Google is beyond a dictatorship at this point.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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The search sucks even if videos aren't falsely flagged & hidden. You constantly have to wade through completely unrelated videos that have nothing to do with the search term (and nowadays also a bunch of spammy Shorts that just tag all trending shit), before you actually reach the videos you're actually looking for. In the past you were able to use quotation marks to explicitly search only for the search terms between them, and nothing else, but that feature got quietly canned a while ago.
Aww I feel bad for SungWon but I'm glad he has covered the slow and steady demise of YouTube one step at a time. He should do a whole history of the reddit, twitter, other social media's enshittifications as a series of his skits.
Death by algorithm
It's inconsistently applied, there's no appeal, but it's cheap and you don't have to hire human moderators... And Google does love things that have global scale, so even if it's wrong, is it wrong enough for Google to care? No not at all
The fact that there's no feedback to the video owner is an indictment of the whole process.
I genuinely believe Shadow banning should be antithetical to social media. Maybe even against the law. The most cogent argument I've heard in defense of shadow banning is, if people know their shadow banned, they'll try to avoid the ban... This argument is the same as gaslighting, we think it's better to gaslight people than to argue with them about the truth.
On many sites you can find if you're shadow banned just by trying to view your posts while logged out, so that breaks that defense of it.
I don't believe this, but I'm going to argue in favor of shadow banding argument here:
Most people, even if they know how to check, won't bother logging out to verify the post is banned or not banned. If somebody's posting a lot of things, how would they even know one thing is banned? What would draw attention to it? Telling somebody hey this one thing you posted out of the 300 you posted yesterday is banned, will draw their attention, and they might work around the ban.
What if I'm not interested in the majority watching my videos, but I still need a place to upload them? Correct me if I'm wrong, but a shadow-baned video should still be available through the URL. That way, it's more on the private side.
Yes, exactly. That functionality has always been available.
I'm pretty sure that exists and is just called unlisted, or if you only want them to be available to yourself private.
Maybe. Depends on how they implement it. Maybe you have to be logged in to see it. I don't know
100% agree. The audacity to call this shite cutting edge technology is hilarious :)
I think it is very good cutting edge technology. For YouTube, YouTube is optimizing for YouTube's benefit.
The problem is YouTube has no competition. If you can't find what you want on YouTube, you'll just watch something else... On YouTube.
Enshitification if you like. There is no feedback loop to improve the quality of their search.
YouTube has no competition because nobody can make competition profitable.
The barrier to entry is insurmountable. You have to operate at insane scales to turn a profit and you'd burn literal billions to get there.