Post by banhammeredexpat on Aug 6, 2019 5:18:25 GMT
Hello everyone,
I am an American expat. I grew up in the Silicon Valley and watched it develop into what it is today. I now live abroad in Thailand with my girlfriend and we are raising our precocious daughter here. Many expats here subsidize their income or outright live on the monetization of the videos they make producing travel vlogs or special interest videos. Most of the views unfortunately go to the sexpats creeping through the red light districts but the majority of expats are quiet, good people just raising their families and living their lives working on environmental or social issues. I was really getting into the production side of things and preparing to do my own vlogs to do food reviews with a focus on Bangkok restaurants because my profession at home is a chef. I also like to play online games so this was another channel avenue I was exploring when the banhammer came down.
My channel did not have a lot of subscribers as I was just beginning to develop it and not a lot of views. I had one warning from a video that had copyrighted music which I set to private but no copyright strikes. Other than that I had no violations ever. I watched a livestream on June 14th (date) of 2019 in which the developers of a game I enjoy were conducting a contest giveaway and said "Spam the comments section with your game user ID's for a chance to win" and we did. Many users got banned because of this action and our appeals fell on auto-generated responses. Since the developers/owners of this channel solicited the response from the viewers I think this does not qualify as a community guidelines violation because it does not meet the standards for spam... another discussion I suppose.
I've watched YouTube become increasingly hostile towards independent creators. I've always kept up to date with the controversies even prior to adpocalypse 1.0. Like many content creators have said YouTube is basically the only game in town now and functions like a town square. It is this fact that motivates me not the potential for monetization. I and others have been silenced for participating in a contest for a game and now our ability to express our positions on the issue of the day (if we so choose) has been compromised. All this happened just months after YouTube supposedly clarified their community guidelines strikes policy in February. I had no warnings just banned for participating in a contest, and the channel owner suffered no repercussions. I don't have any delusions of grandeur about what I could do on YouTube, or what my channel could have become. It's that this heavy handed treatment is so dangerous and antithetical to the values of the culture i.e. western enlightenment which spawned it. I liken it to a documentary I saw about tuna fishing and poor fisheries management. In it they filmed fisherman corralling a school of adolescent Tuna in huge nets. They would proceed to move the penned tuna offshore where they would be captive but still able to fatten up in the ocean before being harvested. The synopsis was that the quickest way to kill a species is to round up the adolescents before they have time to mature and breed then bring them to the slaughter. This is analogous to what YouTube is doing with it's practices across the spectrum of its uses. It affects everyone, I don't agree with it and that's why I'm here.
I am an American expat. I grew up in the Silicon Valley and watched it develop into what it is today. I now live abroad in Thailand with my girlfriend and we are raising our precocious daughter here. Many expats here subsidize their income or outright live on the monetization of the videos they make producing travel vlogs or special interest videos. Most of the views unfortunately go to the sexpats creeping through the red light districts but the majority of expats are quiet, good people just raising their families and living their lives working on environmental or social issues. I was really getting into the production side of things and preparing to do my own vlogs to do food reviews with a focus on Bangkok restaurants because my profession at home is a chef. I also like to play online games so this was another channel avenue I was exploring when the banhammer came down.
My channel did not have a lot of subscribers as I was just beginning to develop it and not a lot of views. I had one warning from a video that had copyrighted music which I set to private but no copyright strikes. Other than that I had no violations ever. I watched a livestream on June 14th (date) of 2019 in which the developers of a game I enjoy were conducting a contest giveaway and said "Spam the comments section with your game user ID's for a chance to win" and we did. Many users got banned because of this action and our appeals fell on auto-generated responses. Since the developers/owners of this channel solicited the response from the viewers I think this does not qualify as a community guidelines violation because it does not meet the standards for spam... another discussion I suppose.
I've watched YouTube become increasingly hostile towards independent creators. I've always kept up to date with the controversies even prior to adpocalypse 1.0. Like many content creators have said YouTube is basically the only game in town now and functions like a town square. It is this fact that motivates me not the potential for monetization. I and others have been silenced for participating in a contest for a game and now our ability to express our positions on the issue of the day (if we so choose) has been compromised. All this happened just months after YouTube supposedly clarified their community guidelines strikes policy in February. I had no warnings just banned for participating in a contest, and the channel owner suffered no repercussions. I don't have any delusions of grandeur about what I could do on YouTube, or what my channel could have become. It's that this heavy handed treatment is so dangerous and antithetical to the values of the culture i.e. western enlightenment which spawned it. I liken it to a documentary I saw about tuna fishing and poor fisheries management. In it they filmed fisherman corralling a school of adolescent Tuna in huge nets. They would proceed to move the penned tuna offshore where they would be captive but still able to fatten up in the ocean before being harvested. The synopsis was that the quickest way to kill a species is to round up the adolescents before they have time to mature and breed then bring them to the slaughter. This is analogous to what YouTube is doing with it's practices across the spectrum of its uses. It affects everyone, I don't agree with it and that's why I'm here.