Post by bigmonmulgrew on Mar 3, 2018 17:02:45 GMT
Posted this in the facebook group. Since it is likely to get lost as someone pointed out I'll post it here too.
I'm so glad to see someone doing this. I've been thinking along exactly these lines for a while but I don't have a large enough following. I think Jörg Sprave is exactly the right person to lead this. I have been saying exactly the things you said in your video for a long time.
Some thoughts on the video. Sorry for the wall of text
1. Monetization for smaller channels. Totally agree as I have said again, and again. It has never been about the money. It is about the hope. You phased it so well. Its about motivations. Remove the motivation means less new creators. Seeing the graph climb has always motivated me to produce more. Then its met with a counter to youtube with demonetization etc and the graph drops for the same effort. Its a real kick in the nuts. The motivation is the important thing. Not the amount of money. The system does not stop bad actors either. it is easy enough to bot enough viewtime and subs to get monetized.
2. I think a human calling a partner to call before action isn't practical if we remonetize all small channels. i think the action should scale with the channel size. Under 100 subs, Existing system is reasonable (I still don't like it but it deals with newly made spam channels which need an automated method of removal) Above 100 subs a bot should flag the video and send information on reasons why the video has been flagged to the creator giving them chance to edit, remove and at the very least learn the reason why it is being flagged. The creator should have 24 hours to deal with it themselves for no penalty. For extreme offenders the bot could flag the video for a human to review to consider instant removal. As this would be a small fraction of uploaded video it would be managable. For videos over 1000 subs A human should be required to take any punishment action on a channel. This is the channel size where people start to consider making a living from youtube and for the Youtube model to work creators need to not be afraid their income will dissapear without warning. We are now in a situation where the Youtube dream cannot happen because its so common that Youtube changes kill the dream after someone has made the jump to the platform. Peopel keep saying youtube has no obligation to its creators to provide them a job, and this is true but it is also true that Youtube needs people to commit their time in order make quality content. People cannot do that if they fear losing their home any time an advertiser complains or they get a false flag from the bot.
3. It is morally reprehensable that you can take someones livelyhood away, leave them starving and homeless (potentially) and never tell them why. In real jobs in most modern countries its illegal to sack people without giving them a reason. Taking videos down, censoring and demonetizing without givingt a reason is disgusting.
4. Youtube claimed Demonetization was needed. Ads were appearing on terrorist videos or stuff advertisers didnt like. Some organisations wanted to target those videos for adds, adds that discourage radicalisation. Video game content often gets flagged for violence too. Again there are plenty of advertisers that would want to advertise there. Youtubes response to remove adverts from certain videos was wrong. What they should ahev done instead is use their bot to tag videos in different categories, violence, sex, controversial topics etc just like it uses to ban videos now. But instead of banning the videos they could have deployed tools to advertisers to remove their adds from videos they didnt like and use the tagging to target adverts to videos they prefer. This way they increase advertising value for the advertisers. If I'm selling a violent game for example I can target my adds on videos that have been flagged as violent. This adds value to the platform and hurt no one. I also think that when a bunch of advertisers complained they should have just offered their competitors good deals on advertising. The argument would have stopped there. i lvoe the car maker analogy, that is genius.
5. Preffered parteners is just leading to a Youtube where all content is the same. The variety and freedom of creativity was what made Youtube great. Now we have to copy the preffered partners to make it. Not good.
6. Honestly I think beheading videos shoudl be available on youtube. They should be flagged and age gated and come with a mature disturbing content warning. It is useful to society though to see societys dark side so we can learn from it. They also don't want to say what is OK and what isn't OK so they can decide on a case by case basis whenever something is int he grey area. 100 subs then that isnt OK. 1 million subs, we will let that one slide. This means not all creators are held to the same standard. Pretty sure Logan Paul's punishment would have been more severe if he only had 200 subs. Not that I think it shoudl have been more severe. I already said why I thinnk it is good top include bad content but creators have been banned for less, or banned and never know why.
I have long said youtube is slowly dying. Peopel think I'm being an entitled creator. I have 168 subs. Really what worries me is that the open, creative platform will not exist in a few years.
My channel makes gaming videos. I was affected. I swear occasionally. Most of the content is Dota so it is suitable for teens. I went from $30 a month to $1 a month. Now imagine if I was making a living from that. Imagine if that was $30k a year. Could anyone go from $30k a year to $1k a year and still keep working. Imagine if your boss turned up one day and announced such a steep pay cut. My channel is not extreme but it was drastically effected. It is definately not just extreme channels.
I have never believed Youtubes PR department that the bots are learning and getting better. I always thought this was a PR excuse in order to buy them some time and get people to back off. Deep learnign AIs are never a good solution. They are experimental at best and produce inconsistent unpredictable results in a lot of cases. You also need to take into account that the information being fed into the bots to learn from isn't neccessarily accurate information. Different countires have different attitudes to sexuality, to violence to comedy so flags will just teach the bot that all content is bad, which is exactly what happened. Even in lab conditions with controlled data fed into AIs its not always predicatable how they will react. I also think that the PR department or management really does not understand the technical challenges involved here so is resulting to just trying to put out PR fires to get peopel off their back.
Finding your own advertisers isnt practical for most creators. That is exactly why Youtube was so good. The only barrier to entry was being passionate about something and knowing how to use a camers. If you add into that having to manage advertisers there is a lot of people who will never be good at that. It is a big barrier to entry. I am a web designer. I have my own hosting space with enough bandwidth to serve double my current audience easily. I also have adverts I could put in my content. But this is a terrible way to work. It removes Youtube as being the fantastic pot to brew creativity. It might solve my problem as a content creator but it will not solve it as a user.
I can confirm that when demonetization hit, there was a drastic drop in my traffic coming from youtube sources. After copying my december upload schedule for the last few weeks I am seeing about half the traffic I was seeing before demonetization.
As far as patreon goes I would like to add a big issue for small creators. If you add a patreon on a small channel people tell you you don't deserve the money and to stop begging. Adding one too early can actually have a negative effect on your channel.
One more thing. If there is anyhting I can do to help this campaign I will be doing it. On top of the usual things if you decide you need help with web design or hosting or anything related to that. I will offer my services free of charge to help with the campaign.
I'm so glad to see someone doing this. I've been thinking along exactly these lines for a while but I don't have a large enough following. I think Jörg Sprave is exactly the right person to lead this. I have been saying exactly the things you said in your video for a long time.
Some thoughts on the video. Sorry for the wall of text
1. Monetization for smaller channels. Totally agree as I have said again, and again. It has never been about the money. It is about the hope. You phased it so well. Its about motivations. Remove the motivation means less new creators. Seeing the graph climb has always motivated me to produce more. Then its met with a counter to youtube with demonetization etc and the graph drops for the same effort. Its a real kick in the nuts. The motivation is the important thing. Not the amount of money. The system does not stop bad actors either. it is easy enough to bot enough viewtime and subs to get monetized.
2. I think a human calling a partner to call before action isn't practical if we remonetize all small channels. i think the action should scale with the channel size. Under 100 subs, Existing system is reasonable (I still don't like it but it deals with newly made spam channels which need an automated method of removal) Above 100 subs a bot should flag the video and send information on reasons why the video has been flagged to the creator giving them chance to edit, remove and at the very least learn the reason why it is being flagged. The creator should have 24 hours to deal with it themselves for no penalty. For extreme offenders the bot could flag the video for a human to review to consider instant removal. As this would be a small fraction of uploaded video it would be managable. For videos over 1000 subs A human should be required to take any punishment action on a channel. This is the channel size where people start to consider making a living from youtube and for the Youtube model to work creators need to not be afraid their income will dissapear without warning. We are now in a situation where the Youtube dream cannot happen because its so common that Youtube changes kill the dream after someone has made the jump to the platform. Peopel keep saying youtube has no obligation to its creators to provide them a job, and this is true but it is also true that Youtube needs people to commit their time in order make quality content. People cannot do that if they fear losing their home any time an advertiser complains or they get a false flag from the bot.
3. It is morally reprehensable that you can take someones livelyhood away, leave them starving and homeless (potentially) and never tell them why. In real jobs in most modern countries its illegal to sack people without giving them a reason. Taking videos down, censoring and demonetizing without givingt a reason is disgusting.
4. Youtube claimed Demonetization was needed. Ads were appearing on terrorist videos or stuff advertisers didnt like. Some organisations wanted to target those videos for adds, adds that discourage radicalisation. Video game content often gets flagged for violence too. Again there are plenty of advertisers that would want to advertise there. Youtubes response to remove adverts from certain videos was wrong. What they should ahev done instead is use their bot to tag videos in different categories, violence, sex, controversial topics etc just like it uses to ban videos now. But instead of banning the videos they could have deployed tools to advertisers to remove their adds from videos they didnt like and use the tagging to target adverts to videos they prefer. This way they increase advertising value for the advertisers. If I'm selling a violent game for example I can target my adds on videos that have been flagged as violent. This adds value to the platform and hurt no one. I also think that when a bunch of advertisers complained they should have just offered their competitors good deals on advertising. The argument would have stopped there. i lvoe the car maker analogy, that is genius.
5. Preffered parteners is just leading to a Youtube where all content is the same. The variety and freedom of creativity was what made Youtube great. Now we have to copy the preffered partners to make it. Not good.
6. Honestly I think beheading videos shoudl be available on youtube. They should be flagged and age gated and come with a mature disturbing content warning. It is useful to society though to see societys dark side so we can learn from it. They also don't want to say what is OK and what isn't OK so they can decide on a case by case basis whenever something is int he grey area. 100 subs then that isnt OK. 1 million subs, we will let that one slide. This means not all creators are held to the same standard. Pretty sure Logan Paul's punishment would have been more severe if he only had 200 subs. Not that I think it shoudl have been more severe. I already said why I thinnk it is good top include bad content but creators have been banned for less, or banned and never know why.
I have long said youtube is slowly dying. Peopel think I'm being an entitled creator. I have 168 subs. Really what worries me is that the open, creative platform will not exist in a few years.
My channel makes gaming videos. I was affected. I swear occasionally. Most of the content is Dota so it is suitable for teens. I went from $30 a month to $1 a month. Now imagine if I was making a living from that. Imagine if that was $30k a year. Could anyone go from $30k a year to $1k a year and still keep working. Imagine if your boss turned up one day and announced such a steep pay cut. My channel is not extreme but it was drastically effected. It is definately not just extreme channels.
I have never believed Youtubes PR department that the bots are learning and getting better. I always thought this was a PR excuse in order to buy them some time and get people to back off. Deep learnign AIs are never a good solution. They are experimental at best and produce inconsistent unpredictable results in a lot of cases. You also need to take into account that the information being fed into the bots to learn from isn't neccessarily accurate information. Different countires have different attitudes to sexuality, to violence to comedy so flags will just teach the bot that all content is bad, which is exactly what happened. Even in lab conditions with controlled data fed into AIs its not always predicatable how they will react. I also think that the PR department or management really does not understand the technical challenges involved here so is resulting to just trying to put out PR fires to get peopel off their back.
Finding your own advertisers isnt practical for most creators. That is exactly why Youtube was so good. The only barrier to entry was being passionate about something and knowing how to use a camers. If you add into that having to manage advertisers there is a lot of people who will never be good at that. It is a big barrier to entry. I am a web designer. I have my own hosting space with enough bandwidth to serve double my current audience easily. I also have adverts I could put in my content. But this is a terrible way to work. It removes Youtube as being the fantastic pot to brew creativity. It might solve my problem as a content creator but it will not solve it as a user.
I can confirm that when demonetization hit, there was a drastic drop in my traffic coming from youtube sources. After copying my december upload schedule for the last few weeks I am seeing about half the traffic I was seeing before demonetization.
As far as patreon goes I would like to add a big issue for small creators. If you add a patreon on a small channel people tell you you don't deserve the money and to stop begging. Adding one too early can actually have a negative effect on your channel.
One more thing. If there is anyhting I can do to help this campaign I will be doing it. On top of the usual things if you decide you need help with web design or hosting or anything related to that. I will offer my services free of charge to help with the campaign.