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by CaptSpify 3233 days ago
So?

If youtube can't handle the load, then they shouldn't claim that they can. At the absolute lest, they need a usable appeals process. If they can't do that, then they need to own up to it, and stop allowing anyone to upload anything.

2 comments

Sorry, but why? Google owns nobody anything. If you have war crime evidence or other important content to publish, upload it to YouTube and all other video sites, letting archive.org and other human rights organizations in the loop. You can put the press in the mix as well.
Because it's a shitty thing to do, and we shouldn't encourage shitty behavior? Just because they want to take the cheap and lazy route doesn't mean that we can't criticize them for it.
Why? Own up to what?

YouTube is a company that is beholden to advertisers. YouTube wants/pays for videos that they can put ads in front of. If your content is not the type of content YouTube can wrap in ads, and you need longevity for your videos, YouTube is not the platform for you. YouTube never claimed to be an everlasting video storage space for all your video needs, so I'm not sure why you're expecting that of them.

It's in part because that is what Google has done in the past. They give you unlimited space to store your photos, your email, and your data, why wouldn't you expect to be able to store video.

Video has become politicised because it is a popular medium for political topics and one which can be rapidly produced and consumed. Advertisers are perhaps influencing Google's decisions on this, but they are equally political. The debacle with the diversity memo is one example of biases inside of the company. There have been many more examples over the last years, one such example is censorship across the board of conservative commentators.

It goes on in Facebook, Twitter and so on. So we have to wait for competitors to turn up, how many years will that take? Is that a responsible route considering the foothold these companies have?

Yes, absolutely, you have to wait for a competitor to turn up. Or you can build a platform yourself, it's not difficult to do, especially in 2017. Hosting is cheap, video codecs are open source, there are a lot of companies that are willing to negotiate advertising partnerships. YouTube is a private businesses, fuck your privilege.

ALSO: I don't know about you, but this so-called "censoring" of conservative commentators doesn't seem to have worked. I see more young people skewing right/centre than I did 10 years ago. You can call it censorship if you want (because sure, that's probably the best term), but implying that a company selectively hosting content is the same thing as limiting the free exercise of speech is absurd.

> I see more young people skewing right/centre than I did 10 years ago.

Probably for this reason: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/