AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Okay, so I've been partaking in Twitters reaction to Trumps convention speech. You know, for people who are apparently terrified that Trump is the next Hitler and the U.S is waltzing down the same path as Germany 1932, they sure seem content to limiting their protests to talking about how scared they are on social media.

I hate how the media is focusing on him and only him. Dammit, that's exactly what he wants, he's a megalomaniac addicted to attention.

The more face time he gets, the more people start thinking that a Trump presidency is "inevitable". Which is not good.

Tabloid media is dependant on ratings, you want that to change, you have to stop watching/reading/clicking first, and tht has bodaciously never happened once in the history of news.

France wants the world to fight back against encryption, wants to work with Germany to get a European anti-encryption initiative and later on a global one.

This is textbook stuff; France has suffered a sizable string of terrorist acts and wants to stop them from happening. Problem is, the solution they came up with would leave holes in formerly-secure apps used by a large quantity of people. The even bigger problem is that they want to export this solution to the rest of the world. A bigger problem than that is that terrorists will just use encryption software they code themselves or buy encryption software from whoever's selling.

The end result is likely innocent Muslims will be racially profiled and tracked through unencrypted messaging channels and everyone will be more vulnerable to cyber-attacks by hackers looking to steal identities and likely the very terrorists that this "initiative" was supposed to protect people from. France needs to brush up on their Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.

To anyone who thinks this is a good idea, realise that this is the equivalent of removing locks on EVERY door in your country. Any service you are using just got compromised. When you send your payment information across the web, it will be impossible to make sure it's secure. Your passwords are all in plain sight. Anything you do on a local web will be visible to everyone. The password to your WiFi will be broadcasted and anyone can listen for it and connect to your network and spend your bandwidth for anything they want.

In short, it will be a disaster. This is not a good idea and will only serve to undermine your freedom and your security. This is the direct opposite of improving the state of the country. You might trade away a few terrorist attacks, but at the cost of increased cyber crime and stopping any service on the internet from functioning properly.

Yesterday popular YouTuber Philip DeFranco made a video talking about how he had been notified that quite a few of his videos had been demonetized because they weren't "advertiser-friendly". He sort of misrepresented the issue, as this wasn't anything particularly new, with the "advertiser-friendly" guidelines having been in the ToS all this time and YouTube has been demonetizing videos all this time. It's just that they're now actively notifying creators via email rather than placing that indication somewhere out of the way. Also, alongside the notifications they're adding an appeal process through which one can appeal the de-monetization of their videos.

Also in the YouTube guidelines about advertiser-friendly content is a caveat that “If the video does contain inappropriate content, the context is usually newsworthy or comedic and the creator’s intent is to inform or entertain (not offend or shock).” It could very well be that alongside this notification and appeals change, their system got tripped up and a now a large number of false positives are being reported, or creators that put out a lot of content over the course of the year are now noticing just how many of their videos get de-monetized.

Hopefully the drama-storm over this will die out in a few days. I'm tired of YouTube doing something and people overreacting and making a big deal out of it for a week or more.

Their guidelines allow them to demonetize pretty much anything they want though, including 99% of music videos.

Not to mention they've already demonetized peole with videos about handling suicide, dealing with depression, skin care, or even just news stories. Its therozed it has to do with tags and not content since there is an invisible blacklist of tags that advertisers must opt in to
(source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUkj4h_Tq-0 ) which they usually don't. This extends out to the previous issue of youtube relying heavily on automation and bots to dish out copyright strikes, demonitization, and takedowns. Most youtubes cannot do anything about it until theyre above a certain threshold and gets more favorable support or at least knows someone on the inside Even then the process can take a long time to even find out WHY something got hit.When you have overtly vague policies of "excessive language" , or "controversial content" coupled with heavily inconsistent strikes (a problem theyve had already for a lomg time) you have a major issue. This sudden publicizing of these demonitzations has only amplified how bad youtube is at being consistent.
Example situation:
https://twitter.com/PhillyD/status/7711 ... 50048?s=09

Whatever your opinions of Phillip are, its still a clear issue of Youtube not having its shit together and shooting its creators in the foot at the same time. When people make a living off of youtube, they have a rught to be upset when they fuck around with them and give them the runaround when they want to know why. Its not "drama", this isnt some bullshit highschool gossip club its peoples jobs and the competency of a major company yanking around the people who make cheddar from them and for them. It would be one thing if all of these people were seriosuly violating community guidelines but the sheer number of false positives and appeals coming out of this say otherwise.

Well maybe if the site's biggest creators were willing to utilize fact-laden videos about what this policy actually is and the problems surrounding it to ask their communities to put pressure on YouTube to become more consistent and user-friendly (improve automated systems, increase human presence for checking appeals on strikes and other things, rework the appeals processes in general to make them speedier), then things could move forward. As it stands right now, they seem more interested in riling people up so they can grab those juicy views and subs. TotalBiscuit's spending the weekend at PAX West so sadly he won't have a video about this up until next week. Shame, that; he's often the only adult in the room when everybody else goes on their whole "YouTube is ruined!" shpiels.

Isn't that what they're doing? I don't even know this guy but this is bodaciously just him reading the list of guidelines and giving examples. You can whine about it being sensationalist or whatever, but that's really the only way you get people to watch something and care about it. If nobody watches your video you wasted your time.

Also, this completely unreasonable policy is likely a ploy that they plan to backtrack on so they can later push a milder but still draconian policy with much less community protest.

Many of the people affected have been laying out the guidelines in videos and twitter, but the problem stems from how vague the guidelines are and how hard it is to get a straight answer from YouTube. With how many people are having to appeal their videos, its clear not even Youtube is sure what coinstitues a violation and is just opting for the bot-run nuclear approch, shoot first ask questions later. Calling people immature and attention whoring for being upset about Youtubes clearly broken and overly heavy handed attempt at enforcement is in itself immature. Youre both condeming them for riling up their viewers and garnering their attention for their problems and at the same time saying they should rile up their fans and pressure Youtube because of their problems.

Notice how I said "fact-laden". He calls them the "new" ToS when it's been pointed out multiple times by multiple sources that they aren't new. What I'm talking about is the people with a million+ subscribers (people that fans will watch videos from, regardless of a sensationalist/unsensationalist tone) sitting down and discussing what's true, what's false, and what YouTube needs to change up to improve its standing and become a place that creators want to use rather than have to use because it's the only game in town. Instead we have heavy-hitters like Cr1TiKaL making a video titled "How YouTube Could Fall" talking about how PewdiePie can't make any cheddar off of his videos anymore because he cusses a lot.

I'm probably overlooking something, but isnt the underlying issue that advertisers dont want to be associated with certain topics and are putting pressure on YouTube to enforce what they want? And... well, isnt that kind of within their rights? They're the advertisers, they can decide which kind of content their products are associated with. Yeah,YouTube's attempt at enforcement is clumsy and draconian but they dont exactly have an incentive to improve the service since any attempt at protesting is barely a drop in the bucket for them.

You're right that advertisers don't want to be associated with certain things. YouTube could do more to help them out as well. I feel that alongside this increased level of transparency and the addition of an appeals process for their demonetization system, they should have added (or at least announced that they were working on adding) some kind of option for the creator to tell YouTube "Hey, this is a sensitive/controversial topic" or "Hey, this video has mature content in it" and then work to find appropriate ads for it. I have a loose understanding of how companies purchase ads for video websites, but I don't think it would be too difficult for the ad server to see check-mark X or Y and serve up an appropriate ad from a company willing to opt-in to have their product or service promoted on those videos.

Having ads that mesh well with the content in the video they're paired up with alongside the newly-introduced increased transparency about demonetization and an appeals process would make YouTube more inviting to your average users, content creators, and advertisers. YouTube/Google does have an incentive to improve their service in that other big tech companies could muscle in and gain market share off of Youtube's failures to acknowledge and address key problems. I still feel that its biggest creators need to go about asking YouTube to improve through a more nuanced manner than they have in the past, however; pressure to change has to come from both sides.