YouTube's problem is their allergy towards using humans. AI technology isn't advanced enough to replace empathy yet. They simply need to add more humans into their processes.
Copyright claims is a perfect example. That system is abused by large companies who know how to exploit their algorithms and they know it is worth it because there will be no humans in the loop to stop them.
If YouTube wants to remain viable, they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
One of my favorite subscribers to watch is some guy (Harald Baldr[0]) who travels around remote areas of the world and vlogs it.
But he's said a number of times how even 10 seconds of background music can cause his video to get demonetized and then all ad revenue for the video goes to the record label who owns the copyright and there's absolutely nothing he can do to combat it.
This happens even if his video is 30 minutes long and has nothing to do with the music at all -- it just so happens he's walking past a store or hotel lobby that has music on.
They make it hard to correct those things too. You have to re-upload the entire thing as a new video instead of being able to edit or replace existing videos to deal with copyright claims. But then their algorithms also seem to demote content creators from deleting or unpublishing videos so correcting those things actually hurts your channel in the long run.
One of my more popular videos could never be monetized because I added a song (via the old YouTube editor interface) that turned out to have a copyright claim but the interface doesn't allow me to remove or change the background music in post. So I'm given the option to delete something with 911k views and annoy my viewers with a duplicate upload or just cut my losses.
That's not a question. That's a statement with a question mark at the end. Also, the statement ignores the fact that the parent comment asserted edits have no impact on demonitization, so even if it was correct it would be moot.
In many languages the question mark can be the only difference on print between interrogative and declarative sentence, and as my native language is one of them, I hope that English will develop in that direction.
English can work that way too, converting statements to questions with inflection or the addition of a question mark. e.g. "You understand?"
However, in this case, interpreting this as question rather than a statement leads us to see a question about the inner thoughts of the commenter, which clearly is not what was intended.
What I believe was intended was to make a statement that was to be understood as uncertain. However, the "I think" prefix is all that is necessary for that and the addition of a question mark just creates uncertainty about the it being interrogative/declarative.
YouTube are actually adding some tech to help with this. In future when making a claim you have to add the timestamps in the video where the copyright occurs. Then the creator will get that info as well as a few simple quick-fix options to cut out that portion of the video or replace it.
It's long overdue but they do seem to be making some strides to help creators at last.
A part of me feels like claimants will find a way of gaming this and making their approval a series of endlessly nudged goalposts...given the way IP holders are already taking advantage of the tools already at their disposal.
No I really didn’t-could do without the implication, why don’t we and leave the personal jabs about what I forgot or didn’t out of this and stick to the issue.
I don’t believe as designed that even three strikes does well at (pardon the pun) striking a balance between content creators and content ID claimants. YouTube’s own behavior, leading up to where we sit now, and the behavior of claimants gives me no reason to give either party the benefit of the doubt or faith in how they purport to be handling content claims.
I don't understand why they won't put the money in escrow instead of just shunting it to the claimant. Presumably because it would require people to make a determination. Seems irresponsible.
Along with some other reasons, the fact that they have implemented a system which effectively strips DMCA protections from content uploaders should result in there being no safe harbor provisions in effect for them.
An internet service provider can impose any rules they want unless a client can produce a contract saying otherwise. Safe harbors are an indemnification against being sued for contributory infringement. That doesn't obligate them to host non-infringing content.
Given that the DMCA is not a fundamental property of the universe, rather it's legislation. That legislation was written in a way to give both copyright holders, people who want to put content on the internet, and service providers a framework for dealing with copyright. If that framework isn't working out for all the interested parties, then it can be changed. When the framework isn't doing it's job, it should be changed. And in my opinion, part of that is that there should be no safe harbor for:
* content that is upload by users who cannot be affirmatively identified.
* content that is uploaded by users who are not within the jurisdiction of the united states.
* if a service provider implements mechanisms that defeat the intent of the law
Ultimately, yes, I get it that no one is required to host others' content. But at the same time we're not required to provide get out of jail cards.
I think it works out that Google spends more time ensuring that the content they import into the US and redistribute is something they can legally import and redistribute.
Nope, the problem is that disputes can be (and routinely are, by default) rejected by the claimants with no risks to them, again. Escalating beyond that risks a copyright strike (three of which mean your channel is gone, but even a single strike costs you access to various features).
The best approach is to only escalate if you understand the specific legal situation of your video and can make a case that would likely hold up in court. Needless to say most creators aren't well-versed in legalese and the risks to the creator are much greater than the risks to the claimant so most creators avoid this for "less important" videos.
They have a general assumption that claimants (or rather, Big claimants) are in the right by default; even when a big claimant is wrong, it's better to be on their good side and at worst lose favor with a smalltime content creator
Not quite true. Incidentals under Fair use are entirely dependant on the context of the created content (at least for the UK).
News/educational - likely okay as incidental.
Everything else is up to the courts to decide.
Under this example, I’d argue that this is not incidental usage. The audio could be considered integral to the “scene” that is being recorded. It gives the audience an idea of what place x looks, feels and sounds like. And this is certainly not news/educational content.
> Under this example, I’d argue that this is not incidental usage. The audio could be considered integral to the “scene” that is being recorded. It gives the audience an idea of what place x looks, feels and sounds like. And this is certainly not news/educational content.
But if you watched his videos this isn't the case.
It's him walking through some public outdoor market in Sri Lanka and one of the vendors happens to have a radio on which is captured by his camera's microphone as he walks through while narrating what's going on. He didn't go out of his way to capture the audio separately and then overlay it afterwards. It's background noise that was recorded in the same audio stream he uses for his voice's microphone, which makes it pretty much impossible to cut out later short of muting all of the audio or making artificial cuts to remove the content.
In any case, it's a shitty situation for both the content creator and the viewer.
How it was recorded has nothing to do with copyright law (in this case, mechanical rights are a whole thing).
A musical work was publicly performed (via the radio). He recorded that musical performance (making a copy of the musical work in the process) and then distributed that recording of it to a wider audience. Each time someone watches that video, that is a public performance of that musical work.
Whether there was intent or not, it doesn’t matter. How it was recorded doesn’t matter.
Copyright law doesn’t care about intent. It cares whether a musical work has been performed or copied. Both have happened in this case.
And it can be argued that it does not fall under news programming (he’s not a journalist breaking a story) nor educational (he’s not teaching anything). Therefore it will struggle to be considered fair use.
This is actually copyright law finally being applied correctly on the internet. Its just taken years for it to actually happen on platforms like YouTube.
I agree with recording by accident or on purpose should not be a deciding factor in anything but...
The problem is 10 seconds or even a minute of a recorded song shouldn't mean a record label or the original music owner can swoop in and reap 100% of the ad revenue (minus Google's cut) for a 1 hour video you recorded which has ads relevant to your content (not the song).
By the way, you could argue he is educating because he often visits historical sites and gives some back story on it. You could also argue he is a journalist because he has a running series called "Harald invades" where he'll go into some family's house (with permission of course) and learn about how they live and work (aka. it's a story). Actually most of his videos feel like stories, since it's not over edited garbage with a spin for profit. He just goes through towns and documents the process raw. I would say he is one of the best journalists I've ever seen.
I agree with the 10 seconds problem. But that’s a problem with Youtube’s implementation - nothing to do with fair use, incidentals or copyright law.
Edit: having replied to another comment, I think I’ve realised something. IIRC The original YouTube license deal with PRS meant that they only sent over video level data - no cue sheets of music tracks etc. They specifically wanted this in their license. So their current implementation might be a remnant of that.
News and educational content actually have quite narrow scope. And those episodes/segments probably wouldn’t fall under that scope.
And then you have to take into account the overall purpose of the channel. Which is not one of news/education.
People watch it for entertainment much like the old Michael Palin travel documentaries. None of which are considered news or educational.
Just playing the devil's advocate, "Fair Use" could be an interesting question here...I think it would fail the "academic use" rule, but worth consideration, if the criteria (from standford.edu) is:
1. The least amount of copyright material as possible should be used.
2. "Fair use" work must have significant new and unique material added (not be a compilation).
3. "Fair use" work must not harm future potential markets for the copyright work. (ex: not a highlight video)
4. Work must be either a parody, criticism, review, or "academic use" to qualify for "fair use".
If we're talking a 10s clip of audio where the original is significantly longer, I think the most significant question is whether the work could qualify under the legal term category of "academic/educational". A work can only be considered "academic/educational" if it meets all of the following (also from stanford.edu):
1. Noncommercial instruction or curriculum-based teaching by educators to students at nonprofit educational institutions.
2. Planned noncommercial study or investigation directed toward making a contribution to a field of knowledge.
3. Presentation of research findings at noncommercial peer conferences, workshops, or seminars.
I don't know the legal muster required to meet this, but from what I've read, this is where "almost all" youtube videos are going to be disqualified, especially by the intent of the rule, which is to provide an out for teachers/instructors and students.
The whole argument is rendered null by the fact that youtube has to comply with the DMCA, which requires that work be taken down if it contains work created by other people (clips, background music, photos), though.
Also youtube seems to have a fairly flexible amount of power here, can take down pretty much any content it wants, and if it chooses to side with the copyright side by default, they have the power to make that consideration.
My opinion is that if you're going to be creating content, and advertising and/or monetizing them, you really shouldn't have any copyright work in there. Saying "it's only 10 seconds of the work" may provide some legal footing for the "must have significant new work" rule, but it seems like you're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying your side is okay, whereas youtube owns both sides and the whole beach.
So to take this to its ultimate conclusion: These copyright holding corporations are just blindly optimizing for maximizing their grasp on any content whatsoever. If there was any more subtlety to it they wouldn't claim a 10 second bit of accidental background radio, that the maker of the video never wanted or asked for. I can't wait until they realize they can build really large speakers and be able to "audio bomb" and lay claim on anything recorded, anywhere ...
> These copyright holding corporations are just blindly optimizing for maximizing their grasp on any content whatsoever.
This is what the reality is:
These copyright holding corporations are just optimizing for maximizing their grasp on their own recordings within any content whatsoever.
They legally own the recordings. What happens with the recordings is ultimately up to them. If they want to be paid for the use of their recordings, it’s their choice and they are free to do so.
> the maker of the video never wanted or asked for
Let’s flip this on its head... Did the rightsholders ask for him to be recording at a specific moment in time when their content was playing?
No. He made that choice. He chose to record that musical work.
He could have done plenty of things to avoid a recording a copyrighted work.
This is actually similar to how it works for traditional TV and Radio Broadcast in copyright societies:
(Total revenue of license period x peak/non peak weighting x duration of song played) / total music duration for license period.
This is something YouTube vehemently fought against. At least in the original 2014 contract with PRS for music.
IIRC YouTube would never send cue sheets (list of included tracks per video) in the usage reporting data. It was just the video title. That was the old deal though - I left before the new deal was signed with ICE services.
Edit: oh, and sampling has its own process. The content creator has to negotiate with each individual rights holder as to the splits when the song is registered.
I don't think it's fair if copyright holders can just inject their audio by having it played in the background somewhere as you are recording (like recording in the vicinity of a bar, which is what one of the commenters talked about), and then get to monetize that.
Which is exactly what these corporations are doing when they buy air time on the radio: part of it is definitely marketing strategy to have that audio be in the background or present in as much places as possible, purely for exposure.
It's something they are actively injecting in our shared/public spaces, basically making ambient sounds "copyrighted", and it's kinda ridiculous they expect to be paid when successful.
I know, this is how copyrights works. But it's a relatively new thing they actually take action when something is recorded that has unwanted background sounds, that the video maker unwittingly recorded, while the copyright holder is explicitly paying to have that sound be playing in the background of as many venues as possible, with the purpose to expose it t as many people as possible.
Also this crazy idea is unheard of (haha pun) in other kinds of media: If one of my graphic designs would be shortly visible in the background of a camera pan ... can you imagine trying to claim even 0.1% monetisation?
Having recently been enlightened as to the incompetence of record labels when it comes to handling revenue splits in the simple model (e.g. they can't even get them right for Tier 1 artists with a simple split between authors), I'd not hold out much hope they'd be able to cope with a more complex model like this. And that's before you get to antiquated places like the PRS who would also need to be involved.
The other thing to remember is that media cartels don't want you to remember that Fair Use is a thing, so they try as hard as possible to make sure no automated system has a provision for it and to argue that there's no good standard to follow so you can only use it if you're willing to pay for lawyers and court time.
But in YouTube's case it is kind of moot since the system isn't designed with fair use in mind and is not technically copyright claims. It's entirely up to YouTube to decide what they do, and their default and only position is to side with the media companies with the expensive law firms over their actual content creators.
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted because it's exactly correct from a the current legal position (as far as I understand it). An automated system can't reasonably be expected to establish, for example, whether copyright content is being used for the purposes of parody. Similarly, a copyright holder has every right to disagree with your determination of what is parody or transformative works, there aren't any simple rules to get around that.
Whether that is a sensible position for us to find ourselves in is another question.
> Under this example, I’d argue that this is not incidental usage.
This seems hard to buy - surely courts are aware that copyrighted material necessarily exists in public spaces? If this guy filmed himself walking around then presumably he filmed all kinds of illustrations on t-shirts, text on signs, people whistling to themselves, etc. Wouldn't the copyright owners of all those things be able to make the same claims as the owner of whatever was playing on the radio?
If the law works the way you're describing here and in replies, it sounds like every video ever made in a public place would be one long string of copyright violations from start to finish.
The problem is that he is making money of the back of the recording of the musical work that has been registered as copyrighted material. That’s literally the whole point of copyright. Someone is making money off my musical work? I deserve to be remunerated for its use. (Very high level description).
If it’s Someone whistling an on the fly melody then that’s fine. The musical work isn’t registered as being copyrighted. It’s just some bloke/lady whistling. So that doesn’t count and is totally fine.
If they were whistling a popular tune, well, that’s getting into the whole idea of arrangements. They’ve created a new arrangement of the musical work, which might be copyrighted. Depends on context with arrangements.
If this were a holiday video he shared with friends and family, it would totally fall under fair use. He’s not making money off the back of it.
As to all the other signs etc, no idea. My background is music copyright.
> The problem is that he is making money of the back of the recording of the musical work
I don't follow. Can any reasonable person really suppose that a 30 minute travel video's ad revenue might be materially affected by the presence or absence of a random ten second snippet of a random song at some random part of the video, briefly audible in the background (at presumably low quality)?
I'm no lawyer, but as stated the claim seems facially absurd.
The degree of material gains from including a copyrighted musical work don’t matter. It’s a blanket thing.
The copyrighted work has been included in content that is monetised. The guy is making money and the musical work has some part to play in that.
Here’s a counter example.
Imagine if I recorded Bono from U2 chatting about random stuff between playing live tracks at a concert. But I inadvertently caught the last 10/20 seconds of most songs. I make these recordings publicly available and monetise them.
I was only doing it to catch Bono’s musings between tracks. But people can hear the copyrighted material as well.
Under copyright law, I have made a copy of the musical works (mechanical right) and have made them available for consumption (performance right).
Just because I only caught snippets doesn’t matter. It might affect the amount of money I need to pay rightsholders, but there is copyrighted material in those recordings. So the rightsholders should be remunerated.
> The guy is making money and the musical work has some part to play in that
I understand that a lawyer for the music owner could conceivably argue that claim, and that a court could conceivably agree with it. I'm sure everyone in the thread agrees on that.
What I'm questioning is your presenting "he made money from the music" as a clear fact, and not something a court would decide - suggesting that the presence of audible music necessarily guarantees that theft has taken place, no matter how strong the arguments to the contrary. It's hard to believe the law on this famously contentious topic would be that simplistic.
He made money from his content. His content included a recording of a copyrighted work. Therefore he made money from that recording. It’s that simple.
He could have:
* scrubbed the audio
* removed the section including the musical work
* overlaid a royalty free musical work to replace the copyrighted one
* asked the market vendor to turn the radio off
* waited until the radio played a work that was not copyrighted
* etc etc
He’s chosen to include copyrighted material in his content by not doing any of that. Some of which would have been relatively simple to do.
In court I would think it would be difficult to prove there was nothing he could have done to remove the offending audio.
And he also falls foul of Fair Use (there’s another comment somewhere that digs into the definitions of educational content in this case) as this is not incidental usage.
If he falls foul of Fair Use, then regular copyright laws come in to play, which takes the simplistic binary viewpoints:
* Is there copyrighted music or not?
* Is money being made from the use of music or not?
I understand that you're trying to be constructive, but nothing here replies to anything in my comment.
> He made money from his content. His content included a recording of a copyrighted work. Therefore he made money from that recording. It’s that simple
That's your position; mine was that there are strong arguments against that claim (I listed several), and no apparent reason why a court wouldn't consider them.
(Note that I'm not claiming the arguments against your claim are correct - I haven't even watched the video. I'm saying that whether infringement occurred is not a simple matter that can be determined by algorithms, as you've presented it. It's a nontrivial legal question that a court would need to rule on.)
> He could have: [removed the audio various ways]
I don't know why you've argued this. Of course he could have removed the audio, but what does that have to do with fair use?
You’re trying to argue that just because the music happens to be there that it has no relevance to the fact he makes money or not. I get that.
Fair use applies for cases like holiday videos shared between family & friends (not the case here), and incidentals.
You’re trying to argue that this is incidental. And I see what you’re trying to get at. But unfortunately the definitions of what constitutes news and/or educational programming are usually pretty clear cut. And this does not fall into either of those criteria. And they are the only things protected under incidental usage. There’s a comment somewhere in the thread that details a specific definition of educational content. The author of that comment agrees it would not fall under that category.
Once you remove fair use, it becomes completely black and white.
He made money from the video. The video contains music. Rights holders must be paid.
That’s it. That’s the copyright law viewpoint once you eliminate fair use.
> I don't know why you've argued this. Of course he could have removed the audio, but what does that have to do with fair use?
We wouldn’t be having this discussion about his specific video if he’d taken action to remedy the problem before it became a problem.
If I were a lawyer for a rightsholder, I would make the argument that there were many options for him to avoid using my clients copyrighted material and he did none of them. He could have avoid this situation but chose not to.
What makes him so special? Why can’t he edit his video like every other media company?
Edit - this is why the incidental provision was created in the first place. News & educational content may not be able to edit out the audio without jeopardising the core of the content - e.g. a live news report where there’s cars driving by playing music in the background.
> > I'm not claiming the arguments against your claim are correct - I haven't even watched the video. I'm saying that whether infringement occurred is not a simple matter that can be determined by algorithms
> [news and/or educational programming] are the only things protected under incidental usage.
In a casual search, every source I checked disagreed with this claim. Examples:
> There are certainly people who argue – and there are credible arguments to be made – that the incidental picking up of the music in the background during a documentary film can qualify for fair use. When you’re talking about incidental music picked up, you’re more likely to qualify for fair use if you’re not focusing on that music, it plays for a short period, and it’s in the background.
> Fair use protects the creative choices of video makers who seek their material in real life. Where a sound or image has been captured incidentally and without pre-arrangement, as part of an unstaged scene, it is permissible to use it, to a reasonable extent..
I’m based in the UK and it seems Fair Use applies somewhat different here thanks to the Copyrights act in 1988.
We have a fair dealing clause[0] here.
> Certain exceptions only apply if the use of the work is a ‘fair dealing’. For example, the exceptions relating to research and private study, criticism or review, or news reporting.
Fair dealing comes from the POV I’m trying to get across.
> > I'm not claiming the arguments against your claim are correct - I haven't even watched the video. I'm saying that whether infringement occurred is not a simple matter that can be determined by algorithms
Yeah I somewhat agree with this. I’m pretty sure I said so somewhere (it might have been a slightly different comment thread, apologies if I didn’t make that clear).
The existence of a copyrighted work can be detected by an algorithm (although the accuracy is debatable in some cases). Whether it falls under fair use cannot.
As stated, Fair Use is decided on a case by case basis. But it’s assumed the rights holder is correct in their claim until the court decides.
In any case, before a counterclaim is approved by the court or if the court sided with the rights holder, then black and white copyright law comes into play.
Still, if the content creator took action to avoid including potentially copyrighted material, like everyone else does, then we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Edit - before you pick up on it, criticism/review is a specific critical review of the work in question. As that doesn’t apply here, news/educational fair dealing then becomes the question. And then all those points I’ve been trying to make come into play. Could he have done things differently? What was the purpose of the content? Etc etc.
> If you’re going to rely on fair use, the bottom line is, you need to factor in how much risk you’re willing to take. Why? Because some uses are riskier than others and the risk of a failed fair use defense is copyright infringement.
Some of those are pretty ridiculous expectations of any content creator.
Scrub the audio? I don't think he's going to go in there and literally separate and remove the song's frequency from his voice which are interweaved together. Something like that takes a tremendous amount of knowledge and time and always comes out sounding bad because any time you remove shared frequencies it'll make your voice sound very choppy and robotic (I know because I've done things like this). His job would slowly become being an audio engineer instead of a traveler.
Overlaid a royalty free musical work to replace the copyrighted one? Not possible, his voice and background audio is on the same track. To do that would essentially mean muting the entire track. This is the easiest option and often what he does. He just cuts it or mutes it, both of which makes his video content worse.
Asked the market vendor to turn the radio off? He often does this in closed stores where he plans to spend a bit of time in, but it's unrealistic to expect anyone to do this in an open outdoor market with ~200 vendors spread around everywhere for 1,000 feet in every direction. You're asking to basically shut down the whole market and control every audio source while you walk around. Not happening for a regular person.
Waited until the radio played a work that was not copyrighted? Not possible due to the above reason but this is also a little more unreasonable because there's no reasonable chance a regular person will be able to determine which songs are copyright and which are not, especially not in another country where they don't even know what song is playing. Also by the time he researches the song (assuming he somehow figured out how to even determine if it's copyright or not), chances are a different song would be playing and now he's stuck in a research loop for the rest of his life, or ends up in an another infinite loop waiting for a copyright free song.
All this stuff I’ve talked about is looked at by teams of people in media companies because they have to exist within the scope of the the law.
And that’s the issue you seem to have. It’s unreasonable to expect one person to do 20 extra jobs.
Yes it is. Which is why media companies hire 100s of people. Because they have to comply with the law.
Just because this is one person doesn’t mean he is outside the scope of the law. He doesn’t get any special treatment for being an individual. He’s got to suck it up like the rest of us.
He sometimes overdubs it while saying he has to mute the original audio due to record labels.
That video seems like an advertisement to try and convince people not to record anything unless they are a TV station.
I'm happy we live in a day where someone like Harald can just point a camera around a place while talking and it ends up being more entertaining (to me at least) than anything running on TV.
> briefly audible in the background (at presumably low quality)?
Yep it's both low quality and low volume. It's hard to apply exact numbers but let's say speaking volume is an 8 but the background music is at a 3 or 4. It's present and loud enough to make it out but it's not crystal clear. Quality wise it suffers because it's not a direct audio input into the video. It's being picked up by a small positional mic from ~50+ feet away.
Why blame YouTube? They're doing it at the request of the right holders, who would otherwise have a claim to pull the whole video down. They also provide an automated tool to scrub claimed music from already-uploaded videos (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2902117?hl=en) You might say the music rights holders lack empathy though...
Issuing a real legally binding DMCA takedown holds legal liability. Youtube id claims are not dmca takedown claims, and youtube is very clear on this distinction. You can not counter-sue a company for issuing a false id claim.
Issuing a DMCA takedown that is both false and meant in bad faith is an act of perjury. In theory the copyright holder could get jail time.
A interesting case is the video of a toddler dancing on youtube, 29s long, to a song. The Ninth Circuit held that copyright owners must consider fair use before issuing take-down notices. The case got settled afterwards.
This difference between DMCA takedown and ID claim is often discussed by youtube creators as both a boon and a curse. The good thing is that id claim does not impact any future standing with google or legal punishment beyond the loss of revenue from the video that get claimed. The bad side is that they get abused.
> Issuing a real legally binding DMCA takedown holds legal liability.
I've seen several documented cases of DMCA abuse but I haven't seen a single case where a major company was punished for it, and I doubt they'd face any consequences substantial enough to overshadow the profits they've made abusing the process. If you've got examples though I'd love to see them.
It seems like there should be a way to escalate from an ID claim to DMCA -- to reject the ID claim as a content creator and force the claimant to send a DMCA. Then you can dispute the notice if it's issued in error, or counterclaim if they're abusing the process.
If the creator has deep enough pockets to fund a lawsuit, a tortious interference claim could be filed if someone falsely asserts a copyright violation and messes with your monetization.
Thanks for the references. So basically the bargain of the ID claim is that if someone's use wasn't fair, the penalty is relatively lenient vs what it could've been in court, but then the disadvantage is that you don't get a proper appeal when you consider something to be fair use?
This is like DRM in a way: it's a circumvention of the copyright system that removes protections/mitigations from the side of "the people" (the demos).
Such actions should void the copyright on the claimed media, either make a DMCA or put up with it. The use of this "side-channel with a supposition of benefit to favour media corps and no proper defense review or resolution" perverts the copyright system's balance in providing a deal between the demos and the creators (and other rights acquirers).
Google's facilitation of this (instigation?) IMO shows they've come along way from 'don't be evil'.
Problem is that YouTube has automated the process to favor the fake claims filers.
Real case that happened to my friend(with maybe 2k subscribers):
1. Film a seaside with normal sea breeze and wave sounds (recorded at the same time) no music added.
2. Some Sony Music subsidiary claims that video infringes on their song from a different region which apparently contains similar sea sounds(facepalm here). Ok stuff happens algos are only human..
3.This is where the evil of Youtube comes in:
You file a dispute, point out the obvious in a professional manner -> YouTube seemingly reviews your dispute and claims that the video is infringing still!! It is obvious to anyone that the response was automated.
4. The only way to win this nonsense is to escalate to the next level of dispute which most normal humans are loathe to do (scared of lawyers, scared of YouTube, etc).
Again, the YouTube is evil for taking out the humans out of the review process while faking the review process.
We know they do it for everything else and that is Google modus operandi - to automate everything requiring human interaction.
In step 3 all that happens is that Youtube sends a second request to the original bot asking if they are correct. All of the bots immediately return yes. There is no penalty for the media cartel lying to YouTube so they don't even care.
For the cartels the decision tree is simple. Issue a demonetization claim and take the money for the channel. Doesn't matter if they own it or not. If the user successfully contests it then you're just out the money going forward, but nothing else. There's literally no reason for them to act ethically, so they don't. If YouTube does push back they have the weight of Copyright Law to bring down on YouTube, making even relatively small violations worth potentially trillions of dollars in damages.
What's the upside of doing so? Is there a cost associated with it that you're going to have to pay even if you win (eg attorney or even just filing costs, or travel to a venue)?
The rights holder most definitely would not have a claim to pull the whole video down. If a human looked at that and saw it was music playing at the mall that was incidental to the video, it would be a clear case of fair use.
Sure, but historically, no one would bother taking such a case to court because the supposed damages from a video in that kind of case are obviously non-existent.
The ability to spam these kinds of take-downs at essentially zero cost and with no ramifications for the chilling effects and false claims create an environment where it is the norm.
Blame YouTube because they made the system. And if you dispute the claim, the clamer gets to decide if the clame was false. The system is totally wrong.
Exactly. The DMCA itself, as bad as it is, is less broken here. Under the DMCA, if you post a DMCA counter-notice, the site puts the content back up, and the claimant has to sue the person who uploaded it rather than the site. As bad as DMCA notices are, that system would still be much better than YouTube's current system.
But I don't think their goal is to have the videos removed. It's to collect any ad revenue generated from the video.
If they collect all of the ad revenue then the last thing they want is for the video to be removed because now it's free advertising for them. If 100 people upload a song and those songs get millions of views, the record label keeps all of that ad revenue.
I believe that's why you can find nearly every song ever made uploaded by many people on Youtube. The record labels and Google love it because they get paid.
Is it even possible to scale a human operation to this level, even with youtube's checkbook?
It's not that AI needs to replace empathy alone, it needs to replace culturally and legally nuanced judgement about copyrighted works, among other things. That's hard to teach fast to a mechturk type workforce, and staffing a team of people competent enough to understand that nuance at youtube's scale has to be prohibitively expensive if it's even possible.
Humanizing operations buys quality at the expense of putting a upper bound on scale. Few companies are willing to accept that ceiling for fear of losing market share.
No but they should be putting more humans towards their larger creators. Anyone with over 100k subs shouldn’t have to beg on social media just for YouTube to take action. Some creators have direct contacts but even those contacts are limited in what they can do.
Youtube could also offer a fee-based genuine review process for epople who care about their channel enough to get their pocketbook out. And to make it even better, if Youtube is as sincere in their claims of "doing their best", make the entire negotiation public, so we can start to finally see the actual nature of what's going on, rather than rely upon unconfirmable promises and pure speculation, as is the current state of affairs.
Do they have to do this? Of course not. Being a private company, they can do whatever they want.
However, by not doing things like this:
- they are constantly losing public support and trust
- they are setting a track record of evasive and non-transparent behavior, that could be used in potential future government legislation
- they run the risk of a cashed up honest/transparent competitor suddenly bringing a new, honest platform to market, catching them with their pants down both technically and ~morally (in the high ground sense of the word). This may sound impossible with the scale of YouTube, but think about this: what if someone brought a platform that only publishes (and maintains) quality (for some definition of the word) content? Like a YouTube for ~serious content? This way, they could leave the expensive hosting of nonsense to YouTube, and cherry pick the quality content, upon which a future self-sustaining business model will likely be very dependent. I think there are probably a number of people in China who have both the money as well as understanding of human nature (including deceitful abuse of legislation and limitations of human intelligence) necessary to make this happen. Whether it's worth the risk I have no idea, but some day user-produced content is going to be a huge cash cow, not to mention the propaganda power inherent in owning the #1 platform.
I agree, but the fee should be a deposit placed by both parties willing to have a review, with the loosing side paying. Direct payments for reviews would create bad incentives to not improve their AI.
Or strait up go for external arbitrators. But "I'm willing to put money behind my words" seems like an easy signal against abusive mass claims.
I really like that idea. Even if you only make both sides put up $5 each, loser pays, that would add up a lot for automated bots making fraudulent claims and hopefully not too much for people being claimed against.
If a single human reviewer takes 15 minutes on average to process each claim, then that's $20 an hour coming in per reviewer, which could make it viable.
Hopefully that would have the dual effect - firstly making it too expensive for bots to make thousands of fraudulent claims, massively reducing the volume of claims, and at the same time having humans hopefully making fair decisions instead of the AI just assuming the claimant is correct.
That makes some sense. I'm not sure where I stand on it.
On the one hand, it seems a bit unjust that smaller creators should be snuffed out for things that wash off the back of established players. A two tiered justice system isn't just.
On the other hand, it's a reasonable (and more cost effective) way to do more than nothing.
A bit gross, but it would probably work in YT's favor to suppress cries of injustice early. Would this even be a scandal if it only hit small creators?
The way I look at it, it's really about the users affected, rather than creators. A creator with 100k fans has more people depending on them than a creator with 100 fans. It makes sense that Youtube would be more careful with the former than the latter, because of the customer impact.
I agree, but fortunately the smaller channels rarely have issues. People go after the larger creators because of the deep pockets and such. Better to start somewhere, at least.
They should be putting humans towards problems that large creators have but not specifically towards the large creators. That way they can help everyone. Those people would naturally be dealing with the large creators more often just because they are heavier users.
That's easy to say and sounds good, but doesn't solve the scaling problem. Every video creator wants some human judgement as to whether their background audio is fair use or not before the video is demonetized. If you give that treatment to every video creator, you are soon going to be employing half the population of the planet as copyright judges
So 3 years ago, there were 24,000 channels with more than 100k subscribers, and more than 40 channels per day were hitting that mark. Even with over a million subscribers, channels make less than $20,000 a year.
There are simply too many people, and they don't make enough even on the big channels to justify that sort of individual attention. In fact, the only way they can make ANY money is to have so little human attention.
If they hired just ten people to do 15 minute manual reviews for >100k channels, that's 250 reviews a weekday and more than enough to take care of all the biggest problems affecting them.
It gets actually pathetic when it comes to channels with a million subs. Sure, some of them don't make a ton of money, but there's only a few thousand total. One small team could do so much. If a channel makes $20k a year, with a significant fraction going to youtube, why can't it get $50 of someone's time?
>Few companies are willing to accept that ceiling for fear of losing market share.
The question I find interesting is: is this assumption correct? Is service scale the dominant factor in market share, or could you win a significant piece of the pie with a "Smaller YouTube by Humans"?
In theory, a more human touch could attract content creators, who in turn could bring their audience. Whether that would translate to significant market share, though, dunno.
> The question I find interesting is: is this assumption correct? Is service scale the dominant factor in market share, or could you win a significant piece of the pie with a "Smaller YouTube by Humans"?
At least so far, the answer to your second question has been "no," at least if you define "significant" as "that which attracts significant VC investment." (I'm not suggesting that's the best metric, but it's what an awful lot of tech companies use in practice.) This is because the answer to your first question is demonstrably yes: when it comes to services that heavily rely on network effects, service scale is the dominant factor in market share.
It's possible that you could carve out a sustainable niche if you really leaned into the "by humans" part, but it'd still be a niche. I don't think that's necessarily a reason to avoid it.
Videos at 1x speed seems to be a very naive approach. Only viewing videos detected/reported with copyright claim would be a more sensible approach, as that is where nearly all of youtube's issues lie. Even putting a few hundred people manning disputes from large customers would be hundreds of times better.
>Is it even possible to scale a human operation to this level, even with youtube's checkbook?
YT probably doesn't make money. We don't know because Alphabet doesn't put it as a separate line item in their earnings reports. Insiders say it about "breaks even".
At $10 an hour that would be $7m a day, $2.5b a year.
Alphabet's revenue is arround $144b a year, so it would cost 2% of revenue to review every single uploaded video. Clearly that's not going to be needed -- you only need to review those which
Until the new EU copyright law with the upload filters, YouTube didn't have to make the copyright takedowns as aggressive as it did. It went way above and beyond what the law was requiring. Why did it do that, you ask? Because if was part of whatever deal Google made with studios in order for them to give it access to songs for its failing music services.
One could also argue that if YouTube's takedown fitler wasn't as "good" (where good doesn't actually mean objectively good, but aggressive) as Google made it be, then EU's upload filter wouldn't have passed either, because then there would have been no example of anyone "doing it right" (read: taking down anything that smells like a cousin of a copyrighted work, including stuff like public works, bird chirps, etc -- just to be sure).
My point is, YouTube wouldn't have needed as many humans to check if people's taken down stuff was needed to be taken down, if its algorithms weren't designed to be so aggressive in the first place.
Google dug its own grave here. Now it's stuck between the creators who increasingly see it as a hostile/too risky service, and the people who keep calling for YouTube to censor stuff that "offends them", and who will never ever be satisfied with whatever censorship regime YouTube puts in place, just like the copyright trolls never will be either.
I've seen videos analyzing the YouTube trending tab and suggesting that human moderation suppresses videos from 'controversial' creators like Joe Rogan and PewDiePie.
It's dangerous to become the arbiter of taste, I can understand Google's aversion to more human involvement beyond just the problems with scale.
I've seen others that allege that the YT related-to algo is being systematically gamed to raise the prominence of such videos, so the removal is a return to norm, rather than a suppression.
What's frustrating is that we don't have many ways to find out what's true.
Youtube's algo is an arbiter of taste whether they're happy about it or not. I'm not sure it's possible to be apolitical here.
Yes it is. Just recommend videos similar to ones you've watched, and attempt to cater neutrally to your sensibilities. Use views and engagement to determine when something is trending. That's apolitical. Arbitrarily excluding Joe Rogan or PewDiePie is political.
PewDiePie is literally the most popular vlogger on the internet by a wide margin, and Joe Rogan is the biggest podcaster on the platform, I find it hard to believe that any "suppression" they are facing is at all significant.
They do apply humans but not where it matters to creators. A lot of creators hate their automated compliance schemes.
Curation is terrible too, when it comes to kids content. I won't let my kids use YouTube kids anymore, it's awful. It used to have mostly appropriate kids content, but now people have gamed it.
That's a popular conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold up to Occam's Razor. The simpler explanation is that content from all sides gets buried to some extent, but it appears biased to people because they only notice when their own content is buried.
It’s because of the way the conjecture is structured. It proposes that we believe a multi billion dollar corporation would risk their profit margins on the tastes of one engineer in the shadows.
Occam's razor would say that such a large corporation does not have the direct controls to monitor every single actor. Is it so hard to find actors acting against the interest of their employer? I've even personally experience cases where the actors are rewarded for such actions due to flaws in the incentive structure.
Saying AI does funky things from time-to-time is hardly an extraordinary claim.
Meanwhile, an individual injecting bias without the hack's true purpose being obvious to co-workers would be difficult. The more subtle and circumstantial the hack, the more likely it will be broken/ignored by someone else's changes.
A hack is still possible, but I'd want evidence of intentional bias before entertaining the claim.
Because most people don't work in silos that allow them to operate with impunity. I'd assume at a company the size of google any feature is going to have minimum of 3-4 different sets of eyes on it between Engineering, QA, UX, and Product.
The very term "conspiracy theory" is frustratingly flawed in the first case, in practice being nothing more than a perjorative for anything that runs contrary to the official narrative, where 'official' is highly context sensitive.
In practice it means 'a theory about a conspiracy' with the implication that conspiracies aren't real and therefore the a theory involving a conspiracy is wacky bunk. But sometimes the official narrative is that there was in fact a conspiracy, and in those cases the term 'conspiracy theory' is not typically used. A prime example is the 9/11 Commission Report which describes in great detail a conspiracy to commit mass murder. When it comes to 9/11, everybody agrees there was a conspiracy. I've yet to even hear rumor of anybody who believes that day was a series of unlikely coincidences. Whether you think it was bin Laden or Dick Cheney, it's obvious somebody was doing some conspiring.
I think the difference between the logical and practical meanings of the term is rooted in a specific case in which popular theories were theories about conspiracies, but for which the official narrative is that the guilty party didn't conspire with anybody. Obviously I'm talking about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
It's no conspiracy, we all encode our beliefs into what we do. I don't think the poster is suggesting it's on purpose. Occam's Razor would suggest it's more work to take bias out, I would think.
“You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it. And our spirit remains in every program we designed for this computer.”
> Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the one that requires the least speculation is usually correct. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation. Occam's razor applies especially in the philosophy of science, but also more generally.
> That's a popular conspiracy theory, but it doesn't hold up to Occam's Razor.
This comment is open to interpretation. A reasonable interpretation is that something must hold up to Occam's Razor, or else it is not true, especially with the inclusion of "That's a popular conspiracy theory".
In fact, the "conspiracy theory" charge is also flawed. The speculative claim "The algorithms are a proxy for some youtube engineers' tastes" may actually be true. We do not know.
Statement #2:
> The simpler explanation is that content from all sides gets buried to some extent, but it appears biased to people because they only notice when their own content is buried.
This persuades the reader, perhaps based on a presumed knowledge of the phenomenon of confirmation bias, that any such beliefs are likely an example of such confirmation bias. Again, the truth is not known.
If you don't like your comments being interpreted, you could tighten them up to minimize the need or possibility for interpretation.
I think he's saying that positing Occam's Razor isn't proof of anything. If he's not, then I'm saying it, and that it gets over applied to the extreme.
Sure it does. I'm hypothetically designing a filter that checks for objectionable content on my site. You find any use of skeletons objectionable. I don't, if they're cartoon skeletons. My filter will not prevent cartoon skeletons from being posted, but will post real skeletons.
Bias has been introduced.
The fact that "both sides" are affected doesn't mean there's no bias, it means there's > no bias. It's literally impossible to censor something without SOME bias, because somewhere, someone doesn't find the thing you censor objectionable.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's an anti-alt right bias (which frankly I don't feel so bad about because many of those folks are toxic).
Also, to be pedantic that's a misapplication of Occam's razor. The simplest explanation to explain nature is likely true. Nature likes simple laws. People and organizations, however, can be endlessly complex.
Although bear in mind here that Epstein has a long-standing beef with Google that may be introducing a bias here.
> In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website. [...] Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but criticized Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection.
Here is a thought experiment: there are two political parties vying for control over the government of a country. Ahead of an election, leaked documents are published on the internet describing a plan by one of these parties to tear down the institutions of democracy in that country and install themselves permanently as a dictatorial elite. This party's political enemies will be rounded up and killed on an ongoing basis by a militarized police force, women will be stripped of their rights and property and reduced to chattel, possession of subversive materials will be punishable by torture and death, and so on. This is all outlined in the document, which was written and reviewed by the leaders of that party. They've been caught red-handed!
The other party has its skeletons-in-closets, but no analog to the above-described document exists. So, people using popular search engines to research their options ahead of election day find this horrifying information about party A and nothing comparable for party B, and they end up voting for party B mostly on this basis.
So, those search engines, despite providing results that faithfully reflect reality without a priori bias toward either party, will (hopefully) greatly influence the outcome of the election. Is that bad? Should they have censored this document in results so that nobody comes away from a web search with different opinions than they had going in? Is finding the truth an unacceptable thing for "big tech" to facilitate?
It's like when politicians like Steve King complain that search results for their names make them look bad. To me, if you conduct yourself as a racist, bigoted lunatic on the public political stage, that's what a web search result about you should say. I recognize that statements like "racism is bad" are subjective value judgments, but that's rolled up in all of this too: if as a society we don't think racism and other bigotries are bad, then this sort of search result won't be seen as negative. So there's some admission here that Steve King and his ilk know their words and actions are viewed negatively by a large segment of the population and so they would like them to be suppressed. By not suppressing them, are major search engines exhibiting a bias?
No, not really. I don't think so.
P.S. The burden of proof falls on the purveyors of conspiracy theories, not the other way round.
Youtubes PS4 UI "breaking news" section is exclusively videos about brexit/boris johnson (this was even before he became PM) for me despite me not living in the UK and having zero interest in the topic. It's weird.
I've always found this argument strange. Your comment isn't specific enough, so I don't want to put words in your mouth, but in general –
Do people really believe youtube engineers are encoding their values into the algorithm, intentionally or unintentionally?
Intentionally, I just can't imagine. What might this look like? How does it get through code review? Is it broad enough to apply to the entire ranking algo, or does it only act on tiny pockets that the offending engineers specifically care about?
In the unintentional case, certainly they're twisting specific knobs like engagement time, ad revenue, vids watched per session, etc... but is that encoding a specific person's taste, or a broader company's thirst for revenue? Do they even care about taste, or just metrics?
In other words, I find it suspect that youtube's policy is "More Jordan Peterson conflict vids", and more likely that it's "float high activity posts to the top", creating an echo chamber.
To be clear, I think there's some blame that rests on youtube eng (and let's be realistic, the broader product teams bossing eng around).
But it's not for encoding their tastes, it's for indiscriminately allowing the tastes of their markets to echo in a feedback loop that becomes a screech of extreme content. Not always anti-social, or even politically directional, just extreme flavors of whatever it is.
Unintentionally. Of course they are doing it. Youtube's content policy is so laughably bad that they probably have no choice but to take their own interpretation and use that.
I think it's pretty clear that "trending" videos are manipulated. I've seen a video with 10k views and five times more dislikes than likes show up in trending.
Unless you know the algorithm for how "trending video" is selected -- I certainly don't -- you can't say that that's "manipulation." Is it a number of clicks over a certain period of time? What's the period of time? How many clicks? And most importantly, how much of what any given user sees as "trending" is based on contextual information: what they've most recently watched, what they tend to watch on average, what channels they're subscribed to?
An awful lot of discussion around YouTube and human curation/moderation elides just how much content they're dealing with; the most recent figures I've seen -- which are over a year old at this point -- show that about 500 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. If we figure an average video is about 15 minutes (a 2017 statistic I found suggested that "the average length of a first page YouTube video is 14 minutes, 50 seconds"), that's 2000 videos a minute -- over 30 a second.
Is it impossible that YouTube employees have secret levers to raise and lower the profile of individual videos and channels? Of course not. But it's absurd to think that such manipulation is common, let alone corporate policy.
To me the problem isn't that flat earth videos exist on Youtube, but the implied "legitimacy" of the recommendations, along with the typically addictive UI elements like autoplay. Flat earth / Nibiru / etc insanity has always been on the internet, but when you saw it, you knew that you were in some obscure corner of the internet that was not normal. If anything, YouTube's insistence on mixing brand-safe, front-page recommendations along with content-adjacent recs lends credibility to the (many fewer now) "rabbit hole" recs. If you're on "Tony Blair is a reptile.mp4" and all you see are things like "Tony Blair is ACTUALLY a hologram.mp4" with 2k views, it's like "whoa, this is weird". But if you get 3 reptilian recs and 5 TED talk recs that have millions of views, maybe it seems more normal? I'm not sure.
Not only is it manipulated, it's flagrantly obvious. PewDiePie for example trends in many countries except the US [e.g. 45 times in Canada, 42 times in Germany vs 1 time in the US], and it's not just him either but many "controversial" channels.
Apparently dislikes count almost as much as likes for popularity - videos that evoke an emotional response are considered better by YouTube. It's a general trend in social networks, because it leads to more views, and one of the causes of the current environment of polarization and toxicity.
While I agree with you, I think you over emphasize the technology and under emphasize the flawed contracts.
Eg, the copyright claim system seems fundamentally designed for abuse. You can't throw humans at it and expect it to work properly, it's working as designed now. You could change it, have humans handle the decision making or w/e - but if you are going to change it you could also "simply" write a better contract. Something not so flawed and easily abusable; of which there have been many ideas, discussions, etc.
YouTube does have human moderators though. YouTube just make a point to pretend they don't exist and the PR tries to make you think all moderation is algorithmic, because the alternative is angry YouTubers trying to retaliate against human moderators.
They can hire more people, but they will (and should) never let you call them up and tell at them after your video is demonetized.
Indeed. A friend of mine used to work for a company that shared an office with them. There's far more human work involved than YouTube wants people to think.
I don't really disagree with you, but I can't even imagine what "hire a whole bunch of people." looks like in this case, the numbers would be enormous I would think.
Facebook’s 30 000 moderators is problematic as it’s a pit of human misery, with basically fresh souls sent down the mine as canaries to detected hurtful content.
Even looking away from the human aspect a second, it means these 30 000 are not stable employees but contractors needed to be replaced very frequently, burning through the pool of potential workers. And people are not even happy with the current number and clamour for way more moderation on facebook, so the 30 000 number is by cheaping out.
Then Youtube need people both for moderating and copyright/monetarization support so multiply by 2, and for facebook and youtube we’d need close to a roster of 100 000 people rotating every year or less, burning through a million people in a decade.
All of that just for two video platforms on the internet.
I can’t stop myself from wondering if it’s a good use of people.
Lots of sites are driven by volunteer moderation - an admittedly risky prospect, but in most of those cases where it goes really wrong it seems like the site is functionally 100% volunteer driven.
A big corp could take a mixed approach. For every paid admin you can have dozens of volunteers whose authority and actions are supervised by the paid admins, and the admins and moderators would also have access to the AI tools to see flags on the content.
This could be a good model for Youtube Kids - whitelisting channels and individual videos as age-appropriate. If the admin sees a moderator abusing the privilege, let them revoke it and revert their entire history.
And I don't disagree with you but the parent company is ginormous and the monetary sums almost unfathomable. Its revenues may comfortably support an enormous number of well-paying jobs.
Alphabet's revenues are already supporting those jobs, though. People don't go to Google to do useful work, they go because the owners are hoarders and like collecting engineers to keep them in a zoo and stop them from starting competitors.
Thus Google will hire Vint Cerf because they think he's cool, even though he's not going to contribute anything, but what forum moderator is cool enough for a PhD hoarder to keep around?
AI flags anything that could be suspicious, human moderator reviews the exact circumstances of anything flagged.
Google is one of the largest tech companies on the planet, if anyone can solve "impossible" problems its them.
But not if they are lacking internal impetus to change anything.
The copyright problem isn't just on Google's end - copyright complaints should be required to be human generated as well. Otherwise anyone can be de-platformed/DDOS someone with bogus automated copyright complaints.
> they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
This issue is not specific to Youtube but to all platforms where users can post. I don't see how Facebook or Twitter or Reddit can hire enough people to review their communities.
"More Than 500 Hours Of Content Are Now Being Uploaded To YouTube Every Minute".
Do that math. Filing copyright claims can be completely automated. Humans can't keep up with that.
In my opinion, YouTube should enjoy Safe Harbor laws. When someone wants to make a Copyright claim, they should have to post a bounty. If their claim is found to be without merit, they forfeit the bounty to the person who created the video in question. And this should be resolved by a governmental judicial group, who also gets a cut of the bounty.
Your math is flawed. This is about reviewing videos that face copyright strikes. Every single minute of uploaded content does not need to be reviewed. And on top of that there are several technology aids that can be used to shorten review times - while still having some human involvement.
> If their claim is found to be without merit, they forfeit the bounty to the person who created the video in question.
That would mean there needs to be an appeals process and humans who do the reviews, right?
My math is not flawed. I highlighted that filing copyright claims can be completely automated. The punishment for doing so is nothing. I'm proposing a way to limit the false copyright claims.
It also shouldn't be Google's responsibility to resolve copyright claims.
If it's Google's responsibility, then you're just raising the barrier to entry for any YouTube competitor.
The people who benefit from Copyright need to themselves pay for fairly enforcing copyright. I can't imagine another way around it.
Google has designed a system where a power dynamic where the copyright owner largely gets the ultimate say because of a combination of artificial "intelligence" algorithms, the ability to perform bulk claims, and googles indifference. To insert a human element in terms of an appeals process or deciding which claims have merit, etc, has nothing to do with reviewing every single minute of content that is uploaded on YouTube.
Actually, it's Safe Harbor laws in the DMCA that have designed that power dynamic. And if there is no negative consequence for making a false claim, then yes, that's exactly what would happen - human reviewers looking at a huge amount of content.
Google could have designed the system where each claim must be specific to a video url, time, and duration. (I think they have made changes recently to do that, but I'm not sure if they're active) That way the copyright owners are left having to review this giant database of video content. Google helpfully runs audio finger-printing on every video and then lets copyright holders issue bulk claims.
>And if there is no negative consequence for making a false claim, then yes, that's exactly what would happen
Google can protect their creators and counter-sue on their behalf or set aside monies for legal defense funds.
>human reviewers looking at a huge amount of content.
More importantly, humans can be part of the appeals process and will be able to determine if someone was illegitimately targeted. As you can imagine its possible to design various review workflows where humans get involved after a certain level of escalation, or after other automated means have been exhausted etc. Also whats your definition of huge? You seem to now agree with me that this is not every single minute of YouTube content as you originally indicated.
> Google could have designed the system where each claim must be specific to a video url, time, and duration. (I think they have made changes recently to do that, but I'm not sure if they're active) That way the copyright owners are left having to review this giant database of video content. Google helpfully runs audio finger-printing on every video and then lets copyright holders issue bulk claims.
Copyright holders don't want to do it themselves, and they have the muscle to hurt Google over it. This is going to happen to every video site when it becomes big enough to be a target. It's a bit absurd to suggest that Google could have designed a system that gave themselves no responsibility but simply chose not to; do you really think Google wants to be involved in these disputes?
YouTube is already covered by safe harbor, and in theory making a false copyright claim is perjury! It's just that the law isn't going to be enforced in that direction.
I think Facebook proved pretty clearly that humans are not a solution to this problem. It doesn't matter if it's an algorithm or a human, at the end of the day the creators believe YouTube wants to censor their content so they will ascribe that motive to the execs, the engineers writing the algorithms, or the humans manually curating content.
Even as a non-youtuber, I think it's been made quite clear that the "motive" is selling ads, and advertisers don't want to be associated with particular topics or tones. It's no longer "Broadcast yourself", but "Deliver us specific content we can monetize, and don't dare touch major IP holders' content", which is a completely different creator audience.
> Deliver us specific content we can monetize, and don't dare touch major IP holders' content
The creators are complicit in this agenda, that's the reason for the backlash, they have an expectation of income from YouTube and when they run afoul of the algorithm it hurts their paychecks.
> That system is abused by large companies who know how to exploit their algorithms
Not even this, but the algorithms are designed in way that is bias towards the person making the copyright claim. It isn't like neutral algorithm and the companies just figured out how to leverage it better than creators, it is literally built in their favor.
>YouTube's problem is their allergy towards using humans. AI technology isn't advanced enough to replace empathy yet.
Not really a Youtube problem, but Google Problem. Google and Apple seems to operate at completely opposite end of spectrum. There is nothing Human about Google's Product and Services, even if they did try, it is as if it was designed by Data Mining and Algorithm. But it was fast, efficient, and instantaneous. Apple on the other hand is far too human, literally having a hand on every step of the process, which means it is very slow, and sometimes bureaucratic. But they do seems to care way beyond what a normal persona and other companies would do.
“Abused” in a similar way to how YouTube existed for (something like) 10 years without paying a single iota of money to anyone for copyrighted material? I’d call that abuse of copyright law myself (neglect can be a form of abuse).
Copyright claims is YouTube finally existing within the scope of the law. There are implementation issues - rerouting all money on a first come, first served basis is wrong - but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
And, from what I know of large record labels, they don’t know how to exploit the algorithms themselves. Most of them work in Microsoft Excel. Beating the claims system is beyond them.
They have software that they’ve bought to do that for them!
>If YouTube wants to remain viable, they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
I completely agree, but that's against everything Google wishes for, which is a world where everyone is 100% online 100% of the time with their data 100% in the cloud and decisions being made by AI 100% of the time.
Pushing for human intensive operation inside Google might as well be career suicide, this is why they would much rather keeping spending large amount of resource on "improving the algorithm" instead of just hire more humans and make more progress with a fraction of the cost.
"In particular if we are talking copyright claims abuse, could you give a ballpark number of the number of humans you think youtube needs to hire ?"
That's a really rough one. Not only do I not have an algorithm for a computer to determine if something is copyrighted, I don't have an algorithm for a human to determine if something is either.
Since you're probably going to be stuck with an adversarial system based on claims and counterclaims anyhow, I'd submit the problem is probably more related to a lack of symmetry. The content creators put stuff up, then there are thousands of entities that can analyze their stuff automatically and make automated claims with no apparent consequences for being wrong. The individual creator then gets notified of a claim, but they know nothing about the claimant, whether they make routine fraudulent claims, whether they have legit ownership, etc., and have to address them relatively individually, by appealing to an opaque system that tells them very little about why the ruling is what it is, and where all the penalties appear to fall on the content creator rather than the claimant.
Something needs to be a bit more symmetrical there.
This is something where a "YouTube union" might start really being dangerous to YouTube; suppose the union puts up a page where they ask all the members to record exactly what claims are made on what content, with all the (meager as it may be) metadata YouTube gives them on the claims. I betcha some patterns would emerge. (I believe there's already some word-of-mouth about certain claimants but I bet this would make it even worse for YouTube.)
Enough so that a human can review every claim. I don't know how many claims they process in a day so I can't give a hard number.
But I suspect the number of copyright claims would go down significantly once they have a bunch of people reviewing them, because the erroneous claims would become unprofitable, assuming they punish entities that make too many erroneous claims.
That could be a tenth of the planet’s working population, and we all know it. It’s not like youtube’s scale is some well kept secret.
If we are thinking about any serious solution and not some philosophical one, just throwing bodies at the issue is a no go (and would be inhumane in my opinion, I don’t want even millions of people spending their life dealing with copyright claims)
Either change the rules about who can emit claim, change how claims are emitted, change the effect of the claims so they’re not so drastic. There’s many realistic directions the issue can be taken.
If there would be a button for claiming copyright that has a checkbox above saying "I accept liability for falsely claiming copyright." the problem might fix itself after enough lawsuits?
A similar power imbalance exists between workers and employers. If the worker doesn't get paid, they face the prospect of having no money for rent, let alone suing their employer.
Happily, the Department of Labor exists and merely mentioning their name is frequently enough to scare an employer into compliance. I think a similar arrangement could probably be found to even the playing field in copyright, but finding the political willpower to get this done will probably prove difficult.
They could improve the AI to figure out when it doesn't know something. As for a cheap way to have humans in the loop, some kind of voting by trusted creators might work.
I think this is absolutely wrong. Youtube algos offer plausible deniability, something that was existentially threatening to any future profitability for youtube in the case of copyright claims.
I'm fairly sure that most of the content watched on youtube was uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder, at least historically. Having an algo people have to actively thwart, can be unaware that the particular content is copyrighted, and/or generates a significant enough number of false positives that google can claim that they're trying hard enough to damage a portion of their legal business is a tool in and of itself.
Not using an algo makes it clear you're doing editorial, and once you're doing editorial, oversight follows. Anyway, even with the algo you can do as much editorial you want through training and dispute resolution. By slow-walking some disputes and fast-tracking others, you can change the shape of your business to hopefully be more independent of legally fragile stolen content.
The Trump/Russia conspiracy was a boon to all of these algorithmically filtering DMCA carriers, now they can actually explicitly filter points of view. I decided that point was inevitable anyway after I heard of the first facebook censoring of an anti-wingsuit post. IMO humans + that degree of editorial = worst case scenario, at least laundering it through the AI means that editorial requires some cost and degree of engineering skill.
> “The post got deleted by Facebook, and I pissed off the entire community,” says Lewis. “My message was followed up by the most fatal month in BASE. I just painfully sat back and watched my friends die one after the other.”
Your point seems to be hiring humans is wrong, because YouTube incorporated more AI to pretend like they're doing something, remain in the good books of copyright folks and make themselves more money. Is that correct? So, what if a person does not sympathize with Google or care about them making more money? Ultimately your perspective is shaped by whose side you're on.
My point is that hiring humans is wrong for Google.
> So, what if a person does not sympathize with Google or care about them making more money?
I have no advice for them. They should do what makes them happy. My point is that Google does not sympathize with them (mostly because it is not a person) and makes decisions based on how the people who control it will benefit.
There's Vimeo, but you either keep paying a monthly fee, or they drop your content due to the 5 GB maximum limit for free accounts. So if you want to publish stuff and no longer worry about it, you need to make sure that you have a subscription going with a valid credit card.
Vimeo is only worth it if you're looking to host video content behind a paywall.
Also for website owners Vimeo drops tracking cookies with no way to turn the behavior off, whereas YouTube has a -nocookies mode that doesn't drop any cookies. On the other hand YouTube has started to serve ads on embedded content as well and in the -nocookies mode they can't notice Premium accounts either.
These are technical issues that could be solved by alternatives, but aren't. We aren't even talking about the lockin effect of YouTube having the huge audience that it has. Nowadays it's more lucrative to host videos on YouTube even if they are meant for embedding it on your website.
Also TikTok is cool, but it's very niche and it's in no way competition for YouTube. There's also the issue that if you're worried about privacy and ads, the fact that TikTok is free (and therefore ads or data driven) and owned by a Chinese company ... is a problem.
> So if you want to publish stuff and no longer worry about it, you need to make sure that you have a subscription going with a valid credit card.
Also known as "paying for hosting". Seems pretty reasonable. If creators want to upload and broadcast unlimited hours of HD video onto the internet for free they need to accept the consequences of this arrangement (i.e. they aren't entitled to anything). The rest of us have to invest capital into our projects so that we can ensure a stable digital foundation in-line with our own prerogatives.
Personally I'm pretty stoked about getting free unlimited video hosting.
I understand that some people want to use it to get into show business, but man, Youtube is not the biggest impediment to that, nor the worst predatory company they'll deal with along the way.
I understand the rationale, the problem is that I don't want to pay for video hosting indefinitely, unless it's a service that's included in a package for something else I'm paying for.
So if the solution is Vimeo versus not hosting video at all, I might go for the later. Therefore free to host services like YouTube win.
> the problem is that I don't want to pay for video hosting indefinitely
That's fine, YouTube offers the service for free, but it's not reasonable to have any particular expectations of quality or service from a free offering.
I think Twitch is probably better off not trying to go after the non-live market because it's tough to surface both live content and recorded content well using the same layout and the tools for deciding what recorded content to show is much different and involved than live.
I do wish they would do better with organizing the VoD section though it's so hard to find particular VoDs even for simple things like Critical Role's once a week show that happens at the same time every week much less a less scheduled streamer.
It's definitely an experience design tradeoff. It's nearly impossible to organically find livestream content on YouTube outside of 1) copyrighted TV shows or 2) 24/7 music streams.
The problem seems to be that on Twitch those pages are at the center and are how the users find content, while on youtube you have to dig for them and people find content via Youtube's algorithm so most are not even aware that they exist.
Linus Media Group has Floatplane, CGP Grey and friends have Nebula... YouTube, like Netflix, doesn't have a special sauce. It has creators, and those creators are happy and eager to leave.
> YouTube, like Netflix, doesn't have a special sauce
But they do have the eyes. If you want your videos to be seen, there's no Youtube alternative. Twitch would be, but they seem to be banning people for political reasons too.
Network effect is real and very strong. It will be very hard to create real YT alternatives.
We have Bitchute and PeerTube, but they severely lack content and the viewers.
I'd say it's real, but weak. The value to me of the next incremental YouTube content provider isn't very large. If one of my favorite providers leaves, I won't find it hard to follow them.
What they have is the only practical advertising-based monetization platform. That's the real moat. You can use YouTube to build enough of a base to then create a backup monetization base with something like Patreon, but I don't know how to get you to that point without starting on YouTube first.
It isn't weak. Not sure how you look for new content. In my case it is yt.com/feed/subscriptions. If you leave i might follow. But only if enough content is on your new website to warrant me opening that tab a few times a week. Maybe also with content very on schedule. But you can be sure I wont do this with many sides, so you better switch to the same platform as anyone else.
Also maybe once or twice a week I actually follow one of YTs recommendations. I'm unlikely to do the same on platforms with significant less content. I'd expect others to behave the same and thus you'd probably loose a lot of advertising. Being big on a smaller platform has its own advantages, but I'm not sure this cancels out. And you have to be one of the top dogs in the first place...
It should be pretty easy for a content creator to start uploading videos to both places? Maybe someone could write a tool that automatically uploads the same video to multiple sites with the same description, similar tags, etc.
YouTube's special sauce is Google's treasury. I'm not convinced that free video hosting is something that is both profitable and scalable running on ad revenue alone, or at least, I believe that any new competitor would run out of runway before achieving a good enough margin to beat out operating costs.
I watch more YouTube than anything else on a daily basis, and I would be perfectly fine watching my favorite creators on another platform. If it actually works and keeps those creators happy, then I'm happy. Competition in the marketplace used to be smiled upon.
Me too. I would happily switch if other websites had good content. But unfortunately, everyone's is on Youtube (I don't watch gameplay videos, so no Twitch for me)
And unfortunately, there's no real alternative to Youtube. Let's say I'm a content creator, where would I upload my videos? Vimeo is not free, other sites similar to Youtube closed, so...
There is https://www.anim8.io for animators and fans of animation. The community is much kinder and more constructive than YouTube and rapidly growing.
This completely. I've never used TikTok, but my understanding is that it is more akin to SnapChat for lipsyncing. I'm sure there are a lot of people who use YouTube for that type of content and have been pulled to TikTok for it, but it does not seem like an alternative to me as someone who almost exclusively goes to YouTube for content that is at least 10 minutes or longer and more like a replacement for television.
I have done no research into this at all, so maybe I'm just an asshole repeating hearsay, but I've heard YouTube is not even remotely profitable for Google. Owning the huge site definitely benefits them in a lot of ways beyond just ad revenue/profit, so I'm assuming from Google's point of view, until some other site can actually challege YouTube's dominance, it's totally worth it to have this stream of publicity gaffes to lose a tiny amount of viewer revenue than to throw even more money down the hole trying to fix the site's issue. It's like a wooden row boat that keeps springing leaks, as long as YouTube has free fingers to plug them, that's what they're gonna do rather than actually fix them.
TikTok is a mobile-only vertical video platform consisting of memes and kids dancing to popular music. YouTube is a platform where long-form, high definition, well produced content is becoming increasingly more prevalent. I genuinely don't see how the two are even remotely alike.
I appreciate that TikTok is the "new hotness" but I don't see its relevance to this conversation about YouTube or why the author felt the need to shoehorn it into every paragraph.
A lot of the most popular content is "long-form" for no other reson than Youtube's 10-minute minimum length requirement for monetizing via ads. Video makers have responded to this arbitrary requirement in exactly how you would expect, by padding out the video length with dull filler material.
Think of the amount of writing that goes into a single 20-minute TV sitcom episode. The most popular ones have 24 episodes a year. Youtubers are expected to come up with 10-minute episodes 1x/week if not more frequently. The quality of the videos take a nosedive, the creators burn out, and subscriptions and views fall as a result.
TikTok's shorter videos can arguably be more entertaining as there's no arbitrary length requirement that incentivizes filler.
The 10 minute limit is for having mid-roll ads - short videos are still monetized, but they only have an ad at the start of the video. Creators only go over 10 minutes so they can have multiple ads on their video instead of just one.
>Youtube's 10-minute minimum length requirement for monetizing via ads.
This is inaccurate. It is suspected, but not confirmed, that the YouTube recommendation algorithm favors videos longer than 10 minutes because they increase the amount of time users spend on the platform. Videos need not be 10 minutes long to be monetized.
Every reality TV show is heavily scripted and edited just as much as a regular show, so it's really the veneer of reality that distinguishes one from the other.
Actual reality is incredibly boring. I'd say that's what networks learned a long time ago.
Neither of those are insurmountable challenges for TikTok should they want to solve for them. The hardest part is becoming the destination people think of when they think video. TikTok looks like it’s getting some traction here.
If TikTok plans to make money from ads it will have the same problems YouTube does. Advertisers will get restrictive on what types of videos they want their products on.
They'll also need their own copyright detection system when lawsuits start coming their way. Then we'll have come full circle.
TikTok is an "the ads are the content" type place, think Zach King (sp?), he makes clever videos as adverts but they also comprise his channels content on TikTok. If TikTok can/do monetise that usage of their system then they can get a payout from advertising.
Or they can get TikTok to the height of popularity and slowly kill it by adding more and more ads ... the 'YouTube Way', one might say.
Some of the creators I follow have taken the drastic step of beginning to upload their SFW content to Pornhub as well to maximize views and take sole control out of YouTube's hands. This way, if their video gets taken down on YouTube for some (often BS) reason they can upload a junk placeholder video that just links to the Pornhub version.
This argument sounds a lot like the ones I heard about why Instagram would never be as big as Flickr. YouTube needs creators and if other platforms keep attracting them, YouTube could have a big problem.
It's obvious youtube is for mainstream media now, with content creators being a leftover wart, minuscule on youtube's radar.
Content creators deal with an opaque algorithm that demonetizes videos based on how the wind is blowing, or it would appear. Weeks or months of work can be wiped out by an arbitrary demonetization preventing content creators from getting paid for their video's views.
JonTron discusses this [1]. It's very easy to violate the "advertiser-friendly" guidelines. They're vague: "violence", "harmful content", "controversial or sensitive issues". Under profanity: "strong profanity used in video even if bleeped for comedy, documentary, news, or educational purposes". ??!
It has been obvious for a long time that daily content uploads are better for the algorithm than longer, quality videos uploaded less frequently. If you look at the LinusTechTips network of channels, they produce at least 5-7 videos per week.
There really needs to be a solid competitor, but the thing is that as far as I know YouTube still isn't profitable on its own, so it's not exactly a space investors are falling over themselves to dump money into.
I have compiled a few videos from youtuber music educators that I follow. The current situation is worse than most of us think. One of them, Paul Davis, even had a copyright strike for playing HIS OWN music. LOL! So ludicrous!
More recently than Adam's October 2017 video, he had another copyright strike for, presumably, showing a repeating clip of the Single Ladies music video without playing even one second of the music itself. He recreated the song with a chintzy MIDI soundfont.
"To learn more about copyright, you may visit..." It must be nice to have such a dominant position that you can patronize your "partners" in such a way.
I'm constantly amazed that this company does not invest more in human copyright legal reviews when their product is pretty much just obtaining rights to share copies of other people's work.
I have a YouTube channel. My first video will be five years old on September 14. I kept putting out content for a number of years, content which I thought was funny and would surely be well-received.
But people never watched my videos! I get 20ish views per video. They never get recommended to anyone because I'm a smaller channel, and then I never become big for that reason. (Or maybe my videos just suck. Some of them definitely do, but I've made some that I'm proud of.)
I joined TikTok, YouTube's 60-second-max competitor. Out of boredom I made a video synced to one of those songs. Fifty views on my first one. Eventually I started making more content. I've clocked around 150K views on my videos combined, 40K likes, and 1200 followers. I made my first video around February and my second around June.
While YouTube discourages small creators, non-celebrities, and those that don't have massive amounts of cash to throw around on sets, TikTok lets whoever's talented become at least relatively popular.
TikTok's algorithm is pretty well-documented by its community: When you post a video, TikTok shows it to a certain amount of people. If enough people who see it "like" it, it moves to a larger amount of people, and so on until everyone on the app sees it. This is easy, straightforward, and transparent (for the most part, there are special cases and such).
YouTube's algorithm is: [redacted]. It's amusing to me that a Chinese company would be more transparent about this. YouTube doesn't understand its community and it's probably too late to save it, it got a monopoly and stagnated. My story is one of many others.
Doesn't this have more to do with the fact that YouTube content is far more diverse with thousands of niches of varying sizes? YouTube's algorithmic recommendations are terrible but TikTok's model if applied to YouTube would just make it completely useless. I don't want to be shown a video that's generally popular, I want to be shown a video that is related to my interests.
Off Topic but from what little I saw, the content on TikTok is pure cancer.
Agreed:for all its faults, I can't see the Tiktok algorithm working for YouTube style content. For instance, I like watching long-form electronics & machining videos. I have no interest in gaming channels, but they are incredibly popular. And by the same token, most average people would be incredibly annoyed to get reccomended a video from 'thesignalpath'.
That is understandable, but the diversity of content makes it so that YouTube can't just reccomend videos to everyone. I just hope that a place remains online for the weird niche stuff that is avaliable there, but Tiktok definitely isn't a place for that. It's fine for memes, but that's about it.
The idea is that their presumably clever AI/machine learning whatever should be able to show you some interesting video about game mechanics. But it's never the case, everyone sees very shallow selections.
Your opinion of TikTok is most likely due to your personal lens. With a 60 second time limit though the app there's very little time for thoughtful commentary unless you make the video elsewhere and import it. It's closer to a meme generator than a video hosting site, which makes the loss of creators even more problematic. Creators are willing to jump through hoops for less YouTube issues.
I know their contentID and copyright system is hopelessly broken and biased towards stealing from original content creators at the behest if established and larger publishers and this has been a real thorn in the side. Someone literally posted random white noise and it was claimed by multiple people automatically within seconds. That's a failure on YouTube's part that borders on facilitating cooyfraud. I'm surprised they haven't been sure over it yet.
Haven't been on Tik Tok that long either, but I stumbled upon this story where a girl send a poor non-binary kid a box full of cosmetics. I found that pretty heart-warming.
The point is it's a bit too quick to label a new medium pure cancer. Given time, people will find ways to create amazing things using any format.
I'm pretty sure you just described the first phase of every product's lifecycle. Everyone plays on the same field, early adopters start winning, everyone else follows... eventually you monetize it and it becomes clear that winners-win is a better business strategy than everyone wins. I don't know how to get around the business physics of this. Not sure anyone does. Tik-tok will eventually become the stagnant incumbent and it will try to suppress its challengers or it will die on the Vine.
YouTube is trying to curate their content. Any site that stays around for a while and wants to attract top advertising dollars does it. Reddit curates to an extent. Facebook is in all kinds of trouble for not curating.
I thought Facebook is in trouble for over curating. They tweaked their algorithms for maximum stay on page time and thus promoted clickbaity content that now increasingly drives away longer-ish time users. FB user count is growing, sure, but not in its lucrative home market, the US.
Click-baity and extremist content. Whether the extreme is more and more 80s PC games, cat videos, or politics, FB thrives but making you more passionate/engaged.
Of course dedicating 1 hour per day talking about Saboteur II is not the same as participating in hate-groups, but this has become our problem, not FB's.
> I don't know how to get around the business physics of this.
It seems like the best way to get around the business physics is to switch from a business model to a federation model. Something like Mastodon where hosting costs are distributed and the algorithm can be tweaked for exposure rather than dollars earned for the hosting company. Of course there you have a chicken and egg networking problem and an ease of use problem.
Exactly. I was going to make this point myself, but you stated it better than I could. I can imagine a lot of prospective founders wanting to build an alternative platform to mitigate this issue, but then realize that further down the road they will ultimately become the very thing they set out to abolish in the first place.
> I don't know how to get around the business physics of this. Not sure anyone does.
Sometimes I think to myself that if their is less reliance on angel/VC funding from the very beginning, then founders could stay true to their vision. Like how Elon Musk refuses to make SpaceX a publicly traded company as it would squander the ultimate goal of colonizing mars. However, given how resource intensive it must be to process and store petabytes of video every year (exabytes in total), there is just no way around acquiring investment dollars.
Agreed. Same for Facebook. Starting about 3 months ago I suddenly started getting about 1/5 to 1/10 the engagement as I used to on any posts with external links. Which means I cannot share Github repos, interactive websites, or blog posts because nobody will see them.
I'm cool with friends seeing my stuff and not interacting or not liking it because it's not likeable. That's democratic. But I'm NOT cool with Facebook not even showing my content to my own friends.
The external link hating algorithm also extends to important news and events. Recently there was an arson attack in Japan on Kyoto Animation where the arsonist doused gasoline throughout the building and lit it on fire. 33+ people died, 37+ injured. I posted a link for my friends to donate to the official charity event on GoFundMe to help the survivors and victims. After 1 hour, ZERO interactions, ZERO comments, ZERO angry reactions.
I then deleted my post, and re-posted a text-only status with the same message and asking people to Google for the donation link. Within 1 hour, 25+ sad reactions and friends donating. Victims got helped, because I removed the link.
I see the same of friends' accounts as well. Links to blog posts about sexual assault encounters and racism get a fraction of the exposure they used to unless they are already viral, so they often never get seen. While on the other hand someone who posts a photo to Facebook directly about their amazing boba while #livingTheCaliforniaLife gets 100 likes.
Zuckerberg talked about changing the algorithm to "bring people closer together" and promote "meaningful interactions", but the algorithm really just promotes content uploaded to Facebook and down-ranks external content. It's not bringing people together at all.
And it's hurting independent creators even more, who increasingly depend on social media to spread their word.
> I then deleted my post, and re-posted a text-only status with the same message and asking people to Google for the donation link. Within 1 hour, 25+ sad reactions and friends donating. Victims got helped, because I removed the link.
That's funny, in my LinkedIn circle people have been doing this for more than a year, even marketing people recommend putting the link in a reply... apparently Facebook caught up with that.
Nowadays it seems common to make a post without a link but with "link in a comment" note, post link as a comment under that post and like it (to increase change of it being on top). At least many fanpages I keep track of do that.
But I guess it's a matter of time before FB starts fighting that too.
This is also why I quit Instagram, as I discussed further in another recent post. After implementing their "algorithm" the app was completely ruined. It clearly just caters the same repetitive mindless content to the lowest common demoninator
As a Facebook user if a friend encounters racism I'd like to see the link to blog post about it as well. If a friend is performing in a concert I'd like to see the link to the concert program. If a friend writes a news article or is in the news I'd like to see it as well. If a friend launches a startup I'd like to know. I often don't see these things because they're links.
I'm referring mostly to friends' content only. Decreased external links from non-friends is fine, but I'd like to see everything from friends and what they're upto, and in whatever form they want to share it in. That's why they are friends.
Sounds to me like filtering for the dashboard would make more sense? Give users the ability to filter through content types instead of trying to cram through 5 thousand friends streams of content.
> If enough people who see it "like" it, it moves to a larger amount of people, and so on until everyone on the app sees it. This is easy, straightforward, and transparent (for the most part, there are special cases and such).
This is the problem of any platform.
What happens when the platform gets so big that you have thousands of videos competing for the same feed position because they are all getting likes?
I see the same thing happening with the dev.to platform. I used to syndicate my blog posts there. I got something like 7,000 followers in a few months while posting a few articles I picked from my site. They got thousands (10k+ on some of them) of views and every article I posted got tweeted from their main account which then got RT'd sometimes hundreds of times, etc..
But for the last few months not 1 of my articles have gotten tweeted and the posts have like 100 views (but have thousands of views on my own site).
So it's the same pattern. It's just a platform getting large enough where unless you get special treatment it's nearly impossible to be visible. In my case I'm probably not going to re-post on dev.to anymore because it's not worth the hassle to manually port those articles to their platform (which takes time).
>"TikTok's algorithm is pretty well-documented by its community: When you post a video, TikTok shows it to a certain amount of people. If enough people who see it "like" it, it moves to a larger amount of people, and so on until everyone on the app sees it. This is easy, straightforward, and transparent (for the most part, there are special cases and such)."
It sounds like your reason for preferring TikTok's approach is tied to an underlying aspect of their business that currently does well for you, but which could very easily (dare I say very likely?) change as their business grows and needs evolve.
What if this is simply what they've determined is the best approach for acquiring content creator market share, and once they feel secure enough, they shift it towards a more monetization-focused blackbox approach? Would you still create content for it? Or are you platform agnostic and you'll go where the views and subscribers are?
That's definitely a possibility and I agree that it will be the likely outcome but I don't think that this should be the take away from the OP.
I think the take away from the OP should be that there are other possibilities. We shouldn't think that the current state of YouTube is somehow optimal or the peak of video sharing simply because it is owned by a behemoth like Alphabet. Too often people assume that because Alphabet employs a lot of highly educated people who often happen to be very intelligent that the products they produce must be the pinnacle of creation but they're not. Their products are often just good enough or designed in such a way to make switching difficult.
You've correctly identified the underlying issue here -- misaligned incentives. As the dominant player in this field YouTube can no longer increase user count so they instead want to maximize per user revenue and the ways to go about are that produce a sub-optimal user and content creator experience.
Tik-Tok and Youtube before it are guilty of a common thing today which is basically business model bait and switch. Cool, Hip tech companies offer one thing to entice new users and once they get established they switch to a model that locks you in.
The solution isn't to just tweak content selection algorithms it's to move to a decentralized content distribution system so that we can't be lured into these kinds of bait and switch traps again.
Does anyone feel like this whole thing, including this top post, is just a carefully crafted advert to TikTok? It's no a YouBoob competitor at all! Maybe a Vine or Snap competitor.
You can't host the same type of content on there. Honestly people should just use PeerTube; either set up an instance or pay for a hosted one.
>TikTok lets whoever's talented become at least relatively popular
Enjoy it while it lasts.
No user generated content meritocracy ever lasts. Not steam greenlight, not the app store, not new grounds, not YouTube etc.
The problem with your "transparent algorithm" is when the supply of content starts to outpace the supply of 50 users to test it on. Then content will inevitably get unfairly unviewed and the only thing left to do is implement some dodgy [redacted] process.
Don't believe me? Consider this. Your one clip takes 30*50=1500 seconds of user time to categorize (according to your algorithm). If a user spends 1 hr on tiktok per day, they effectively volunteered 3600 seconds of work towards categorizing clips as good or not. Meaning if you post a moderate amount (2, sometimes 3 times per day), you've just cancelled out that entire user and you only spent 90 seconds of your own time to do it. If more than half the people on the platform are moderate posters and 1 hr a day consumers, the system breaks.
Most people on any platform are consumers, and that doesn't seem to decrease as the platform grows. Steam, the app stores, and YouTube are not exceptions.
If it did become a problem, TikTok could change rules so that you must review X clips for every one you post. It wouldn't put off most creators.
The reason user-generated recommendation systems don't last is not because they break down under a flood of content. The reason is that the platform finds it more profitable to promote content based on a different algorithm (whether that is pay to play, sponsored posts, optimise for user engagement/clickbait...).
YouTube's pathology is the logical end result of any recommender based system.
I briefly worked on the recommenders for a fare sized fashion site. TLDR: the entire effort was a waste of money.
About the time I left, they were trying to pivot to a personalization based system. Think StitchFix. (With $1.5b/yr sales, they're doing much better than I thought possible.)
Long neglected is search and discovery. Somehow supporting casual foraging behavior online. We internally had long discussions about how to improve. I know exactly what I want and I worked for the company. Yet, I still couldn't find a likable shirt that fits. Pathetic and unforgivable. (I half considered moving to the search team, but stopped caring first.)
YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc. are all the same in this way. While I love YouTube content, it's terrible for finding new stuff.
PS- There's a phrase or term for preferential attachment leading into a (search space) local min (or max) sinkhole or dead end. Not recalling it right now is killing me. Any one know it?
That solution for sampling could work for tiktok/vine/... any service that wants to provide you the latest meme. It won't work for YouTube.
How many people will be ever interested in a random topic in a random language? If I was provided with a sample of new uploaded content, I'd be interested in approximately 0% of it. Even if I'm subscribed to 30 or so varied channels right now.
I can understand your feeling, but I'm not sure I share it. I did a series of extremely bad Dwarf Fortress videos on YT. I've gotten hundreds of views for some of them (and only a few for the latest ones: a testament to their lack of quality ;-) ). Mostly I think my views come from DF being a small community and it's easy to advertise to those people. If you are making a general comedy channel, I don't think it is surprising that you will get lost in the shuffle. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Even if it comes up on my suggestions, I'm not going to watch it unless I've heard of it.
I think you are correct that YT caters to the big names, but I can hardly blame them. It makes money for them. The platform is not about being fair: it's about making money for Google. I have no problem with that, really. They host my content for free, make it available to almost anyone, retain it for who knows how long... The fact that you have to do advertising and marketing for your content yourself is not really something that bothers me.
YouTube is no longer for funny short clips, it's not really set up for that.
I think YouTube could do more to expose people to more small channels (especially when you run out of videos from subscriptions if you are lucky enough that they will even deliver them to you).
Some of us are working together to build a YouTube video curation site, following a discussion a few days ago on HN. (although we're thinking mostly kids contents, but it doesn't have to be only that) See the discussion from then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20528913
I'm hoping to get a bunch of YouTubers involved, since they want to get their stuff out there, and I think we can do better than YouTube at that. Notice that we won't be serving the videos, but we will embed them in a site.
The goal is to have something to put up on HN within two months.
If you want to join, let me know: rjbrown at gmail
What if YouTube just does the same, but the goal of the algorithm is not to maximize like/dislike ratios, but actual click-through rate and watch time? [1]
It's an ad company after all.
Also, the domain of TikTok videos seems very limited in comparison to YouTube videos, so your like-based algorithm might result in bad user retention with this broad strategy of showing random videos.
So the question really is: If YouTube's algorithm is more sophisticated than TikTok's and TikTok is trying to do the same, would they still be as transparent about it?
In the current media climate, the risks of recommending small channels probably aren't worth it. The moment something dodgy gets recommended and journalists get ahold of it, the loss of advertiser income site-wide costs both YouTube and other creators far more than they could ever get from better recommendations. The incentives are intentionally stacked against you.
Had never heard of them. Now I have and will be giving them a try. I definitely could see this word of mouth threatening YouTube if not outright killing them. Competition is always good.
(Runs off to check TikTok)
....
(After checking out some videos)
That was actually refreshing. Many of the videos were fun to watch and put a smile on my face. Not bad TikTok!
Have you ever asked yourself why you put so much effort into making these videos and what your goal is? Why you seek validation from views and likes from strangers?
your pride or your viewpoint doesn't = views. Sounds very entailed, but I would agree with you. It's hard to become something on Youtube, but that's the same for everything.
I stopped reading. YouTube is a completely free platform. It will even pay you to host your content there if it's popular enough. You're free to go else where.
TiKTok does not pay you. Your subscribers are just a number, and you have no evidence that most of them are even real and you offer no evidence in your post that any of it matters.
This defense of "free" platforms is reminiscent to feudalism. In feudalism you of course did not pay rent. You simply took care of the land and in exchange your lord would provide you a small share of the produced food, a place to live, protection from attacks, and a [heavily biased] conflict resolution system. All for "free." But of course it wasn't free. The lords were utilizing the labors of the peasant to generate mass surpluses which were in turn used to greatly empower themselves.
In today's times human attention is arguably the most valuable 'commodity' there is. And YouTube is using their peasants to produce it in unprecedented quantities. In exchange they return a small share of the returns produced, a free place to host, protection from attacks, and a [heavily biased] conflict resolution system.
It's of course technically correct that it's free, but the connotation is entirely wrong. Few would idealize for the "free housing" of feudalism, and I think in the future we'll have few that would idealize the "free hosting" of today. In the present? People are simply greatly undervaluing their own worth, much as the peasants did. It took the black death emphasizing their relevance for them to finally understand they were the ones running the show all along.
Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days, and put out a video and go to bed. You wake up the next morning and find that after the first 3,000 views, the video was de-monetized and the remaining 500,000 views went generated no revenue. You complain to YouTube, they manually review it, and your video is re-monetized. Your views for that video barely increase for the rest of eternity. That bug just cost you X revenue. Multiply for the entire month.
At the very least, YouTube can offer a service your video can go into limbo before it's sent out to your subscribers, where all of these "mistakes" can be ironed out.
Perhaps the platform is de-monetizing video based on mass reporting - leaving the system open to be gamed by anyone who is okay with the ethics of brigading/report bombing. This is a VERY common thing these days.
The other possibility is that the AI is generating false positives and de-monetizing as a result of it.
Whichever the case may be, it ought to be possible for content creators to publish a video that is not mistakenly de-monetized for the vast majority of their viewers.
> video based on mass reporting - leaving the system open to be gamed by anyone who is okay with the ethics of brigading/report bombing. This is a VERY common thing these days.
I would say the “angry mob” is one of the biggest threats to free speech in our generation. If you can’t get the government to silence those you don’t like, try and get them deplatformed everywhere.
> Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days. That bug just cost you X revenue. Multiply for the entire month.
Counterpoint - it didn't cost you anything, it's just lost opportunity. Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days and literally no ones watches the videos you produce. You have no cost, but also no revenue.
I understand why people want to criticize YT, but if you are using a service that will gladly pay the costs for your distribution with no upfront obligation and no on-going payment, then what do you expect?
I mean this is why unions exist. Not suggesting that unions are the right answer here. In fact, I really don't know what the solution is, but I don't think either side of the table has a solution that will solve everyone's problems unilaterally.
> Counterpoint - it didn't cost you anything, it's just lost opportunity. Imagine you work hard editing for a day / days and literally no ones watches the videos you produce. You have no cost, but also no revenue.
Sorry I guess I should have provided the context - the context was you are a YouTube user with a subscriber base of regular viewers. I figured that came across when I quoted the viewership numbers. Monetization is only offered to users who meet some thresholds.
Those 500,000 views wouldn't have had ads shown on them. Some solutions might be:
1. Being able to automatically unpublish the video if it's de-monitized.
2. Have a monitoring service available that can fight copyright claims in real-time.
3. Don't upload at night and then go to sleep. :)
It does cost them money when they get it wrong. It's not as if google makes money off the demonetized video, they only make money if the creator does. People act like YouTube wants to demonetize videos, of course they don't, they would monetize every single second of YouTube if the advertisers allowed them to do so.
Google has the problem of too much advertising space vs too few advertising clients. Being able to significantly cut down the advertising space means they get better prices across the board.
Demonetizing any singular video (especially if suspect or borderline) is one time loss, long time profit.
Maybe they weigh the risk of creators leaving vs advertisers leaving. High profile creators haven't left yet. Advertisers have already bluffed a number of times and Google didn't call them on it.
> At the very least, YouTube can offer a service your video can go into limbo before it's sent out to your subscribers, where all of these "mistakes" can be ironed out.
This has existed for some time. You can upload your video as "unlisted" and then later make it "public."
This is a little too cynical for my taste. Google isn't exactly a monument of ethical business, but I seriously doubt that Google would intentionally demonetize videos for the purpose of stealing from content creators.
Often used to hear the same accusations when adsense was a bigger thing. Accounts with expected big payouts would always get banned a few days before payout. They would accept all traffic you send them for the month, then just before paying out, banned.
Perhaps a coincidence sure, but when accusations keep getting made about underhanded tactics, maybe there is somethig there
We're seeing a lot of sentiment similar to this on Quora as well, now that they pay question askers. This is the first time I've been on "the other side" and see what's actually going on, rather than just seeing blog posts about "I made $X and got banned a day before payout!"
At least in Quora's case, almost everyone making thousands and getting banned right before a payout are gaming/scamming the system to make those thousands, and just play the "right before I got paid!" card whenever they get caught because, well, there _was_ another payday coming... even though they should have been demonetized a long time prior.
The hypothesis is that the channel was only demonetized after a long period during which it generated ad revenue. Flipping the demonetization switch doesn't make that revenue disappear. Rather, that causes the revenue to stay in Google's pocket instead of being distributed to the channel owner.
The channel still gets the previous revenue leading up to the demonitization switch, so no, Google doesn't gain anything. In fact, they lose because they're now hosting videos that no longer generate revenue.
That happened to me too. Min payment was 120€ or so, and when I had amassed that amount (it took me like one year), bam, banned a few days before I could cash out. Obviously on purpose. That was ten years ago or so I think.
Google isn't exactly a monument of ethical business, but I seriously doubt that Google would intentionally demonetize videos for the purpose of stealing from content creators.
Whether it's intentional or accidental, it's readily apparent that their incentive structure doesn't motivate them a bit to correct the situation. Also, this mechanism makes it very easy for lower level employees with a political axe to grind, to punish viewpoints they don't like.
Why is it 'too cynical'? It's metric dysfunction. A division of the company is getting results with a cost that is way below what it should be. Nobody in management wants to know how the sausage is made. It would tank their revenue reports for the next quarter.
It takes leadership that most companies no longer possess to avoid situations like this, and Wall Street enforces this behavior (see also, B Corporations).
The AdSense settlement (http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com/) was quite literally that exact pattern: Google would do a review once you cleared the $100 threshold for a payout and conveniently block you, but there was no evidence that the ad customers were being refunded
Are any of these business models transparent? I think a lot of it runs on pure faith.
If I spend $10,000 on an ad, is there a way to prove that I got $10,000 worth of advertising and not $8,000?
If I am a content creator and my content generated $500 in total revenue of which I have a share, is there a way to prove that it generated $500 and not $1,000?
> I seriously doubt that Google would intentionally demonetize videos
Upper Management will never say that directly but when they keep saying we need higher revenue and lowers costs, the people working under them find ways to achieve the targets and get their bonus.
Yes, whats more likely is that one of the countless bean counters at Google saw the long-tail revenue pie chart/breakdown and thought to themselves "Hmm! Would you look at that!" and just decided to not upset the apple cart..
Well, let's look at Google's ethics here - they still run ads on demonetized videos, right? So Google is okay making money off that, they just don't want the creator to make money off demonetized videos.
No, they don't. Fully demonetized videos don't run ads because that's the entire point of demonetization - that the video was deemed unsuitable for showing ads (because ad buyers don't want their ads showing next to certain content).
Partially demonetized videos may show ads, but from a reduced set of advertisers - those videos will make money but possibly not as much due to less desire for the ad space on that content.
De-monetized videos do not show ads or earn revenue, so that actually hurts Google as well (of course it has indirect effects that are beneficial for Google overall).
I think one of the problems that YouTube has is their three-strikes policy and how they interact with said offending user.
When a video gets flagged, it supposedly is queued up for manual review. Upon manual review, if the YouTube employee deems that the video has broken one of its rules, it will take the video down and it will notify the uploader that they have received a strike.
That's all fine, but the problem is really in how they handle this interaction. They tell the user which "set of rules" they've broken (e.g. "Hate speech, discrimination or other forms of bigotry based on race, gender or religion"), but they get no more specific than that. They do not offer a timestamp for the exact moment in which you violated their rules. The result is as you'd expect. I'm sure many terrible videos are rightly taken down this way, but there are plenty of people who don't believe their video violated any rules and are seeking clarification on what they did wrong.
It would also be beneficial for the relationship between YouTube and its creators if there was an opportunity for restitution. For example, maybe YouTube informs the user that their video has violated a rule and if they don't take it down within some period of time, they will receive a strike and it will be taken down automatically (of course, with the knowledge that some types of videos should be taken down immediately). Maybe when YouTube takes a video down, they could timestamp it and tell the user that they can re-upload the video without that specific part.
As it is now, there are people who make their livings on YouTube, and these somewhat vague rules and the nebulous enforcement of them does not instill creators (I'm talking about creators who post about divisive or controversial things - could be something as simple as viewpoints on modern political news) with a feeling of security and the end-result may be that they simply move to a different platform.
If YouTube listens to the complaints of this 'FairTube' group and engages them, I think that'd be best for everyone.
I wonder what the percentage difference is of people getting copyright strikes vs. copyright ID claims. I do hear far less about strikes themselves, i would assume (big assumption on my part so i might be wrong) if a video had a lot of views one would want to make a copyright ID claim and monetize on the popularity, that would also give the creator a chance to dispute it.
Also if you make all your living just being on youtube and no other platforms, in my opinion you are setting yourself up for failure. Youtube is a business with shareholders. They do have a responcibility for creators bringing in the money, but just like facebook, when you are a creator on youtube your ARE the product. One does not have to like someone calling them a product, but it is still the truth.
Not to mention the stories of creators losing money to false claims. YouTube should should the money is escrow until copyright strikes are resolved one way or another because, as it stands, creators don't have the resources to fight the rampant safe harbor fraud.
It's even worse than that. Sure, a chunk of the video's initial ad revenue will be lost over illegitimate claims but if the video is restricted, the video is basically dead. Most videos get the lion share of their views in the time immediately after they're uploaded (i.e. the first day or week). If the video gets stuck in limbo, not only isn't the creator making any money but also the video will underperform and any cost of producing that video will have virtually no return on investment.
So in other words, smaller channels can easily get stuck producing worse content because the risk of investing significant amounts of time into a single video is too great. And even when channels don't rely on monetisation, lost exposure can limit their reach and harm their growth.
Disney, Sony and their many tentacles randomly steal from youtubers ALL THE TIME, then are expected to review claims of wrongdoing by themselves on good faith, and this is about as "creator friendly" Google will ever get.
Those rules suck. It's time to leave for greener pastures.
Honest question - when the creators know the bad behavior of Disney/Sony etc, why poke them at all? What is the point of using their music, even if it is used in good faith for just 5 seconds?
I've seen a handful of primitive tech guy's videos, they are some of the most enjoyable videos on Youtube. There are very few videos where using someone else's music is a must, most videos are better off without these bad actors' music
Many creators don't want to use music claimed by the big names, but they might not have a choice.
For example, footage used in a review (say a clip of a TV show) necessarily comes with any background music. If the TV show is using licensed music in that scene, it then shows up in the Youtube video.
Even real-life, vlog-style footage can have unsolicited music.
There's also a full spectrum of Content ID claims that are frivolous because of over-matching. Even public-domain footage (especially video) can be claimed. For example, if a news agency uploads its own news report to the Content ID system for matching but that news report contains public-domain material such as a NASA video, that raw video itself can be reported as 'matching' in other uses.
Whether this effect is malicious or unintentional is a subject of debate.
The world is filled with Disney/Sony etc.'s music and if you are recording anything out in the world there's a chance that it will get included in the background.
YouTubers are getting flagged by big media companies because YouTubers are using their music or other media without getting a media license. This is not a mystery unknown rule. YouTubers know to not use music they don't have the rights to.
They are also getting flagged for things that are obviously fair use. The idea that a travel vlogger loses their entire video's monetization because they walked by a restaurant playing music is absurd. The music isn't even a substantial part of the video.
Ebay used to be a great garage sale / thrift-store place where individuals could sell their stuff, no hassle. Then they started catering to Ebay stores, and then finally they wanted to become Amazon 2.0, almost pushing individual sellers away. They're now basically geared toward large stores that act and operate like any big amazon store - you're pretty much expected to eat any losses that may come up, and write it off as "cost of doing business".
Same with Youtube. Used to be a great place for small individual creators, but now it's basically just a stream of memes and high-production vids that are the equivalent to visual fast-food.
Sure, you can still post as a small-timer, but there will be no help, and you're at the mercy of the big companies and their relentless search for copyrighted material. Or if you're not in the creative space, there's still a chance you'll get screwed by arbitrary tripping the controversial content-wire.
All that kinda narrows down the scope of what one can create, and thus we see the rise of low-effort content farms .
(It's not that there's no good content - there's a ton of good high-quality content, but as we've seen the past years, even the good channels with a decent amount of followers can get demonetized at the drop of a hat)
> Same with Youtube. Used to be a great place for small individual creators, but now it's basically just a stream of memes and high-production vids that are the equivalent to visual fast-food.
What are you talking about? Youtube is full of great high quality content from individual creators. So much so, I'd wager youtube gives "real tv" a serious run for their money. Almost all my video-based content consumption is youtube these days.
It's extremely disappointing how the broader US technology scene never really "got" Vine. Despite the platform's constraints, it was full of genuinely innovative content.
This is why I like tiktok more, I rarely see the same people twice. Kills the whole "celebrity" aspect entirely for casual users like me. It's comfy to sit just before bed for about 15 and laugh a bit with tiktok.
To some degree, I do appreciate the fact that it was shut down just to illustrate the fact that all of these sites and services are not "real" and could disappear at any time. I think it is good that people at least keep this fact in the back of their minds, so a concrete example from time to time can be helpful.
It's been absolutely fascinating to watch the YouTube v. community drama play out. I think many forget the exact same situation has been and continues to play out for Alphabets other major community, website owners.
The difference of course is we don't really have active and vocal "followers" in the way YouTube creators do, so for the most part, when a website owner like myself gets penalized for some abstract and out of my hand reason, or a algorithm change destroys your business overnight, it happens silently, beyond the headlines.
I can't stress this enough -- Google has been a powerful, often positive force for the wider Internet. But they're also a cruel, heartless, and often maniacal source of pain and sorrow.
On YouTube, if you make a 10 minutes long video, but include 10 seconds of copyrighted material, the copyright owner gets 100% of the revenue, the creator 0%. I think this is YouTube creators main objection to the plattform.
2 years back, i uploaded a wildlife video which surprisingly became popular. A year back i noticed im now eligible for monetization as i had crossed the minimum required numbers for Subscribers and Views. One month after applying i got rejected saying the content was duplicate. I thought it was a mistake and applied again and again to no avail. My guess is, someone has content-ID'd the video and monetizing it. The video now sits at 7M+ views and it occassionaly irks me knowing somewhere someone is making money out of that video.
I am surprised there isn't any way similar to Google reverse image search or TinyEye which can do the reverse search for videos. Have you looked into it if that's possible?
I am pretty sure you can upload a video to your favorite web host and publish as much controversial content as you want.
People want YouTube's captive audience of billions and the pre-existing monetization network. But they are upset that there are arbitrary rules for accessing that audience/money. I am pretty sure that 99.9% of Youtubers wouldn't exist if there were no possibility of ever making money from their videos.
Wherever YouTube stands right now, it's still better than the situation 20 years ago where a few network executives controlled what sort of video programming would be produced. It might not be perfect, but there are plenty of people who started from nothing that are making money from their creative work; something that wouldn't have even been possible just a few years ago. So maybe it's not all bad.
We need neutral platforms where content will not be punished because of political agendas. If content doesn't align with a progressive viewpoint, at best FB/Twitter/YT/IG ignore it, more commonly they ban/block/derevenue it.
Youtube is a monumental money-making machine for Google because of the large amount of ads. Creative content is only incidental, it is not the primary purpose of Youtube to foster creation, only to gather ad revenue. It shows in the way they treat creators and viewers vs advertisers and rights holding companies. So this backlash is justified, but for what, TikTok, another closed garden controlled by another media comany ?
I'd personally want to see rise an alternative made of peertube and micro donations, where users would chose to pay for infrastructure and content creation, but I don't know how to make this happen.
I'm working on a side project right now that tries to address the issues we have with monetizing content and creatives at the moment. Ad revenue as we've seen with Youtube and countless other platforms simply isn't viable at scale. You have to play too safe to not associate your brand with any controversy, it degrades the user experience, and it means creatives have to walk on a tightrope not to get demonetized.
Patreon is probably the best current system that's out there, but it doesn't provide a good way to get eyes on the content. I'm trying to create an open source reddit meets patreon system, with the model described by this interactive prototype: https://syd.jjcm.org/soci/
I've got the frontend sorted, an API fully specced out, and some rough backend code created, but I'll be honest in that I'm not a backend guy so I could use some help. If anyone is interested in trying to solve the problem send me a message at j@jjcm.org. I've got an active job ad in the who's hiring page with more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20331491
I'd also be open to just paying someone remote to help out. At the end of the day I just want there to be a better system available for creatives.
Generate enough outrage and laws can change. While current law recognizes the difference between a publisher and a platform, recent activities could very well cause pressure for publisher-like liability when these platforms begin exercising a high degree of editorial control.
The social media giants' problem is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the editorial control, and they want to be absolved of any liability when they host terrorist propaganda (think ISIL), pedo bait, and other garbage.
There's also the recent court decisions regarding politicians' usage of blocking. That ruling creeps right up to the line of recognizing "private" social media providers as a public square of sorts. The situation we're in is not tenable for much longer.
I always thought a great idea for stepping over this whole problem is a robust tagging/categorizing system, and then make certain tags opt-in to view. That would be the least amount of work and least likely to be upsetting to reasonable people.
That aside, the one worry I share is that the outrage is going to drive a legislative solution that ends up splitting the baby and sucking for all parties concerned. I was entirely serious when I said this situation wasn't tenable, though. Too much emotion/polarization/etc for something to not give soon.
Long, long overdue, but it seems like Vimeo is starting to pick up steam in response. I'm really not sure if their policies around DMCA claims are (or would be) any better, but I've noticed folks gravitating toward it as an alternative.
Youtube creator here. I am running a Youtube channel for the last few years and it is my full-time job. About a year back I criticized youtube on twitter. Soon afterward my views started dropping. Though it cannot be concluded that my tweets were responsible it is difficult to explain how a channel which was very popular in its niche will suddenly fall off the cliff?
I am over 40 years old and I am unable to find regular employment. For the last 6 months, I am learning to program and trying developing 3 web apps. I am hoping that one of them will reach ramen profitability.
The channel is still active. I cannot reveal it publicly out of fear of a second backlash from Youtube. I still earn about $600 a month from the channel. At its peak I earned c. $3000 a year.
YouTube is always facing creator backlash. I don't see anything new in this article.
For example, I'm not a fan of how the algorithm seems to prioritize clickbait (clickbait is the cancer of the internet) and longer videos. This leads people to load up their videos with filler to hit that 10 minutes length, and then sensationalize their titles, often into "questions" that the video will then fail to subsequently answer. I've had a video get a false copyright claim - it sucked, and it steered me away from making the kind of political videos that use news clips.
But there are no viable competitors, I guess because hosting video content is expensive and network effects. Facebook is probably the closest competitor, but there's too much noise and it's not really much of a search engine for videos. Tik-Tok is not a competitor - it serves an entirely different market (the one formerly served by Vine and Music.ly) of short mobile clips.
Until Youtube starts shadowbanning channels and playing a "Big Brother" censorship role, I'll continue to post there. (I've heard rumours of Youtube shadowbanning channels, but I'm not convinced that they're legitimate, though I haven't really looked into it)
One of my favorite youtube channel by 'Indy Neidell' on WW2 has been demonetized. He and his team cover WW2 week by week, one video with historical analysis/story for every week. They recently completed a series for WW1 and it was amazing.
Even as a semi serious history buff, I learn new stuff. But they have been demonetized, seriously hurting their ability to put up videos.
He put up an extensive view on this and states there is no rhythm or rhyme on what gets restricted or not.
I am a big fan of machining and metal working videos. Whatever changes YouTube did last year basically gutted that niche, with many channels simply abruptly giving up mid project.
I have no idea what exactly they changed but from my perspective as a casual viewer it had a large and negative impact.
According to anecdotes I've seen online (so take this with a massive grain of salt), some videos showing how to use tools like drill presses and CNC machines have been demonetized due to youtube's policy against educational gunsmithing videos (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?hl=en)
I ageee that YouTube sucks for many reasons. They have a weird undocumented algorithm that defines what gets popular and as a result creators are constantly playing games to bait it. Their monetization/demonetization policies are just bonkers. Their copyright enforcement system is Kafkaesque. Plus, as a consumer they seem to be going down the facebook route of trying to curate my viewing choices in a way that suits them.
But they can do that as they are a private company. They don't owe anyone anything. If you rely on YouTube for a living without a backup plan then you are dumb.
YouTube is no longer the only player in online video. If you don't like what YouTube is doing then look at alternative platforms.
There is definitely a wave that is happening on other video sharing platforms but I suspect that it won't be a big sea change as the content on YouTube is deep and embedded so the YouTube still casts the widest net. Tik Tok and Astronaut.io are interesting but as I type this post word from a 15 year old teenager says that the alternatives are boring so the attention span required is short. The alternatives are entertaining but will really only be a threat when learning takes place on them. The demographic is different and learning will need to take place it 15 seconds or less. It might also be interesting to note that there are approx 200 variables Google looks for when deciding who rides the wave or not.
I hate that the YouTube ads aren't at all targeted to the video that you're watching, or even your profile. Google has like every bit of data they could possibly want on me... and I literally have never seen an ad for anything I would care about.
Worse, like I'm trying to sleep, and I turn on some ASMR or meditation video, and if I forget to turn off the "auto play" feature (it's annoying to turn off from the TV interface), then I'm hit with what can only be described as used-car-guy-volume ads. "BUY NOW! LOW LOW PRICES!"
Now I just use a video scraper to download the videos I like so I can watch them while I sleep. Nobody wins when they don't tie ads to content, or ads to users.
Unpopular opinion, but this whole career choice of "YouTube content creator" seems like a frightful gamble in the first place. You've intrinsically tied yourself into a particular company's product. I guess I don't see YouTube's website as a public space and I don't see how anyone is "entitled" to monetization.
But to be more sympathetic, in this case it just sounds like YouTube should have done most of its automated content scans before posting the video in the first place.
Okay? But you can apply that logic anywhere to anything. Its also a "frightful gamble" that Google needs Microsofts and Apples blessing to operate on their platform. They have intrinsically tied themselves to a particular company's product. They also need Cisco's blessing for routing their packets. The default configuration of all of these products could be to ban google's products and services because they spy on their users or -insert-other-privacy-rationale-. I don't think just because you use and depend on another companies product that you should expect them to be malicious towards you.
But Google has the resources to fight Apple and Microsoft, in the markets and in the courts, if denied a level playing field in a way that is illegal or bad optics. YouTube content creators, and content creators in general, have no defense against this since the big aggregation companies like YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram have market power over hundreds of millions of creators instead of just a few powerhouses.
I fully agree. I'm just pushing back against the sentiment of shitting on the little guy, because of a personal opinion that what this person is doing is vapid or devoid of value to me.
Philosophically I agree with you, but the reality of the situation makes it very difficult to have those views and not be concerned.
- YouTube is owned by Google.
- Furthermore, the world's most popular browser is owned by Google.
- Furthermore, even the other popular browsers will forward your location bar text to Google as default behavior.
So if I am a content creator, my platform decision is guided by these realities plus:
1) Most folks type what they are looking for in their browser's location bar.
2) The result of this action is most often a Google search result page
3) Google search results seem to favor YouTube over other video platforms
So if I want to publish a video review of the iPhone 12, and I decide to go with Vimeo. I am doing so despite all of the above.
Let's say I stick with YouTube. What if Alphabet buys 30% stake in Engadget.com and their AI mysteriously starts to "bug out" and de-monetize all the independent phone reviewers. Is there any transparency? Is it illegal?
You can also argue that there's no compulsion to depend on YouTube for monetization, but YouTube's very existence is owed to content creators. Folks were on places like LiveLeak and other platforms until YouTube essentially "bribed" everyone into switching over by offering monetization. Now YouTube has a monopoly over the audience. YouTube has the power to hand-pick the next big star by just "tweaking" their visibility. They could even hand-pick the next President. This kind of power ought to concern anyone.
Very true. And let's not forget Android and Adsense. It's scary how many developers, publishers, and creators depend on Google for revenue today. A tiny change in Google's opaque algorithms can and will affect many's livelihood.
I agree with that in principle, but increasingly lots of gigs are tied to some kind of platform as intermediary, so it's getting harder to avoid tying yourself to some company's whims. I guess you can try to diversify and at least hedge your bets, but that's easier to do with some kinds of jobs than others.
Besides YouTube, some other platforms that many people's businesses/livelihoods depend on in one way or another: Google AdSense, Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Associates, Steam, Patreon, Square, Uber, ...
Not really. If the discussion was about weather a video should be allowed to exist, or be taken down, then yes it would be publisher vs platform. But this is a case of monetization vs non-monetization. I think YouTube, Twitter, ect. should be treated as "Platforms" and that nothing should ever be deleted/banned/taken down unless it is strictly illegal. That said, monetization is entirely a different beast, YouTube as a business can pick and choose which videos to monetize and which ones not to. Restricting content is a violation of the 1st amendment, refusing to pay creators is a business decision.
There should be a box you can tick as a YouTube creator for "monetized views only". Meaning, if this video gets demonetized, take it down while I dispute that, and show my viewers a notice instead.
This isn't a rights thing, it's just a sane business decision thing, to not alienate creators. Can you imagine if cable companies could just arbitrarily decide to "demonetize" a football game, and then show it for free with no ads?
Let's say YouTube's parent company invests in a new cosmetics company that's doing make-up tutorials on YouTube. Is it fair for YouTube to then de-monetize the independent content creators who are creating make-up tutorials and therefore hurt their revenue stream? Let's say their algorithm does it by "mistake" all the time, what can be done about it?
Over time, the independent creators have less YouTube ad revenue share. Their competitor (in which Alphabet has a stake), is "coincidentally" given higher search ranking and more visibility in the recommendations as well.
What happens to the independent content creators over time?
>Is it fair for YouTube to then de-monetize the independent content creators who are creating make-up tutorials
Fair, no. Legal? Yes.
> Over time, the independent creators have less YouTube ad revenue share.
OK, and? There is no fundamental right to YouTube monetization.
>Their competitor (in which Alphabet has a stake), is "coincidentally" given higher search ranking and more visibility in the recommendations as well.
Ranking is a problem, if you are platform then everyone has equal voice then the ranking system needs to be 100% equal and transparent, which it is current neither.
> What happens to the independent content creators over time?
They find other ways to make $$ or they find another career. Lots of YT's are now pushing things like pateron membership. There is also nothing stopping any YT from going out and securing their own advertisers and doing their own ads in their videos.
>What is the legal remedy for the above scenario?
Legal remedy is simple, YT can't ban/restrict/bury content. YT can decide who, if anyone, they want to monetize.
>How would one even prove this case in court?
It is obvious when a video is taken down, and if the ranking system was 100% transparent it would also be easy to verify if there was tampering ("My video had 1mil views in the first 24 hours, this other video had 200k views the first 24 hours, the other video was trending, mine wasn't.")
As John Dewey said, “politics is the shadow casted by big business” and until businesses are democratically owned and managed, this will continue to be the case.
I mean there are lots of jobs like that. The bottom line is that there has to be a level of trust between the rent seeking platform and the people creating content for them for the platform to keep existing as it is. Youtube is currently diversifying to that it doesn't need to rely solely on content creators, and can instead rely on a more traditional "studio" model for portions of its income. Great for Youtube, less great for creators as they are becoming less valuable over time.
Very few visit youtube for studio content unless you are counting clips of shows uploaded by fans. Probably the same percentage that buy playboy for the articles.
If youtube suddenly stopped supporting user content we would see youtube shutdown like google+.
There are enough places for studios to provide content and many more streaming options coming your way shortly.
Now if youtube decided to copy netflix and started pouring in billions for new self produced content yearly that might be an option.
So you're telling me that youtube premium isn't a diversity play on youtube's part? They're copying netflix right now, making "youtube original shows" as well.
They're absolutely adding other content sources to their platform beyond "kid self publishing a vlog in their home" style material they started with all those years ago. It's not the majority of their page views yet, but when Netflix first launched people were mostly using them to rent physical DVDs, so we'll see how this plays out long term.
YouTube has a monopoly on self-published videos on the internet. "Don't use YouTube" is the equivalent of "shut down your business", so content creators do need to be protected.
"YouTube content creators" still have the ability to monetize the video content they create in other places, in other ways.
They could do Patreon, make their own products..etc.
These people should think of Youtube as one distributor only, and just like a TV show can move from NBC to Netflix, they should open to change distribution channels whenever it benefits them.
I know the community/audience is on Youtube argument makes this a difficult problem, but I feel like this has been somewhat solved. You can still advertise on Youtube. You can still promote teasers of your brand on Youtube.
Look at Russel Brand right now, he levered iTunes to create a new Podcast, which then became a Premium product that is only accessible from the Luminary app. But that doesn't mean he can't still benefit from iTunes and use it as a sales channel to move his audience over.
Then you must like the gamble many young people make: becoming a professional athlete.
First you must spend years, to the exclusion of much else, to even have a chance to become one. And even if you succeed you're very likely to be just an average athlete. Most won't earn enough money in their ~20 year career to live on for the rest of their life, so you still need to make a big career shift late in your life.
And you're always at the mercy of facing a career-ending injury, similar to how Google can wreck your channel for whatever reason.
I for one agree wholeheartedly, it makes a lot more sense to have your own company with a product or service, and use YouTube to attract customers for your business, while AdSense revenue is just the cherry on the cake.
Tim Schmoyer for example talks about this a lot, of how he was making over 10k usd a month in a channel with 10k subs or less, because he built a business model around the channel and not just based himself on addsense.
Creating content is not a problem. Some of them will do it really badly, ripping off stuff and others will be creative and genuine. That's the magic of the market.
Sounds like a symptom of centralized silo services, period. This wouldn’t be a problem if each of those creators had a website with their content on it. The copyright holders would have to issue a DMCA to for that 10 second of radio music, which, while not perfect, is better than this YouTube content claim garbage completely controlled by claimants.
Then maybe copyright law would be molded into a better system. Which is exactly what these copyright cartels DON’T want. They want to avoid any judicial review whatsoever of their actions.
The one thing I dislike about Youtube and no one talks about is their aggresive lossy compression.
My monitor is only 1080p but I set the quality to 1440p or 4K if the video supports it, as those resolutions allow a higher bitrate and I can enjoy videos without noticeable distortion. I prefer my computer to downscale the image instead of Youtube butchering the whole thing by limiting the bitrate to an extreme.
I understand that Youtube has to optimize their storage and bandwidth, but still, if I see a video with too many compression artifacts I just close it.
is the youtube trending page algorithmically generated or human-curated? Its complete garbage. If the first 20 videos are really what most people want to watch... god help us lol
I wish every content creator was aware of the importance of having a backup plan. It's sad to read so many stories about creators losing not only the audience and revenue, but alse the content itself after YT shut them down.
Unless Youtube enters into a serious dialog concerning Fairtube's demands, IG metal's lawyers will be challenging Youtube in court over "false self employment". Could get very expensive for YT:
The whole ContentID/de-monetization thing sucks. YouTube made a video about it themselves to explain how it works, which is pretty informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYurafmTwcw
Does YouTube mistreat and exploit its creators in a myriad of ways? Absolutely. Is it a fair platform and does it behave in reasonable ways? Absolutely not.
That said, I feel that a reminder about the nature of YouTube monetization, AKA the YouTube Partner Program is in order. The YPP puts ads in and around your video and gives you part of the profit from running those ads, but what does that mean? It means YouTube is:
>Finding advertisers
>Persuading them it can pick content (yours) that is profitable to advertise on
>Handling the entire negotiation and payment work behind implementing that advertising
>Handling the entire technical aspect of adding those advertisements to your video
That is an enormous amount of work YouTube is doing for its content creators for free. You are not in any way entitled to YouTube doing that work for you. Having your videos categorized as not eligible for the YPP is not in any way depriving you of the ability to make money from them, just the ability to automatically make money from them with no effort on your part. Without access to the YPP, you are still free to find sponsors, find advertisers and run your own ads, receive donations, or rely on patronage services like Patreon. That means you have every single avenue of revenue generation (aside from paywalling your content) available to you that you'd have if you were hosting the videos yourself on a personal server. Hell you can even do that if you want to set up some kind of script that uploads your videos as Private and only adds viewer usernames to the whitelist after they pay you.
It would be a terrible idea, but YouTube would be entirely within its rights to charge content creators for the bandwidth consumed by their viewers and offer no assistance at all for making money off your content. YouTube owes you nothing.
Youtube's copyright claims system is absolutely abysmal. I didn't know that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, so I assume that they are much more resistant to copyright trolls?
The copystriking system is totally ridiculous. The person who claimed the video should not be the one to decide appeals if they incorrectly claimed your video.
I miss the days when you could watch "Bill Cooking Chicken part 1" and the related videos would be "Bill Cooking Chicken part 2" and "Bill Cooking fish part 1" instead of "I wasted $200 on Wish.com" and "More Adventures in Replying to Spam" and "Ten Flaws of the Borg Collective".
mps-youtube using either channel or search, saving to playlist, and then stepping through that list is such a vastly superior experience to YouTube itself it's not even funny.
Although Youtube sucks in many regards (namely handling copyright claims and deleting/demonetizing videos for wrongthink), one thing I really like about it is their terms of use. I come very rarely upon so creator right friendly service.
You give rights to your content to Youtube only for purposes of operating and promoting Youtube, which means that it won't eventually become remixed by third party and put behind paywall without you having anything to say about it.
And this license which you grant to Youtube ends if you remove your videos. Also it doesn't have indemnification clause. Compare it to virtually all other services which request irrevocable right to do pretty much anything with your content and also demand indemnification.
Copyright claims is a perfect example. That system is abused by large companies who know how to exploit their algorithms and they know it is worth it because there will be no humans in the loop to stop them.
If YouTube wants to remain viable, they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.