YouTube: Due to limited creator history we're limiting the number of views
reddit.comDoes anyone have more context? Or a link to a video showing this issue? This Reddit thread only seems to have a screenshot (though I didn’t scour the entire comment section).
I’ve never seen this in the wild, and technically without a link I still haven’t seen it live at all. I’m wondering if the channel triggered some sort of anti-spam mechanism.
EDIT: The only source I can find is from screenshots of right-wing Twitter accounts suggesting something about YouTube censoring anti-vax protests: https://m.imgur.com/dh1kU1q Until someone can link to an actual video showing this issue, I’d approach this with an extremely high degree of skepticism.
EDIT 2: Appears to only apply to live streams from new accounts. Seems like a reasonable limitation to clamp down on the spread of copyrighted material rebroadcasting (people live streaming sports and such from throwaway accounts) and cryptocurrency scams.
According to the Reddit comments, this is only for livestreams not for videos in general. I'd guess that the problem with livestreams in particular is that any kind of abuse prevention / moderation needs to be done in realtime, vs normal videos where it can reasonably be done either as a pre-pass or with a delay.
How does limiting the number of viewers of a stream by a small channel help? Well, it means that stream with a large number of viewers is done by somebody in good standing and with something to lose (i.e. their popular channel) if they break the TOS. You can't just create a new channel for the purposes of abuse.
Seems reasonable. YouTube is a platform for content creators with some skin in the game. New accounts producing viral livestreams are a hotbed for spam and scams, such as the ubiquitous free cryptocurrency livestream scams.
Frankly, I’m glad to see they’re doing something about it.
What you are asking for is already widely available: network television. I don't see how it is a good thing that Google has adopted more and more of the negative aspects of the old system, but they certainly have been busy doing so for the last few years.
You know a very good way to control what is and is not part of the public discourse? Allow only those with a lot to lose the privilege of speaking. Those creators with skin in the game will think twice about saying something that the "platform" doesn't like, and it isn't even censorship - it is self imposed, so nobody can complain about it.
That’s an exaggeration. YouTube is still far more accessible than network television even if brand new accounts aren’t able to livestream to huge audiences.
Limiting new accounts is a common, and often necessary, feature in most internet platforms. Even HN will limit how fast new accounts can post and highlights new users in green.
If HN allowed new users to sign up and immediately post hundreds of comments or links, it would be inundated with spam and abuse. Likewise, YouTube requires new accounts to demonstrate some actual traction before they’re allowed to livestream to huge audiences because the feature was being used for abuse.
This really grind my gears too. You want carefully curated content? I like that too from time to time and it is more or less ubiquitously available. You don't have to destroy every platform that might diverge here.
Youtube is long gone from non-commercial use and for me the platform is a lot less interesting, although there still is good stuff on it. But so many people want to go back to church. Every measure is a punch in the wherever curiosity is situated in the body...
You realise that you can set up your own web server and livestream as much as you like (and can afford) from that to as many people as you want? Youtube doesn't owe you free bandwidth.
> New accounts producing viral livestreams are a hotbed for spam and scams
Which is why spammers & scammers compromise existing channels and stream there. It happened to one I'm subscribed to; they completely renamed the channel and started broadcasting what looked like a crypto newscast which I'm sure eventually pivoted to a promotion for some scam.
I found this tweet from Jan 8 in reply to somebody who was livestreaming a dogsledding race, complaining about the same error message: https://twitter.com/Cami5320/status/1479893333480599555
The account that streamed it on YT had some livestreams a year ago with 10s of views, and nothing recent except the stream in question which lists 1400 views.
So this does seem to fit the pattern of restricting livestreams from suddenly popular accounts. My best guess is that this has been done to combat scams and fraud, and that politically charged livestreams are collateral damage.
It's hard to monitor live streams for piracy. Twitch just had a trend of livestreamers streaming full movies and episodes of popular TV shows for hours on end.
Mobile live streaming requirements: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9228390
Over 50 subs and under 1000 subs == streaming is limited via mobile.
It doesn't matter how old your account, either -- I have an account with only 28 subscribers (somehow?) for several years and I get the same limitations on mobile streaming, namely that I can't even stream.
Technical workaround would be to set up a stream via desktop and use my phone as an RTMP source... but that's just a kludge.
> for several years
Old accounts are still hotbeds of spam... There are plenty of spammers who signed up for 100,000 gmail accounts back in 2010 when there were no good captchas, and have left them mostly idle till now, and can now sell them to others to use for spamming.
Reading that I had to go check the subscriber count on my account. 17 year old YouTube account has.... 115 subscribers! I would have thought more bots than that would have randomly subscribed over the years.
Went to jail for eight years. First thing I do when I get out.. how many views did I get on YouTube while I was gone?!
They did, but the accounts got deleted probably. I was going from 1200-1000 on a mostly inactive account for years.
My guess is that the purpose is to prevent people from creating throwaway accounts that re-broadcast sport events, movies and so on.
Supposedly it is targeting a very specific type of content: medical mandate protest coverage. Unfortunately this is a plausible explanation.
That interpretation is unclear from that source. It's at least equally likely that a feature to tamp down on rebroadcast of sporting events and such has fouled broadcast of protests.
Regardless of cause though, it would make YouTube a worse platform for live citizen journalism.
> That interpretation is unclear from that source.
lol.
"Several livestreams posted on Google’s platform last weekend by truckers protesting in Canada have had their audience limited... This creator explained that they have had the channel for seven years, with 90 videos and several streams..."
Yes. That is what the source said and the interpretation "it is targeting a very specific type of content: medical mandate protest coverage" is unclear from that source.
A recent change to the system to tamp down on resharing copyrighted data would catch those kinds of streams in the "blast radius," so to speak. Such a change would not be targeting that very specific type of content the GP comment describes. The source does not support that interpretation with sufficient evidence.
I saw the behavior first hand on a few of the livestreams of the Ottawa protests last weekend, wanting to watch them out of curiosity. Never had YouTube do this before and it allowed me to watch only after subscribing to the channels in question.
This video was archived while the issue was occuring: https://archive.fo/IMxlI
> more context?
This suggests it’s only for livestreams coming from new accounts, not videos uploaded in regular YouTube style.
Might be an unpopular opinion, but I think this is fine. YouTube is a platform for content creators and they don’t want their services becoming a platform for throwaway viral live broadcasts.
According to comments on reddit, it was on an anti-vax livestream that was pushing a line of products from a brand-new account. This message only shows up on live streams.
> anti-vax livestream
Is it possible to get more nuanced clarity on this? The word "anti-vax" used to mean one thing, but today can refer to somebody who is against mandates.
The screenshot in GG(G?)P that they called an anti-vax protest was of the truckers in Canada; that's an anti-mandate protest, not an anti-vax one.
From other [dupe] thread:
I think the answer is still related to censorship. Streamers with lots of history also got throttled.
So, ask yourself, why would YouTube need to throttle in the first place? Who is giving all these protest-streamers their first 300 viewers, making them rise in the live-streaming rankings and exposing millions to anti-mandate protests?
I think YouTube is under attack. I think they learned from live-streams during George Floyd protests, which, incidentally, I also was exposed to, even though not caring too much about that. I think throttling is an attempt to avoid the artificial boosting of divisive and polarizing content.
I really do not want to turn this into a conspiracy theory, though Mark Zuckerberg did offer for Facebook to make some changes, with the rest blacked out under "secret weapon" technology. After experiments done on Facebook on emotional contagion, surely, they must have ways to, instead of rile up an entire populace, calm them down. We are at an age where a single out-of-context video of alleged police brutality can shut down the economy.
Edit: copyright - and ad fraud make little sense to me, since the videos could still be viewed when subscribing to the channel or logging out. If detected as fraudulent, the stream should go offline without warning.
OT: I'm curious why that is the thread that got marked [dupe]. That was the one that was posted first.
From Google support...
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9228390
>Requirements To live stream on mobile, you’ll need: At least 50 subscribers. No live streaming restrictions within the last 90 days on your channel. To verify your channel. To enable live streaming. You may need to wait 24 hours before you can start your first live stream. An Android 5.0+ device.
>Why is my mobile live stream’s audience limited? To help aspiring creators while protecting the community, we've created safeguards to limit the spread of potentially harmful content.
Will they implement the same rate limiting for apps in the Play Store or sending emails from new Gmail accounts?
New support articles coming soon...
Why is my app's audience limited? Why is sending emails from Gmail limited? Why is sharing my Google Doc limited?
So basically a big old "fuck you" to anyone witnessing a noteworthy event. No citizen journalism allowed.
Presumably it's to stop copyright infringement. People streaming shows and such.
Use twitch? Or any of the other hundreds of live video platorms out there.
Live footage of an event actually happening is “misinformation” from their perspective.
the spam being targeted https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elon+crypto&sp=...
First off, I'd like to see some additional proof that this isn't a hoax. There's other people in that thread claiming it's real, but I have yet to see anything other than the image posted.
Assuming it is real however, this is another baffling decision Youtube has made in recent months. I assume the thought behind this is to try maximize their walled garden in some way, but unlike other sites Youtube has such a long history of being embedded in external sites that they can't block all external access all at once. However, the main continued success of Youtube is arguably the emergence of new viral videos that boost new blood into a position of becoming a long-term profitable creator. This is being done in the name of "small creators" but it seems apparent this will have the opposite effect.
(full disclosure, work for Google but not on this)
>Assuming it is real however, this is another baffling decision Youtube has made in recent months... This is being done in the name of "small creators" but it seems apparent this will have the opposite effect.
A few months ago, people with under a thousand subscribers couldn't livestream at all. I think for 99% of situations, "livestreaming with limitations" is going to be a step above "no livestreaming" (unless you think livestreaming in general is bad, and I can see the merits of that viewpoint)
> However, the main continued success of Youtube is arguably the emergence of new viral videos that boost new blood into a position of becoming a long-term profitable creator.
This appears to only be for live streams, not uploaded videos.
The livestream feature has been heavily abused to promoted cryptocurrency scams and rebroadcast copyright material (sports games), among other things. Livestreams are also likely the most computationally expensive videos (on a per-viewer basis) and tend to run for hours, unlike a 10-minute cacheable video.
Honestly this seems reasonable. They don’t want the platform to become a livestream free-for-all and they’re already under fire for hosting scams and misinformation content. Limiting the reach of livestreams from new accounts is fair.
I don't see why we can't have trusted reporters or researchers to have access to Youtube's platform or source code or software documentation to confirm this? How many hours (of us commenting, debating, discussing, people struggling on Reddit, hearsay, fake news, conspiracy theories, etc) are wasted on something that should be a simple "yes/no" response from Youtube? This is a huge waste of human-time and it's such a small one compared to other such examples that I'm surprised no one is looking to tackle it.
I found a benign example from Jan 8 of this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30178196
My guess is far more benign: YouTube operates one of the world's largest CDNs. It takes time to saturate that CDN, but it's necessary in order to serve many of the largest content creators. If a small video, from a historically small content creator, gets too popular, too quickly, they likely, simply, aren't ready at an infrastructure level to serve the video.
And, a moron of a product manager was responsible for trying to word that into an error message that a billion people can understand.
Why would you assume that the person who is paid to do this professionally has less of a clue than you who just... read a reddit comment
My default assumption when interfacing with anything created by YouTube is that the people working on it have, naturally, as much of a clue as anyone, but observing them act with wisdom on that clue is a rare event given the carbon monoxide leak which affects every floor of their headquarters. Except the one home to the team that designs the algorithm recommending pregnant Disney character kidnapping videos to children; the air on that floor is pristine, as their metrics are so high they shattered the ceiling to bring in some fresh air.
I read a streamer from the Truck protest in Ottawa was getting hit by this.
Hope Youtube doesn't become just another mouthpiece for only government approved narratives like TV.
> Hope Youtube doesn't become just another mouthpiece for only government approved narratives like TV.
This is already the case. Things like the lab leak theory were getting people banned for months before it suddenly became ok to talk about once the mainstream news channels started talking about it. This is why the label "misinformation" is dangerous. Anything can be deemed misinformation depending on who the fact checker is or the sources they use.
In 2020, the lab leak theory was dangerous and unhelpful. The incumbent at the White House was easily swayed into acting rashly without thinking too hard, and the whole world was dependent on very limited supplies of PPE and biotech equipment that mostly came from China.
In 2022, the lab leak theory isn't so dangerous to talk about, and China is making waves about Taiwan.
It's all about the time and the place. Sometimes it's better to keep quiet for now. That's not a conspiracy, it's strategy.
What does "conspiracy" mean to you, exactly? If the biomedical research community covered up an idea they thought might be true in order to support a political strategy, I'd consider that almost the canonical example of a conspiracy. Maybe it was a good political strategy, maybe it was serving an important goal - the bottom line would still be that you can't trust what they say because they might have secretly decided that it's best to deceive you.
Ah so lets suppress the truth when it's convenient and bring it back out when it's politically advantageous for your party. That doesn't seem dangerous to you? It's quite literally propaganda and the stuff that tin foil hat loonies have been warning about for years... If that's where we are at politically I guess they weren't so crazy after all.
Lab leak theory is not "the truth". It's still very much a minority POV. And either way, it seems clear by now that the virus has originated in an animal reservoir and that similar things happen all the time.
In my experience, its very much not a minority POV. Almost no one I talk to thinks its a coincidence that a novel coronavirus with unique characteristics just so happened to pop up in a city with the only BSL-4 laboratory in hundreds of miles which works specifically with bat coronaviruses.
I don't think anyone reputable is saying that anything was intentionally released, but I think its quite obvious at this point that something was accidentally released and the CCP is very focused on covering it up to save face.
I always loved YT as this immense archive. Twenty year old videos are still up. Anyone can upload anything regardless if it makes Google money.
It is inevitable that YT is changing. Shareholders need to be payed.
Done to prevent live-streaming of terrorist activities/suicides etc?
I think it's for those crypto giveaway scams.
Do we have any numbers on how many subs does the channel have and how much is the viewer limit?
I have a small YT channel for local OSM chapter with 15k views & 300 subs, good to know they could fuck me over if I ever try to make a live stream that would blow up... Not that I ever had more than two dozen viewers, but social media engagement has proven to me to be very unpredictable in both upside and downside.
Was it really the bitcoin giveaway scams that instigated this, and not events like the Christchurch terror attack that was live streamed?
This is fine. This is YouTube trying to curb antivax bullshit, which is a good idea
> protests, since they were organized by truckers opposed to Covid vaccine mandates.
Which is a good idea for you. Maybe create or install a nanny-filter.
It is not a good idea for me. If I want official information, I know where to find it.
If I want to read about young men getting a heart attack one week after taking a vaccine, if I want to see how the pandemic is forming in China before going global, if I want to know how Indians combated flu epidemics with flavanoids, then I need to pass by the gate-keepers, and the experts who do not care about my personal health, just that as much people are vaccinated as possible.
But according to you that is not a good idea. I am not allowed to form my own opinion, because you think that opinion is damaging (perhaps even to you). It is a fact that all vaccines in existence increase miscarriages. But, especially after 2020, increasingly hard to find. Please do not think it is a good idea to tell a white lie, so less intelligent people go along with the government. It is not a strong-man, but to me, that is your position. Trying to curb that with feedback and debate, not censorship.
> I know where to find it.
Then it will be from known source right? And not from new source like this system is blocking you from, right?
This is against NEW content, from people that are not known.
Once more people see them, once you keep watching them as you believe in them, then yeah that restriction will disappear. There's a reason why this is asking people to subscribe...
These downvotes remind me about downvotes 2 years back, when I was here on HackerNews talking about leaky vaccines, vaccination-driven variants of concern, and COVID eventually turning endemic (without or without human intervention), impossible to ever remove.
There are people still on HackerNews right now, who were back then talking about overreactions, and it just being a flu, and that masks promote xenophobia and do nothing. That must weigh really heavy on their mind, or perhaps they got with (vaccination) program, and if you downvote it quickly, it does not exist to bother your own manipulated decision-making gaffe.
Yes, I am saying a horrible thing: you want to mandate a treatment for non-at-risk people, which can give them permanent damage or even cause death. But what is more concerning? Me saying a horrible thing? Or you condemning a pregnant woman to miscarriage, because the message needs to be that the vaccine is 100% safe?
Stuck between censor-happy left, and anti-science right, and both reduce my right and duty to be an informed citizen.
> There are people still on HackerNews right now, who were back then talking about overreactions, and it just being a flu,
What? It just being a flu is an argument that I only seen from anti-vax... never been a thing here but would be happy to be proven wrong.
> and that masks promote xenophobia and do nothing.
Never seen this also, could you show me? The best I have seen in the past was that a mask in the wrong hands do no good, which is true when you need 100x more mask than you got, which was the case at the time.
> you want to mandate a treatment for non-at-risk people, which can give them permanent damage or even cause death.
I'm curious how you define non-at-risk people too? Covid was not a risk for them but vaccine was? That's weird how the virus works ;). Whatever you fear from the vaccine, you can fear the same from the virus... except that from the virus, the numbers are incredibly much worse. Why would we use the vaccine if that wasn't the case? We would be stuck with the exact same issues.
For sourcing, I'll see if I can muster some time later. But you'd do the same as me: Look at HackerNews discussions starting around February 2020.
Non-at-risk people are young people without co-morbidities or overweight. These have a similar risk profile as for influenza. At-risk people are older people, and since the decisions are made by older people, these decisions mostly favor their own pockets and peace of mind.
There are groups of non-at-risk people, with naturally acquired immunity (because these worked in supermarkets, when older powerful people had the luxury of work-from-home), for which taking the vaccine has more to fear than contracting COVID. For them, taking the vaccine still helps with pressure on hospitals, the at-risk elderly decision-makers, and aiding economic recovery. Helpful. Selfless. We are in this together. But scared into, or mandated into, or forced into taking the vaccine "for their own good".
I get the sense you are strung out. - there are way more lurkers than those who comment - a reminder to try not to extrapolate too much from those who do. Hell, I've found myself in arguments with eugenecists on this site. With the weight of viral worries, the megaphone of a public forum has people nervous, you should expect strong reactions to anything negative about vaccines; people perceive negatives more than positives. Just be honest about what you do and don't know, cite sources that you've tried to understand, and take vitriol in stride. The pregnancy thing for instance - now lurkers have to Google things for themselves and may end up on some save the children propaganda site
Youtube Alternatives :
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
This limitation is only for live-streaming. It doesn’t apply to uploading videos. Most of your alternatives don’t have unlimited mass live-streaming features.
The number of platforms that allow free live-streaming to huge audiences is much smaller because it’s a relatively expensive thing to do.
I think it's a chicken-egg question.Live streaming is expensive, indeed, but we can do more to send people to alternative platforms to create content.Platforms will generally expand their 'free' plans once they amass users and become more serious.I think rumble has streaming for sure, not sure if free, but at this point at least the web experience is decent for youtube alternatives.The mobile experience through apps isn't there yet[though the web experience on mobile isn't terrible], but some promising ones are to be seen on stores like F-Droid.
PeerTube has livestreams, and they're even P2P load-balanced; this reduces the cost quite a bit.
That would be so much abusive from youtube that I don't believe it. And since I use yt-dlp I don't think I'll be able to see the text of such blockade.
If this is about people broadcasting sporting events unauthorised, I wonder if the fact that the Olympics are currently happening is making this worse.
> "Due to limited creator history we're limiting the number of views. Subscribe to this channel to help the creator"
Better yet, do so on peertube.
I don't get the whole point, so we should just subscribe to the channel so that we can continue what we're watching?
Nah this seems to be fake, right? Haven't seen anything like this besides screenshots
I for myself had this on a live stream some days ago. This is not fake, but I think it only applies to live streams.
I see negative comments on this on here and (mostly) reddit.
But the reality is this is simple and yet brilliant approach to stop misinformation and policy violators. May be even lazy approach to avoid doing the hard work. What does any policy offenders usually do? Create new accounts and post the same misinformation slightly modified.
Between Youtube and PlayStore, google has seen enough of this trends. I am surprised it even took them this long to limit virality of new accounts.
On the one hand, kinda scummy, on the other, do we really need more "Elon musk crypto scam live streams"?