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Comment by iamgilesbowkett | Hacker News Reader

"While I appreciate the sentiment and agree with his point of view, his simply telling Google 'go fuck yourself' doesn't really offer an in-depth critique of why these changes [are] wrong"

what you said is literally false. here's his in-depth critique:

"I’m going to lose a crapton of potential upvotes for Tabletop, because the core of my audience is tech-savvy and may not want to “upgrade” to yet another fucking social network they don’t want or need...

Those upvotes are incredibly important to us, because we need them to earn another season of our show...

[this] will negatively affect how users can interact with us on YouTube."

translation: "we might lose the ability to do our show, because this G+ +1 button introduces friction and a sign-up process we don't expect our users will bother to complete."

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> translation: "we might lose the ability to do our show, because this G+ +1 button introduces friction and a sign-up process we don't expect our users will bother to complete."

Yeah, but he misses the next step in logical thinking which is that the changes will apply to everyone. This new button is for everyone, which means everyone will get less votes which means less are needed for him to continue to run the show.

Everyone will get less votes in different proportions, based on their audience.

It's not a linear adjustment for everyone.

Of course, but I imagine the proportional increase/decrease will probably be the same with the people he's competing with.

That's not the point the author is arguing anyway.

"Yeah, but he misses the next step in logical thinking which is that the changes will apply to everyone."

no he doesn't, not at all. he "misses" this step because while it might be logical over the long term for the world on average, it's irrelevant to his business.

if you've got a deal in place, based on existing expectations of the number of upvotes, and Google changes how upvotes happen, your existing deal is threatened. it's like if you agree to work for an hourly rate right before your government devalues their currency.

I believe what's happening here is he has a certain number of upvotes which he needs to obtain if his show is going to continue. for instance he might have a deal with investors, or he might just want to compete with pre-existing vidoes whose upvotes (achieved under the previous system) are already secure. Google made it harder for him to get upvotes, thus disrupting his business.

it's cool to disrupt businesses but if you set yourself up as a platform and then you disrupt businesses built on your platform, that's less cool. that's an unstable platform and a dangerous place to do business.

The blogger is to be frank an absolute dumb nut! He is not losing more viewers. In fact he is gaining them. If people upvote your video and it goes onto a social network site that is outside of your "youtube channel" that just means that you are turning on automatic sharing. Ofcourse, an option that lets the user who is upvoting to choose whether he wants to share it or not is all that is needed.

If he does share it, that just gives your video and even greater probability of going viral. Why cant content publishers get this?

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