The cottage industry of YouTube obituary pirates
wired.com
wired.com
Somewhat relatedly, an actress once told an amusing anecdote on UK the TV chat show "Graham Norton", I was curious about it, so I googled it as I was watching, but there was nothing. Right as the show ended I googled again, hundreds of results, but all the articles I found mentioned that she told this anecdote on the show (so if I wanted to learn more about it, the articles won't help since they're just rehashes of what I just watched). WTF, hundreds of search results, a few minutes after she told the anecdote!
I now guess somebody wrote it up, published it and maybe linked to it on Twitter, some content-farming bots notice $ACTRESS_NAME trending on Twitter, and their algorithm realize there's audience eyeballs to be gained there, and found the freshest article about her, on Twitter I suppose?
Thanks a lot Brin/Page.. you're welcome for buying you private jets!
Probably actually one of the ways billionaires reluctantly cycle money back into the normal economy more effectively, considering the enormous labour needs in design, build and operation! Per the teachings of supply-side Jesus.
A better approach, in my opinion, would be for websites like legacy.com, where the obit author originally posted, to seek authorization to pursue DMCA takedown requests on these obit pirate videos through a clickwrap agreement when the author makes the initial post. That way, there's value-add for the original obit-posting website, and it adds legitimacy/weight to the DMCA takedown requests because YT can centralize the DMCA takedown processing from fewer sources.
The real problem here is the advertisers and the revenue that comes from it. It's disgraceful that YouTube and Google have these show up so high on the list when it's so clearly fraud. Facebook is no better.
Another one of these weird things is football (soccer) highlights. If you look for the highlights of a recent match, you will find a load of videos with the team names, date, and score. But the video will be... a clip from a game of FIFA. As in, obviously not video of the game you were looking for, and not a reproduction of the action either. Just a screencap of some video game. How can something like this monetize?
Now repeat this a million times. Economies of scale and all that.
The current PE owner, Blackstone, installed an ex-Facebook exec as CEO of Ancestry/Find A Grave who instituted a gamification system. Thanks to this engagement tweak, many deaths from accidents to natural causes are quickly "claimed" by random people. Quoting genetic genealogist Roberta Estes:
The problem is that finding your loved one’s memorial, often with incorrect information, created by a stranger is unexpectedly jarring, at best. Especially to discover that your family member was only a trophy harvest whose memorial was created hours after they died. Then, having to ask (sometimes beg an unresponsive person) for the transfer of their memorial to you, only to have the creator’s name forever associated with the memorial adds insult to injury.
https://dna-explained.com/2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-a...
What's particularly disturbing are the "memorials" created by strangers to victims of major accidents, mass shootings, and other tragedies:
Even with the photo and some information hidden, for now, the Uvalde victims’ memorials are still listed. The one above is the same child’s memorial as in Judy’s article.
Even after eventually transferring the memorial to a family member, the original creator is always still listed. Unfortunately, this practice of awarding points and forever listing the “creator” by Ancestry encourages and incentivizes “trophy hunting.”
Family members and genealogists have been infuriated by the Find-A-Grave situation, but Ancestry's management team has basically shrugged and said "tough luck."
But they don't want to fix it.
Some external links (including to findagrave), but lots of info they store locally. They seem to have a ton of my ancestors imported from national archives on microfiche from a predecessor country of a predecessor occupier of a former yugoslav republic.
And somehow an uncle's US naturalization certificate...
The Church of the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints doesn't store or maintain any data on people that aren't members of the Church and relatively little data on those that are. FamilySearch only stores data that individuals put in about themselves and on individuals that are deceased. Further they go to great lengths to ensure that data about living persons is only visible to the person whose data it is.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/15/mormon-church-...
Also, you've posted this article twice in the past week. Hacker News is probably not the best place for your Anti-Mormon crusade.
As such I find instances of white collar crime that involve nonprofit organizations and a hundred billion dollars to be quiet odious.
> They received a small fine for organizing the funds incorrectly
Where can I learn more about this?
Do you happen to be Mormon?
I'm sorry you feel my ethnicity is a cult, I didn't choose it, but I am proud of it.
They've a drone army of grey hairs with an innocent interest in family history funneling data { names, connections, digital scans of original documents } into the LDS-borg collective.
It's in no way limited to Mormons, it's people about the globe paying to assist the LDS in assembling a massive archive of family lines along with documents and DNA samples.
Don’t think they’re acquiring any DNA samples in this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestry.com
Not a direct church run company, but born out of Utah via LDS members so pardon my incorrect implication above .. although (just from curiousity rather than any hostility) I suspect that there's still money flowing back from the private for profit company to the church (via tithes) and data exchanges of some form (because, human nature).
Regardless of church ownership I've always had a dim view of any group ownership of a major silo of family relationships coupled with DNA samples.
There is absolutely no money flowing from ancestry to FamilySearch in any way. There is an agreement that members of the Church and FamilySearch centers get free access to ancestry in return Ancestry gets access to data collected by FamilySearch.
There is however no kickbacks of any sort.
Edit: Also FamilySearch doesn't store any DNA samples of any kind.
I wouldn't have expected money to flow directly from the private company to the free company, I do expect money to flow from the private company to the LDS coffers simply as a matter of founders and shareholders tithing back to their church.
If that's true Then (If the LDS supports FamilySearch in any financial way Then it's also true that money does flow from the private company to support the free company)
I'm not suggesting kickbacks or anything other than simply observing the manner in which money flows, much as a hydrologist describes how water flows.
The case in my experience with relatives and Ancestry.com is them being encouraged to pay to send samples in or genetics testing - those samples are likely processed by a third party company that may or may not be connected, may or may not keep the original samples, full scans, partial result markers, etc.
I find it very unlikely in the present Information Age that such data would be fully discarded regardless of any public disclaimers.
This, of course, does not suggest that FamilySearch is storing DNA samples - but it does mean that I fully suspect someone of holding onto that information.
My solution to this is to not get worked up over digital lies about the dead. I know what happened to those I care about, and that's enough. And even if I didn't know, it's in the past so it's as inaccessible to me as Cygnus A*.
Not sure what the huge difference is. If it's in bad taste, it's in bad taste, otherwise it's not like newspapers do obituaries out of some pure heart dedication to the community, they'll gladly sell a funeral home service ad next to it all day long as well.
The key part, I think: ...the business model focuses on quantity over quality...
This shows that you are dealing with inept spammers, and not someone that is particularly skilled at either SEO or mass-content creation. This model can be killed practically overnight if YouTube cought up on it.
It seems like they’re both offering a service and asking a fee for that service.
I was one of the people looking for her and these videos kept getting sent to me, and they had inaccurate information.
Was a bizarre experience. Also so auto generated articles popped up as well.
What’s puzzling about this? Someone writing an article about baity social media accounts surely knows a YouTube account has to have a minimum number of subscribers to receive ad payout (mentioned in TFA), and that like every other stat online, it can be bought with money? They don’t need to “amass” actual fans.
That's a lot of melodrama to say 'selling'.
I'm sure that's not the only or first example, but that's the one I heard about.
I wouldn't rule out they are not actually targeting the relatives of the dead person.
Alive celeb obituary industry - https://twitter.com/BoneJail/status/1645991572008255489
I see an opening for live persons obituaries, just rip them off Facebook. I'd like to watch my own.