YouTubers are unionizing, and the site has 24 days to respond

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20554806

Are youtubers employees? Surely they can't be.

They're not and I predict this will not get them what they want.

This reeks of the non-employee uber driver issue. I guess we'll see what happens in a month.

Does that matter? The concept of collective bargaining still applies.

Obviously anyone replaceable has a bad position to bargain, so it becomes a question of how replaceable YouTubers are. Clearly there are plenty of people who want to fill that role, but I don't know how the average user interacts with YouTube.

For me, if the creators I watch were striking and trying to force change, I'm not going to bother going on YouTube. I have no idea if "watching a specific set of creators" is a significant enough part of the user-base to really hurt YouTube enough to comply, or if most people would just watch other videos.

Youtube I'm not sure about, but Twitch is pretty controversial about selectively enforcing their TOS with regards to big streamers. Youtube has become more corporate-focused lately so I don't know how much they depend on let's say the top 10% of creators vs TV/Sports networks, but striking might work.

Brilliant asymmetric response.