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YouTube finally breaks Chuck Dowling....

Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2018 11:22 pm
by Strelnikov
[youtube]XpG32i334r8[/youtube]

Chuck Dowling (aka "Watercooler Films") had been on YouTube for 12 years, doing reviews of genre movies and posting best of bits from the group podcast he is involved in, BMFcast aka "the Bad Movie Fiends podcast" where they review awful movies from the last sixty years or so.

For the last couple of years, all Chuck did with YouTube was an October, later September "31 Days of Horror" series. He did 11 years of that, and for all his hard work YouTube demonetized his channel and blocked him from uploading ANYTHING FOR A MONTH. He made pennies on the dollar from these videos because most only had less than 2000 views, which isn't considered "good enough" by the algorithms any more - you have to be pulling in millions of views, which most channels can never do. In fact many people only have a channel on YouTube to make comments! If they are giving Chuck Dowling shit, God knows what is going on with bigger channels. And this is a guy with a TV studio technician background - if Dowling can't talk over mostly-silent clips of old horror movies, then YouTube has become unusable for anybody attempting to run a film criticism channel on it.

[youtube]C1y6Gglc8Sc[/youtube]
What Chuck looked like in 2010.

Re: YouTube finally breaks Chuck Dowling....

Posted: Sat Sep 29, 2018 1:33 am
by The End
I have a friend who depends on his YouTube channel as his primary income. He mainly works on "family-friendly" material and so far no one's complained about copyright. It worries me more than him that YouTube could just shut it all down in a blink a of an eye. I suppose you can't worry about everything, but YouTube is very hard to understand nowadays. No one knows whether or not their channel will punished without good reason. If I did rely on YouTube for primary income, I'd try to save what money I can for that day YouTube stabs me in the back.

Re: YouTube finally breaks Chuck Dowling....

Posted: Sat Sep 29, 2018 2:02 am
by ericbarbour
This is still early days--obviously Alphabet top management is screaming at YT to "maximize profits at all costs". There are billions of videos on it (even they don't seem to know how many) and I'm quite sure that they are getting fed up with paying for hosting for uncountable millions of personal videos with almost no views.

Inevitably they will purge "underperforming properties" and it will finally become just another viral-turd service. Just a giant BuzzFeed, ViralNova or Upworthy with motion. Reality "shows", sports videos, memes, and generic lurid crap designed to generate "idiot traffic". Even the little educational content they have will probably disappear.

Oh btw, this report from March was basically ignored
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... censorship

Re: YouTube finally breaks Chuck Dowling....

Posted: Sat Sep 29, 2018 2:50 am
by Strelnikov
The End wrote:I have a friend who depends on his YouTube channel as his primary income. He mainly works on "family-friendly" material and so far no one's complained about copyright. It worries me more than him that YouTube could just shut it all down in a blink a of an eye. I suppose you can't worry about everything, but YouTube is very hard to understand nowadays. No one knows whether or not their channel will punished without good reason. If I did rely on YouTube for primary income, I'd try to save what money I can for that day YouTube stabs me in the back.


Dowling does not rely on YT for anything and at this point, he only really uses it maybe two months out of the year.

YouTube's insane rules and awful system for dealing with copyright claims has been around since Google/Alphabet bought the site, and it gets more and more opaque as time goes on. I would never want to be in a position where I had to rely on YouTube or Patreon for income, because I think we haven't really seen the big social media crash yet.

Re: YouTube finally breaks Chuck Dowling....

Posted: Sat Sep 29, 2018 3:30 am
by Strelnikov
ericbarbour wrote:This is still early days--obviously Alphabet top management is screaming at YT to "maximize profits at all costs". There are billions of videos on it (even they don't seem to know how many) and I'm quite sure that they are getting fed up with paying for hosting for uncountable millions of personal videos with almost no views.

Inevitably they will purge "underperforming properties" and it will finally become just another viral-turd service. Just a giant BuzzFeed, ViralNova or Upworthy with motion. Reality "shows", sports videos, memes, and generic lurid crap designed to generate "idiot traffic". Even the little educational content they have will probably disappear.

Oh btw, this report from March was basically ignored
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... censorship


There is no way to "maximize profit" on YouTube, and going the route you suggest will just make people leave, because people use YouTube as a replacement for bad TV. If they tried to delete all the low-performing channels, then they open themselves up to a class-action lawsuit because there is no demand in the terms of service that anybody who has a channel on YT has to make videos with millions of views.

I personally am expecting to see social media collapse with the next big recession because the margins of profit are too damn thin; the whole thing is supported by advertising that people block out when they can, and Twitter and Facebook and Reddit have made and entire generation of smartphone-obsessed teens and twenty-somethings miserable. Boards like this one will survive, as will text-messaging, but much of what we think as "online normal" might disappear like Blip.tv.

Oh btw, this report from March was basically ignored....


I read the report - the uptick in governments banning YouTube has meant the growth of other countries doing their own YouTubes with their own rules - things that do not fly here might be allowed on RuTube (Russian YT knockoff) or vice-versa - the mostoffensivevideos.com guy was hosting his satire re-edits of Peanuts specials (A Charlie Brown Kwanzaa, etc.) over on a Brazilian site that had a cartoon frog as a mascot. He's back on YouTube because the Schulz estate either doesn't have 'bots running through YouTube, or the newspaper syndicate that sent his strips out across America no longer has claim to those cartoons, or the simpletons at Google now understand that a completely reedited video with a new soundtrack and voicetrack is no longer the original work and thus fits under the parody clause.

Re: YouTube finally breaks Chuck Dowling....

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2018 4:39 am
by The End
YouTube's stand on firearm-related videos, which usually involves banning them without warning, even led one channel to start uploading on Pornhub. Why FPSRussia was never banned, I will never know.

I back a few YouTubers on Patreon, but I'm not able to give a lot and I can't imagine running a business in the long term on solely Patreon/Kickstarter/etc. plus YouTube monetized ads. The wiser ones are uploading videos to other, albeit obscure, video sites in the inevitable (?) YouTube ban/crash. Another problem is that it's almost impossible to take vacations or disengage from YouTube for even a few days without your "fans" and the algorithm punishing you. 2018 has become the year of YouTube Burnout.

Re: YouTube finally breaks Chuck Dowling....

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2018 11:26 pm
by Strelnikov
The End wrote:YouTube's stand on firearm-related videos, which usually involves banning them without warning, even led one channel to start uploading on Pornhub. Why FPSRussia was never banned, I will never know.

I back a few YouTubers on Patreon, but I'm not able to give a lot and I can't imagine running a business in the long term on solely Patreon/Kickstarter/etc. plus YouTube monetized ads. The wiser ones are uploading videos to other, albeit obscure, video sites in the inevitable (?) YouTube ban/crash. Another problem is that it's almost impossible to take vacations or disengage from YouTube for even a few days without your "fans" and the algorithm punishing you. 2018 has become the year of YouTube Burnout.


They just use and use people and then they act shocked when they go on hiatus. Maybe FPSRussia's fake Russian accent scares them?

Compare Chuck last year to the previous Dowling video I posted:

[youtube]FEKEJHOx4GM[/youtube]

He does not look like six years passed.

Re: YouTube finally breaks Chuck Dowling....

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2018 8:52 pm
by ericbarbour
The End wrote:YouTube's stand on firearm-related videos, which usually involves banning them without warning, even led one channel to start uploading on Pornhub. Why FPSRussia was never banned, I will never know.
People have been telling me about that incident for a while. Also numerous YT vloggers have requested space on Vimeo, and been refused, because "we want to maintain a higher level of quality" or something.

An email shared with friends the other day:
https://www.reddit.com/r/11foot8/comments/9jq3r9/youtube_drama_at_11foot8/

Jesus, do I have to take notes on the history of YouTube's numerous scandals? Really don't wanna do that. Few or no traces left of most of them anyway--Google really knows how to censor the web.

Re: YouTube finally breaks Chuck Dowling....

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 8:03 am
by Strelnikov
People have been telling me about that incident for a while. Also numerous YT vloggers have requested space on Vimeo, and been refused, because "we want to maintain a higher level of quality" or something.


Vimeo is supposed to be an art video website for film students and people working in HD video, so the idea of Patreon-funded YouTube vloggers using the site to talk into a camera just horrifies the people running it - they want animations and cool graphics, not creaky stuff like this. When I Hate Everything was deleted off YT a few years ago he tried to set up shop on Vimeo and the system claimed he was spamming it for some reason.

[youtube]FRW4KRPKgQU[/youtube]
Proof of what I wrote is at 4:41 to 5:08.

Some people use Vimeo as a backup; former Channel Awesome contributor Todd in the Shadows used to have a channel under the name "Paul Woodcock" for the videos that the insane YouTube copyright 'bots would yank in seconds (usually his "end of the year" lists of worst songs.) That stopped being a problem for some reason and he deleted all of his Vimeo videos, leaving a digital footnote.

Re: YouTube finally breaks Chuck Dowling....

Posted: Sat Sep 21, 2019 4:52 pm
by Strelnikov
Even more minor YouTube drama:

Ben Minnotte runs Oddity Archive, a YouTube channel and website focused on obscure media and strange formats for media. After SIX installments of a laserdisc karoke series, the idiot machinery at YouTube has decided that COVERS of famous songs are somehow the originals and they would not let him upload his video AT ALL, so he got his revenge by posting a bowdlerized version on YouTube with black screens describing the clips and snarky comments, and an open letter to YouTube at the end.



....Where he used the video description portion to pass along a link to the Internet Archive, where the full video resides:

https://archive.org/details/ep.179laserkaraokevol7

As I said before, it's becoming very hard to use YouTube as a media criticism platform because these shitty 'bots have full reign of the place due to the Google mentality of "guilty before proven innocent." Most of the "content providers" are not large corporations, but small private parties. Minnotte has been at this since 2012, and has been a Patreon member through most of it.