They've been pissing off their content creators for quiet a while now w/ completely arbitrary, machine-driven demonitization. Many of these creators are far beyond the "kid in a basement" category; they're celebs, have employees, and make $$$.

It's crazy and really sad how YouTube bloomed into this awesome, independent alternative to all the crap coming out of hollywood and cable TV, but now they've decided to kneecap the independents, promote the shit out of establishment stuff, and push actual, real-live cable really hard.

It feels like a hostile takeover.

A whole of that can be traced back to leadership change at YT. Since S.W. took over, the culture at YT has changed profoundly, and most of the blunders in the last few years (this is just one in a long series) can be traced back to the culture change she fostered.

insider knowledge or external observations? would be curious to hear more. this could be an interesting article, even.

I mean, that only happened because advertisers learned that the "independent" creators were all assholes. Like this started after advertisers started pulling out when PewDiePie didn't just apologize and admit he was wrong with the Nazi stunts. He threw a fit and advertisers realized that YouTube isn't really as good as they thought it was.

I honestly don't believe this. I think YouTube used this as an excuse to crack down on channels they didn't like, for whatever reason. (And also a lot of other channels, because the flagging is poorly done. I know some people who run a very popular skateboarding instruction channel, and they've had huge problems with demonitization. The content is utterly inoffensive.)

I think if all you were concerned about is advertisers, you'd just let them pick that as a criteria: "Would you like to advertise on channels flagged by our system as potentially offensive?"

Some would, some wouldn't. Problem solved, you don't piss off creators, you make more money.

(Maybe the counter-argument to that is advertisers wouldn't want to appear on any YouTube channel because some other YouTube channel had offensive content, as though all of YouTube were a tainted brand, but that is frankly laughable.)

+ 1 flagging is extremely poorly done. Have a friend with gaming channel and he showed me how it is easy to get video demonetised, just add "fetish", "cannibal", any religious phrase... The fun and insanely frustrating part is that you can reupload same video with same description, tags and titles second(or maybe more) times and it will be monetised if algorithm will think you are lucky... wtf. And you can't appeal if your video has less than 1k views for the last week. I know it's not much, but appeal process takes 1 week and usually most videos get majority of their views in that 1-st week, so it is easier to just reupload...

It's fine if new videos get flagged, you can reupload them, but youtube bots flag old videos and there is no notification whatsoever. Even their own "Video manager board" not showing them as demonitised, because they still get money from youtube red and considered as claimed, you have to enter "edit video" to see the notification. You just have to manually search them... And for gaming channels with 1-2k videos it's a pain.

Why would YouTube willingly run fewer ads? They were hardly profitable as it was, it doesn't make sense for them to "crack down" on channels all of a sudden by continuing to host them, but not running ads on them.

Not to mention part of the problem was YouTube not enforcing their content guidelines to begin with. Hate speech has always been against their content guidelines, they just never actually enforced it.

> "Would you like to advertise on channels flagged by our system as potentially offensive?"

They already do this. People need to stop being angry at things they know nothing about.

not sure what you are talking about. people getting their videos demonitized is a huge problem.

I'm pretty annoyed, I was planning on using a bunch of MITOCW video series to level up some on some computer science and information theory this summer and I hadn't even gotten through the first lecture of the first series on my list (6.001 with Sussman from 1986, classic and awesome) when this stopped me in my tracks.

I've been waiting patiently hoping it comes back, but at this point I feel like I'm going to have to use archive.org or download directly from them.

I was slowly warming up to the idea of paying for Red for commercial-less music and maybe checking out some other paid content, but this has been a bucket of cold water on that notion.

The 1986 6.001 videos are available here: https://archive.org/details/MIT_Structure_of_Computer_Progra...

You can download videos from MIT OCW website here : https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

You can not stream videos from the website though as streaming links are from youtube.

I'm in a similar spot - you can also stream the MP4s from archive.org as a workaround (they're usually linked on the lecture's OCW page.)

I know this has been posted before but youtube-dl is a godsend when it comes to archiving content. Considering how quickly youtube is taking down educational channels, it's prudent to create a backup just in case.

which other educational channels have youtube shut down?

Actually it’s much worse when they hit the random kid living with parents who might be relying on it and who won’t get through to support like orgs like MIT and Blender can.