On the other hand the legit end of the business isn't that great. Newspapers charge for placement in print and then legacy.com or whoever will charge to have the information visible.
I encountered versions of this days ago. Someone I knew for decades died suddenly, unexpectedly, too young. Trying to learn what happened, I searched for his name and found YouTube videos and AI-generated “news” articles that spit out variations of the same public information. It was unsettling but also pointless, nothing but noise in a situation that was already so upsetting and confusing.
I just ran into one 30 minutes ago. There was a song stuck in my head and I found out it was by a different band than I always thought, so I DuckDuckGo'd a comparison between the bands. The first hit was a completely reasonable sounding article about how Band B covered a song by Band A as a single and also put it on one of their albums. Except they supposedly did it two years before Band A did the original song, the single doesn't exist, and although Band B's album exists the song isn't on it. A few years back I would have assumed someone was talking nonsense to crank out an article, but now Occam's Razor says it's just a fluff AI piece.
There's a similar phenomenon on "Find-A-Grave" (https://www.findagrave.com) which was a quiet old-school genealogy site used by family historians and researchers until private equity took it over via Ancestry.com.
The current PE owner, Blackstone, installed an ex-Facebook exec as CEO of Ancestry/Find A Grave who instituted a gamification system. Thanks to this engagement tweak, many deaths from accidents to natural causes are quickly "claimed" by random people. Quoting genetic genealogist Roberta Estes:
The problem is that finding your loved one’s memorial, often with incorrect information, created by a stranger is unexpectedly jarring, at best. Especially to discover that your family member was only a trophy harvest whose memorial was created hours after they died. Then, having to ask (sometimes beg an unresponsive person) for the transfer of their memorial to you, only to have the creator’s name forever associated with the memorial adds insult to injury.
What's particularly disturbing are the "memorials" created by strangers to victims of major accidents, mass shootings, and other tragedies:
Even with the photo and some information hidden, for now, the Uvalde victims’ memorials are still listed. The one above is the same child’s memorial as in Judy’s article.
Even after eventually transferring the memorial to a family member, the original creator is always still listed. Unfortunately, this practice of awarding points and forever listing the “creator” by Ancestry encourages and incentivizes “trophy hunting.”
Family members and genealogists have been infuriated by the Find-A-Grave situation, but Ancestry's management team has basically shrugged and said "tough luck."
After a decade of declining search result quality, you'd think Google would have made some headway at busting through this kind of blatant SEO highjacking. It's interesting what kind of scummy markets emerge when there's no rules, no barrier to entry, and the only thing you need to earn a profit is to get views.
My take on that is it's simply more profitable to ignore it. Having to click through multiple results to find the information you want is more ad impressions than having answered your question in the first or second result.
I do some genealogy on the side and Find a Grave has been really helpful - but to only those who have died long ago. They really needed to make a system where the recently departed are off limits to everyone except confirmed, direct family members for the first few years proceeding the individual’s passing.
Go with familysearch.org, it's run by Church of Latter Day Saints/LDS, so I don't think they'll be selling it off anytime soon.
Some external links (including to findagrave), but lots of info they store locally. They seem to have a ton of my ancestors imported from national archives on microfiche from a predecessor country of a predecessor occupier of a former yugoslav republic.
And somehow an uncle's US naturalization certificate...
oh man, of all the malicious entities on earth I care to not have my data or know which deaths in the family I need info on, the LDS is probably near the top. Best thing is it might be tractable to keep my data out of the cult. Thanks for the warning!
They are spending a huge amount of money digitising archives around the world for their genealogy projects, and were involved in the early use of microfiche in England back in the fifties.
The Church of the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints doesn't store or maintain any data on people that aren't members of the Church and relatively little data on those that are. FamilySearch only stores data that individuals put in about themselves and on individuals that are deceased. Further they go to great lengths to ensure that data about living persons is only visible to the person whose data it is.
The Church of the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a criminal organization that has embezzled billions of dollars[0] so I would imagine that they would store whatever data they felt was valuable to them regardless of what they publicly say about the matter.
This complaint was resolved. They received a small fine for organizing the funds incorrectly. But the money was legally donated and it's not illegal to invest money donated to a charitable organization.
Also, you've posted this article twice in the past week. Hacker News is probably not the best place for your Anti-Mormon crusade.
I'm not an antimormon. I'm a secular individual who would like to see the promise of a secular society kept. I am also an individual who happens to think that white-collar crime is the blight on our society that causes so much of the other crime that we feel the effects of every day.
As such I find instances of white collar crime that involve nonprofit organizations and a hundred billion dollars to be quiet odious.
> They received a small fine for organizing the funds incorrectly
On other hand if some people are doing the menial data entry work at this point on centuries old records. I say more power to them... Specially if the results are cheap enough to acquire.
> And somehow an uncle's US naturalization certificate...
They've a drone army of grey hairs with an innocent interest in family history funneling data { names, connections, digital scans of original documents } into the LDS-borg collective.
It's in no way limited to Mormons, it's people about the globe paying to assist the LDS in assembling a massive archive of family lines along with documents and DNA samples.
Not a direct church run company, but born out of Utah via LDS members so pardon my incorrect implication above .. although (just from curiousity rather than any hostility) I suspect that there's still money flowing back from the private for profit company to the church (via tithes) and data exchanges of some form (because, human nature).
Regardless of church ownership I've always had a dim view of any group ownership of a major silo of family relationships coupled with DNA samples.
Disclaimer FamilySearch is one of my primary clients.
There is absolutely no money flowing from ancestry to FamilySearch in any way. There is an agreement that members of the Church and FamilySearch centers get free access to ancestry in return Ancestry gets access to data collected by FamilySearch.
There is however no kickbacks of any sort.
Edit: Also FamilySearch doesn't store any DNA samples of any kind.
Disclaimer, I'm well on the other side of the planet from Utah and have no particular bias about the LDS.
I wouldn't have expected money to flow directly from the private company to the free company, I do expect money to flow from the private company to the LDS coffers simply as a matter of founders and shareholders tithing back to their church.
If that's true Then
(If the LDS supports FamilySearch in any financial way Then it's also true that money does flow from the private company to support the free company)
I'm not suggesting kickbacks or anything other than simply observing the manner in which money flows, much as a hydrologist describes how water flows.
The case in my experience with relatives and Ancestry.com is them being encouraged to pay to send samples in or genetics testing - those samples are likely processed by a third party company that may or may not be connected, may or may not keep the original samples, full scans, partial result markers, etc.
I find it very unlikely in the present Information Age that such data would be fully discarded regardless of any public disclaimers.
This, of course, does not suggest that FamilySearch is storing DNA samples - but it does mean that I fully suspect someone of holding onto that information.
Familysearch took down a photo of my grandparents because it they were kissing. It is the only picture I have of that grandfather, but they say no PDA of any kind allowed so I guess his appearance will just be lost to history. Pretty weird if you ask me that they treat a peck on the cheek the same way they handle full nudity / porn / etc.
>Family members and genealogists have been infuriated by the Find-A-Grave situation, but Ancestry's management team has basically shrugged and said "tough luck."
My solution to this is to not get worked up over digital lies about the dead. I know what happened to those I care about, and that's enough. And even if I didn't know, it's in the past so it's as inaccessible to me as Cygnus A*.
This is a legitimate use of a DMCA takedown. The author of the obituary (presumably the decedent's family or friends) owns the obit and therefore owns the copyright to it. Whether Youtube would honor that type of takedown is a different question, but it's as legitimate as any other copyright takedown and not subject to any fair use.
A better approach, in my opinion, would be for websites like legacy.com, where the obit author originally posted, to seek authorization to pursue DMCA takedown requests on these obit pirate videos through a clickwrap agreement when the author makes the initial post. That way, there's value-add for the original obit-posting website, and it adds legitimacy/weight to the DMCA takedown requests because YT can centralize the DMCA takedown processing from fewer sources.
Using any kind of legal routes is probably a complete dead end.
The real problem here is the advertisers and the revenue that comes from it. It's disgraceful that YouTube and Google have these show up so high on the list when it's so clearly fraud. Facebook is no better.
I think one needs to be a little more specific - it is not the advertisers, it is the company that is responsible for selling and publishing their ads. Google.
Seeing Google try to turn YouTube (something kinda democractic where anyone can publish and search should be the great leveller) into something like Netflix (pros content only, old Yahoo style directory) is fun to watch.
It would probably work if it were just a -$1 ad credit on each download? Except it looks like they are making their money here on sponsorship and upsells rather than youtube ad revenue.
Ah, stupid attention "economy", or whatever this dystopia is called.
Somewhat relatedly, an actress once told an amusing anecdote on UK the TV chat show "Graham Norton", I was curious about it, so I googled it as I was watching, but there was nothing. Right as the show ended I googled again, hundreds of results, but all the articles I found mentioned that she told this anecdote on the show (so if I wanted to learn more about it, the articles won't help since they're just rehashes of what I just watched). WTF, hundreds of search results, a few minutes after she told the anecdote!
I now guess somebody wrote it up, published it and maybe linked to it on Twitter, some content-farming bots notice $ACTRESS_NAME trending on Twitter, and their algorithm realize there's audience eyeballs to be gained there, and found the freshest article about her, on Twitter I suppose?
Thanks a lot Brin/Page.. you're welcome for buying you private jets!
Private jets are cheap, because nobody bothers with truly custom builds, nor wants to fly something unproven. Private yachts are what they're thankful to afford, the sky is the limit for those!
After all, a yacht is just a hole in the water into which you must constantly shovel money in order to keep it open.
Probably actually one of the ways billionaires reluctantly cycle money back into the normal economy more effectively, considering the enormous labour needs in design, build and operation! Per the teachings of supply-side Jesus.
> But if local papers presumably have the community’s interests in mind when they share death notices, those reading obits on YouTube seem to be in it solely for the clicks.
Not sure what the huge difference is. If it's in bad taste, it's in bad taste, otherwise it's not like newspapers do obituaries out of some pure heart dedication to the community, they'll gladly sell a funeral home service ad next to it all day long as well.
Agreed. Astounded how stretched the word piracy is nowadays, I've been seeing it used for even stuff like using an ad-blocker. My policy is to only use it to refer to actual at-sea piracy.
Not by people who copy and share information, it hasn't. People who stand to gain from the spreading of an idea WILL tend to spread it, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to accept it.
> Their subscriber numbers are modest, making it all even more puzzling
What’s puzzling about this? Someone writing an article about baity social media accounts surely knows a YouTube account has to have a minimum number of subscribers to receive ad payout (mentioned in TFA), and that like every other stat online, it can be bought with money? They don’t need to “amass” actual fans.
The part about search engine optimization is most probably highly inaccurate; you do not need special SEO skills to rank highly for low-competition niches, so that's that.
The key part, I think: ...the business model focuses on quantity over quality...
This shows that you are dealing with inept spammers, and not someone that is particularly skilled at either SEO or mass-content creation. This model can be killed practically overnight if YouTube cought up on it.
I don't get how this is worthwhile to do though? Don't you need a huge number of views to get ad money, and won't 99% of people bounce when they realize what the video is?
Another one of these weird things is football (soccer) highlights. If you look for the highlights of a recent match, you will find a load of videos with the team names, date, and score. But the video will be... a clip from a game of FIFA. As in, obviously not video of the game you were looking for, and not a reproduction of the action either. Just a screencap of some video game. How can something like this monetize?
Related/taking this further, and what I thought this was going to be about, apparently there's AI-generated Jennifer Aniston discussing/paying 'her' tribute to Matthew Perry. But a complete fabrication. (Not going to search for and link it to give it any more of a boost.)
I'm sure that's not the only or first example, but that's the one I heard about.
I found a weird situation kind of like this during covid. A friend of a friend died and loads of videos popped up on YouTube announcing the death, blaming the covid vaccine. The really weird thing to me was that they weren’t automated, they were made by people with Indian accents narrating them. The death occurred in small city NZ which made these videos even more bizarre. I guess it was just someone paying to pushing their antivax agenda, it was just bizarre.
83 comments
[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 29.3 ms ] threadIt seems like they’re both offering a service and asking a fee for that service.
The current PE owner, Blackstone, installed an ex-Facebook exec as CEO of Ancestry/Find A Grave who instituted a gamification system. Thanks to this engagement tweak, many deaths from accidents to natural causes are quickly "claimed" by random people. Quoting genetic genealogist Roberta Estes:
The problem is that finding your loved one’s memorial, often with incorrect information, created by a stranger is unexpectedly jarring, at best. Especially to discover that your family member was only a trophy harvest whose memorial was created hours after they died. Then, having to ask (sometimes beg an unresponsive person) for the transfer of their memorial to you, only to have the creator’s name forever associated with the memorial adds insult to injury.
https://dna-explained.com/2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-a...
What's particularly disturbing are the "memorials" created by strangers to victims of major accidents, mass shootings, and other tragedies:
Even with the photo and some information hidden, for now, the Uvalde victims’ memorials are still listed. The one above is the same child’s memorial as in Judy’s article.
Even after eventually transferring the memorial to a family member, the original creator is always still listed. Unfortunately, this practice of awarding points and forever listing the “creator” by Ancestry encourages and incentivizes “trophy hunting.”
Family members and genealogists have been infuriated by the Find-A-Grave situation, but Ancestry's management team has basically shrugged and said "tough luck."
But they don't want to fix it.
Some external links (including to findagrave), but lots of info they store locally. They seem to have a ton of my ancestors imported from national archives on microfiche from a predecessor country of a predecessor occupier of a former yugoslav republic.
And somehow an uncle's US naturalization certificate...
https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_102866_smxx.pdf
The Church of the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints doesn't store or maintain any data on people that aren't members of the Church and relatively little data on those that are. FamilySearch only stores data that individuals put in about themselves and on individuals that are deceased. Further they go to great lengths to ensure that data about living persons is only visible to the person whose data it is.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/15/mormon-church-...
Also, you've posted this article twice in the past week. Hacker News is probably not the best place for your Anti-Mormon crusade.
As such I find instances of white collar crime that involve nonprofit organizations and a hundred billion dollars to be quiet odious.
> They received a small fine for organizing the funds incorrectly
Where can I learn more about this?
Do you happen to be Mormon?
I'm sorry you feel my ethnicity is a cult, I didn't choose it, but I am proud of it.
They've a drone army of grey hairs with an innocent interest in family history funneling data { names, connections, digital scans of original documents } into the LDS-borg collective.
It's in no way limited to Mormons, it's people about the globe paying to assist the LDS in assembling a massive archive of family lines along with documents and DNA samples.
Don’t think they’re acquiring any DNA samples in this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestry.com
Not a direct church run company, but born out of Utah via LDS members so pardon my incorrect implication above .. although (just from curiousity rather than any hostility) I suspect that there's still money flowing back from the private for profit company to the church (via tithes) and data exchanges of some form (because, human nature).
Regardless of church ownership I've always had a dim view of any group ownership of a major silo of family relationships coupled with DNA samples.
There is absolutely no money flowing from ancestry to FamilySearch in any way. There is an agreement that members of the Church and FamilySearch centers get free access to ancestry in return Ancestry gets access to data collected by FamilySearch.
There is however no kickbacks of any sort.
Edit: Also FamilySearch doesn't store any DNA samples of any kind.
I wouldn't have expected money to flow directly from the private company to the free company, I do expect money to flow from the private company to the LDS coffers simply as a matter of founders and shareholders tithing back to their church.
If that's true Then (If the LDS supports FamilySearch in any financial way Then it's also true that money does flow from the private company to support the free company)
I'm not suggesting kickbacks or anything other than simply observing the manner in which money flows, much as a hydrologist describes how water flows.
The case in my experience with relatives and Ancestry.com is them being encouraged to pay to send samples in or genetics testing - those samples are likely processed by a third party company that may or may not be connected, may or may not keep the original samples, full scans, partial result markers, etc.
I find it very unlikely in the present Information Age that such data would be fully discarded regardless of any public disclaimers.
This, of course, does not suggest that FamilySearch is storing DNA samples - but it does mean that I fully suspect someone of holding onto that information.
My solution to this is to not get worked up over digital lies about the dead. I know what happened to those I care about, and that's enough. And even if I didn't know, it's in the past so it's as inaccessible to me as Cygnus A*.
A better approach, in my opinion, would be for websites like legacy.com, where the obit author originally posted, to seek authorization to pursue DMCA takedown requests on these obit pirate videos through a clickwrap agreement when the author makes the initial post. That way, there's value-add for the original obit-posting website, and it adds legitimacy/weight to the DMCA takedown requests because YT can centralize the DMCA takedown processing from fewer sources.
The real problem here is the advertisers and the revenue that comes from it. It's disgraceful that YouTube and Google have these show up so high on the list when it's so clearly fraud. Facebook is no better.
That's a lot of melodrama to say 'selling'.
I was one of the people looking for her and these videos kept getting sent to me, and they had inaccurate information.
Was a bizarre experience. Also so auto generated articles popped up as well.
Somewhat relatedly, an actress once told an amusing anecdote on UK the TV chat show "Graham Norton", I was curious about it, so I googled it as I was watching, but there was nothing. Right as the show ended I googled again, hundreds of results, but all the articles I found mentioned that she told this anecdote on the show (so if I wanted to learn more about it, the articles won't help since they're just rehashes of what I just watched). WTF, hundreds of search results, a few minutes after she told the anecdote!
I now guess somebody wrote it up, published it and maybe linked to it on Twitter, some content-farming bots notice $ACTRESS_NAME trending on Twitter, and their algorithm realize there's audience eyeballs to be gained there, and found the freshest article about her, on Twitter I suppose?
Thanks a lot Brin/Page.. you're welcome for buying you private jets!
Probably actually one of the ways billionaires reluctantly cycle money back into the normal economy more effectively, considering the enormous labour needs in design, build and operation! Per the teachings of supply-side Jesus.
Not sure what the huge difference is. If it's in bad taste, it's in bad taste, otherwise it's not like newspapers do obituaries out of some pure heart dedication to the community, they'll gladly sell a funeral home service ad next to it all day long as well.
What’s puzzling about this? Someone writing an article about baity social media accounts surely knows a YouTube account has to have a minimum number of subscribers to receive ad payout (mentioned in TFA), and that like every other stat online, it can be bought with money? They don’t need to “amass” actual fans.
The key part, I think: ...the business model focuses on quantity over quality...
This shows that you are dealing with inept spammers, and not someone that is particularly skilled at either SEO or mass-content creation. This model can be killed practically overnight if YouTube cought up on it.
I wouldn't rule out they are not actually targeting the relatives of the dead person.
Alive celeb obituary industry - https://twitter.com/BoneJail/status/1645991572008255489
I see an opening for live persons obituaries, just rip them off Facebook. I'd like to watch my own.
Another one of these weird things is football (soccer) highlights. If you look for the highlights of a recent match, you will find a load of videos with the team names, date, and score. But the video will be... a clip from a game of FIFA. As in, obviously not video of the game you were looking for, and not a reproduction of the action either. Just a screencap of some video game. How can something like this monetize?
Now repeat this a million times. Economies of scale and all that.
I'm sure that's not the only or first example, but that's the one I heard about.