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Comment by chirau | Hacker News Reader

They shut down my channel with more than 20k subscribers earlier in September. I sent in all the digital publishing rights contracts signed by all the artists whose content I had.

No response, just automated emails. Even tried my assigned partner manager, just more automated emails.

I feel most sorry for the artists... Most were from my home country in Africa and I had given them a sustainable source of income. Overnight, like Thanos, it was gone. I tried to fight for them, but YouTube would not even bat an ear.

Maybe one day we will get a better service than this.

And if there is a person from YouTube or Google here, your company really needs to do better.

I personally have not forgiven them yet.

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Looking at the revenue, growth rates, etc, it looks like Youtube sadly does not need to do better.

It seems protecting the rights of massive media companies at the expense of tiny players has resulted them in attracting the massive crowds, at the expense of tiny crowds.

Keeping Marvel trailers and Madonna music videos up brings in much more money than serving the indie sector. They care very little for the false positives, because only false negatives actually cost them money.

It seems like such a blanket statement to say that false negatives don't cost them money so they just let is happen. First it's very clear that Youtube spend considerable effort creating content ID and not used a dumb filter which would have been so easy to create and might I add cheaper also. They also care about their reputation to the extent that it doesn't impede them in making money in a significant way. Don't get me wrong I completely think Youtube's copyright system is a joke and for instance if Kim .com was operating it, it would have been raided by the FBI out of existence spontaneously.

Right, they've clearly put a lot of amazing work on the engineering side, but sadly, this is something that really need more humans. Especially in the edge cases.

I don't know if anyone remembers how bad Steam customer services used to be. They tried super hard to use engineering to solve it and it was awful. They finally gave up and hired more people and now it's much better.

This definitely isn't an easy problem as some make it, but yeah I don't think the answer lies in better algorithms. You just need a lot more partner supports that actually assist creators who run into issues.

Clear your browser history and load a “fresh” YouTube to see how low that denominator is.

That's also what pisses me off. They'll claim to the end of the earth they're a neutral platform. Your recommended videos say otherwise.

>Looking at the revenue, growth rates, etc, it looks like Youtube sadly does not need to do better.

Careful with this line of thinking. Youtube got to having massive players by moving up market from indie videos. The main thing blocking a competetor from following the same path is that Youtube still dominates in the indie sector as well. If they damage themselves in that market enough to give a competetor a foothold, then they lose that moat; and their competetor can follow the same up market path that Youtube took.

I think there is a chance a competitor could pop up and hurt YouTube. They would need to have a ContentID like system, monetization, and a non sucky copyright system that isn’t gamable, and of course infastructure. Very tall orders but could be done with a talented team.

YouTube has it exists today are out right abusing their indie people. Shuttering channgles, demonitizing channels with very little feedback. A could case in point would be Max Yurev. He has a great photograpy channel and they demonistized him for months until he recieved some weird fwd email that said re-monitize him its becoming a “PR problem”. They have zero accountability.

The false negatives will only cost them money when they are litigated against consistently on the basis that they systemically aid fraud and/or engage in unlawful interference in economic relations.

There might be other nice torts to ding them on, but as always, the channels that are too small to matter for manual review are also too small to support the economics of litigation.

It's sad to hear this. We're currently building a video streaming platform (live and VoD) with a major focus on letting our users control their entire brand identity and viewers.

I might personally help you to resolve this situation. But we need to explore and scope it out. I'm currently the head of the product here at vVents (we're hunting for better name now, since our product is ready! ).

When we started with our platform, we genuinely felt a need to help artists stand on their own feet. Unlike other platforms, it was and is hard to cache our frontend assets, because everything is customizable. But we still took a bet to fix many issues just to make sure our users can showcase their own brand.

If you, or any other person needs to react out to me please mail me at pk at vVents dot com

Or maybe instead of crying and groveling at Google's feet we could get up in arms and create a better platform.

But, oh, we can't make it a centralized platform because then we'd have to replicate something similar to Youtube's copyright system to avoid getting litigated to death by media companies.

So how about a federated or fully distributed platform? That could work... except it couldn't use regular payment processors because they will block payments.

I seriously believe cryptocurrencies were the final piece to this puzzle. Maybe we'll see a resurrection of cryptocurrencies in 5 to 10 years, like the one the internet had after the dotcom bubble.

there are tons of alternatives. the probme is, no traffic, no viralness, and terrible user experience relative to YouTube

Chicken and egg issue and having good website with good UX and good bandwidth and accepting anyone who wants to open his own channel costs a lot of money... The parent comment is kinda right crypto currencies could help here

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