Major YouTubers protest video suggestion changes

[Minoa]

Sources: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/38263470 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38236644

Arts & Fiction because it relates to entertainment.

PewDiePie has deleted one of his subsidiary channels in protest of changes to how viewers find videos.

But annoying to me he may be, he is not the only user that is complaining, as the BBC clarifies.

He, according to the BBC, alleges that:

• A lot of people visited his channel from the "suggested video" feed (the bar on the side that appears when a video is playing and recommends more content) but now these visits have dropped dramatically - which he says means YouTube has changed how it promotes videos.
• The homepage used to show videos from channels the user had subscribed to - he says it is now filled with "recommended" videos which might not be related to stuff they like.
• He also says he noticed that some channels he himself had previously subscribed to had been removed from his subscriptions list.

I started this thread because I want to highlight another more serious problem that may have resulted in the complaints:

• When I do a basic search for videos and either sort by the newest, scroll down, or go forward by a page or two, I see many spam playlists, some of which are pornographic. This may have linked to a pointer from the latter BBC source, stating that the suggested videos feed "favoured click bait and pornography".
• I used to have a YouTube channel, but I deleted it when Google started pushing through Google+ integration. That was around the same time that YouTube required Google+ to comment on videos, which did nothing to stop the spam that PewDiePie at one point disabled the feature for his videos (Graham Cluley, 2013).

NSers, what other problems have you noticed about using YouTube?

[Insaeldor]

Sadly YouTube isn't about bringing you well made a put together video entertainment anymore. It's gets getting views and getting ad revenue. It's why we no longer see flash animations being as previlent on YouTube as they once were. The high production coasts and time needed to make one can no longer be justified given that YouTube has a system where minutes watched is better than rention time or any other forum of response.

I'm not a YouTube content creator, but as a fan of the medium and with it being the main source of my daily entertainment it does sadden me that it's become more and more difficult to find quality content on the sight. A series like The Great War where one dude and his team recount the events of World War One week by week one hundred years after they've transpired is one of the best long running shows I've seen the sight produce. Yet after yearly two years of constant main content uploads and possibly hundreds more uploads regarding side shows and the like they're pushing maybe 500,000 subs and I think there videos get about 200,000 to 300,000 give or take. Compare that to say twerp queen Zoey Burgher who broke the 1 million sub mark after only a couple months it's easy to see that YouTube itself is enabling the proliferation of this content, she even said herself that if it wasn't for how videos are recomended she'd be sitting at 250,000 subs at best, although lots of factors play into why she blew up with arguably trans content.

A savvy person with terrible content can easily outperform a good content creator who doesn't understand the system. It's that simple. It's why we see all this YouTube "drama" because it's good for views and a good long rant video on why XxX_NoScOpEpUsSySlAyEr_XxX is a bad person person could get you some noticeable attention. Hell rice gun and fuseytube two massive YouTube personalities fakes a fight and a whole beef just to get views and stay relevant.

YouTube as a money making machine is doing wonderful, YouTube as a social media platform is being raped by toxicity and manipulation of the system. This model can not be sustained and YouTube really needs to figure something out in order to try and alleviate a lot of the problems they helped to manifest.

[Minoa]

Here are more problems about the YouTube of today:

• A simple search for Drew Pickles, a children's character from Rugrats, returns hundreds of videos that use text and speech software to tell sexually explicit stories. I actually contacted Nickelodeon to get them to do something about it but I haven’t got a reply, yet.
• Then there are the many "grounded" videos, which originally used GoAnimate, where some child or cartoon character does something bad and then their parents give them grossly disproportionate punishments. This partly links to the views issue because one video got 2.6 million views in 1 year.

To add on to the suggested videos problems, the problem is the suggested videos is so much that I had to use a Greasemonkey script called YouTube+ (The Windows Club, 2015) to blacklist channels that I did not want to see at all, things like the Annoying Orange and all those conspiracy-theories-intertwined-with-religion channels, amongst other annoyances such as the bandwidth-wasting autoplay.