YouTube

Highlight of the new TOS for December 2019

https://www.youtube.com/t/terms?preview=20191210

" You Tube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if You Tube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable. "

Half of my subscriptions will be fucking suspended then. Guess it's finally here, the "too late to start a channel" point has arrived.

Edited by UltraWanker on Nov 10th 2019 at 7:23:55 AM

So they're just blatantly admitting it now.

This sounds like something that will drive many of it's users away.

Well, it would, but where will they go? YouTube basically has a monopoly.

Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Nov 10th 2019 at 11:37:57 AM

Either someone will have to create an alternative or people will just have to settle for Dailymotion.

The company in the best position to create an alternative that can actually break the monopoly is Pornhub. But they have quite a few disturbing practices of their own, so it might be a "new boss, same as the old boss" situation.

Understatement of the century there.

I'm scared to ask but it is a porn site after all

The company behind Pornhub, Mindgeek, actually owns most of the internet's porn site (Brazzers, digitalplaygrounds, etc...) as well as most porn streaming website (Pornhub, youporn, etc...).

They are known to use their near monopoly status in the porn industry to bully producers and rivals. Pirating their subcontractors' own content on their own streaming website, and pirate rival content knowing they can bully their way through any lawsuit... Their CE Os also got investigated (and arrested IIRC) for insider trading. The company's had multiple antitrust investigations on it. And on top of that they are in deep with malware advertisers.

Mindgeek has no interest in starting a youtube competitor coz their business revolves and depends on the fact that no one wants to look at the dealings in the porn industry too closely so they can do whatever they want.

Edited by Ghilz on Nov 10th 2019 at 12:09:42 PM

Reminds me of the gaming industry. Only way more scummy and less regulated.

And the gaming industry just now its getting flak for those practices

Porn industry has it better because no Politician is ever gonna go "Look at whats going on in the porn industry!". At least when it comes to gaming a politician can go "think of the children!". Talking about the porn industry, that's basically an election killer right there unless you're framing it as like, combating prostitution.

Edited by Ghilz on Nov 10th 2019 at 12:14:11 PM

I really wish there was more talk about how to undo the stigma around sexual matters in general left over from the Puritans, but that's a different thread.

The nest step for Youtube at this point would be to charge for access to their service. In other words, its gonna get worse unless we can get Lawmakers on our side about this.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Politicians find the porn industry skeevy so they don't touch it, which leaves it unregulated and easily able to do skeevy things. Ironically, the problem is their business practices, not their content. Pornhub doesn't have child porn or anything, but they're killing the professional porn industry through their monopoly. And porn stars already had problems before Pornhub came along, but that's probably off-topic.

There has been a movement to start combating "revenge porn," one of the big problems in the industry, but that's rather low on the list of Pornhub's problems.

As more Millennials become lawmakers, we are getting more elected officials on our side. Part of the reason everything has gotten out of hand is because the internet slipped right in the generation gap, where elected officials have no idea what the hell they're looking at.

However, putting that aside, Youtube is only an effective monopoly, not an actual monopoly. And that means if they do something too stupid, like charging to use their site at all, the market will immediately turn against them. There are other video streaming sites, and if Youtube shoots itself in the foot they'll rise up.

Edited by Discar on Nov 10th 2019 at 9:23:27 AM

I think what people are asking is, is this that?

If nothing else, it’s closer than they’ve ever been.

Jesus,this will be tough for content creators.

Of course the real kicker is Youtube announcing this, giving no context, and answering no question. As if the usual MO now.

Jim Sterling for example, has no ads on his videos. Is his account about to be closed?

Edited by Ghilz on Nov 10th 2019 at 4:01:03 AM

Yeah I checked his twitter now and he's expressing concerns over the vague wording.

Edited by Dhiruxide on Nov 10th 2019 at 10:04:03 AM

Dan Olson, from Folding Ideas, posted an insight on the situation. Basically, Youtube his this whole weird industry of span accounts that upload hours of video everyday with no real content whatsoever. This new policy would allow Youtube to go after those more easily.

So, I guess depending on the implementation, it could hopefully not effect any real account. And, if we think about it, it is Youtube best interest that people don't fear having their account deleted randomly. Sure, they are virtually a monopoly, but the reason they have that status is because it is the most convenient and well known platform for people to use. If people can't trust their video will still be there, they will migrate elsewhere (or even nowhere) because using youtube will be a hassle. And with less small content creators there will likely be less viewers overall as well. It is not like most people go to youtube solely for the big monetized content. A lot of traffic is random memetic stuff, account that have one video go viral and then disappear and whatever. So they probably don't want to ruin that, it would completely change their business and shake the status quo which is likely not their intention as they do have the monopoly

The kicker of course, is that anything that "depends on implementation" is a recipe of disaster with Youtube. They fuck things up so consistently that I don't trust they won't again here, even if their intentions aren't terrible. And, as said they aren't giving answers because of course they wouldn't. So it is not like we can know for sure they aren't trying to completely change how things work to make youtube less a video repository and more like Netflix.

Edited by Heatth on Nov 10th 2019 at 7:23:31 AM

Does anybody here have more details on this incident?

From what I heard, there's an internal limit on spamming in Youtube streams and they will suspend your account for spamming.

Markplier's stream was interactive and had people spamming specific emotes for choices.

Daily Motion is the alternative, along with Veoh and Vimeo. I'm going to repost what I said on the Jimquisition thread.

YouTube is big due to the network effect. It was the first video sharing site, and because video hosting is expensive, nobody else seriously tried for some time. As a result, YouTube became synonymous with Internet video, rather like how Google is synonymous with search engine. With no other options, everybody who wanted to put videos on the Internet put them on YouTube, because there was nowhere else to go.

And this was powerful. When the likes of Veoh, Daily Motion, and Google started trying to get into Internet video, they faced a powerful hegemon. People searched for videos on YouTube because that's where the videos were, and people posted videos on YouTube because that's where people went for videos. Even Google, who already had hegemony on search engines, couldn't compete with the might of YouTube's network.

Yeah, that's right. Some of ye might be too young to remember this, but Google didn't start YouTube. In fact, for a while they had their own video sharing service, Google Video. But nobody used Google Video because YouTube had a way better selection. So after a couple of years, Google shut down Google Video as they do to so many of their other products, and bought out YouTube for that sweet, sweet influence. But such is the power of the YouTube brand that Google made an exception to their rule of renaming acquisitions to Google N and left it as YouTube, because the YouTube name was and is so strongly linked to Internet video in the minds of users.

And it is that very meme that means other sites have to climb a cliff if they want to compete.

If I recall, Dailymotion appeared around the same time as Youtube and did almost compete with them for a while… but the site seemed to get worse and worse with time, although last time I tried it did work surprisingly well.