Oh man, we can't just leave YouTube alone!
I have already published an article a while back about how YouTube's practices are terrible in terms of content creators with the classical slogan of "Where's the fair use?" Now for those who care you can check out that article before this one. But normally a company that does something inherently flawed and against its content creator base would attempt to fix the problem they started. At least I thought that was happening due to the last copyright claim that we fought (and won) on YouTube. But YouTube has decided instead of cooling down the situation that instead they're going to add some gasoline to the mix!
Read on if you wish to read our diatribes of text.
S, you left YouTube. You host your own videos, why do you even care?
To be honest we feel bad for people who are caught in the middle of this shit-storm that is taking place right now. In some respects, it may be bloggers like us who will be the last voice of reason. Outsiders have nothing to gain or lose from whatever outcome is about to happen on YouTube. Some of these creators are ***** and are learning the very hard way how volatile a middle-ware business model can be.
Okay, let me back up a little here.
Taking off from where our last blog left us. People were freaking out over commercial businesses throwing around as many copyright claims as they are damn well pleased with zero penalties to those businesses which wrongfully site YouTube videos for their supposed copyright claim. It appears there's another terminology that has popped up in the last few months.
YouTube De-Monetization.
De-Monetization is a word that frankly didn't exist in the English vocabulary of many people until YouTube decided to throw it out there. But this term came out of nowhere as YouTube decided to let the advertisers in the administrative driver-seat of YouTube and decide which content creators are going to get paid versus which content creators are going to get blacklisted from ever seeing any profits off of their hard work because they violated the new policies of YouTube. What are these rules you may ask? Luckily, I kept a screenshot of their rules to preserve for all of history: 
If you start going through these rules line for line. You'll quickly realize how vague a lot of these are. *****ually suggestive as one example.
*****.
By whose rules and judgment a video is "too *****ual"? Some mythical group of people? Illuminati confirmed? We'll get to this in a minute! But this rule throws the middle finger to every comedian that is on YouTube past present and future because ***** can be funny! In the eyes of the art world and especially high fashion breasts can be exposed as a way of making an artistic statement about clothing and the devoid of clothing. The bottom line is that it's censorship because Western culture is massively offended by the human body and YouTube complies with the traumatized few. You will have people agreeing with this rule for the sanity of not having YouTube devolve into a ***** server like X-Tube. Unfortunately, YouTube is not implementing this rule as a way to tell people "Go somewhere else for that kind of business" but it's vague and can be used as a hammer on just about any video.
Violence.
This can fall under the same category as *****. Where you can start asking questions about "What is violence?" But this is one of the few arguments that everyone on YouTube seems to agree upon. And perhaps everyone shouldn't necessarily agree with this rule. here's why.
- Demonstration of power - This can be held under the concepts of firearms and showing the audience what it can do to inanimate objects such as wood, steel, fruit, and soda bottles. Even though it's considered educational as to what an explosive device does to materials. This can be considered an act of violence.
- Surgeries - People who want to know what doctors see for many reasons. Some are patients that want to know everything before they even approach their doctor. Although it is highly organized and all participants are willing. Surgery can be considered an act of violence as you are cutting into the human body. Disclaimers are placed at the start of these videos.
- Daredevils and stuntmen - Getting into the cliche MTV Jackass mentality you have people who do violent acts such as getting thrown into a plate of glass for the sake of reaction. This falls under the 'serious injury' tab even though there are cable TV shows that do this on a daily basis. And who's to say who is a "Professional" stuntman and who is not? Perhaps the people on YouTube are people who want to be Stuntmen but have nowhere to really build their portfolio? Although many stuntmen have disclaimers begging their subscribers to never attempt this at home. This is still a violation of YouTube's policy.
- Independent Journalism - Covering stories on the group of what is happening in their towns and cities. There is many protests going on throughout the world over human rights and sometimes they can turn violent between the protestors and police. Regardless if you agree or disagree with the politics behind it. YouTube will silence these news events because they might offend someone due to their violent nature. I'm sorry YouTube, the world may not be a happy place 100% of the time!
Now I can't talk about one spectrum of violence without talking about the other. So here are the aspects of violence that people rightfully agree with banning from YouTube:
- Unwilling mutilation such as footage from terrorists beheading people.
- Torture and beating of human and/or animal life with zero consent.
- Gang activity for self-promotion and mass destruction - this is a two-sided coin. On the one hand, people don't want to see it. On the other hand, police love this kind of footage because it serves as evidence to bust these assholes.
The bottom line is that violence like ***** is subjective. And you can't just paint your rule set with a broad brush without shutting down communication as a whole. Sorry for spending so much time on this. But it deserves to be explained why people agree or disagree with this.
Language.
It gets more insane as you get to the vulgar language parts. So if a content creator accidentally says "*****!" in the middle of their video. Boom! Kiss what little money they get from YouTube goodbye! So, by attacking freedom of speech YouTube has become a monster far worse than what the government has created with the FCC. Some say this is to be expected. YouTube wants to become a cable channel because that's where the money is. We hate to break it to YouTube. But Cable is a dying media. Stop it.
Politics and war.
I covered this a little in the violence category. But this last rule is the icing on the cake in our opinion. What YouTube is effectively saying is they don't want content creators doing what FOX news MSNBC and CNN do on a daily basis! Which is talk about political conflicts and war! So if you are an independent reporter that simply wants to get the news out there to people. Don't expect to be paid for it by YouTube! In fact, don't expect it to even stay on YouTube! YouTube does not respect the reality of the world that everyone lives in and instead would rather create a virtual safe space of smiles and happiness. It's okay for you to express yourself on YouTube so long as you express yourself in a way where it makes the world feel comfortable with themselves and everything around them. Screw your YouTube. But I know what you may be thinking:
Well, it doesn't matter if my YouTube video gets de-monetized! That means it'll have NO COMMERCIALS!
There are still commercials on YouTube videos that have been stripped.
Oh, but you are wrong! On many videos that lose their monetization status, the commercials are still playing on said videos as if monetization is still in effect. So if the advertisers are so twitchy about presenting themselves in the wrong light then why continue to place their ads on videos that they have demonetized? And since the ad did play in the first place where does the money from that ad that supposedly never should have been there go off to? The most probable answer into the black hole of Google's off-shore financial department.
Friendly fire!
I've heard a lot of stories about *****ren's shows. and especially the psychological field getting massively affected by this bizarre ruling that YouTube has made. Many YouTube videos that talk about Suicide and how to help people get out of suicide have been especially hit by this ruling. In some cases, those videos are stricken completely off of YouTube since you are talking about a form of violence. So effectively, a doctor can't even begin to help people online if he or she wanted to. Something tells me the advertiser that was offended by this one is probably one of the prescription giants out there. How dare you work your way through a tough point in life naturally right? Take a pill and enjoy the white noise! *****ing monsters is putting it nicely at this level! We're sorry guys, it's really tough to be civil when you're watching the very backbone of the internet erode right before your eyes! Freedom of information is a good thing. Apparently, YouTube disagrees!
YouTube Heroes!!
There's a problem with the barrage of new rules that YouTube is implementing which is they have nowhere near the manpower to actually enforce it. And advertisers demand that YouTube conform to the dinosaur system of television where their content will be reflected in the happiest light possible. Their AI system is simply not smart enough to make a moral judgment on its own (yet). So instead, they are going to hand the proverbial "gun and badge" to every 8-year-old, heroin addict, and mentally imbalanced human being to join their militia and become a "YouTube Hero" as it were. This is one of the very few times I'll do what I'm about to do. But in this case, we really have to just illustrate some points.
<YouTube Video promotion link for being a YouTube Hero>
Update 08/30/2021
In a rather awkward move. YouTube apparently censored itself with its own "YouTube Heroes" video. They even got rid of the subdomain "heroes.youtube.com" which the video encouraged people to go to as well. Normally, we would consider this a victory except for one problem.
Google/YouTube is not sorry.
Google never apologizes for any mistakes they make. They don't feel their message and their way of thinking are ever wrong. If anything there is probably someone at the company that feels that people (like us) are obviously too stupid to understand their message. Regardless of their reasoning, this very blog is prepared for that which is why we have some gifts for you the reader. Since we can't link to the video anymore. Since it no longer exists on their network similar to Disney and their Nazi propaganda films. We'll mirror it for you right here! It's probably better that we mirror this so that our friends on the Tor/Onion network can take a look at the video as well. It's important that videos like this do not go away so that Google/YouTube can simply push this under the rug and repeat history again.
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This archive which is approximately 12Mb in size contains a perfect snapshot of the YouTube video before it was pulled. Click here to download the archive or click on the icon to the right of this paragraph to begin. Links will continue to be provided here in the event the company discontinues support.
First off, let us say before proceeding into the review. YouTube is the first company we've experienced that can use Ukulele and Whistling/Clapping in their happy music to promote fascist ideologies. So Kudos for breaking ground in that department YouTube!
We guess the first problem with their entire video is what YouTube describes as a "Hero" is. In the minds and eyes of people, a hero is someone who does something for the good of one person to the good of the entire world because they simply can. They do not ask for anything in return they just wanted to make the world a better place. But if you analyze the slogans YouTube describes in their own advertisement:
Because all heroes deserve a little GLORY!
Note how the word "GLORY" is all in caps. Yeah, a hero does not do something for glory. That's what a narcissist does. YouTube already has a problem with a handful of high-profile content creators with egos the size of a large US state who thinks they can do no wrong. Now YouTube remakes its own mistakes by inflating the egos of a group of net-cop wannabes!
When you start lining up all of their slogans YouTube knows exactly who they are talking to. With their perpetual usage of the word "deserve" in order to attract the drive-by SJW entitlement crowd to sign up and help them make the internet a "cleaner" and "safer" place. In their world "heroes" are people who do something that is perceptibly good with their hand perpetually out asking for things because they worked to be a hero and they deserve compensation. Again, that's not a hero. That's a social justice mercenary!
Oh, what's this?
Do you get points for being a YouTube Gestapo Hero? So effectively YouTube is making the joy of corporate fascism into a game show! Where you can grab your favorite YouTube content creators and throw them under the bus for fabulous prizes! Do you get money with these points? Nope! So you're trampling on the rights of others for almost nothing! Man, If George Orwell could be alive to see this right now. It would truly be a sight to behold, post it on YouTube, and probably get it pulled for violent or vulgar behavior.
On a side note, I liked how the "Report inappropriate videos accurately" had the shortest video time out of all of the ways to earn points. As if this is YouTube's limp-wristed way of DE-emphasizing something they knew is inherently wrong to do.
The benefits of being a YouTube thug, er, informant, er, "HEEERO!"
Levels 1 and 2 are rather straightforward. Like any good regime, you must first find the volunteers who share your propaganda and ideology of suppressing the freedoms of others by having them sign up (level 1), and afterward, you can attend classes and group chats to further indoctrinate and share ideas with others (level 2) and you see. Level 3 is where it gets interesting:
Level 3
Aw yeah! YouTube heroes have superpowers! Level 3! Now you don't even have to watch the video individually to determine if they are good or bad. You can simply mass flag all of them to have the advertisement revenue revoked from there. Better yet! If one of these "YouTube Heroes" has some sort of vendetta against a channel. Hell, they could just mark their entire channel and schedule it for deletion! Why not right? After all who watches the heroes? Certainly not YouTube. They're too busy making money while NOT really paying the people that are doing the work moderating.
Level 4
Now at level 4, we have the very feature that should've been present for when creators get a strike or take-down notice and wish to contest said strike. Which is "Contact YouTube staff directly." But guess what? I guess content creators are shit out of luck and will have to deal with the automated e-mail system instead of speaking to a live person on YouTube. Unless of course, you are one of those very few content creators that easily pull in 10 million views! Then they might care about you! Maybe! Don't push your luck serf!!!
Level 5
Level 5 is where you get to be a self-righteous elitist prick of the YouTube community and get access to the latest YouTube technologies they will be implementing to further destroy the creator's rights and abilities to do their jobs all the way making your own clique that only you and a handful of others can follow while destroying any other path to success. No need to show the picture of that because at this point you've made it to the top. And everyone below you is ants at this level.
Fascism.
S, YouTube is a company! Not a government! They can do whatever they like and if you don't like it you can just stay the hell off of it!
You can be a company, a government, or a group of jack-asses boot-kicking doors in your neighborhood. I'll call out fascism when I see it. This video is insulting to the very core of what the internet is and it deserves the dislikes it receives. It can't even stand behind the GhostBuster 2016 defense that everyone online is a group of misogynist pigs. And the real icing on the cake is comments are disabled on their video which like any good fascist group their terms are not open for discussion! Comply or die!
It's so insulting that I highly encourage everyone to report this video as being 'abusive' and how it's a form of bullying all on its own. YouTube won't listen like most corporations do when they get an idea. Am I no better in encouraging people to dog-pile upon this video by enticing mob action? Yes, we are! We suppose that makes us no different than the average internet bully. We guess you'll have to put a strike on us-. Wait. You can't can you? They are a company, and they can do whatever they want. Honestly, we think they WANT people to leave! They want to cull out the weak and only have a handful of strong creators left behind that they can curate into the YouTube network. That can easily explain googles fascination with WebM which I talked about in one article and HTML/2 which we talked about in another article. That they're desperately trying to find a way to maintain the data centers that they already have.
Solutions!
Surely you have a solution for this problem.... Right?
Nothing that is an easy fix. If you look at things from the creator's point of view YouTube/Google is the biggest thing, THE END! We've even proven this in our later blog entries about the monopoly of YouTube. It became the biggest simply for being there and simply because everyone else goes there. But it doesn't mean you have to put all of your eggs into the YouTube basket. There are things you can do to soften the blow in the event YouTube goes ballistic and kills your channel either by Nazi's "Heroes" or by the automatic AI bots that scrub the internet to make it a cleaner more advertiser-friendly place.
- Host a website with your content on it - Hosting does cost money which is why when people go this route they will ask people to donate via Patreon. You aren't going to be rich going this route unless, of course, you're doing something truly remarkable. But it's a step from getting back control away from the Google empire. There is even a CMS known as "PeerTube" that can help users launch their own YouTube-Like platform using a VPS or (Virtual Private Server).
- Diversify your video content - sites like Vimeo are great for independent films and Vimeo is the second most viewed site in terms of video. It may not help outlets players or drunken pod-casts. but being able to mirror is super-important. If YouTube screws you then you can tell people to visit other sites that aren't a bunch of total prudes.
These are not easy steps and they will take time. But once you've established your base then it won't be nearly as painful the next time YouTube lashes out at you.
Where did the tolerance go?
For freedom of expression there must be a spirit of tolerance within the community - Albert Einstein.
Personally, we've come across YouTube videos that bring a response of pure hatred, or the content creator is pure cancer. But you want to know what? They don't have to be watched! It's a little thing called 'self-control' which in itself is a form of "tolerance". I'll even entertain comments disagreeing with me so long as it doesn't devolve into just swearing! Just because we don't like what a content creator does in their videos doesn't give us the right to trample all over them.
Final thoughts.
Just know this. *sarcasm* YouTube believes that giving a group of highly biased individuals with an entitlement complex administrative power over the largest video broadcaster in the world is going to work out just great! */sarcasm* We personally have never been so happy to leave YouTube behind as we are right now.
Don't forget to read the first article:
Part 1 of 2 - Dealing with YouTube strikes and copyright claims. Click here to see the first article.
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Hello,
I cam across your article after looking for some technical info about how people deal with online presence, how people get discovered, so my search engine (Duckduckgo) has shown me your blog post.
Everything about censorship and fascist practices is so *****ed man, I need to do camping to escape this reality and breath fresh air.
Back to your thoughts, I believe people who can upload videos without strikes about a subject not accepted on Youtube have a good lawyer. In my case I had an interview of a professor of medicine having a community strike, but yet I saw an institution (so who presumably has a lawyer, who is in position of strength, not like me, an individual) being able to upload videos without having this community strike.
The most ironical thing is what you called "middle-ware business model". Now contents creators are like prostitutes, you accept what your pimp tells you to do. I saw total inversions of reality and of ethical values (well... at least ethic I have) about behaviors. I know the head of a political party whose channel has been striked also. He is now on BitChute.
My thought on that is, peer to peer is the best way to manage this "crisis" of information there is now on Internet. Since monopoly and concentration of individuals is a problem, using Internet as it was at the beginning is the solution, that's why I use now Peertube, a French initiative. I started recently though, so still discovering what people do.
What are your thoughts about that? Do you believe peer to peer ways of communications is a solution? Or THE solution? What are your views about solutions on this problem you described? Did you manage having your website and videos discoverable?
My thoughts on the peer to peer solution is that, as I told you, it is THE solution. But other problems with that is there is the need of an index, something incorruptible. As a solution I have been thinking about hosting an index and put it on the blockchain, so that nobody could ask for deleting it. Still I am still thinking about "best" solutions and possible problems from that. I have an account on BitChute, but nothing tells me there won't be the same issue on Youtube, and I have also an account on Odysee, but the way they handle user's identity is problematic (you have to keep the same email address or follow a labourious process to be able to get change your email address and keep an account).
Hello again,
Totally dig the "Pimp" analogy when it comes to how YouTube treats its creators. It's true!
YouTube now simply suffers from the "Big Industry" complex. Where Jimmy Kimmel, MSNBC, CNN, can violate every single policy on YouTube that was set upon individuals unfettered because of "YouTube TV." As YouTube TV become a thing the big networks are effectively their "Partner" more so than the individuals that made them who they are. They should simply call themselves "TVTube" just take the "You" out of the equation.
Now, a while back my friends did look into peertube. And while it has a good CMS engine for storing videos like YouTube. We didn't go with it because it gave us vibes similar to Mastodon. I suppose another issue with decentralized content like Mastodon or Peer-Tube is search engines really loathe repeatable content. So, if you have multiple entry-points all hosting the same thing. A search engine's response may be to demote you due to spam. But then again, we can't really trust search engines now, can we? PeerTube didn't really work for us because we want to not just show a video. but also write, post stills, and even have binaries for people to download.
I took a different path. I took in Tor/Onion.. I went against my friend's suggestions and invited the DarkWeb in for coffee. Which as I discussed in my Tor Blog. The Onion/DarkWeb is a lot like New York City. On initial response, one would think it's filled with a bunch of vile monsters that want your money and do not care if you live or die. But beyond the hit-men banner ads, crappy engines, and crazy/illegal ***** sites. you have a massive amount of clients that are just passively using the Tor engine. So, if you make it safe for them to browse. like the 1990's internet. They will come. We've been super fortunate to have the majority of the comments from the dark web to be kind. Which is mind-blowing to us.
In our opinion, turning on the Torv3 address was one of the best decisions. It did increase readership. Without having a metric installed to validate that statement I'm purely going off of people who comment and you can tell it's a Tor user because their address goes into loopback. Whereas most on the clear-net even with a VPN has some kind of address behind it. And how I made Tor work for me is since the dark web operates like the 1990's internet. Where people are hosting 'link' sites and/or submission sites. There are 'search engines' but they rely on submission as it's statistically impossible to brute-force all of the TorV3 addresses in the world. Some of the sites like "The Hidden Wiki" are human-run like the days of DMOZ. I spend about 10 minutes a week visiting them and saying "hi." In part to see what they got and explore but also in part if they DO have a blog category to add my site to the list.
It's not 10,000 hits per day awesome. But I'd rather take 15 legit readers than 10,000 bots. It's all about the little victories. As there are people who simply refuse to leave YouTube/Google. Nothing will be the same as YouTube because YouTube does give scraps to the creators if they beg hard enough. That's something that few video services can really offer. Which is some form of direct payment.
Perhaps THE solution is all of the above. You can get content from the site. You can get content from a peer network. You can -try- to get content on YouTube even though they may destroy it but some videos will still stand there and people may follow over to your PeerTube network that way. Even post content on the DarkWeb because viewers are viewers and their location is irrelevant.
I even tried Google AMP for a few months before destroying that. Great idea, just Google, like YouTube gets in the way of their own policies.
Anyhow, thanks for checking out this blog!
- S
Hello,
Thank you for your reply!
Just about the thing you said about the redirection to itself with the tor protocol, I read things about this protocol maybe 10 to 15 years ago when I didn’t have knowledge about how networks work. I tried the software but in the end I turned back to stuff everyone used (i.e. Google). At this time, at least in France there was no evident censorship, everyone were allowed to speak, although censorship in the media began around this time (I feel like narrating the beginning of Terminator hahaha).
So thank you for your story about the tor network, I will definitely check it again. Now I am looking for alternatives, actually I find it far more pleasant to look at what non mainstream people say because it is far more documented than what I saw on YouTube. Actually what I saw on YouTube has been banned but, my point is your blog content is like a condensed documentary where I can feel more knowledge than in a 5min video. So consequently you lose public but definitely there is like a natural selection which operates and it is not necessarily a bad thing as you state.
Talking about peertube and the multipoint issue I noticed the same thing, but in my opinion it is more a software issue. Normally, with the torrent protocol the same file should be shared among peers, and the redundancy should be based on the same file and not a copy of it. So we should all share the same copy and not a copy of a copy. But anyway I understand, and I think for peertube to report it as a bug or to fork something and do my own search engine to remove duplicates of the same file (although technically I have no idea how to deal with that since I am new to peertube).
So anyway, thank you for your reply. My conclusion is indexing is actually important, I suggested the blockchain, what you did apparently was to index your website on the “dark web” (I don’t like this “dark” naming though it sounds like propaganda against technology which is not good or wrong, I would rather say “safe web”), and then you get discoverability from something which doesn’t filter based on political principles. I will try that too!
Weird no comments on this post. I'll make one. I can't agree more with your sentiment about this policy and rule making YouTube has for its sites creators of the very thing that brings people to its site. You actually are so dead on its kinda scary. Google is really just another arm of gov't. Gov't of *****rs of authority to force compliance with its edicts and demands while further abusing its authority to punish without limits or discretion anyone it turns its focus upon. Fascist dictatorships are ran by narcissists who are always right and loved by everyone, in their own eyes that is. That is Google to a T.
Yeah, It's a shame that Google dropped their "Don't be evil" policy a while back. As for the lack of comments I just thought that Google down-ranked my site for talking crap about them. But apparently YouTube did address the comment about how flawed this system is which ironically is the same comment they used when people were getting strikes against their content which goes a little something like "This policy has been in place for a long time. You just didn't know it."
It's a real cheeky way of avoiding the fundamental flaw of something when you tell your accusers that they were too stupid to realize it's already happened and too bad we're not going back. I don't think this will push YouTube back to the #2 slot of "Most watched video sites" but I am hoping it gives fuel for others to start up their own service.