YouTube Bans Award-Winning Short

Put another way by Terry Pratchett,

"And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up."

What you say is true, but there's another oracle of media that should be quoted in addition to Jobs:

"The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."

--Marshall McLuhan

I evoke this point because I think it is crucial to remember that the content of a form of media is nowhere near as impactful as the medium itself. While TV as a medium was designed to cater to lowest-common-denominator values via video, YouTube and other digital video distribution services enable this same thing - but at enormous scale, brevity, and accuracy unknown to the TV medium.

This is not just like the era prior to digital media - this is a huge expansion of the era prior to digital media. And it isn't incorrect to point out how scary and dangerous that fact is.

It's sort of tautological to say that 'most people still want to watch "lowest common denominator" content'. I'm not really casting a judgement on the quality of the content, or of peoples' tastes - but I am lamenting the change to the system that tilts the scale further towards less distinctive media, at the expense of more distinctive. Especially since this used to not be the case. I'm also asserting that it need not be one way or the other. It's not a zero sum game. They could have multi-modal video relevance algorithms that don't leave niches to wither. They certainly have enough data to infer tastes. Do you want top 40 videos? You're in luck. Or do you want to hear some amateur Finnish death metal from a band that only posts 3 songs a year? The people that would be really jazzed about the latter are being under served, and the obscure Finnish death metal band is being under-compensated and under-promoted.

Not so much what they want to watch, but what they will watch the most of.

Guilty pleasure: I love to indulge in YouTube fail video compilations when my brain is mush from a hard day.

I've often noted that these days you get the entire actual content of a "<insert country>'s Funniest Home Videos" TV show in 60 seconds or less.

In better times I'll turn to documentaries or TED talks, but yes, L.C.D. content is sometimes exactly what is needed.

I disagree. Paraphrasing filmmaker James Gray: "To say people want to see trash is totally elitist. If you feed people McDonald's every day for years and then give them sushi, there ain't no way they're going to say 'give me more of that wasabi, please'. No, they're going to say 'what the hell is this crap?'.

I personally agree with this. One piece of evidence is that thinking adults do go see Marvel movies instead of the Scorsese/Fellini/Antonioni/James Gray/Coppola/Fincher/etc. feature, when those are not options.

That's an interesting quote, but Steve Jobs was describing an industry with very little competition beyond its set format at the time. Look at the TV industry now: It's been declining for years, mostly because of rising prices and program line-ups that cater only to the lowest common denominator.

The internet media of today is a completely different industry from the television industry of the 1990's. Catering to the lowest common denominator isn't necessarily bad as long as it's not the only option. If, however, YouTube only monetizes crap and removes more thoughtful content, people will go elsewhere.

Though I respect Jobs, I don't think he is completely correct here. We know that the networks sometime gives us what we don't want in order to push society into a certain direction. For example, the first interracial kiss in star trek caused a lot of pushback. The first gay theme in media also caused a lot of headaches for the networks. Even the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the first show about a career woman was met with resistance.

I don't think it is a conspiracy. It is just what the networks do. It influences society.

In other words, I think it's 50/50. Some times, the networks influence society and other times, society influences the networks.

So British people want better things than American people? BBC quality vs American?

The networks aren't in business to give people what they want. They're in business to make money, and doing what sells easily is the usual way to make that money. The BBC have a different business model, so they don't have to chase the money that way.

Jobs is talking as if people can afford the things they want - if he instead said that "the construction industry builds tons of cheap, shitty housing, because that's what people want! It's the truth!", it'd be immediately obvious that he was speaking blubbering nonsense.

What you might not be aware of is how the following claim by GP is implemented:

> What DOES create a problem for artists is the tuning of the algorithms to be highly preferential to long form frequently posted content

Disclaimer: I'm typing this on mobile so can't look up the sources as the same time, so this is from memory, might get some details wrong

A relatively recent change in YT policy is that you don't see every video you're subscribed to. They select among your subscriptions. How? Well, apparently one very important part of the algorithm is that you have to upload at least one long form video every week. If you break the streak, you're at the bottom of the priority queue.

Which is crazy, because if anything, one reason to subscribe is to not miss out the content of people who only very rarely upload!

Or what if you're a regular content uploader but just so happen to feel like you deserve a holiday for one or two weeks a year?

Now this might have changed since they first started doing it and youtubers rightfully complained about it, but the fact that this was implemented in the first place, and the big effect it has on content creators is pretty disturbing.

(aside: this is why I don't rely on YT subscriptions; NewsBlur has the ability to turn a channel into an RSS feed. Of course, that in turn means I don't show up in the YT subscription statistics, hurting the content creators I follow, so I symbolically subscribe but ignore the YT subscription service. How bonkers is that?)

> If a creator only pumps out high amounts of low quality content, they'll never gain a subscriber base.

How do you explain the youtuber phenomenon, then? Unfortunately there seems to be very little in terms of content rather than commentary, as the latter is so much cheaper to throw together with no money.

> I think describing it as a bias towards maximizing aggregate watch time is more accurate than a bias towards "long form" content. > It's definitely a balance. If a creator only pumps out high amounts of low quality content, they'll never gain a subscriber base. On the other hand, if the content is so short that subscribers only interact with their channel a minute per month, this isn't particularly useful to advertisers.

I agree that the objective is definitely to maximize aggregate watch time, but, the practical implication that I've been hearing about is that longer more frequent uploads are key to getting a video to rise in search and recommendation rankings, and thus become discoverable. It's been a while since I've had any inside information, but this guide mentions as much http://techtipswithtea.com/youtube-tips/youtube-changes-algo...

The thing is, what they're doing is clearly working as far as optimizing the key metrics that they're looking for. It's also not necessarily to call high volume game commentary low quality - it's a lot of fun, it just ignores the many dimensions of great videos that may account for the long tail of viewed minutes, but are still a big part of the soul of independent art. Those videos may never reach the critical mass to become viral and make money for their creators, where before, the algorithm gave them a better shot of being seen and shared until they take off under their own momentum.

To make an unnecessary food analogy, it's like a marketplace that rewards a creator that can pump out $1 cheeseburgers at a huge rate - they're tasty and they're good enough to keep people coming back. Bigtime profits. Win! But it's sad, then ,if the marketplace is no longer viable for the artisan who can only make one fancy, excellent, but unconventionally flavored, cake per day. Hosting the cake maker may be a loss for a long time, but, if they never had a chance they'll never be around to have their innovative, challenging, masterwork (viral video) take the world by storm some day.

Mr.Weebl, the animator who made the ubiquitous early-internet viral flash movie about badgers, mushrooms, and snakes was recently talking about the issues he's seeing. It doesn't seem like any of the early viral animations could have gotten featured and taken off in the current environment.

Who knows, maybe everyone will go back to newgrounds?

>That said: making a YouTube is a hell of a lot of work and a huge investment. Yes I'm sure you can kludge up a simple clone of the basics in Your Favorite Language in six hours, but can you build the infrastructure to deal with the inevitable copyright infringement, avoid falling foul to widely varying obscenity laws across the globe, hire people to screen for that sort of thing, there's a whole bunch of stuff above and beyond "

As I know, current Patreon's stance on what to do with it when they reach that stage, is to focus on English speaking speaking audience, and have no legal presence outside of US.

As the US is the only paying off market for 9 out of 10 of any online media businesses, it makes sense.

Same thing with CDN, if they go that way, they only have to deal with much smaller loads, and have no need for multi-dc replication.

If they only have to deal with the most creative and valuable share of makers that they will skim from yt, the will not have to deal with exabytes of cat videos and other garbage content.

Same on the legal from, for as long as most content is original, the only issue will most likely be music, but there is already a thriving industry of RIAA-free music licensing specifically for makers thanks to YT yielding to requests for automated takedowns/DeMo/and revenue divertions.

Maker relationships? Very straight, steal top 10% makers from YT, depriving it of majority of genuine creative content. Here YT can't counter that with pretty much anything: Google sells ads, Patreon sells makers themselves. Google stays with cat videos, while Patreoners take the tasty stuff.

Predicament looks rather dim for YT unless they will have the willpower to make a U-turn in their relationship with the creative community

Part of the failure here was in the human organization attempting to determine "artistic merit". The definition of art has been debated for centuries. Contractors aren't always going to make the right call, even if they do have a better rate than a computer.

I don't know why everyone seems to think I'm only talking about technical solutions. Human solutions have to scale, too.

The problem is then that the only possible way to implement that is crowdsourced voting/flagging, and enough people out there don't get some kinds of art that they would flag it that way. I think most controversial modern art would not survive on a platform like Youtube where everyday people make a determination on the palatability of it.

I'm starting to like this idea better. It's at least an approach that isn't yet a proven failure. You can probably get some mileage out of weighting reliable users more heavily than randos, being smart about what thresholds constitute sufficient evidence, etc. Existing systems are definitely good at that sort of thing.

The problem you might have is that most who search for terms that would bring up similiar results will have a vested interest in sexual content and will produce false flags

Neither of those are really good options, despite your attempt to spin it. Do you think a parent is merely being "easily offended" if they don't want their kids watching "Fifty Shades of Grey" or the equivalent on YouTube? I agree that the other extreme isn't much good either. That's why it's hard.

Note that no one said anything about a technical solution. Google's human review process is what failed here, and that's what I'm saying is likely to continue.

> With a bit of foresight there certainly is, your own domain pointing at gmail?

That costs money for the Google Apps Enterprise suite, and you're still dealing with a company that isn't known for customer service - you may point your MX records somewhere else but still can't access old emails when they terminate you for whatever stupid reason.

(Yes, backups are a solution but many people blindly trust the cloud)

That only redirects the problem to a different level: you've got to rely on a domain registrar, a business ... similarly not recognised for its attentiveness to small-player customer service. And for which loss of control poses a whole higher level of problems.

I disagree there's "too much to do" when it comes to having humans moderate reported or detected cases of terms violations.

We have a near crisis with people having a harder and harder time finding jobs that don't require college degrees. A lot of older job fields machines can do just as well, so a lot of old jobs are going away. The people are there.

Google is sitting on many billions of dollars it just doesn't want to spend (like $100B or so, I believe?). The money to pay for people is there.

However, Google would not be nearly as profitable if it wasn't automating away jobs that as we've continually seen, automation is pretty bad at doing. This is a business decision, plain and simple. New jobs for humans aren't opening up because tech companies are insisting on using automation to do things automation isn't good at.

A good chunk of that is duplicate videos.

e.g. FTA, many duplicates of this video exist, each of which are ranked higher than the original, and each of which are monetized when the original isn't.

There's just no way that Youtube isn't able to detect this duplication.

Because that doesn't attract viewers like nudity does. How many times have you seen a half naked chick as the thumbnail, yet never appears in the video?