This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed.
From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software."
This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content.
Here in the UK, Ofcom held their second day-long livestreamed seminar on their implementation of the Online Safety Act on Wednesday this week. This time it was about keeping children "safe", including with "effective age assurance".
Ofcom refused to give any specific guidance on how platforms should implement the regime they want to see. They said this is on the basis that if they give specific advice, it may restrict their ability to take enforcement action later.
So it's up to the platforms to interpret the extremely complex and vaguely defined requirements and impose a regime which Ofcom will find acceptable. It was clear from the Q&A that some pretty big platforms are really struggling with it.
The inevitable outcome is that platforms will err on the side of caution, bearing in mind the potential penalties.
Many will say, this is good, children should be protected. The second part of that is true. But the way this is being done won't protect children in my opinion. It will result in many more topic areas falling below the censorship threshold.
I like the way Jeff signed off the article, pointing out that whilst the video has been pulled for (allegedly) promoting copyright infringement, Youtube, via Gemini, is (allegedly) slurping the content of Jeff's videos for the purposes of training their AI models.
Seems ironic that their AI models are getting their detection of "Dangerous or Harmful Content" wrong. Maybe they just need to infringe more copyright in order to better detect copyright infringement?
This is mass problem with almost any topic you want to share.
I'm sport shooter, range officer and competition jury. You have no idea what crazy stunts YouTube do for Gun/Sport Shooting related content.
YT terms containt some weirdest restriction for things like "shown magazine capacity".
Wrong angle on video and your 10 round mag is seen by YouTube as 30 round and your video is gone.
You can show silencer disconnected from firearm, connected to firearm but showing moment you screwing it to end of barrel and your video is banned.
There are dozens rules that are so vague that if YT wants he can remove any gun related content.
This is problem YT is not willing to fix because collateral damage costs are peanuts comparing to beeing sued and loose because some real illegal content slip trough filter. I don't expect any improvement here because there is no business justification.
> In that case, I was happy to see my appeal granted within an hour of the strike being placed on the channel. (Nevermind the fact the video had been live for over two years at that point, with nary a problem!)
Looks like some L-(5|6|whateverthefuck) just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software.
Quick appeal grant of course, because it was more about sending a message and making people who want to talk about that kind of software think twice before the next video.
> But until that time, YouTube's AdSense revenue and vast reach is a kind of 'golden handcuff.'
>
> The handcuff has been a bit tarnished of late, however, with Google recently adding AI summaries to videos—which seems to indicate maybe Gemini is slurping up my content and using it in their AI models?
Balanced take towards the end (after the above quote), but yep, the writing is on the wall.
I really wonder where the internet goes in this age. The contract between third party content hosters and creators is getting squeezed, and the whole "you're the product" thing is being laid bare more and more.
Is it a given that at some point creators will stop posting their contents to platforms like YouTube? Is it even possible at this point given that YouTube garners so many eyeballs and is just so easy? Does a challenger somehow unseat YouTube because programming and underlying libraries (ffmpeg et al) becomes so easy to use that spinning up a YouTube competitor goes down to basically zero?
Seems like there needs to be a new paradigm for anyone to have a choice other than youtube. Maybe AI will enable this -- maybe "does jeff have any new videos" -> a video gets played on a screen in your house and it's NOT hosted on YouTube, but no one knows and no one cares?
YouTube's moderation feels like it’s being done by a drunk Roomba half the time... totally missing context, especially when it comes to open source and self-hosting content. Meanwhile, there's a flood of actual piracy tutorials that stay up for years. Your video gets flagged for showing people how to use LibreELEC, but somehow there are entire channels pushing borderline NSFW content under the guise of "body art" or "educational content" that stay monetized and untouched.
Every time I sit down at my own piano in my own living room and record something written by a composer who died 150 years ago or more, I get a copyright strike on YouTube--often by a big label (BMI, etc). Last week it was a Robert Schumann piece, composed in 1848. The strike is still there, even though I contested it. (The form to contest it doesn't even have a good box to check for this scenario.)
I would love it if I had the resources to sue BMI for defamation (they're claiming I'm a thief) and sue YouTube for facilitating this.
They really need to make sure their music match looks for _exact_ matches for compositions that are out of copyright, to catch specific performances and not just melodic/harmonic/rhytmic matches.
> The video doesn't promote or highlight any tools used to circumvent copyright, get around paid subscriptions, or reproduce any content illegally
Here's my theory: they aren't concerned with the movies and TV shows shown in the video (which are presumably obtained legally as Jeff mentioned), but rather the brief use of what looks like [plugin.video.youtube] (https://github.com/anxdpanic/plugin.video.youtube) at about 12:10 in the video.
The plugin is an alternate frontend to YouTube, and as such, allows bypassing ads. He never mentions the plugin explicitly in the video, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is; he mentions YouTube and is clearly watching one of his own YT videos in Kodi. Just today, I noticed YouTube getting more aggressive in its anti-ad-blocking measures. They got really strict a year or two ago, backed off a bit, and seem to have ramped up again. My guess is that someone in management needs to show better numbers and is looking for ways to punish anyone even hinting at accessing YouTube without the obligatory dose of advertising.
Since Youtube started to show me funny "TURN OFF THE ADBLOCKER!!!" notices, I just started slamming links in yt-dlp and watching them offline. No drawbacks so far.
I've had 2 of my videos taken down - they were educational videos teaching how to use Microsoft Access (I know, I know, but lesson plans are lesson plans). We were using a fictional medical database to help explain tables and general querying.
BUT whatever the reason, be it a user or YTs moderation team, showing table records was deemed inappropriate because I was "sharing PPI". I appealed both cases and got rejected. Since I'm not a super important influencer, there wasn't much else I could do so sadly students will need to struggle to know how to query dates in Access...
Yeah YouTube are getting shittier by the day. I keep getting banners telling me that ad blockers aren't allowed on YouTube. Stuff is pretty unwatchable now without them.
Well fuck you I'll just download the videos with yt-dlp instead. If that stops working, I'll not bother.
I purposefully avoid demonstrating any of the tools (with a suffix that rhymes with "car") that are popularly used to circumvent purchasing movie, TV, and other media content, or any tools that automatically slurp up YouTube content.
Post your videos on Rumble. Lack of competition for YouTube causes a them to have power and a monopoly. Competition removes this power. Rumble has gone publicly traded. They have become a peer to YouTube. Smaller. Their ads keep them profitable for the long-term, so accept their ads being not quite as smooth as YouTube as the cost of preventing being censored. Or from YouTube being able to have power of what is allowed to be communicated.
Keep creating your videos. Keep supporting these projects. We need them.
I'm finding historically critical videos disappear from the internet. There was one interview with Jack Dorsey that he was threatened that if he didn't allow censorship rollout over twitter, that he felt (or was told?) they would remove twitter from the mobile app stores and kill it.
Do you want to see that interview? It has been scrubbed off of the internet. This happens with many key videos in history. We need a FileCoin IPFS way to use open source blockchain way to keep these videos forever. Even beyond the lifetime of any author, owner or company.
LibreELEC and JellyFin can be the open source part of making them easy to retrieve and watch. Open source for freedom. Blockchain for publishing freedom. Controlling information is their weapon. Protecting freedom for information spread keeps all other freedoms protected (and defendable).
There was a recent drama in the drum'n'bass community because someone kept claiming they owned the rights to music that wasn't actually theres, resulting in some classic dnb music from the 90s by Peshay repeatedly being taken down from YouTube. It's utterly ridiculous how trivially bad actors can wreak havoc like this.
First things first: I'm on your side. But the whole content-creator industry should really start looking for and pushing alternatives to Youtube.
Floatplane from LTT folks looks promising, I wish it got more attention. It seems that only Linus and Luke actually had the balls to come up with a business model and implement the darn thing.
Otherwise you (and other content creators) sooner or later will have to decide between self-censoring and make a living.
Corporate content streaming giant thinks you shouldn't just do it yourself. Honestly this should be obvious but it's nice to have people highlighting concrete examples as people never want to hear this kind of thing.
These platforms are still relatively young. We need to roll the clocks foward another 10-20 years to truly understand what level of control they will be able to exert on public knowledge and speech, either at the behest of their investors or through government pressure.
I wonder whether one solution is for everyone to own a "personal cloud computer" (a relatively cheap VM) on which they install software much like they did in the pre-SaaS era. They might also be able to open up file system and SQL interfaces for certified external providers.
Theoretically, the same arguments that apply to a cloud service provider would apply to a cloud infrastructure provider too, but if the contract were to define the infrastructure as leased property, and all data stored on it as belonging to the user, then it might be somewhat harder to control.
People complain about big tech, but they use their free services all the time for convenience.
I wish more people would self-host or use paid services so that the influence of big tech could decline based on an economic chance of balance; complaining about something while keep using it sounds hypocritical.
The problem number one is the total monopoly of YouTube in the Internet TV, so they can abuse without consequences. We need competition, but we don't have it because it is a natural monopoly: the more users YouTube has, and the bigger the scale, the cheaper it is for google.
It is bad that youtube became only video hosting platform and everyone is putting videos there, even government institutions. That leads to many annoyances, where critical information is blocked by myriad of ads. This should be illegal.
Reading through all this has been eye-opening with so many thoughtful comments that made me think, even if some parts are a bit discouraging.
I’ve been toying with the idea of jumping on the content creation wagon with storytelling, vlogging life experiences, that sort of thing, but now I’m wondering:
Is it still worth building on YouTube if there’s a real risk of getting banned later for unknowingly crossing some unclear content line?
I’m not focused on monetization right now, just hoping to share and connect, but I’d hate to build something meaningful only to watch it vanish overnight.
I'd be more than happy to get the 10€/month I am not giving to YouTube and send it to Jeff if he completely moved out of it.
I know that he is already on Floatplane, but we all know that Google is not working with the best interests of its users/creators in mind, so "criticism" of YouTube while making money there seems hypocritical.
That's just some bot being clueless as usual. Implying YouTube understands what it is doing from a human point of view is giving it too much credit. Your video is too much like the kind of videos that trigger legal action, according to an algorithm, that's all.
It is also a good warning against trusting AI agents.
A bit off topic, but still: Why do we need YouTube and other "Video Hosting" platforms at all? Simply upload your video (webm, or MP4) to any static Webserver and embed in HTML5. Plays nicely and no adds. I don't get why some sites still embed their movies stored on YouTube.
Alphabet in general is ripe for disruption. Nothing they hold near and dear is long-term safe. They are close-followers in several areas already. GMail will probably be their last surviving product because it holds our most sensitive data.
The phrase “considered harmful” should be “considered harmful”. It’s basically an argumentation trick, raising a subjective conclusion to a neutral and objective conclusion without any qualification.
> or any tools that automatically slurp up YouTube content.
I’ll bite. Last time I tried yt-dlp on a vps, YouTube wanted me to login - inevitably that’d lead to a banned account, which is the same reason I was using a vps in the first place.
Are there any tools that source videos either via a vps or decentralised for popular channels?
I refuse to not use ublock, and I’m not paying whatever ridiculous amount premium costs (now, or when they inevitably increase prices).
Edit: i want to download videos from YouTube to stream via Jellyfin, I don’t need a hosting platform.
> I purposefully avoid demonstrating any of the tools (with a suffix that rhymes with "car") that are popularly used to circumvent purchasing movie, TV, and other media content
What is he talking about here? Im old, I was expecting it to rhyme with “abhorrent”.
Exercising your rights now considered violation of just-in-time terms of service updates. Please drink verification beverage if you agree to these modified terms of service.
this is what happens when the 0.01% control and owns almost everything. They want to control and own exactly everytging, and more.
no more free speech, or opposing speech or ideas..
it is also dangerous to go outside after dark. I propose a global curfew and make it illegal to go outside after dark. we will all be safer and you will thank me for it.
Yeah, and it's not just YouTube's moderation that's messed up. Their whole governance model tilts hard against creators.
I have a creator friend who was telling me that newswire agencies are gaming a loophole in YT’s copyright policy to extort creators. Basically, they threaten takedowns unless the creator pays up.
Even when creators argue their use falls under "fair use" for reporting, YT’s 3 strike policy doesn’t care. Three strikes and your channel is dead - no nuance.
They let rightsholders file strikes at their will & it’s on the creator (or the courts) to fight it out. Guess who usually blinks first?
Also this looks like a global grift. Came across Asian newswires picking up on this playbook - licensing clips at premium prices under the implicit threat of a strike.
I mean, YT could fix this, but they won’t. they benefit either way. Creators are stuck between losing their life's work and paying up just to stay online.
In the recent past (say up to the mid 2010s) it was a really good product and there was a reason nobody gave a shit about Vimeo et al, YouTube as a site, app, platform was so far ahead of the competition.
But now? Youtube is full of slop, search barely works, and Google is on an endless campaign to make ad-blocking and free downloading impossible. Even most of the "good" channels resort to clickbait titles, thumbnails designed for children, and embarrassing shilling.
Meanwhile hosting and streaming HD video is a mundanely easy feature to implement with off-the-shelf/FOSS software, hundreds of no-name, fly-by-night websites have HD video hosting. Maybe it's time for someone to make a mastodon equivalent for youtube.
Enshittifiction is in full swing in Youtube and like the article says, creators are effectively golden-handcuffed in. In a normal world, youtube would twist the knobs until their bureaucratic momentum causes them to twist too far, and also cause them to take too long to twist back, during which time a competitor can come and steal all the advertisers and creators.
That won't happen in our world, because of www.google.com. The existence of that website guarantees that nobody can ever create a competitor to youtube, because youtube can just undercut on ad costs or pay out creators at high enough rates to run a loss for basically fucking centuries if it has to, until everyone else's funding runs out.
Imagine building just one of the datacenters needed to feed Youtube... They're what, 200 million a pop?
Within a capitalist mode of production and without any real regulatory guardrails, I just don't see Youtube going away, ever, and I don't see any real competitors, ever. Happy to be proven wrong.
I try to do my part - I host a tubearchivist instance that at this point is mirroring a couple TB of content from channels some friends and I enjoy. So, .00000000000000000000001% of Youtube. I use it to watch youtube without the stupid ads, and every once in a while buy a mug or whatever from my favorite creators. I'm not sure what else consumers can do about the situation.
As I recall, it all started as the so called "Trump exception". The laws temporarily did not apply. I remember reading a letter by Stanford Journalism Professor in the Economist, saying that situation was exceptional and journalists not only do not have to tell the truth, but almost have a duty to say whatever is necessary to rectify the results of 2016 elections.
It was just the beginning. Next was the "Covid exception". Then "HCQ exception", then "Ivermectin exception", then "Covid origin exception", then "Israel exception", then ... Always for a good cause.
And now we finally got to the "self-hosted media" exception. Congratulations.
Hmm, a big commercial site who's purpose is to provide free eyeballs for the viewing of advertising considers a video about how to avoid providing free eyeballs for the viewing of advertising as "harmful".
Of course that video is harmful. /s
The "harm" is to youtube's revenue stream. Which is why they gave it a strike and denied the appeal.
The good news is that LLMs + growth in storage & bandwidth will eventually put Google in its place. The full texts of stack exchange and wikipedia (kiwix) are only a few gigs. Same for offline models like llama/gemma/qwen. As the wizards keep finding new ways to pack more bits on metal plates, we will be able to store more video than we will ever watch, just as we now store more text than we will ever read.
I hate these policies as much as anyone but if you decide to use an ad blocker you're only making things worse. You probably spend more time watching youtube than netflix. Just pay for a family youtube premium account and everyone will be happier, including the people who made the videos you watch.
This is reason #597 why you just don’t allow platforms to censor.
If a site wants to be a publisher, by all means, be a publisher, and don’t monetize user content.
If a site wants other people to provide the content for free, then sorry- no censorship for you.
“Community guidelines” etc are just censorship with a nicer name.
“The algorithm” is just opaque censorship by making content undiscoverable. “un-content” in Orwell speak.
There are valid use cases for on-topic/off-topic. User content sites should have to declare whether they are a single-topic community or not, and act in good faith either way. If you are a single topic site then you must aggressively prune everything that is off topic (not just some off-topic). If you are multi-topic then no censorship for you.
And multi-topic sites like Reddit have to do so per channel/subreddit/etc. but the key points are “on/off topic” is the only valid filter criteria, and it must be applied consistently and in good faith.
If your algorithm is the secret sauce that makes your platform worthwhile/profitable/whatever, then people must be able to opt out, eg opt into a “only stuff I follow, all of it, most recent first”.
Or if you care about your users then implement curated feeds, allow users to create their own curated feeds, and implement your algorithm as the first curated feed.
From the article the explaination for what part of the dangerous or harmful content rule being broken is about instructing people how to pirate content.
>Dangerous or Harmful Content
>Content that describes how to get unauthorized or free access to audio or audiovisual content, software, subscription services, or games that usually require payment isn't allowed on YouTube.
In the article and video he aludes to dumping DVDs and Blurays.
>I've purchased physical media (CDs, DVDs, and more recently, Blu-Rays)
It is illegal to break the encryption of DVDs and BluRays. Playing copies of DVDs and Blurays via Kodi will always be illegal to do since there is no way to get a unencrypted version. This whole video is about how you can play illegal acquired content, but technically it doesn't tell you how to illegally acquire it.
Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube
(jeffgeerling.com)1633 points by DavideNL 6 June 2025 | 757 comments
Comments
From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software."
This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content.
Here in the UK, Ofcom held their second day-long livestreamed seminar on their implementation of the Online Safety Act on Wednesday this week. This time it was about keeping children "safe", including with "effective age assurance".
Ofcom refused to give any specific guidance on how platforms should implement the regime they want to see. They said this is on the basis that if they give specific advice, it may restrict their ability to take enforcement action later.
So it's up to the platforms to interpret the extremely complex and vaguely defined requirements and impose a regime which Ofcom will find acceptable. It was clear from the Q&A that some pretty big platforms are really struggling with it.
The inevitable outcome is that platforms will err on the side of caution, bearing in mind the potential penalties.
Many will say, this is good, children should be protected. The second part of that is true. But the way this is being done won't protect children in my opinion. It will result in many more topic areas falling below the censorship threshold.
Seems ironic that their AI models are getting their detection of "Dangerous or Harmful Content" wrong. Maybe they just need to infringe more copyright in order to better detect copyright infringement?
You can show silencer disconnected from firearm, connected to firearm but showing moment you screwing it to end of barrel and your video is banned. There are dozens rules that are so vague that if YT wants he can remove any gun related content.
This is problem YT is not willing to fix because collateral damage costs are peanuts comparing to beeing sued and loose because some real illegal content slip trough filter. I don't expect any improvement here because there is no business justification.
Looks like some L-(5|6|whateverthefuck) just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software.
Quick appeal grant of course, because it was more about sending a message and making people who want to talk about that kind of software think twice before the next video.
> But until that time, YouTube's AdSense revenue and vast reach is a kind of 'golden handcuff.' > > The handcuff has been a bit tarnished of late, however, with Google recently adding AI summaries to videos—which seems to indicate maybe Gemini is slurping up my content and using it in their AI models?
Balanced take towards the end (after the above quote), but yep, the writing is on the wall.
I really wonder where the internet goes in this age. The contract between third party content hosters and creators is getting squeezed, and the whole "you're the product" thing is being laid bare more and more.
Is it a given that at some point creators will stop posting their contents to platforms like YouTube? Is it even possible at this point given that YouTube garners so many eyeballs and is just so easy? Does a challenger somehow unseat YouTube because programming and underlying libraries (ffmpeg et al) becomes so easy to use that spinning up a YouTube competitor goes down to basically zero?
Seems like there needs to be a new paradigm for anyone to have a choice other than youtube. Maybe AI will enable this -- maybe "does jeff have any new videos" -> a video gets played on a screen in your house and it's NOT hosted on YouTube, but no one knows and no one cares?
I would love it if I had the resources to sue BMI for defamation (they're claiming I'm a thief) and sue YouTube for facilitating this.
They really need to make sure their music match looks for _exact_ matches for compositions that are out of copyright, to catch specific performances and not just melodic/harmonic/rhytmic matches.
Here's my theory: they aren't concerned with the movies and TV shows shown in the video (which are presumably obtained legally as Jeff mentioned), but rather the brief use of what looks like [plugin.video.youtube] (https://github.com/anxdpanic/plugin.video.youtube) at about 12:10 in the video.
The plugin is an alternate frontend to YouTube, and as such, allows bypassing ads. He never mentions the plugin explicitly in the video, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is; he mentions YouTube and is clearly watching one of his own YT videos in Kodi. Just today, I noticed YouTube getting more aggressive in its anti-ad-blocking measures. They got really strict a year or two ago, backed off a bit, and seem to have ramped up again. My guess is that someone in management needs to show better numbers and is looking for ways to punish anyone even hinting at accessing YouTube without the obligatory dose of advertising.
BUT whatever the reason, be it a user or YTs moderation team, showing table records was deemed inappropriate because I was "sharing PPI". I appealed both cases and got rejected. Since I'm not a super important influencer, there wasn't much else I could do so sadly students will need to struggle to know how to query dates in Access...
Well fuck you I'll just download the videos with yt-dlp instead. If that stops working, I'll not bother.
Can't figure out what tool Jeff is writing about.
Keep creating your videos. Keep supporting these projects. We need them.
I'm finding historically critical videos disappear from the internet. There was one interview with Jack Dorsey that he was threatened that if he didn't allow censorship rollout over twitter, that he felt (or was told?) they would remove twitter from the mobile app stores and kill it.
Do you want to see that interview? It has been scrubbed off of the internet. This happens with many key videos in history. We need a FileCoin IPFS way to use open source blockchain way to keep these videos forever. Even beyond the lifetime of any author, owner or company.
LibreELEC and JellyFin can be the open source part of making them easy to retrieve and watch. Open source for freedom. Blockchain for publishing freedom. Controlling information is their weapon. Protecting freedom for information spread keeps all other freedoms protected (and defendable).
[0] https://joinpeertube.org/
First things first: I'm on your side. But the whole content-creator industry should really start looking for and pushing alternatives to Youtube.
Floatplane from LTT folks looks promising, I wish it got more attention. It seems that only Linus and Luke actually had the balls to come up with a business model and implement the darn thing.
Otherwise you (and other content creators) sooner or later will have to decide between self-censoring and make a living.
Me — I knew that. Power to the people.
I wonder whether one solution is for everyone to own a "personal cloud computer" (a relatively cheap VM) on which they install software much like they did in the pre-SaaS era. They might also be able to open up file system and SQL interfaces for certified external providers.
Theoretically, the same arguments that apply to a cloud service provider would apply to a cloud infrastructure provider too, but if the contract were to define the infrastructure as leased property, and all data stored on it as belonging to the user, then it might be somewhat harder to control.
I wish more people would self-host or use paid services so that the influence of big tech could decline based on an economic chance of balance; complaining about something while keep using it sounds hypocritical.
I’ve been toying with the idea of jumping on the content creation wagon with storytelling, vlogging life experiences, that sort of thing, but now I’m wondering: Is it still worth building on YouTube if there’s a real risk of getting banned later for unknowingly crossing some unclear content line?
I’m not focused on monetization right now, just hoping to share and connect, but I’d hate to build something meaningful only to watch it vanish overnight.
I know that he is already on Floatplane, but we all know that Google is not working with the best interests of its users/creators in mind, so "criticism" of YouTube while making money there seems hypocritical.
It is also a good warning against trusting AI agents.
I guess I'm setting up a download solution this weekend.
It's so kind of them to at least make me wait for 5 seconds to acknowledge that using an adblocker is illegal.
I’ll bite. Last time I tried yt-dlp on a vps, YouTube wanted me to login - inevitably that’d lead to a banned account, which is the same reason I was using a vps in the first place.
Are there any tools that source videos either via a vps or decentralised for popular channels?
I refuse to not use ublock, and I’m not paying whatever ridiculous amount premium costs (now, or when they inevitably increase prices).
Edit: i want to download videos from YouTube to stream via Jellyfin, I don’t need a hosting platform.
What exactly is he talking about?
What is he talking about here? Im old, I was expecting it to rhyme with “abhorrent”.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240531142901/https://www.youtu...
This post is so useful. Bookmarking it for my Pi setup. I grew up in the 90s media. Want my content to be owned, not rented.
<3
I can guarantee that if youtube got 70% of it's income from paid subscriptions, they would not give a fuck about 99% of this.
If you want youtube (or any other platform) to not suck...pay for it.
There is no world where you are not a paying customer and get treated like your opinion matters much.
TV is literally way less self censoring at this point
And don't get confused. Most videos would be allowed on YouTube content creators just prefer to monetize them.
I have a creator friend who was telling me that newswire agencies are gaming a loophole in YT’s copyright policy to extort creators. Basically, they threaten takedowns unless the creator pays up. Even when creators argue their use falls under "fair use" for reporting, YT’s 3 strike policy doesn’t care. Three strikes and your channel is dead - no nuance. They let rightsholders file strikes at their will & it’s on the creator (or the courts) to fight it out. Guess who usually blinks first?
Also this looks like a global grift. Came across Asian newswires picking up on this playbook - licensing clips at premium prices under the implicit threat of a strike.
I mean, YT could fix this, but they won’t. they benefit either way. Creators are stuck between losing their life's work and paying up just to stay online.
In the recent past (say up to the mid 2010s) it was a really good product and there was a reason nobody gave a shit about Vimeo et al, YouTube as a site, app, platform was so far ahead of the competition.
But now? Youtube is full of slop, search barely works, and Google is on an endless campaign to make ad-blocking and free downloading impossible. Even most of the "good" channels resort to clickbait titles, thumbnails designed for children, and embarrassing shilling.
Meanwhile hosting and streaming HD video is a mundanely easy feature to implement with off-the-shelf/FOSS software, hundreds of no-name, fly-by-night websites have HD video hosting. Maybe it's time for someone to make a mastodon equivalent for youtube.
Fuck YouTube
That won't happen in our world, because of www.google.com. The existence of that website guarantees that nobody can ever create a competitor to youtube, because youtube can just undercut on ad costs or pay out creators at high enough rates to run a loss for basically fucking centuries if it has to, until everyone else's funding runs out.
Imagine building just one of the datacenters needed to feed Youtube... They're what, 200 million a pop?
Within a capitalist mode of production and without any real regulatory guardrails, I just don't see Youtube going away, ever, and I don't see any real competitors, ever. Happy to be proven wrong.
I try to do my part - I host a tubearchivist instance that at this point is mirroring a couple TB of content from channels some friends and I enjoy. So, .00000000000000000000001% of Youtube. I use it to watch youtube without the stupid ads, and every once in a while buy a mug or whatever from my favorite creators. I'm not sure what else consumers can do about the situation.
It was just the beginning. Next was the "Covid exception". Then "HCQ exception", then "Ivermectin exception", then "Covid origin exception", then "Israel exception", then ... Always for a good cause.
And now we finally got to the "self-hosted media" exception. Congratulations.
Of course that video is harmful. /s
The "harm" is to youtube's revenue stream. Which is why they gave it a strike and denied the appeal.
If a site wants to be a publisher, by all means, be a publisher, and don’t monetize user content.
If a site wants other people to provide the content for free, then sorry- no censorship for you.
“Community guidelines” etc are just censorship with a nicer name.
“The algorithm” is just opaque censorship by making content undiscoverable. “un-content” in Orwell speak.
There are valid use cases for on-topic/off-topic. User content sites should have to declare whether they are a single-topic community or not, and act in good faith either way. If you are a single topic site then you must aggressively prune everything that is off topic (not just some off-topic). If you are multi-topic then no censorship for you.
And multi-topic sites like Reddit have to do so per channel/subreddit/etc. but the key points are “on/off topic” is the only valid filter criteria, and it must be applied consistently and in good faith.
If your algorithm is the secret sauce that makes your platform worthwhile/profitable/whatever, then people must be able to opt out, eg opt into a “only stuff I follow, all of it, most recent first”.
Or if you care about your users then implement curated feeds, allow users to create their own curated feeds, and implement your algorithm as the first curated feed.
From the article the explaination for what part of the dangerous or harmful content rule being broken is about instructing people how to pirate content.
>Dangerous or Harmful Content >Content that describes how to get unauthorized or free access to audio or audiovisual content, software, subscription services, or games that usually require payment isn't allowed on YouTube.
In the article and video he aludes to dumping DVDs and Blurays.
>I've purchased physical media (CDs, DVDs, and more recently, Blu-Rays)
It is illegal to break the encryption of DVDs and BluRays. Playing copies of DVDs and Blurays via Kodi will always be illegal to do since there is no way to get a unencrypted version. This whole video is about how you can play illegal acquired content, but technically it doesn't tell you how to illegally acquire it.