maven debate?
There's a couple simpler, far more plausible explanations.
It's a number of observations. It's only natural that a company like YouTube would seek to monetize and shift towards the mainstream. It's what they are doing with the long tail and the creative margins which is suspect.
What would be really nice, from a viewer standpoint, would be if it was done on a flat subscription rate, like Sirius XM and the BBC do it. Basically make a premium version of YouTube, but I'm sure their marketing department will try to give it a cooler, but less useful, name than YouTube Premium.
And they shouldn't freaking block videos because the creators flipped a switch. That's just stupid. If they're not willing to offer the videos without ads, then offer the videos with ads.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6304294
Google's strategy as they offer patronage options will be to make it a ransom that removes ads. That way, the ads are still there for non-patrons and Google gets to keep their primary business model.
What I'm saying is that patronage should go to those who treat the public better by not showing ads to anyone. We shouldn't reward bad behavior through ransoms that make the bad stuff go away just for those who pay up.
http://mimiandeunice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ME_486_P...
This is a speculation of mine from what I observed on some tech channels I am not familiar with YT Terms and Conditions.
If you get third party sponsors and not allow monetization is YT getting nothing? If yes then we can see what they are trying to make here.
YT is free to block whatever content they want for whatever reason. However, creators will follow the path of least resistance and viewers will follow creators.
Push the creators away and there will be no viewers to show ads to.
If people picking that option is causing problems for your business, you take that option away.
I'd venture to say most people learning blender will spend a significant time on YouTube, blender isn't the easiest thing to learn by a long shot.
Shocking.
Advertising is certainly one way to square that. Honestly I don't see what the big deal is here.
Also don't forget that YouTube gave them the option to not advertise on those videos. It's so arbitrarily capricious I was convinced it was a technical mishap when the news first broke.
The Blender Foundation isn't "Blender", though. It's a financial entity with income (there's literally a giant "donate" link on their home page) and expenses. They pay for all sorts of stuff that they need (obviously I have no clue what their balance sheet looks like).
And no one whines that they don't get free conference admission or airline tickets or printer paper or whatever. Why is their video hosting any different?
Those are terrible analogies. YouTube offers free hosting with the ability to opt out of monetizing your videos -- features that they will apparently punish you for using. That is absurdly user-hostile.
It's very likely that Blender is going to have the same problem with Dailymotion and Vimeo too. No one wants to (or has the means) to be a dumping ground for hosting other people's content. We all have to share in this world. As it happens advertising is the mechanism YouTube offers for sharing revenue.
But it's not for people and organizations who are being funded to put up those videos. If you are deriving revenue from that video stream, whether or not it's a "profit" legally, then it's not unreasonable for you to be expected to pay for it. Advertising with shared revenue is the standard mechanism for paying for youtube videos.
By opting out of ads you're also opting out of your share of the revenue so by definition you're avoiding a potential profit stream. I think you'd have a fair point if it was a publicly-listed company complaining about ads hosted for free on YouTube but come on -- these are free, educational videos hosted for the explicit purpose of democratizing knowledge.
Again, you're not wrong. YouTube is within their rights to do this. I just think it's an incredibly disappointing move from Google.
That's outrageously spun. They're Blender evangelism. Having those videos out there helps Blender get users and visibility and (here's the important part) donations, that they can then use to make Blender better by paying for stuff that Blender needs to get better.
Except for video hosting. You think they shouldn't be required to pay for video hosting the same way they are for member reimbursements. Because... I dunno, Google is evil or something.
No more outrageous than you trying to spin Blender as some corporate behemoth looking for a free pass.
That's ridiculous, and it's totally shooting yourself in the foot.
People using power over the private YouTube platform to push political agendas through censorship crossed the "ridiculous, and it's totally shooting yourself in the foot" threshold awhile back. It's just that it's leaking into the monetization realm.
This is what happens when you let authoritarian mindsets take over your company's culture. You wind up with a company that can't keep its hands off the ecosystem it's supposedly fostering.
Publish something YT doesn't like, and we'll demonetize you!
Publish something YT likes, and... we'll force you to monetize?
Not surprising but disappointing. Hopefully people leave YouTube in droves and remind them that their position is not static.
First time hearing of PeerTube, but looks good so far.
Offering to host your videos for free and display ads along them hardly seems like "abusing that position"...
YouTube gives Google _unparalleled_ access to what we like, how we think, what we want, ... It's the best profiling tool there is.
Let's not say "for free" when we are paying a price for it already.
But hey, feel free to upload your videos elsewhere.
Well, exactly, content they can monetize.
By accessing videos you normally provide personal information: ip address, playlists, access history, browser fingerprint, device id,...
Not to mention that you can upload it from a burner account and device in a cafe.
Oh, and you always have to option, well, not to upload it.
Blender already had an account and videos hosted on Youtube. Blender did not change their videos. YouTube changed their rules - and is holding Blender's videos hostage until they accept NEW terms.
These aren't terms already part of Blender's contract - which is why Youtube is literally trying to force Blender to sign a new contract and refuses to execute their original ToS.
I do agree that they are abusing their position, but I don't agree that they shouldn't be allowed to act the way they are acting. Are they being unreasonable? Maybe, but it's not my, or your, place to decide that.
Whose is it then? This is playing out in public; the public is free to opine.
Some things that are free of legal consequences come with consequences in other realms, and that's perfectly okay.
What a ridiculous statement. It's everybody's right and place to decide for themselves whether or not they think youtube is being reasonable.
Of course you can, as long as that is specified in the contract.
> These aren't terms already part of Blender's contract - which is why Youtube is literally trying to force Blender to sign a new contract and refuses to execute their original ToS.
And that is allowed per the contract.
This is pretty standard torts 101. You can say whatever you want in a contract but that doesn't mean the clause is valid. Furthermore ToS fall under sticker contracts which have a different level of scrutiny especially in regards to material changes post facto.
YouTube knows this. This is why they are trying to get Blender to sign a new contract. If your claim above was correct, YouTube would of simply already monetized the channel and unblocked the videos.
That's a bit of a clumsy analogy, but the issue here is the immediate blocking of content and then demanding of pay. If Youtube instead said "Hey, you have 90 days to remove your content or let us monetize it" that would be a bit different.
No, they can't do that, but they can end the service until a new contract is signed. Which is exactly what happened.
The YT ToS does not create an obligation on YT's part to serve your videos.
Correct. The issue here is that they blocked the videos (not plain removal) with no warning or stated limit, and then demanded monetization to unblock the videos, thus creating a duress situation.
If YouTube had a stated policy saying "Videos getting over 250k views must be monetized" or sent a 90 day warning the situation would be different.
Instead YouTube blocked the videos without warning and then demanded a new monetization contract to restore service. That reeks of a duress case.
As in, their consideration here is “we continue to, without any pricetag, host your videos for free on a website receiving ongoing updates and development, AND FURTHER allow you to continue to upload and store new content, despite either and both being complete deadweight cost for us?”
The consideration being the right to indefinitely add more to the platform and benefit from those updates
You can start running a platform for free expression, then start bullying people into adherence to a monetization policy. You're within your rights. However, that's a stupid level of bait and switch, like billing yourself as a vegan restaurant, but telling everyone they can only eat burgers.
For free? No. For your valuable data. You think youtube is worth over $100 billion because it's hosting your videos for free?
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/youtube-might-be-worth-o...
However, another reason competitors haven't cropped up is because copyright law in the US and elsewhere highly favors publishers over hosters or creators. Publishers will sue the crap out of you the moment you get big enough to make a difference. If Google hadn't dumped money into YouTube, they'd probably have gone under years ago when Viacom and others sued them for copyright infringement.
We need copyright reform.
Peertube, d.tube, and other federated/decentralized streaming service are really not that reliable, at least from my experience.
Edit: Apparently vimeo reversed its position in 2014. https://vimeo.com/blog/post/new-upload-rules
https://vimeo.com/blog/post/new-upload-rules
The only difference is you don't go through YouTube.
They were conducted from an IRC channel, and ranged from 5 minutes to a couple hours, with random-ish topics: a chair, a pair of binoculars, boombox, etc.
I am fairly certain this experience also contributed to well-developed spatial skills (mentally representing and manipulating objects). I hope you encourage your daughter along this path. :)
https://www.kisskissbankbank.com/en/projects/peertube-a-free...
> This Software must be used for Good, never Evil. It is expressly forbidden to use YouPHPTube to build porn sites, violence, racism or anything else that affects human integrity or denigrates the image of anyone.
Sigh.
https://www.bforartists.de/
The Blender team is working on Blender 2.8 which will bring a lot of new features, including a lot of UI changes.
There was an article about some of these changes a while ago on their blog [1], and more recently a video showing a lot of these UI changes... available on the Blender Developers Youtube channel (how ironic!) [2].
[1] https://code.blender.org/2018/04/tools-toolbar-and-tool-widg...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZufGqRP6Gc8&t=6s
Recently the Peppa Pig shock videos thread started up again. As a parent it does worry me - but if we had to visit "grot-peppa-porn-1234.com" before viewing the video instead of choosing "bbc.com" I think managing the problem would be easier.
So, peertube is nice. Perhaps it's not the right solution still?
Different instances of peertube can follow each other (doesn't have to be mutual - think twitter follow) and essentially share content to improve discoverability (think twitter timeline showing content from all the instances you follow).
When it came to searching for all content across all instances (in a way like how we can search all content on YouTube) is this something that would be possible?
> The administrators of a PeerTube instance can follow each other. When your PeerTube instance follows another PeerTube instance, you receive the videos preview informations from this instance. This way, you can display the videos available on your instance and on the instances you decided to follow. So you keep control of the videos displayed on your PeerTube instance!
[0] https://joinpeertube.org/en/