Tag Archives: YouTube

Tech Giants Too Powerful, Need Policing

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The famous quote from Lord Acton—“Absolute power corrupts absolutely”—is a good guide to compiling a list of the companies that are likely to need policing. The list is pretty short—Amazon, Facebook, Google (including YouTube), Twitter, and Uber (perhaps). And the effect on humankind (especially children) is pretty severe. Amazon is now so large and powerful that it is in danger of being prosecuted under the antitrust laws.

And Facebook and Google make bags of money from advertisers, and have a continuing series of privacy violations.

Fortunately, a handful of Silicon Valley notables have become activist vigilantes. And they are aiming at kids to use their smartphones for healthy purposes rather than wasting time on useless social apps.

Needless Tech Giants’ Hiring Worsens Silicon Valley Housing Shortages and Traffic Jams

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We have twice before posted strong pleas for the giant tech companies—especially Alphabet/Google/YouTube, Apple, and Facebook—to stop expanding their Silicon Valley facilities rather than creating/expanding sizable operations in other cities. They’re mostly software companies, which could be located anyplace with high-speed data transmission capabilities!!! Are these companies afflicted by cases of hubris?

We wonder why all those cities who were campaigning for the Amazon HQ2 aren’t similarly campaigning for expansions of other tech giants.

We also wonder why Silicon Valley communities have not been able to either (1) extract enough money from these companies to compensate the many victims (long commutes, wasted time in traffic jams, inability to find housing, homelessness, etc., or (2) tax the companies so much that it makes it uneconomic to expand there.

Other organizations that are keeping up the good fight include the San Francisco Peninsula Resident Association.

Tech Can Help or Hurt – Part 5: Angry YouTube Video Creator “Goes Postal”

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Though YouTube was a great technological achievement by its original developers, more recently YouTube management has made a lot of video creators bitterly angry by their actions that started deliberately de-monetizing YouTubers since June, 2017. But not angry enough to shoot three YouTube employees at their San Bruno, CA headquarters and commit suicide on April 3, as Nasim Najafi Aghdam did. For many of these video producers, their anger was due to the pressure from advertisers who deplored YouTube’s running their ads preceding objectionable video content.

Unfortunately for a lot of people (including us at Technology Bloopers), in mid-2017, YouTube changed their monetization rules and instead of immediate monetization, they required that all YouTube channels had to exceed 10,000 views before they could make any money from advertisements that played in conjunction with their video creations. And in early 2018 YouTube upped their monetization ante by requiring each channel to have had 4,000 hours of watcher time during the preceding 12 months plus 1,000 subscribers. While there is no law against YouTube’s actions, many of these actions were a shock to the video creators—who had invested a lot of effort to produce entertaining or informative content and who highly valued—in monetary or artistic terms—a way to present them and some, like the YouTube shooter, relied on the income they received from monetizing their videos on YouTube..

The shooter felt that she had been especially victimized, not only by the numerical requirements that easily overwhelm small, independent video producers, but also by her perception of YouTube’s censoring of some of her content, and took revenge with a pistol. And the current vogue for shooting up a group perceived to be the reason for an individual’s economic or moral discomfort very likely gave her both a method and additional motivation.

Technology Can Help or Hurt – Part 3: Large-Scale Deaths or History-Altering Events Enabled by Technology

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Even more dangerous to individuals, America, and the whole world, are the loopholes in the processes at internet giants like Facebook and Google. Technology is evolving faster than it can be controlled by either man or machine. And since these companies make most of their money by selling ads, exciting events—whether or not correctly reported on—boost their revenues and profits.

The technology of rapid-fire firearms that are available to crazed murderers like Craig Paddock who murdered dozens and injured hundreds in Las Vegas on October 1, is the most serious recent example. That technology was not kept in check by proper rules (and their enforcement) regarding what firearms can be sold to whom. On the information side Facebook and Google allowed two known rightwing “hate news” sites to post incorrect information unfettered, for minutes in the case of Facebook and for hours in the case of Google. All the information gaps here can can ultimately be traced to errors by humans, either failures in the basic design and implementation of the laws/rules or in the software, or in the review by people. Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle, and is misusing its powers.

Beyond such “fake news”, which can be distributed widely and quickly, the very content of the ads can be hurtful. Facebook and Google (including YouTube) apparently accepted a considerable number of ads from Russia supporting Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. Since those ads were paid for, which is how those companies make money, they were motivated to accept them. Apparently only in retrospect did they investigate, after which they reported on what happened, but Facebook, at least, didn’t tell the whole story.

Like the old saw “Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it” (including President Trump, who refuses to recognize global warming), there doesn’t yet seem to be any consequences for these tech giants. But change may be in the offing from places like Stanford University, which has launched a new Global Digital Policy Incubator, with a speech by Hillary Clinton. We can only hope that we can get the genie back into the bottle, by getting these tech giants under control … if that is possible.

Silicon Valley Continues to Be #1 Technology Hub; Why Not Boulder, CO or Ithaca, NY?

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Despite our repeated reminders that the multiple woes—especially housing prices, traffic gridlock, and long commutes—of tech companies’ building large staffs in the San Francisco/San Jose area, nearly all of these mainly-software organizations continue to ignore the logic of setting up new operations in other cities in the U.S. And these other cities would love to have them locate their operations in their respective cities. This phenomenon, coupled with the September 13 opening of the vaunted Cornell Tech in New York City, is so noticeable that Bloomberg Businessweek went to considerable effort to prepare a pictogram for its September 11 issue that includes about 300 metro areas (but they do not appear to be the 300 most populous cities in the U.S.) is so detailed that they couldn’t include it in their online version and an article apparently so basic that they couldn’t include it in their print version. On the horizontal (“good stuff”)axis it combined nine positive ways: rates of college education, science and engineering majors, top universities, headquarters of big tech companies, venture capital investment, share of jobs in computer-systems design and related services, broadband subscription rates, independent coffee shops (huh??),and commutes by bike/public transportation/on foot. On the vertical (“bad stuff”) axis it combined three negative ways: high home prices, lots of income inequality, and long drive times. It weighted these 12 ways equally (what else could they do?) and plotted a scattergram with city names as labels. In the upper lefthand corner (high on both good stuff and bad stuff) is the San Francisco/San Jose area (Silicon Valley), which is in the biggest “quadrant” (the quadrants are quite unequal in area) called “Both the good and the bad of Silicon Valley”. The upper righthand quadrant is “Unequal and expensive, but not techie”, the lower lefthand quadrant is “Tech without the downsides”, and the lower righthand quadrant is “ Least like the Bay Area”. The authors highlighted Boston (not surprisingly, due to its many good universities and Route 128 tech companies), Boulder, Co (high percent of households with broadband access), and Ithaca, NY (low housing cost). Ithaca??!! Well, it’s home of Cornell University which, together with partner Israel’s Technion, created Cornell Tech, and it’s the most techie of the Ivy League. (It’s also our home town, with nice summers, but awful winters … especially compared with Silicon Valley.)

Crowdsourcing Companies Likely Can’t Boost YouTube Views. Can Proxy Servers?

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The old adage “If it seems to be too good to be true, it probably is”. That is, it’s NOT true. Crowdsourcing companies promise a lot more than they can deliver. Our previous post proved to be way too optimistic when we tried to get a couple of those companies to actually deliver those views. What we found was that some proxy servers MIGHT do so.

However, it seems that proxy servers are as much of a bag of snakes as crowdsourcing entities. We noted during our experiments with crowdsourcing companies that some of them proposed to use proxy servers, or actually did so, but they apparently did not succeed in adding more than a handful of views. That apparently was because YouTube is too clever, and they disqualified most of the views for a variety of reasons. For example, if the crowdsource operative used a proxy server located in a country other than his/her own (which they could tell if the visiting IP was from one country in one time zone but the time of the computer to which the IP was attached was set to a different time zone), YouTube disqualified those views.

The other challenge is that most proxy server folks want to be paid in Bitcoin. While you can use dollars or credit cards or gift cards at sites like Paxful, they can be pretty expensive.

The bottom line is that many owners of YouTube channels may find it too expensive and time-consuming to boost their view counts via crowdsourcing or proxy servers.

YouTube’s New 10K Views Minimum: Triumph of Quantity Over Quality, Bonanza for Crowdsourcing Companies

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YouTube makes money by putting advertisements on video channels, but advertisers are increasingly restive because some of those channels show terrorists attacks or racist rants. Ironically, the terrorists and racists could have earned money via YouTube’s AdSense program. Additionally, some YouTube channels have been stealing others’ content (and associated AdSense payments). Unfortunately, this new rule disenfranchises the millions of YouTube video creators who have not yet reached 10,000 views of their channels. According to Internet data firm Pex, 88 percent of all YouTube channels have fewer than 10,000 views.

YouTube’s new policy should create a bonanza for the numerous organizations who provide low-cost labor for doing a wide range of tasks on the Web that are more suited for humans than software, because many of sub-10K view channel owners can flock to them to boost their view counts. The most famous of these is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. When we first heard of what appeared to be slave labor, we were affronted, but when we found that people as ethical as Stanford University researchers used Mechanical Turk we were somewhat mollified. And we quickly learned that it would only cost about one cent to have one of these low-paid “slaves” watch a video for the 30 seconds that is needed to create a “view”, so it would only cost about $100.00 to rack up 10K views. This means that essentially ANY channel owner—including terrorists, racists, and plagiarists–could exceed YouTube’s 10K requirement.

Social Media, Especially Facebook, Unfortunately Hijacks Users of the Web … But “Better Web” May Reverse That

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Facebook and a handful of other social media are so entrenched that few people think about life before them. But the Web was conceived 15 years before Facebooks’s founding in 2004. Facebook put a pretty face on the Web, and billions of people have flocked to it. And Google Search, YouTube, and a handful of other giants –fueled by tons of advertising revenues—exercise a lot of control over what people can see and do, so much so that there is growing sentiment about breaking up these monopolistic organizations. And delivering fake news or vicious propaganda from the likes of ISIS (ironically ISIS can even get PAID by YouTube while it disseminates its messages of hatred) adds further pressure for this breakup.

It will take more time, but help may be on the way from the original creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee. He is working towards a “Better Web” where users’ control their own (private) data. One group that should benefit from greater control of their data is musicians. The title of Jonathan Taplin’s new book, “Move Fast and Break Things”, may even have caused Facebook to foresightedly replace their eponymous former motto with “Move Fast With Stable Infra(structure)”.

YouTube Takes Bigger Slice of Overall Television Pie

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Google is certainly getting a lot out of the $1.76 billion they spent buying YouTube almost exactly 10 years ago today. As of early 2013 YouTube was experiencing one billion unique viiewes/visitors every month, nearly one out of every two people on the Internet, use it for myriad purposes. Anyone at all can upload or watch videos of cats or dancing babies, and Google benefits because it can charge advertisers to put ads adjacent to those videos.

But either Google had great vision a decade ago or they have more recently realized that they have a great medium, arguably better than conventional television. However, a recent study by Nielsen and Google shows that YouTube and conventional (“linear”) TV may be more complementary than competitive. People are watching TV on YouTube and they are watching YouTube on their TVs, so the gap between the two media is shrinking. In fact, it is shrinking so much that Google has just signed up CBS for its imminent web TV service. And, notwithstanding some folks’ criticisms of CBS, its leader seems to be pretty savvy.

The Witches’ Brew that is YouTube

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Google presciently bought YouTube from its founders in October 2006, “betting that the popular video-sharing site will provide it an increasingly lucrative marketing hub as more viewers and advertisers migrate from television to the Internet.” Silly us. We thought that YouTube was something that individuals could use to entertain ourselves, and that popular ones would bring their originators (and Google) some (or a lot) of money from ads.

Well, Google sure isn’t making it easy for individuals, thanks to the messy combinations of accounts, email addresses, channels, and browsers that makes it a nightmare to find videos once you have more than one of each of these four entities. And to make matters worse, Google threw its failing Google+ social network into the brew. Using Chrome we find three channels (or are these accounts?)—Wilddancer, Beekeeping (thus far empty as we try to sort out the whole mess), and Bill Coggshall—associated with one email address, and two channels—Car Tunes by Coggshall (which started out as “Car Tunes” that YouTube allowed me to reserve then reneged and forced me to add “by Coggshall”) and bill@technologybloopers.com (strange-looking channel, no?)– associated with a different email address (bill@technologybloopers.com). Using Firefox we find two channels (or accounts?)—Car Tunes by Coggshall and bill@technologybloopers.com—associated with email address bill@technologybloopers.com.