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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have more context? Or a link to a video showing this issue? This Reddit thread only seems to have a screenshot (though I didn’t scour the entire comment section).

I’ve never seen this in the wild, and technically without a link I still haven’t seen it live at all. I’m wondering if the channel triggered some sort of anti-spam mechanism.

EDIT: The only source I can find is from screenshots of right-wing Twitter accounts suggesting something about YouTube censoring anti-vax protests: https://m.imgur.com/dh1kU1q Until someone can link to an actual video showing this issue, I’d approach this with an extremely high degree of skepticism.

EDIT 2: Appears to only apply to live streams from new accounts. Seems like a reasonable limitation to clamp down on the spread of copyrighted material rebroadcasting (people live streaming sports and such from throwaway accounts) and cryptocurrency scams.

View on HN

According to the Reddit comments, this is only for livestreams not for videos in general. I'd guess that the problem with livestreams in particular is that any kind of abuse prevention / moderation needs to be done in realtime, vs normal videos where it can reasonably be done either as a pre-pass or with a delay.

How does limiting the number of viewers of a stream by a small channel help? Well, it means that stream with a large number of viewers is done by somebody in good standing and with something to lose (i.e. their popular channel) if they break the TOS. You can't just create a new channel for the purposes of abuse.

Seems reasonable. YouTube is a platform for content creators with some skin in the game. New accounts producing viral livestreams are a hotbed for spam and scams, such as the ubiquitous free cryptocurrency livestream scams.

Frankly, I’m glad to see they’re doing something about it.

What you are asking for is already widely available: network television. I don't see how it is a good thing that Google has adopted more and more of the negative aspects of the old system, but they certainly have been busy doing so for the last few years.

You know a very good way to control what is and is not part of the public discourse? Allow only those with a lot to lose the privilege of speaking. Those creators with skin in the game will think twice about saying something that the "platform" doesn't like, and it isn't even censorship - it is self imposed, so nobody can complain about it.

That’s an exaggeration. YouTube is still far more accessible than network television even if brand new accounts aren’t able to livestream to huge audiences.

Limiting new accounts is a common, and often necessary, feature in most internet platforms. Even HN will limit how fast new accounts can post and highlights new users in green.

If HN allowed new users to sign up and immediately post hundreds of comments or links, it would be inundated with spam and abuse. Likewise, YouTube requires new accounts to demonstrate some actual traction before they’re allowed to livestream to huge audiences because the feature was being used for abuse.

You realise that you can set up your own web server and livestream as much as you like (and can afford) from that to as many people as you want? Youtube doesn't owe you free bandwidth.

This really grind my gears too. You want carefully curated content? I like that too from time to time and it is more or less ubiquitously available. You don't have to destroy every platform that might diverge here.

Youtube is long gone from non-commercial use and for me the platform is a lot less interesting, although there still is good stuff on it. But so many people want to go back to church. Every measure is a punch in the wherever curiosity is situated in the body...

> New accounts producing viral livestreams are a hotbed for spam and scams

Which is why spammers & scammers compromise existing channels and stream there. It happened to one I'm subscribed to; they completely renamed the channel and started broadcasting what looked like a crypto newscast which I'm sure eventually pivoted to a promotion for some scam.

I found this tweet from Jan 8 in reply to somebody who was livestreaming a dogsledding race, complaining about the same error message: https://twitter.com/Cami5320/status/1479893333480599555

The account that streamed it on YT had some livestreams a year ago with 10s of views, and nothing recent except the stream in question which lists 1400 views.

So this does seem to fit the pattern of restricting livestreams from suddenly popular accounts. My best guess is that this has been done to combat scams and fraud, and that politically charged livestreams are collateral damage.

It's hard to monitor live streams for piracy. Twitch just had a trend of livestreamers streaming full movies and episodes of popular TV shows for hours on end.

Mobile live streaming requirements: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9228390

Over 50 subs and under 1000 subs == streaming is limited via mobile.

It doesn't matter how old your account, either -- I have an account with only 28 subscribers (somehow?) for several years and I get the same limitations on mobile streaming, namely that I can't even stream.

Technical workaround would be to set up a stream via desktop and use my phone as an RTMP source... but that's just a kludge.

> for several years

Old accounts are still hotbeds of spam... There are plenty of spammers who signed up for 100,000 gmail accounts back in 2010 when there were no good captchas, and have left them mostly idle till now, and can now sell them to others to use for spamming.

Reading that I had to go check the subscriber count on my account. 17 year old YouTube account has.... 115 subscribers! I would have thought more bots than that would have randomly subscribed over the years.

Went to jail for eight years. First thing I do when I get out.. how many views did I get on YouTube while I was gone?!

They did, but the accounts got deleted probably. I was going from 1200-1000 on a mostly inactive account for years.

My guess is that the purpose is to prevent people from creating throwaway accounts that re-broadcast sport events, movies and so on.

Supposedly it is targeting a very specific type of content: medical mandate protest coverage. Unfortunately this is a plausible explanation.

https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-capping-viewer-limits/

That interpretation is unclear from that source. It's at least equally likely that a feature to tamp down on rebroadcast of sporting events and such has fouled broadcast of protests.

Regardless of cause though, it would make YouTube a worse platform for live citizen journalism.

> That interpretation is unclear from that source.

lol.

"Several livestreams posted on Google’s platform last weekend by truckers protesting in Canada have had their audience limited... This creator explained that they have had the channel for seven years, with 90 videos and several streams..."

Yes. That is what the source said and the interpretation "it is targeting a very specific type of content: medical mandate protest coverage" is unclear from that source.

A recent change to the system to tamp down on resharing copyrighted data would catch those kinds of streams in the "blast radius," so to speak. Such a change would not be targeting that very specific type of content the GP comment describes. The source does not support that interpretation with sufficient evidence.

I saw the behavior first hand on a few of the livestreams of the Ottawa protests last weekend, wanting to watch them out of curiosity. Never had YouTube do this before and it allowed me to watch only after subscribing to the channels in question.

This video was archived while the issue was occuring: https://archive.fo/IMxlI

> more context?

Maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30177216

This suggests it’s only for livestreams coming from new accounts, not videos uploaded in regular YouTube style.

Might be an unpopular opinion, but I think this is fine. YouTube is a platform for content creators and they don’t want their services becoming a platform for throwaway viral live broadcasts.

According to comments on reddit, it was on an anti-vax livestream that was pushing a line of products from a brand-new account. This message only shows up on live streams.

> anti-vax livestream

Is it possible to get more nuanced clarity on this? The word "anti-vax" used to mean one thing, but today can refer to somebody who is against mandates.

The screenshot in GG(G?)P that they called an anti-vax protest was of the truckers in Canada; that's an anti-mandate protest, not an anti-vax one.

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