I don’t quite know if this is an early April’s fools joke, but I just saw YouTube has built in yet another obstruction in their video display mode. I followed a link Randy had put on his blog to an Office XP commercials (that apparently has been uploaded many times) and all of the sudden there’s this warning page I’m directed to that says:
This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube’s user community.
By clicking “Confirm,” you are agreeing that all videos flagged by the YouTube community will be viewable by this account.
Here’s the message, as described above:
The (fake?) commercial itself doesn’t show any nudity, there’s no explicit scenes, there’s no extreme violence whatsoever. Agreed, for Microsoft’s image, the ad is a bit risqué, but still… what’s up with this? There are thousands of videos that feature far more worse content than this one…
Here’s the YouTube link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=CFKTGpUoens
Really. I wonder how much further you can bring it. Either the movie gets flagged, verified and then removed or you remove the flag and let it go live. This ‘in between’ thing is just ridiculous. Every movie has its fans and its haters. Either the content is ok to go live or not.
The sad part is, you only get the message when you’re logged in. A small but subtle WTF comes in one’s mind as he begins to wonder how much more YouTube is going to do to pester their existing users. I’m getting pretty tired of all these warnings and limitations. I like the service, but all this extra stuff that pops up, all these restrictions… pffff. I definitely don’t like it.