youtube was a platform for which people with issues could still produce an income, gain an audience, and be part of a social group (even if it was just subscribers and comments).
During the great boom era of youtube, it certainly helped lots of depressed and down on their luck people that had a creative spark. It's not that youtube draws them, but that they are desperate enough, and youtube was a good opportunity.
Now youtube becoming more mainstream means that those opportunities that it used to afford to socially awkward and/or depressed people no longer exists. It's a sad outcome imho.
And then you proceed to defend that anyway.
Any webserver will be happy to serve up .mp4 content. There are free players (JWPlayer for instance) and you are entirely free to serve up whatever you want from your own hosted service.
That capricious decision can be appealed, you can take Youtube to court if you feel they have wronged you.
> Why would you be surprised that someone would be upset about a capricious decision, which cannot be appealed, suddenly taking away the money?
Because it never was theirs in the first place. The contract which you engage in when you sign up with Youtube or any other user created content service is pretty clear in that respect: the service can be withheld at the discretion of the company. If you can't live with those terms don't host your content there.
>Any webserver will be happy to serve up .mp4 content. There are free players (JWPlayer for instance) and you are entirely free to serve up whatever you want from your own hosted service.
This echos the classic dropbox comment, "you can just do it yourself". A layperson isn't going to.
>That capricious decision can be appealed, you can take Youtube to court if you feel they have wronged you.
You can sue whoever you want, but you will lose due to lack of resources.
> Because it never was theirs in the first place
As the facebook controversies have show, people have a remarkably bad time using common sense and making rational decisions on the internet, so while you are totally correct, its silly to assume people think that way.
Then you will have to live with being dependent on the whims of another entity. Which means you give up a lot of your freedoms.
> As the facebook controversies have show, people have a remarkably bad time using common sense and making rational decisions on the internet
This wasn't 'on the internet', this was about as IRL as it gets.
We don’t have time for everything, at some point we have to outsorce work.
Did you write the OS used to start up your browser/app to type this comment?
Just because we agreed to depend on others doesn’t mean they can shit on us.
Funny, I did actually write an OS, and no it is not the one on my computer but the one that is on my computer is open source and I know I can rely on it for ever because I have that source and know how to use a compiler.
Yes, that's a conscious decision.
That's the state of the vast majority of the population, who lack the system administration and/or development skills to "do it themselves."
Chiding them for not "doing it themselves" is akin to chiding someone upset about their medical bills for not reading to become their own doctor.
I think the problem is that people are using "common sense", but depending on your background "common sense" can lead you to dramatically different places.