Comments for YouTube Adding ITV, Channel 4 Programmes?

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GoldenGuy

4:44 PM on 21 May, 2009

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This is not what YouTube was originally designed for. It was supposed to be for Average Joes to participate in a worldwide forum, exchanging ideas and discourses, and you could easily have important issues being discussed to people on the other side othe world. But for too long now, the smaller channels, thepeople who make YouTube what it's supposed to be, are being treated like crap - being votebotted and false-flagged and DMCAed, whenver they confront the opinions of some incredibly unsavoury characters, and YouTube won't do a damn thing about it because they actually want the smaller channels to fall by the wayside while, they turn the whole site into the online equivalent of a soulless retail park, and at the expense of the person who doesn't have a million dollars to spend, and just want to make some homemade videos. I've just watched another great YouTube broadcaster be suspended for absolutely no good reason other than because he was confronting Christian conservatives that have been allowed to abuse the system, decided to gang up on them, knowing their slanderous complaints (the false DMCA issue has genuine legal implications) knowing full well YouTube has their support, and yet teh system is completely assymetrical because any counter-complaints go nowhere. For a multi-billion dollar corporation, they have NO reasonable, fair means of dealing with customer complaints - they have no phone number and the support links they provide, deliberately work in a circular fashion to make the process hermetically sealed. Their incompetence and willful neglect of the people that provide their site with original content, the people that YouTube was supposed to be bult for, are now being deliberately pushed fiurther and further down the search results, while the damn Channel 4 previews are allowed to take over more and more space, dominating the search results through YouTube's bias, and perversion of the ratings and view counts. One subscription of mine is now recommneding users take their fight to an organisation called the Better Business Bureau which sounds, if anything, a last resort given YouTube's complete disconnect with teh core base and refusal to protect its needs.





Now, you could just say, "Yeah, get over it. All companies are evil. You don't like it, go somewhere else" but I actually think YouTube is worth trying to save. I'vebeen on it long enough to see it be more than a site where people watch jetskiing squirrels, but actually allows all generations, to be sociopolitically engaged with one another - particularly the younger generation. There's been a plethora of interesting debates by the public and lesser known public-speakers and activists conveying little known information, and users have been able to deconstruct and scrutinise the mass media in a fine detail, you won't get from the regular outlets of punditry. But the Goggle takeover has killed its initial democratic spirit, and turned it into the very thing that the best YouTube broadcasters put at the forefront of their deconstruction.





In short, a whole bunch of people want it to be reduced to the likes of Hulu - that's not what they came for, and it's not the reason they put so many hours into generating their own videos. Let Channel 4, or Fox, or the dating agencies advertise on their own blasted sites.