But they haven't really sorted it out, have they? False copyright strike claims have been plaguing creators for years. This is just another case of someone needing social media and a huge reach or an inside connection to Google employees to get human eyes on a situation and "resolve" it, with no recourse on the lost revenue from the time it was down and no real guarantee it won't happen again.
Google is not paying my Admob money even after 5 months has passed (no violation, self-close of account)
Through the Kafkaesque maze of non-existent Adsense support, my case (they say) finally got escalated to a payment person at Google. Yet, I didn't hear update for the past month.
You can't ask anything about your case and you can't get any time projection on when you'll hear anything back.
If you don't have big traffic or huge social reach, you are expendable and can get stuck in a never-ending hell.
I think the only letter the legal team expects through google-legal-support@google.com is a notice of sueing them. I really don't have the power to sue them in a US court.
Do people have success when they notify (not sue) the legal team about Google acting against their Terms of Service?
If the amount is low enough you can sue them in small claims court in the US, which the amount is dependent on the state. Small claims court is geared more towards people self defending.
This may not apply to where you are, but you really don't need a lawyer for small claims courts in the US, since the monetary values are relatively small.
That said, I'd be surprised if your court system required you to lawyer up for every (relatively) small contract infringement- contracts essentially become pointless for anything less than 20 hours of billable time from a lawyer.
If you are a citizen of another country doing business with Google it should follow that your country's courts have jurisdiction, if you're in the EU I imagine any EU country has jurisdiction (not because I imagine you are, but just as an example of how you might be able to pick a better jurisdiction - but that of course would be up to talking with a lawyer about)
Adsense held my funds for 6+ years in a never ending loop of bank account not valid->can’t edit this bank account. Same kafkaesque maze of non-existent support. Beyond frustrating.
One day it just suddenly let me fix the issue. No idea why.
Your point is spot on, if you don’t have a huge social media following you might as well be invisible. This has to change, hopefully via law. Because it isn’t just a google problem.
Yeah. I should probably note that I wasn’t continually working on the issue. It was attempted sporadically over that time period - mainly because google’s support maze ..err I mean ‘system’ is so terrible.
I would spend ~20 minutes following different resolution paths, get mad at them not helping at all, forget about it because this level of frustration is not worth $100 to me, repeat a few times a year. Don’t get me wrong, $100 is $100 - I just wasn’t in dire need of it I guess.
I'm banned for life from using adsense because my brother thought it would be a fun prank to repeatedly click the ads on my blog. I reported it myself before the next payout and received a generic "you have violated our policies" and a ban that's still there to this day some 15 years later.
In the old days, bigcorps just wouldn't engage with ISVs directly at all. Instead, as an ISV, you'd engage the services of an 'integrator' or 'reseller' — a smaller-scale but still-large entity that you'd have a support contract with — where the integrator would then have a support contract with the bigcorp. If you were having an issue with the bigcorp's product, you'd complain to the reseller, and then they'd complain to the bigcorp. And because the bigcorp only had a few such resellers as clients, each reseller would actually be able to get the bigcorp on the line.
This was (and still is) the IBM model for B2B software; and it was also the industry-standard model for game developers (interacting with the platform owner through a "publisher" — essentially taking the role here of an integrator.) It's probably still the industry-standard model for musicians to engage with big record labels.
I'm honestly not sure why Google doesn't push for this model. Their focus on "scaling services as much as possible using as few human support staff as possible" means this model is essentially perfect for them. But they ignore it. Maybe because they think it'd make them look like a dinosaur?
(I know they do do it in some places — we use GCP, and apparently, to be able to switch from card-based billing to invoice-based billing, we're required to also switch from direct GCP support, to a support-contract with a GCP reseller. So we'd be paying the reseller — the invoices would be riding as accounts-receivable on the reseller's books, rather than on Google's!)
> I'm honestly not sure why Google doesn't push for ['integrator' or 'reseller' — a smaller-scale but still-large entity that you'd have a support contract with] model.
YouTube MCNs are more like book publishers: none of them are very large in number of supply-side entities aggregated. Some of them have "popular" talent that could very well get YouTube's attention on their own, but none of them are doing collective bargaining for thousands of creators. So there are still tons of them; so YouTube doesn't really relate to them on a first-name basis.
Like book publishers, MCNs mostly offer one of two benefits: either "we do the hard business parts of running a content-creation business for you" (not a lie, though it's a bad deal); or "we have at least one very popular creator, and so by joining with us, you're at-least-theoretically taking advantage of the attention they get." (When that's tenuous, as the popular creators aren't beholden to these groups and might leave at any time, and if they do, there goes your trump card in dealing with YouTube.)
I have the opposite problem. I changed my payment info without telling Adsense so they send menacing paper letters that threaten the process of escheatment if I don't claim my funds. I decided I don't want their services in my life, and when it came to accepting their money I was fine with leaving that behind as well. Apparently when enough monthly checks stack up it causes problems. I've moved since then, so I hope the new tennant was wise enough to just send them some new payment info.
I'm not a lawyer and this isn't advice... but it seems to me that kind of non-payment is probably the kind of thing you can resolve pretty quickly with appropriate legal action. A simple letter to legal saying, "your terms say you'll pay me X, it hasn't been paid. I'd like you to do so or I'll have to look at taking all appropriate steps to get paid." Will often get the right person to look at the issue. And if that fails actually filing the appropriate action almost always does.
They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not really something that Google can sort out. They have a legal responsibility to respond to these copyright claims, with major penalties if they don't -- this is from DMCA and its successors, from an era of... I don't want to say "copyright maximalism," but something closer to copyright maximalism than the balance is today.
We need to reform the legal responsibilities of sites like Youtube to enable them to take a more considered approach.
We just need to fine copyright holders who abuse the system. Currently they are free to file as many false DMCA notices as they want, with zero drawbacks or consequences or costs for the filer and the burgen of proof on their victims.
If every false DMCA notice resulted in a fine for copyright holder, or even better, filing X false DMCA notices resulted in a copyright holder's ban from filing more DMCA notices, then I think the problem would resolve itself in short order.
I have heard that some folks use DMCA as, basically, a "protection racket." Not sure why they would do that, because there are probably easier (and less risky) ways.
But, as long as there's no penalty for filing a false DMCA claim, there's nothing stopping the "blunderbuss approach," which is hugely popular, with lawyers.
It seems to me like a reasonable starting point for a solution is to allow hosts to bill claimants for "reasonable costs" (I assume that's legally well defined) for false claims.
That provides an incentive for companies to respond to the screaming demand from their users to have better review.
> They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not really something that Google can sort out.
This isn't really true. The main grievance people have with Google is that they've automated _everything_ to the point where it's impossible to escalate to a real person. They enable this type of abuse because they make it easy for people to abuse the DMCA system with impunity.
> they've automated _everything_ to the point where it's impossible to escalate to a real person
Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to a human, would be flooded with people trying to step around the whole automated edifice without ever first trying to engage with it. People would post links to it on various forums saying "hey, doing X allows you to get a Google CSR on the line" (even though that person is only empowered to do a very specific thing, and probably doesn't have internal contacts for their equivalents in any other department), and then those CSRs would be demoted-in-practice to level-1 triage, even though level-1 triage is supposed to be the machine's job.
As it so happens, Google do offer plenty of ways to engage with them — they just can't "say any of them out loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as above.
I'll give you a hint for three such side-channels, though:
- There are public product discussion and bugs mailing lists (Google Groups) for many Google services. The engineers working on these products monitor these lists.
- When Google engineers and, especially, Product Managers, put their public @google.com email addresses on conference presentations, they do that for a reason. They want you to reach out with questions/concerns about the thing they've built!
> Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to a human, would be flooded with people trying to step around the whole automated edifice without ever first trying to engage with it.
This is because Google has no culture of human support, so when an agent does become available they're flooded with backlog. If Google started providing it, especially where money is involved, the backlog would eventually be caught up and this would no longer be a big issue. But I suspect they will never do it until forced by law because of the cost.
> But I suspect they will never do it until forced by law because of the cost.
I would go further: I suspect that Google would just shut down many of its services if they had to provide human support, because the cost of serving the sheer number of people Google serves, with any level of effectiveness, would turn the the products from positive-margin or at least acceptable-cost loss-leaders, into highly-negative-margin.
But in this case, those problems need to be disclosed upfront. Google should have a big banner upon signup that says "this is a fully automated service and you have no recourse if the automation goes wrong", to warn people against relying on them for anything critical.
To that I say, good—if you can't support it, you shouldn't ship it. At least when it comes to taking people's money or promising to revenue-share (like YouTube creators).
In any case, Alphabet's net earnings in 2021 were $76,000,000,000. They could hire 760,000 people at $100k cost per year and still break even. It wouldn't take anywhere near that number to introduce humans into critical loops like copyright strikes and ad revenue customer support, so they could easily–easily—afford it. I think they just don't want to, because they'd rather make all the money and they don't institutionally care about people ground up in the cracks.
>the cost of serving the sheer number of people Google serves
That cost is mostly imaginary. First, it’s already tiny - computers are cheap - and second, 90% of that cost is for stuff that only matters to Google; you could make that part disappear without hurting user experience.
We're talking explicitly about the cost of putting humans in the loop as content moderators / customer-service representatives / ombudsmen / etc. That cost, industry-wide, grows at O(N) with the number of customers; as some constant fraction of people will always call with their problems rather than attempting to engage with automated support systems.
So? That doesn’t justify shifting that costs to society. You’re assuming corporations have to be allowed to do whatever they want, because otherwise they would earn less money, and you’re assuming that’s not an acceptable outcome.
> Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to a human, would be flooded with people trying to step around the whole automated edifice without ever first trying to engage with it. People would post links to it on various forums saying "hey, doing X allows you to get a Google CSR on the line" ...
Okay, and what about the thousands of people who legitimately need help? Do you really think it's acceptable that people have their content stolen or falsely flagged, or their channel demonetised or banned without recourse?
The only reason the scenario you've described could happen is because Google has made it impossible to talk to a real person in the first place.
> As it so happens, Google do offer plenty of ways to engage with them — they just can't "say any of them out loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as above.
I'm aware of these. None of them are an acceptable alternative to having actual human support for paid products.
Furthermore, even if I were to concede that your first point is valid that still wouldn't excuse large channels or corporations having to navigate a Kafka-esque nightmare to get basic human support. It speaks volumes that Bungie's team of lawyers couldn't even stop someone from filing false DMCA claims on their behalf without considerable effort.
> Okay, and what about the thousands of people who legitimately need help? Do you really think it's acceptable that people have their content stolen or falsely flagged, or their channel demonetised or banned without recourse?
Yes. Or rather, these particular commercial relationships shouldn't exist in the first place — they're fundamentally untenable.
As I say in my sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071124#32073569), Google shouldn't be attempting to work with independent creators at all; there's no way to make it work. It shouldn't allow people to directly post on YouTube. (At least, monetized. They could still support it for hobbyists who aren't out to make money and are explicitly opting out of any support.)
Instead, YouTube should be directly engaging — and encouraging the consolidation of — MCNs, into a small collection of reseller-partners; a collection small-enough that YouTube can scalably listen to those partners' complaints. Where those partners then act as collectors and filters for complaints, only raising to YouTube's attention the problems that actually seem to be YouTube problems rather than PEBKAC problems.
Am I reinventing mainstream media? Yes. Because mainstream media scales.
>As it so happens, Google do offer plenty of ways to engage with them — they just can't "say any of them out loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as above.
This seems pretty ridiculous though, right? Imagine a system like this for any other service. A self checkout with no help button, but they'll totally help you if you do the konami code on the screen and say the pledge of allegiance.
I don't get why we act like google being too big to support all its clients is our fault. They are choosing to be this big, and they can choose to have better customer support. It would just cost them a lot of money.
> Imagine a system like this for any other service. A self checkout with no help button, but they'll totally help you if you do the konami code on the screen and say the pledge of allegiance.
You're being flip, but there are actually plenty of things like this.
For example — you know those arcades full of UFO-catcher machines, where the games are rigged so that it only allows you to grab the thing after N tries?
You can pump 10 dollars into the machine, and maybe still not get it... or you can just politely ask the attendant to get you the thing out of the machine after trying and failing once. And they will, because — unlike a carnival side-show operator who owns their booth+merchandise — for a gacha-store employee, it's no skin off their back if everyone gets a bear. Unacknowledged public side channels!
For another — it's a common belief that Adobe is perfectly fine with individuals pirating Photoshop, and really only go after companies who pirate. They think of individuals using the pirated version of their software, as future professional users in training; where the company those professional users work at, will inevitably buy them a Photoshop license. Adobe won't give you a Photoshop educational license (or at least, they didn't used to have such a thing) — but by pirating it, you're essentially taking advantage of an unacknowledged public side-channel left there by Adobe.
But really, in the Google case, it's not just about it being an unpublished side-channel; it's also specifically about engineers being okay with being reached out to by other engineers, who are signalling by their method of outreach that they understand engineering culture, and so, implicitly, that they understand the engineering problem implied by their request; have already tried to solve the problem themselves; etc.
It's the same reason that people in NOCs have unpublished numbers to get people in their peer NOCs on the line in case of a network outage. They're fine with people reaching out with a problem, if those people are going to tell them something useful that they don't already know.
The Google engineer is fine being told that their code breaks in edge-case XYZ. But they don't want to be asked how to empty your trash in Gmail. And they especially don't want to deal with demands and threats from people who have been scammed out of money over email, who want their money back, and think it's Google's legal responsibility to do that for them.
> I don't get why we act like google being too big to support all its clients is our fault.
It's "our" fault in the sense of Google being an American corporation incentivized to maximize profit; and profit maximization implying maximization of margin by cutting / avoiding cost-centres (e.g. support costs); and consumers enabling that by preferring services that have those lower-margins over services that have higher margins. Your ability to use email, today, for free, has higher Net Present Value than your future unanswered support questions.
Or, to put that another way: it's capitalism's fault. But not capitalists' fault, per se. It's the fault of people doing what's economically rational. It's economically rational to use Gmail instead of a paid email service. It's economically rational to build your following on YouTube instead of Dailymotion/Vimeo/etc.
People can complain all they like, but they still do it, rather than doing something else, because a free product with no support still optimizes better for their preferences than spending a single dollar on an alternative does.
They can sort it out readily simply by implementing the part of the DMCA they don't support yet. If the falsely accused were allowed to submit a counternotice with instant restoration none of this trolling behavior would be happening
The DMCA doesn't support instant restoration for a counter-notice. They have to wait for a ~2 week period for the copyright owner to have time to sue alleged infringer.
> They have a legal responsibility to respond to these copyright claims, with major penalties if they don't -- this is from DMCA and its successors
This wasn't just a DMCA take-down of specific material (which for it's faults, does have an appeal process and some legal remedies.) This was a complete account ban imposed by Google, where the only functioning appeal process is going viral on twitter. While we do need to change the DMCA to hold issuers of fraudulent or abusive take requests more responsible, in this instance we also need to hold Google responsible for choosing to create an automated copyright strike/ban system that is clearly ripe for abuse and that does not have a functional appeal processes for the average user.
What we need is the ability to face our accuser. YouTube is more or less doing the right thing execpt they are not giving anyone the legal contact information of the accuser. If I post something, and it is reported I should have the option to take my accuser to court for a false accusation.
Let's pretend for a minute that Google's DMCA system is actually necessary to comply with the law (other commenters below poke a number of holes in that claim, I don't need to repeat them here), and that it's the DMCA that's the primary method by which copyright strikes happen (also questionable and discussed in other comments).
Even given those things, Google is complicit in the legal landscape being what it is today. Google has regularly defended the DMCA, and claimed it's working well. They're the largest lobbying organization in the tech world. They've even spent time and money defending other providers (e.g. Hotfile) in court for not implementing filtering, arguing that it's not necessary to receive DMCA's safe harbor provisions, but have implemented content identification and filtering in-spite of that.
why do they have a legal responsibility to respond but are somehow exempt from the legal liability from acting in a harmful manner while failing to assert the legality of the claim?
They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not really something that Google can sort out.
Sure they can. They choose not to, for obvious reasons. If they were able to confirm, after the outcry, that the takedown claim was "abusive" -- by whatever criteria -- then there's no reason they couldn't have done that before they outcry. But the cost of doing that would start to chip away at, well, you know what.
Also, a DMCA claim has (in theory at least) some recourse for filing false claims. Google's ContentID system however doesn't, at least not in any material sense, so why not file false claims? There is no legal repercussions, and the damage which can be done to your competition is well worth the minor bad press
I saw a whole long thread on Twitter of screenshots of (big) creators themselves getting copyright strikes for their own work and being like WTF. It seems a lot more rampant than people may be aware...
Just a couple of days ago there was a Noam Chomsky interview on the Machine Learning Street Talk channel. The whole video is almost 4h long, including a long intro. The MLST crew worked for months on it, posted it, and it got promptly banned.
Damn that opening was beautiful. Like this format, never heard of this show. Noam is so old now though... Still listening, a lot more philosophical than I was expecting. He really quoted Bakunin? :) Thanks for sharing.
I'm absolutely convinced that copyright is holding back progress at this point. It's only ever wielded by giant corporations, despite folks arguing it's to protect the little folks.
Yes, they absolutely have not sorted it out. However, currently when you're working for a social media company this sort of behavior while not normal, has to be accounted for.
I wish I could be more sympathetic, there are people sharing information and entertainment on youtube that is priceless. But they're working for a faulty employer with a poor history of worker rights. Worker beware.
There is: don't rely on a single hosting provider for your material. Use Youtube as a CDN for material originating from a self-hosted Peertube instance and you're protected. Add some patronage/sponsorship/subscription options to replace or enhance any lost income from Youtube and you're set on that front as well.
Centralised services are fine to use as content delivery networks but they are not reliable as single sources for your material. Self-hosting - i.e. where you own the domain through which the material is distributed, you can choose to leave the actual hosting to a hosting provider since you always have the option of redirecting the domain to another address should the hosting provider fold in some way - gives control over a far larger part of the distribution chain, if the copyright police wants to block you they'll have to move down in the protocol stack to take down your internet access. We're not there yet and should it ever come that far there are ways around that as well (IPFS, I2P etc.).
It's a pretty terrible situation for folks that build their livelihood curating a channel to have to accept the risk that their channel could be taken down at any moment due to a false positive regarding copyright violation. Making matters worse, it sounds like there's no real recourse beyond taking your grievance onto social media and hoping your channel has enough clout to get Youtube's attention.
In this case, it sounds like it was a malicious action by an actual human being, but I've seen a lot of great content creators say things like, "I'm only going to play you 3 seconds of this song to avoid having my channel removed." Seems like there's gotta be a better way.
People are upset about Spotify trying to own the podcast market. Meanwhile Web video is already in the position everyone dreads podcasts reaching, and has been for its entire existence. Assuming folks aren't wrong about RSS-based host-anywhere podcasts being better than having the entire market controlled by one provider, seems obvious video'd be better with the same model.
The why is obvious - the bandwidth involved isn't quite so hospitible to small scales as podcasting. Either we need to revive Moore's law or start flogging electrons and photons for not going fast enough.
I know (believe me, I know) that bandwidth is expensive, but I'm also pretty sure YouTube's margins leave plenty of room for competitors to come in with less-effective monetization schemes and still turn a profit. There's no reason a host couldn't put ads on videos hosted under some kind of free tier, after all. I'm quite sure we wouldn't end up with no free hosting. Worst case, I think it'd tend to be quality capped to SD-quality or something, and that's worst-case.
You're not following me. I'm not saying youtube channels should be podcasts. I'm saying that the problem with YouTube is its monopoly, driven by coupling hosting and discovery in one platform, and a podcast model that separates those would improve the ecosystem and solve most of the problems with YouTube being able to dictate terms for an entire super-popular form of creative content.
> Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and Spotify, so that analogy isn't great.
My bad, I misunderstood your comment. FWIW I agree on both counts, but I'm also saying is that podcasts are falling to centralisation pressures that plagued video since the very beginning.
Heh, no big deal, that "like" in the original was crucial and easy to scan past. These things happen.
> FWIW I agree on both counts, but I'm also saying is that podcasts are falling to centralisation pressures that plagued video since the very beginning.
More generally I think the Internet and the markets growing on it would be a hell of a lot healthier if we outlawed the creepy & dangerous mass data collection that encourages lock-in and monopolization, and the video market specifically (including streaming services like Netflix and friends) if we outlawed certain kinds of vertical integration there. Economy of scale is quite enough to push things toward monopoly, no need to have those factors amplifying the effect and increasing the harm of such monopolies.
In theory that would be great, but video is in general much larger than audio. There would be no way for many channels to even get started, given the costs involved. I expect most people getting started on YouTube would be driven out of business simply by the bandwidth costs alone.
I'm confident hosts would step in to make money if YouTube's monopoly on combo hosting+discovery were broken. Folks tend to like making money. No reason they couldn't put their own ads on the videos, like YouTube does, to cover costs for creators who want free hosting. All kinds of angles to provide free hosting to feed the ol' marketing funnel, just like all kinds of other hosts, like limiting quality (so, drastically reducing bandwidth costs—SD video with modern codecs can be tiny)
I find the push-back on this baffling. It's like if web hosting were all but completely controlled by one monopolist and questioning that drew all kinds of "LOL how could web hosting even work without one monopolist controlling the whole thing and dictating what can and cannot be hosted, it's impossible, you're nuts, no-one could ever start a hobby website again without that monopolist".
I'm confident hosts would step in to make money if YouTube's monopoly on combo hosting+discovery were broken. Folks tend to like making money. No reason they couldn't put their own ads on the videos, like YouTube does, to cover costs for creators who want free hosting.
Who is buying these ads on this new video site that no one is using yet?
You posit the alternative, that no-one would figure out how to make money off this market? I find that implausible. If we take that objection aside, the question looks a lot like "how does a business possibly start?" which... well, look at the site we're on.
In the pre Facebook era people thought social networking would be distributed over thousands and millions of blogs with the help of RSS but that didn't happen because it turned out that centralized commercial services are better than FOSS distributed ones. That's why Facebook and Google won; they offered better services because they were centralized commercial services which were constantly updated and improved all because ad revenues were skyrocketing and all the best engineers decided to work for them instead of trying to pursue decentralized/distributed FOSS solutions.
Bitcoin is an exception to this and it was most likely made by one guy as a FOSS payment solution which would compete against Visa/Mastercard, commercial banks and central banks all at the same time. On the other hand Satoshi could've patented his ideas and go straight to the VISA and try to sell them the Blockchain story but he decided to make it FOSS and truly decentralized.
> In the pre Facebook era people thought social networking would be distributed over thousands and millions of blogs with the help of RSS but that didn't happen because it turned out that centralized commercial services are better than FOSS distributed ones. That's why Facebook and Google won; they offered better services because they were centralized commercial services which were constantly updated and improved all because ad revenues were skyrocketing and all the best engineers decided to work for them instead of trying to pursue decentralized/distributed FOSS solutions.
I think they mainly won because they figured out that capturing a huge amount of data about user behavior (i.e. industrial-scale spying) was incredibly lucrative. That's also part of why, despite being free services, they despise anything that might take your activity (so, valuable data) somewhere else for even a second, so, open standards and any kind of inter-operation. This let them provide free services with tons of income to put into development and, vitally, promotion.
I think the key insight from there is that that sort of situation doesn't just discourage use of free alternatives—it discourages development of them. I'm certain we'd have more and better free (and paid!) alternatives, and way more developers putting free work into that space for protocol and client/server development, if not for the huge moat that is creepy data-hoarding to feed monetizable AI. Competing—even on a volunteer basis—against unassailable behemoths with what may as well be an unlimited advertising & development budgets is discouraging, to put it lightly. I'd never think of working on that kind of project right now, because the market, enabled by the legality of mass-scale stalking by corporations, means it's pointless no matter how good a product you make.
I think back in the day Larry Page saw that Altavista was free and he wanted to compete against it so he chose Google to be free and when millions of users started flocking in with millions of data points ads were the next logical step.
The same situation is with Zuckerberg and MySpace. When Zuck saw MySpace and other social networks at the time being free he made his own version of free social network and again when millions of users started flocking in with millions of data points ads were the next logical step and therefore surveillance capitalism emerged.
Tbh idk if Google and Facebook would be so successful if they were subscription based or would some free alternative come and destroy them.
Take Netflix and YouTube as example; they are both modern versions of TV and they both compete for screen time but YouTube being free and being fueled by essentially free user generated content is in much better position business wise than Netflix will ever be. Netflix needs to convince people to subscribe, they need to do movies contracting, they are spending billions to create their own content etc. And I think at this point YouTube is close to surpassing Netflix by revenue.
>I think the key insight from there is that that sort of situation doesn't just discourage use of free alternatives—it discourages development of them.
I agree with you but at the same time look how TikTok rose from the ashes of Vine. And now TikTok is the biggest Facebook and YouTube competitor for digital ad spending in the last decade.
I think if you want to compete against behemoths you need to dive into niches they do not dare to explore. For example imagine search engine which would allow you to search for "ad-free" websites. Google would never think of creating such feature yet implementing it would be unimaginable because they run the ad show on the web.
Yeah I don't like your solution. Not everyone has plenty of money like HN commentors tend to have. Some are fine with ad supported channels. They just want youtube to cut the funny business and require those who are claiming "copyright infringement" actually show real, concrete proof of their claims.
YT couldn't care less if creators are unhappy with anything at the moment. There is no real competition, so creators have to just deal with it. I hope for a real competition, where there will be a mass exodus.
I’m delighted to see that people are recognizing what a threat tiktok poses.
I don’t blame people for being skeptical. It’s easy to forget that big companies die due to being transcended, not replaced. The YouTube killer won’t look anything like YouTube, and tiktok fits that bill nicely.
Maybe for certain segments/formats, but TikTok doesn't do long-form videos, does it?
Most of my YouTube watching is things like Anton Petrov's 15+ minute science videos, PBS Space Time, hour+ live streams, DefCon/Blackhat/Other Conference talks, and a hundred other things that I don't think are available or desired on TikToks platform (and maybe not even supported? I'm not sure what the max video length is on TikTok).
It sure does. They enabled 10min videos, and at this point it's a meme that creators are getting roasted for doing part 2's. (I.e. breaking up a long video into multiple parts for no reason.)
Not only that, but lots of tiktok accounts are literally just reuploading full youtube videos from channels like Kurzgesagt. Not happy about that, but it's also a sign of a successful platform. Facebook had the same situation going on.
Most of my tiktok watching is exactly the same as yours on youtube, by the way. My educational playlist is at 242 entries, whereas the lol playlist is around 160.
> just reuploading full youtube videos from channels like Kurzgesagt (...) it's also a sign of a successful platform
No, not really.
Ripping Youtube content is trivial, so you basically have a raidable pool of high-quality content that you can re-upload and monetise, that you didn't have to pay for in any way.
If you're seeing a lot of Kurzgesagt vidoes on TikTok, all that means is that someone found out their monetisation success rate for those stolen videos is high enough that it makes financial sense to carry on doing it.
Tiktok is not a competitor to YT. It's much more focused on shorter-form content, and it's much more addictive. For those two reasons alone, it's not a 1:1 competitor to the Youtube monopoly.
That's just trading one master for another. It'd degrade to be similarly bad. A podcast-like model would provide a lot more freedom—host anywhere, promote anywhere, with clients, not monopolist web platforms, controlling "subscriptions" and such.
YouTube is such a hard market to crack. 99% of the problem is simple information theory and getting bits from A to B. The actual software isn't that difficult.
I honestly don't think something like YouTube ever could be profitable without destroying the product that exists today. I don't believe the primary purpose of TikTok is to make money.
There's plenty of competition for music streaming, internet radio is easy to find, the only impediment is installing VLC and finding a stream. which if you know how to google is easy enough.
Wendover's video from today looks a bit closer at the ecosystem as it is now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoWcQUjNM8o - says Youtube is the best option for creators right now
I downloaded this with YouTube -DLP which is a (working) fork of YouTube-DL, so I have a local copy I can play when coding & can play it in offline environments without needing a YouTube tab open in my browser which gets in the way of web development. It plays in VLC which isn’t as distracting. I love that kind of music for getting in the zone. It’s clear that many people have a tab open listening to this due to the way YouTube shows all the active listeners in the stream. I prefer my local copy though.
I wish these creators with other social media presence would use their platforms to move their audience to something besides youtube (they can even keep their youtube presence).
Content creators are the only ones with the power to build up a competing platform such that youtube has to stop hurting the creators or risk losing their monopoly status as the de-factor video hosting platform.
Imagine if this content creator chose an alternative and linked to it in this tweet and everyone else started doing similarly. At the rate youtube is harming content creators, doesn't seem like it'd take long before users instinctively checked the competitions site anytime content gets taken down which might eventually turn into overthrowing their monopoly if they don't fix their issues.
I think it's a really, really tough sell to move people off YouTube. The network effects are just too good. I might be projecting my preferences onto the masses here, but I suspect this is a common feeling.
I've been watching quite a few videos from a fairly popular Youtube channel, tldrnews. At the beginning of a lot of their videos, they've been advertising an alternate video platform, Nebula, with exclusive and more in-depth videos. Thing is, even though I might want to watch those videos, I've never been tempted to even click on the link.
It's not that Nebula costs money. Even if it were free, I don't really want to be watching videos on other services. I hate the way YouTube is run. I hate ContentID, I hate the copyright strike system, I hate the recommendation algorithm, I hate how difficult it is to get a real human to deal with the issues on the site. But everything's there, and that's what I want most of all.
It's a strange position to take, especially when I wish everyone would go back to having their own sites rather than just post on social media, but when it comes to video content, I want it to be like Star Trek. I want to be able to search in one place and be able to find exactly what I'm looking for.
I know it's greedy and irrational, but I want everything centralized into one service so I don't have to think about where to go to watch a thing. I want a monopoly, but without the problems that come with a monopoly, and I suspect a large enough percentage of users feel the same way that other platforms just can't get off the ground.
> I know it's greedy and irrational, but I want everything centralized into one service so I don't have to think about where to go to watch a thing. I want a monopoly, but without the problems that come with a monopoly, and I suspect a large enough percentage of users feel the same way that other platforms just can't get off the ground.
Podcast model. Client handles discovery and "subscriptions" and all that. Hosting is separate. YouTube's immense control comes from controlling all of that, but there's no reason you have to have a single provider to get the everything's-in-one-place effect—you can instead empower client programs. That kills the "ugh, but I don't want to go to another site..." effect because it's simply not an issue. You click "subscribe" and it's in the same "app" as everything else, regardless of where the videos are hosted.
I really like the podcast model, but compared to the scale of YouTube, I'm not sure it can hold up. It's not just hosting, but search as well, for 500 hours of video per minute.
> I really like the podcast model, but compared to the scale of YouTube, I'm not sure it can hold up. It's not just hosting, but search as well, for 500 hours of video per minute.
If only there were some company dedicated to providing search for resources that others host online. Perhaps if they had a mission to make the world's knowledge more accessible. :-)
Plus, I'm pretty sure if you excluded stuff that's never likely to be watched by many folks except the odd fluke that gains viral notoriety (think: training videos, home videos that aren't aiming for virality, schools filming sports & activities and posting them, that kind of thing) you could cut that number to 10% or less of that. Most of the content going up isn't intended for a wide audience, I'd bet. An at-least-as-good video-podcast client wouldn't need to index or present the vast majority of what gets uploaded to YouTube. Much of that would be fine over on one of the lesser streaming services (Vimeo, say) now, but only ends up on YouTube because it's synonymous with user-uploaded Web video for most folks.
> I wish these creators with other social media presence would use their platforms to move their audience to something besides youtube (they can even keep their youtube presence).
Coupling discovery and hosting means you're either killing your business by trying to do this, or finding temporary refuge with another soon-to-be monopolist that'll start abusing you in the same ways before long.
The abuse of this system is only going to get worse as high profile cases like Bungie's [1] highlight how exploitable it is, even against big companies. It seems to me, as an outsider to YouTube's systems, that the system of "copyright strikes" (which is not prescribed by the DMCA, it's a more recent demand concocted by MPAA and RIAA lawyers) has caused a lot of harm to good faith creators while determined infringers simply make a new account when one gets banned. Is there any real helpful effect of using strikes that copyright owners couldn't get from just taking action on individual videos?
The company I work for builds websites for small and medium sized businesses throughout the US. For a period of about two years we would host a copy of a video that we made for the customer on YouTube and use it on customer websites. There came a point where a handful dissatisfied customers claimed infringement for some of these videos and our YouTube channel (thousands of videos) was terminated without appeal, even though the customer had always provided authorization and the contents for these videos. Fortunately we'd decided to self-host our videos before the channel was terminated but there were cases where we lost content that we'd created.
The DMCA has provisions that is supposed to protect against copyright false claims. But every article I read about false claims always ends with some kind of definition of copyright. Like in this article, 'What is Copyright?'.
It never goes beyond that ever. What about restitution to the people who were wrongly taken down? Why is false DMCA takedowns so prevalent if it's illegal per DMCA? Turns out NO ONE has ever been convicted of a false DMCA claim, and that's by design. In fact, the phenomenon has its own name: Copyfraud.
That's what happens when we let businessmen write our laws. A fix to how Google handles DMCA isn't enough, DMCA is fundamentally user hostile. We need to fix this at the political level.
Great, Bungie is a big corporation that can pay lawyers for things like this. Individual creators are not in an equivalent position and cannot reasonably seek damages for false claims, unless additional legal framework is added to support them.
There should be remuneration for people whose material is wrongfully taken down, even if temporarily. I bet that will force these platforms to deliberate more before taking any action.
That poor kid has been studying for two and a half years now. I really hope she's able to pass that test; it seems like a real nightmare.
That aside, do we know the claim was really bogus? The article doesn't seem to mention that. It does seem like a rather easy grift to just nab a bunch of MP3 files plus some artwork from DeviantArt, throw them into IceCast or whatever, and go live on YouTube. I've listened to a few similar streams (not this one in particular since the "lo-fi hip-hop" genre isn't my thing) and just kinda always assumed the whole YT meta was basically a bunch of pirate radio stations.
YouTube screws content creators over, and content creators complain, and then go right back to YouTube, so that YouTube has no incentive to fix anything.
"Oh, you don't like it? Are you going to leave? No? K then."
YouTube makes its money because there are eyeballs on screens. As long as somebody is making content for those eyeballs, and the eyeballs remain on YouTube, there is literally z e r o incentive for them to change.
> & thx for your patience as we sorted it out
But they haven't really sorted it out, have they? False copyright strike claims have been plaguing creators for years. This is just another case of someone needing social media and a huge reach or an inside connection to Google employees to get human eyes on a situation and "resolve" it, with no recourse on the lost revenue from the time it was down and no real guarantee it won't happen again.
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