Okay. I’m out of YouTube. I refuse to use the service any longer. Recent changes made it very obvious they don’t want users with large archives. The site is very very slow and I have over 30 pages of videos. Browsing to page 28 took me exactly 12 minutes, whereas before the interface update I could just click the page I wanted to see. Turns out a few of my uploaded videos were rejected due to inappropriate content, which I totally don’t get, because nobody got killed, no nudity was shown and no dirty language was in it. It didn’t feature any stolen music and I didn’t sing. Then why is it inappropriate? Because some puritan mind flagged the movie in the hopes it would make the world a better place? Well I’ve had it with these random rejections. I don’t take it anymore. There is totally no way to defend you against this, you get no warning at all if a clip has been flagged, you just have to come to the conclusion whilst browsing your video archive. This particular clip was uploaded in September last year. It’s been on there for months, and all of the sudden the content isn’t appropriate anymore?
I wanted to check out some archives from friends I made through YouTube, but when I opened my subscription list, only 5 people still had a video archive. Nathan got kicked, Professor Smile (who didn’t do anything but sing songs while he played on his guitar and videoblog his thoughts) started again under a new name because his account had been cancelled as well. And the list goes on. I can name you at least 10 other people on my subscription list that either said “screw YouTube” and left or silently took multiple other accounts in the hopes the content would last longer. Well, I’m not taking any more chances. Nathan got his account cancelled because of the Google commercial and some SNL sketches. I’ve had my two strikes with SNL too. The Google commercial is still there. Is it offensive? No. It’s boring as hell. Then why does it get you kicked? Nobody knows. SNL is tricky. YouTube did have a point there. But they warned me fair and square. So I took those videos down.
You can perform searches about almost anything you know from music or tv-shows. All you see are violations. Yet still. They’re allowed. Of course it would be denied if you asked YouTube, because in fact they’re not allowed. But it’s so much and so ubiquitous they can’t manage anymore. Aren’t there any rights on Manga videos? On cartoons? Sure there are. But if YouTube should really do what they state in their chapter, 2/3 of it’s users would be kicked out. And that threatens the business model. So what they do is put out little fires here and there.
It would be quite funny to create fake profiles and go around and flag every violation you see, and keep notes of the ones you’ve flagged. It would keep you busy for weeks. If everybody did this YouTube wouldn’t be as big anymore is it looks now. How come no lawyer collective actually threw itself on this?
I’m not going to upload anything anymore. The people I used to know on YouTube got banned, saw their accounts set to zero or just left by themselves. No matter how hard they try, YouTube isn’t the attractive videohoster it used to be. It became too corporate, too yadda yadda and far too bloathed with options, groups and whatever.
I see TinyPic just started to accept video uploads, and their player looks really slim. You can choose tags to add and the accepted formats: avi, mov, mpeg, asf, wmv, divx, 3gp, qt & dv. I’ll see if this turns out any good.
» Screw YouTube » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel
May 3, 2006 at 6:07 am
[...] Miel’s quit YouTube. Considering he introduced me to the service, which I began to love, contribute to, and trumpet as the next great success story, you’d think I’d be surprised. Not even a little. [...]
Anonymous
May 3, 2006 at 1:25 pm
I don’t know if you realize it, but YouTube isn’t exactly making a profit here. They’re losing money, and they’re losing it fast. That explains why they’ve been doing the things they’re currently doing. I give them credit for even keeping the service up, considering they’re losing so much money. Personally, I don’t think you should bitch about a free service.
Coolz0r
May 3, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Anonymous,
Agreed, the service is free. I didn’t knew they were losing money, from what I’ve heard and read, they collected millions from investors. Could be that I’m wrong. All I’m trying to point out is that I’m not using the service anymore because it’s become slow and unstable. It happens a lot, and I mean more than 3 times a week that the clips don’t load and the thumb doesn’t appear. It brings the blog in a loading loop that takes ages. No thumbnails to announce an update, just a blank space.
Users that are either jealous or just plain stupid go around flagging clips that aren’t really inappropriate, but by flagging the clip make YouTube or its employees think the content IS inappropriate. I’ve had clips deleted because they were violating copyright laws. I know that. I cleaned up my archive myself and removed over 200 clips of which I thought they might be violating these laws. *might*, not *are*. Fact is, if you look at the hall of fame, which I think is the showroom of YouTube, a lot of clips are violating the copyright laws. If not all of them.
Every clip that has an entire song in it, every compilation of a sports event, every manga movie, every 3rd rock from the sun snippet… the list is long. Very long. If YouTube were to put a team on it and actually went ahead with a zero tolerance policy, as they’ve done with some users, I think a large part of the community would be wiped out, and a large part of the content too.
I’ve enjoyed my time at YouTube, and until they started to do all these updates, everything was fine. I don’t need a fancy new player. I just need a ‘play’ button. I don’t need dozens of user groups and adjustable colors in the profile pages. I just want the clips to work and the content that I upload delivered fast. YouTube is becoming way to bloathed. I understand they want to make it a home, and they want to give people the feeling they can customize it anyway they want, but that’s really not necessary. It was fine the way it was. Stylish, relaxed and limited options.
If it would make a difference, I’d be willing to pay a small amount a month to have my videos hosted. But what I really hate is that videos on my blog don’t load, and by clicking on them I have to find out they were removed for some dark reason as ‘inappropriate content’, without having received a warning or without being able to do something about it.
The least I expect from a company who’s service I use is that they alert me when something changes in my account, or when something is about to change. It might be a free service, and that’s great, but if I had known that it would include being the toy of someone’s goodwill, I’d never have started to create an archive in the first place.
Added: For the record: I haven’t been kicked out, I decided to leave.
Homer Jay
May 3, 2006 at 1:55 pm
And this is exactly why I have absolutely no faith in these ‘web 2.0′ sites. They offer the world for free, and inevitably their temperamental users start “demanding” more, and more, and more for that nothing a month. If you were to actually charge them a monthly fee, the demands would shoot up even higher!
Trying to make money off ADD-addled teens and ingrates is a losing proposition. Expect to see YouTube dying a .com death 1999-style.
Rob
May 3, 2006 at 2:13 pm
I’m not disagreeing with your arguments. However, with bandwidth charges approaching $1 million per month (see link), I can understand why they may be making policy changes.
http://www.forbes.com/home/intelligentinfrastructure/2006/04/27/video-youtube-myspace_cx_df_0428video.html
Coolz0r
May 3, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Again: I’d be willing to pay, if that would ensure my content to be mine, including possible risk of laws I’d be breaking when I want to keep ‘my’ archive of commercials.
Coolz0r
May 3, 2006 at 2:26 pm
And in reply to your link, Rob (thanx for that, by the way):
“A home-made video of two boys lip-synching along to the Pokémon television theme song. Internet video site YouTube has streamed the video more than 9.5 million times in the last four months, making it the site’s most-watched movie. ” –> theme song is copyrighted. If they’d removed it, according to their policy, that would’ve saved them a lot of bandwidth. Using the entire song exceeds ‘fair use’, I think.
Also:
Nobody ever complained about the ads. It’s logical to have ads, especially when you’re a free service. If you have 12.9 unique visitors a month and you still can’t make it profitable, you better stop doing whatever it is you do. They should’ve had ads from the start. Nobody would’ve said anything about it.
Weblogs Work: Social Media Consultants
May 3, 2006 at 4:47 pm
[...] Seems like some folks are getting bent out of shape about YouTube policies. (We heart YouTube as a viewer, but haven't really published much there.) [...]
Michael Eisenberg
May 3, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Try Metacafe.com. better user experience and community can be trusted.
Jim Thompson
May 3, 2006 at 6:57 pm
Try Vimeo, http://vimeo.com/
They have just converted to a Flash player similar to (but better than, I think) YouTube’s player. Their video quality is better because they use a higher bit rate than YouTube. On the other hand, you can only upload 30 MB per week, which is on the stingy side.
My notes on Vimeo and YouTube:
blogs.chron.com/makingmovies/archives/2006/04/youtube…
blogs.chron.com/makingmovies/archives/2006/04/viewer_changes…
blogs.chron.com/makingmovies/archives/2006/04/video_quality_…
Coolz0r
May 3, 2006 at 8:48 pm
Hmm. The post made it to CNN (thanks for the link, Peter)
money.cnn.com/2006/05/03/technology/…
User Revolt on YouTube @ Alice Hill’s Real Tech News - Independent Tech
May 4, 2006 at 1:24 am
[...] “Yesterday, blogger and longtime YouTuber Miel Vanopstal lost his cool in a post titled “Screw YouTube.” Vanopstal complains that YouTube’s recent upgrades have made the site significantly slower, and that new efforts to enforce copyright and delete otherwise questionable material strike him as arbitrary. He is particularly galled that a single alert notice from a “puritanically minded” fellow user can result in a video being deleted. “I’ve had it with these random rejections,” he writes. [...]
Jim Thompson
May 4, 2006 at 1:40 am
YouTube claims they give the accused the chance to make a DMCA counter-claim:
What if I have been falsely accused of copyright infringement?
We’ll let you know if we receive a copyright complaint about any of your video content that is hosted on YouTube. We’ll also give you the opportunity to file a DMCA counter-notification. (http://www.youtube.com/t/help)
Did YouTube give you any such opportunity in denying your uploads?
Thomas Skermil
May 4, 2006 at 1:40 am
I have tried eVideoShare.
Doesn’t seem like too much traffic there yet – the speed looks pretty adequate!
Mister Moy
May 4, 2006 at 1:54 am
Man, I gotta say, fuck YouTube, but fuck copyright harder.
Anon
May 4, 2006 at 2:18 am
Dude, quit your bitching, you whiny little emo faggot.
If you want a massive archive of your videos online, rent a webserver, or space on someone elses.
Fucking cheap ass lazy little trick
Anon
May 4, 2006 at 2:19 am
Your fucking little peice of shit blog has more ads than youtube
for a pissant worthless little blogsite
Joe
May 4, 2006 at 2:22 am
I think you are entitled to a full refund, take them to collections.
Homer Jay
May 4, 2006 at 2:23 am
Yeah, who do these authors of original works think they are? The nerve of them trying to make sure they have some control and/or income from their work!
Coolz0r
May 4, 2006 at 2:29 am
@ Jim: “We’ll let you know if we receive a copyright complaint about any of your video content that is hosted on YouTube.” – True, after they’ve taken down the clip, YouTube sends you a notification that one of your videos was violating the terms. I’ve never seen an actual request from NBC (I think they own SNL, don’t they?), so there was nothing I could fight against. Also: if you decide to fight it, the content still remains removed. You could upload it again, but then the original link wouldn’t work anymore, so you’d have to go make changes to your blogposts.
I’ve never seen any legal claim from a third party and I’ve always believed YouTube if they said there was one. I don’t doubt that. I don’t say they were wrong. The SNL clips are copyrighted and all SNL content has been removed from the servers, by YouTube. Because they had to.
But there’s a difference between having a video that’s taken down because of copyright violation (which results in an email) or having one removed because of ‘inappropriate content’, which is done silently and you’ll never find out unless you browse through your archive and see that it has been removed. Why? Because in the first case, YouTube probably received the request externally, from a lawyer or law firm or through some agreement, and in the second case, it’s done from within – meaning somebody was offended by the clip and flagged it for bad content.
I’ve requested decent information about this and all I got was: sorry, we can’t check everything. It’s possible the video didn’t contain bad content, but it was flagged, and thus removed.
Lately, I’ve seen notifications pop up, (only if you’re logged in), that alerted users if a clip was flagged by the community. The notifications aren’t shown to outside users, I tried it by logging out and then accessing the same clip. Only members of YouTube get the annoying splash screen.
16 year old girls shaking their butt, porn chicks in thongs, live footage of police chases, violent cartoons… My content was nothing of that at all, and still it suddenly disappeared. I don’t even know the exact date, because I didn’t get a notification. All I know is that it happened between february and now.
It’s the second sort of rejections that I object to because they are based on personal taste, which always comes down to a clash between lovers and haters. But the lovers have nothing to defend them with against the haters. If you create 5 blank fake profiles and start flagging around, be sure you’ll get what you want: content removal for that certain author.
matthew
May 4, 2006 at 6:00 am
I was just talking to my developer the other day . I said to him youtube.com is just a fancy video hoster which will fail because they don’t want to get bought out. I read they have 1 million dollars in bandwidth costs alone! that isn’t good BUSINESS sense!
anyways the model will work will be my software http://www.mexbrowser.com it allows you to share ANY size, ANY TYPE of media formate instantly!
GIVE A GO PEOPLE WE NEED MORE PEOPLE!
John
May 4, 2006 at 6:03 am
You said:
‘I’d be willing to pay, if that would ensure my content to be mine, including possible risk of laws I’d be breaking when I want to keep my archive of commercials.’
Except that the ‘risk of laws’ isn’t solely yours to bear. YouTube has to bear some of the responsibility, too, which clearly it is trying to get out from under. It’s nice of you to offer to bear that responsibility. It’s presumptuous of you to offer that YouTube take on that responsibility, too.
If you don’t like the way YouTube runs their gig, start your own YouTube. Good luck with that.
Deirdré Straughan
May 4, 2006 at 8:45 am
If you want to service-hop, there are lots of video hosting sites out there with more springing up all the time – see http://www.beginningwithi.com/vlog/test.html for several dozen in a head-to-head comparison.
But the easiest long-term solution is to pay for your own hosting. There are incredible deals out there right now (I use DreamHost, but there are others) with tons of storage space and huge bandwidth allotments to satisfy the most prolific videoblogger.
Coolz0r
May 4, 2006 at 8:56 am
I’m currently paying for my hosting myself and I don’t think I can pull videohosting. I pay $450 a year already, I could probably upgrade, but I don’t think that’s the answer. I liked it when there was a uniformity in the clips, that they were all transcoded to one and the same format and that they were displayed in one and the same player. I can’t do that, that’s why I’m looking for ‘online alternatives’.
Another Idiot
May 4, 2006 at 11:12 am
Oh, boohoo my free webservice doesn’t do what I want.
Cry me a goddamned river, or better yet, make a better service yourself. It is a free net, enjoy it while it lasts.
Gordon
May 4, 2006 at 11:23 am
Lol..yeah make ur self a better service, and ur url is way too cheesy for a video service LOLOL coolz0r!!!!….looser!
Coolz0r
May 4, 2006 at 11:29 am
At least my name isn’t Gordon.
Gordon
May 4, 2006 at 11:31 am
Yeah,, everyone don’t use real name on the net. Don’t you realize that?
blog.forret.com | Youtube bandwidth: terabytes per day
May 4, 2006 at 11:54 am
[...] Youtube seems to be losing some of its early adopters: Coolz0r quits the service, while Nathan even embarks on a grassroots activism mission to ruin the company (by getting its most popular uploaders banned – I have mixed feelings about that one). The issue is: to protect themselves from lawsuits, Youtube is taking the approach of deleting videos and even users upon first suspicion of (copyright) problems. They already gave an ultimatum from NBC in Feb, then a proof to Jason Calacanis that it was ‘not a real business‘. [...]
Grant Gochnauer - Blog : Technology : Foundation » News From The Web
May 4, 2006 at 1:18 pm
[...] YouTube sees user rebellion MORE HERE EVEN MORE [...]
David
May 4, 2006 at 3:36 pm
You’re right. YouTube is going down the pan.
Musings of the Great Eric » Blog Archive » YouTube figures out how to solve it’s financial woes
May 4, 2006 at 5:31 pm
[...] Hypergrowth comes with hyper-growing pains — just ask YouTube. The online video-sharing site is facing a rebellion among the formerly faithful. Yesterday, blogger and longtime YouTuber Miel Vanopstal lost his cool in a post titled “Screw YouTube.” Vanopstal complains that YouTube’s recent upgrades have made the site significantly slower, and that new efforts to enforce copyright and delete otherwise questionable material strike him as arbitrary. He is particularly galled that a single alert notice from a “puritanically minded” fellow user can result in a video being deleted. “I’ve had it with these random rejections,” he writes. [...]
Anonymous
May 4, 2006 at 6:32 pm
photobucket.com is another youtube alternative.
For those who say kwitcherbitchin about a free service, it is the USERS who are bringing other ad-clicking USERS to their site by submitting videos (for which Youtube pays NOTHING). If users are expected to submit content to them for free, they can expect good service in return.
Unfortunately youtube is no longer cool, mostly because of their slow site that takes 30 minutes on broadband to download a single 30 second video.
Too bad, it could have been something good!
Maku
May 4, 2006 at 6:56 pm
YouTube does indeed suck. Thats all I got to say…
wade
May 4, 2006 at 7:05 pm
On this matter I can give a few facts.:
I have personally contacted YouTube about copyright violations, and when they got back with me I found out this. If you arent the original author of the video you are complaining about, then you are screwed.
The DMCA seems like it was designed to protect the people who are in the wrong. Also, these sites make killings from ad revenue alone. If you think they dont, then you are only fooling yourself.
I tried to start up a group on myspace about this issue http://www.myspace.com/stealing_is_bad
but nobody seems to care much. Glad to see someone is on their tails besides me.
Joseph
May 4, 2006 at 7:14 pm
All,
Check out Sharkle.com. They have great techonolgy (flash converter is the best, in my opinion) and hear they are releasing a new site soon. Should be faster and sleaker.
Haven’t heard of some of the others, but will check them out…
G
May 4, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Just grow up, get out of the house abit.
Boz
May 4, 2006 at 7:25 pm
bing bada a bing bing bing…sharkle is the word! screw youtube…
Mara
May 4, 2006 at 8:21 pm
I love how people love to complain, bitch, whine, and complain some more. YouTube is a free service and if they starting charging -prior to changing their interface- your post would’ve been about ‘Screw YouTube this and Screw YouTube that’ since they’re charging for something that used to be free… and how they’re ’selling out’ and ‘going corporate’ on you. Give me a break. Get off of your computer, get out there and find something real and worthwhile to complain about. Something that people *actually* care about.
Coolz0r
May 4, 2006 at 8:40 pm
Dear Mara,
Thank you for sharing your valuable opinion. If you’d have cared to read what I’ve written, you’d have seen that in fact I don’t even mind to pay for a service like YouTube, and yes, even if they started charging before the interface change you refer to, and even before the dozens of other interface changes before that; if that would guarantee my movies to be left alone by the rest of the community and if it would make the service run faster I’d sign up right away. I bet you I’ve been on YouTube from before you even knew it existed. I’m there since July of last year. I know where they come from, I just don’t like where they’re heading to. There’s absolutely nothing wrong about having a business model and making money. There’s nothing wrong with being corporate. But if you try to be corporate and only do it every now and then, almost randomly, something doesn’t feel right. That’s why I expressed my thoughts and vented them on this blog. But hey, thanks for coming by.
bittorrent
May 5, 2006 at 12:14 am
You talk about ‘your content’. It sounds to me that it was all stolen copyright material. If it isn’t specifically in the public domain and not a very small extract used as ‘fair use’ then it is copyright material and used illegally.
You need to learn about the copyright laws.
bittorrent
May 5, 2006 at 12:15 am
And if YouTube started charging they would then be profiting from stolen content.
colin
May 5, 2006 at 2:34 am
Friends,
May I recommend a site that a few friends and I have made called:
http://www.138fx.com
We decided to offer an unlimited size/length policy (all FREE of course), plus a lot of cool social sorting features. We just got it done and are looking for members to check it out and give us feedback on it. We want to dev this site with an open source like policy of listening to the community so please check it out, sign up, upload stuff, and let me know what you think !!
Digi Vid
May 5, 2006 at 4:34 pm
I’ve been checking out vMix.com. They review every piece of content before it is placed on the site and they just upgraded their Flash encoding something or other which makes my videos play back with pretty nice quality.
Colin How
May 5, 2006 at 10:46 pm
If you have a tonne of stuff and dont want to spend time uploading try PiXPO. http://www.pixpo.com
anon
May 6, 2006 at 9:05 pm
it sounds like you were violating copyright laws. you don’t seem to respond to critics who point out this obvious fact. how about responding to the elephant in the room, instead of focusing your responses on the ad hominem attacks?
the law is what the law is. my sympathies are with these free host sites whose members seem to think it is okay to replicate and distribute copywritten video, music, etc. it’s the abuse that wrecks the site. the site is the risk-taker, you’re just some poor dumb bastard that doesn’t want to play by the Terms of Service and is willing to dump that risk off onto the provider. pay a fee, as you threaten, big deal, that’s what professionals do……
how about displaying a little creativity and sticking to posting original content? that’s what the free sites are actually intended for….duh. not for you to host your personal SNL favorites. why don’t you get out your camera and shoot something, upload it, synch it to a little freeplay.com music, or some garageband loops, and show us what you got?
Coolz0r
May 7, 2006 at 1:48 am
I was, and am still violating copyrights. My account is still online. Yes, there were some SNL clips in it, but not a lot. Maybe 4 or 5. Some of them of which I didn’t even knew they were SNL. I’m from Europe, Belgium. I don’t watch or have the channel that airs those clips or shows. I just thought they were funny so I uploaded them. 99 % of the clips in my account were and still are pure commercials. Now it’s 100%, since YouTube helped me or advised me to moderate the entire account. Everything in that account (username: coolz0r) is 100% not my content. I never claimed any rights to it.
I agree, the law is the law. I never said YouTube was wrong for removing the SNL clips.
I’m just saying that I think that, from my point of view, commercials should be an exception in the copyright law. I pay for cable, I pay for television. I get advertisement jammed in my throat every time I turn on the television. Advertisement is worth nothing without a captive audience. If I want to talk about creative or interesting commercials or discuss them on this blog, from a marketing point of view, I think that I should be allowed to.
I don’t need to display creativity. I’m not going to make commercials myself, my intentions were not to make an archive of my personal SNL favorites. All I wanted was a site/service that would host these commercials and display them continuously on this blog.
I don’t threaten to pay a fee, I pointed out that I’m willing to do that, if it would make a difference. I’m not a lawyer, I’m just a guy who loves ads. As weird as it sounds. Every single clip I uploaded has been forwarded to me by email. Agreed, without thinking I uploaded the remarkable ones to YouTube. That was dumb, but this sort of content is what made YouTube big and popular. It’s the same sort of content that is going to bring YouTube down.
I never uploaded samples from tv shows, the way you can find snippets from ‘3rd rock from the sun’, ‘That 70s Show’ or for that matter any show you can imagine. I don’t rip tv shows to put them online. Check out my account and see for yourself. I still don’t think I did anything wrong, except for the SNL clips, which YouTube pointed out to me, and which I immediately deleted on request.
Mike
May 8, 2006 at 1:11 am
Seems to me that a lot of the comments above are surround around the fact that YouTube is a FREE service. Some of the posts make it seem as if YouTube is some kind of not for profit organization and that it is a big deal that they are losing a lot of money. WHO CARES?! So they are losing money now, but guess what, so was Myspace and it sold for over $600,000,000!! So why has it not come across to anyone that maybe one day the owners will sell the site to a buyer for a ton of money and never work again?!
techgal
May 8, 2006 at 9:31 pm
Check out http://www.clipshack.com. Streaming Flash, fast, new version of site coming out this month.
Pietel.be » Blog Archive » Video: excuse to try.
May 10, 2006 at 9:12 am
[...] De video staat ook op deze YouTube pagina (maar dat mogen we niet meer gebruiken van Miel) Een google video versie komt is al onderweg. [...]