The Folly of Youtube Heroes

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Youtube is trying to promote a system that encourages you to "report negative content" and carries the perk of being able to "mass flag videos". Aside from evoking images of denouncing undesirables to the secret police, the system is self-evidently ripe for abuse and has led to dozens of response videos being made in opposition.

     Linking to the original disasterpiece here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_1966vaIA

     Note the like/dislike ratio on the video.

[Associate Justice PiT]

"Report abuse" makes sense on personalized social media like Twitter or Facebook where people can be and frequently are abused. YouTube, idk...

     That is a good point that this is simply less applicable to a platform like Youtube.

     Part of the issue also with employing volunteer moderators to mark videos is that it is far too easy to just target videos you disagree with. Since millions consume political content on Youtube, there's potentially a lot of that. Other recent changes in the TOS that broadly recommend many different kinds of videos for demonetization suggest that the people in charge are seeking to move the platorm away from all of that though, so that may in fact be the end-goal.

[Associate Justice PiT]

I think Youtube does this just to piss off people and make ad revenue off a whole crop of angry videos that are made.

     It makes sense as a hypothesis, except that Youtube recently demonetized a wide cross-section of videos, including some from very large content creators. That probably cost them a lot more money than this single move will make them.

[Associate Justice PiT]

I think Youtube does this just to piss off people and make ad revenue off a whole crop of angry videos that are made.

     It makes sense as a hypothesis, except that Youtube recently demonetized a wide cross-section of videos, including some from very large content creators. That probably cost them a lot more money than this single move will make them.

They actually didn't, just made the system to tell creators  that videos were demonetized much better and instant.  No rules or terms of service were changed in that.

     I remember now that someone was talking about how some videos had been demonetized and they had not found out for almost a year. It seems that there was no real system for notifying content creators; you had to check your own videos to find out.

I think Youtube does this just to piss off people and make ad revenue off a whole crop of angry videos that are made.

     It makes sense as a hypothesis, except that Youtube recently demonetized a wide cross-section of videos, including some from very large content creators. That probably cost them a lot more money than this single move will make them.

They did it for a few select videos that had tags like "rape" or "suicide".

Let me tell you, it's in Youtube's best interest to piss off the big stars who make a lot of money. The people who are large stars on Youtube can get professionally outraged over this and get millions of views, 55% of which goes to Google. Is it a terrible policy? Yeah. Will anything meaningful happen? No. Youtube is playing a delicate balance between pissing people off and making money off them vs having them actually leave.

They're playing people for saps and making even more money in the process. The most infectious virus on earth is anger.

     Until Youtube Heroes takes down any channels there's a real case to be made that Youtube is just stirring the pot here, and I can see that side of the equation.

     They edited the video without telling anyone, which ended up upping the hilarity factor by a lot. If their goal is to run damage control for a legit proposal then that was a massive failure and they were idiots for thinking it would work. On the other hand if their goal was to get people riled up and making videos then it has worked.