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by aquova 1605 days ago
First off, I'd like to see some additional proof that this isn't a hoax. There's other people in that thread claiming it's real, but I have yet to see anything other than the image posted.

Assuming it is real however, this is another baffling decision Youtube has made in recent months. I assume the thought behind this is to try maximize their walled garden in some way, but unlike other sites Youtube has such a long history of being embedded in external sites that they can't block all external access all at once. However, the main continued success of Youtube is arguably the emergence of new viral videos that boost new blood into a position of becoming a long-term profitable creator. This is being done in the name of "small creators" but it seems apparent this will have the opposite effect.

5 comments

(full disclosure, work for Google but not on this)

>Assuming it is real however, this is another baffling decision Youtube has made in recent months... This is being done in the name of "small creators" but it seems apparent this will have the opposite effect.

A few months ago, people with under a thousand subscribers couldn't livestream at all. I think for 99% of situations, "livestreaming with limitations" is going to be a step above "no livestreaming" (unless you think livestreaming in general is bad, and I can see the merits of that viewpoint)

> However, the main continued success of Youtube is arguably the emergence of new viral videos that boost new blood into a position of becoming a long-term profitable creator.

This appears to only be for live streams, not uploaded videos.

The livestream feature has been heavily abused to promoted cryptocurrency scams and rebroadcast copyright material (sports games), among other things. Livestreams are also likely the most computationally expensive videos (on a per-viewer basis) and tend to run for hours, unlike a 10-minute cacheable video.

Honestly this seems reasonable. They don’t want the platform to become a livestream free-for-all and they’re already under fire for hosting scams and misinformation content. Limiting the reach of livestreams from new accounts is fair.

I don't see why we can't have trusted reporters or researchers to have access to Youtube's platform or source code or software documentation to confirm this? How many hours (of us commenting, debating, discussing, people struggling on Reddit, hearsay, fake news, conspiracy theories, etc) are wasted on something that should be a simple "yes/no" response from Youtube? This is a huge waste of human-time and it's such a small one compared to other such examples that I'm surprised no one is looking to tackle it.
I found a benign example from Jan 8 of this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30178196
My guess is far more benign: YouTube operates one of the world's largest CDNs. It takes time to saturate that CDN, but it's necessary in order to serve many of the largest content creators. If a small video, from a historically small content creator, gets too popular, too quickly, they likely, simply, aren't ready at an infrastructure level to serve the video.

And, a moron of a product manager was responsible for trying to word that into an error message that a billion people can understand.

Why would you assume that the person who is paid to do this professionally has less of a clue than you who just... read a reddit comment
My default assumption when interfacing with anything created by YouTube is that the people working on it have, naturally, as much of a clue as anyone, but observing them act with wisdom on that clue is a rare event given the carbon monoxide leak which affects every floor of their headquarters. Except the one home to the team that designs the algorithm recommending pregnant Disney character kidnapping videos to children; the air on that floor is pristine, as their metrics are so high they shattered the ceiling to bring in some fresh air.