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"YouTube is banning furries!"
4 years ago
General
See, it's worse than that actually. Google has progressively been pruning those who doesn't quite conform to their logic of "brand safety". It's not JUST YouTube.
I'll preface this post with a statement that one of my goals is to improve FA, rebuild some of our community trust, and get us to the point where we have enough funds we can ditch those ads and return to 100% built-in advertising solely for furries, by furries. That's my goal. But servers and hardware cost a bit of a money, so it's a necessary evil I must contend with until we reach that point, but the moment we do, dropped they will be.
Google used to be one of FA's primary ad providers for a number of years until they weren't, and when they weren't, they spontaneously dropped us and ghosted the entire community, but it had nothing to do with mature/adult content. Google signed off that it was totally fine so long as we hosted their content SOLELY on SFW pages. They approved of it. Not once, in fact, but multiple times.
When Google was an ad provider they'd used to send us these lists, right? Spreadsheets with hundreds/thousands of submissions that were in "violation" of their advertising policies and practices. These lists would come with warnings like "indecent," "pornography," "hate speech," "violates Google policy," or "no content". But there was no way to understand what any of these labels were or why they were applied. No definitions were provided to us as a website to help us understand why things were flagged. You'd look up a picture tagged "hate speech" and it'd just be a furry standing without a shirt. You'd look up pornography and it'd be a fat fur chilling on the beach. And I don't mean furry levels of chonk but realistic. Zootopia pictures of Nick Wilde without pants as portrayed in the film? "Indecent."
There was a point where I'd go through hundreds of these submissions to try to find WHY they were in violation. I never could. There were always a handful of submissions that were in violation, but I'd wager 99% were fine. The best part? We'd contact our Google rep to ask for clarification on why these actions were taking and to help us understand what the warnings meant... AND NOT EVEN THEY UNDERSTOOD THE ERRORS. Google could literally not tell us why they had flagged these violations. It was entirely algorithm based.
After I purchased the site back we tried to get back with Google for advertising. They ghosted us. When Google decides they're done with you, for whatever reason, you get ghosted. Forever. I have contacted multiple reps over time and never once received a response. They apparently decide responding to your email isn't profitable and outright stop talking to you.
This decision by Google cost us quite a bit in losses, as it cut off one of FA's main sources of funding overnight. Things are VASTLY better now on that front, but 2021 was a quite a rough year.
We worked with another ad provider to get things back up and stem the losses. That same ad provider also happens to be a Google ad partner, and they tried to hook us back up with Google... who immediately said no. But this time, ahh, they provided an answer. Not to us, naturally, but our advertising partner. "We are no longer supporting UGC websites." User Generated Content. This means sites that exist based on user-provided content like FA are considered too high risk for brand safety so they pulled the plug. And not because of any one reason. Just user generated content.
Now consider what's happening with YouTube. They're not just suspending accounts of people they feel are in violation but outright deleting them. Videos are UGC, and they're cracking down on anything that isn't brand safe.
If you've been paying attention to what Google's been doing over the years you'll see this come up time and time again. Brand safety. This is the reason YouTube videos showing people drinking alcohol get demonetized. Curse too much? Demonetized. Talk about "political" issues like trans rights? Demonetized. They're pushing creators off their platform(s) across the board. It's not just YouTube. It's not just FA.
This has been happening more and more over recent years, and from what I can tell you I've seen behind the scenes, it's only been getting worse.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Coffee and donuts will be served in the lobby.
I'll preface this post with a statement that one of my goals is to improve FA, rebuild some of our community trust, and get us to the point where we have enough funds we can ditch those ads and return to 100% built-in advertising solely for furries, by furries. That's my goal. But servers and hardware cost a bit of a money, so it's a necessary evil I must contend with until we reach that point, but the moment we do, dropped they will be.
Google used to be one of FA's primary ad providers for a number of years until they weren't, and when they weren't, they spontaneously dropped us and ghosted the entire community, but it had nothing to do with mature/adult content. Google signed off that it was totally fine so long as we hosted their content SOLELY on SFW pages. They approved of it. Not once, in fact, but multiple times.
When Google was an ad provider they'd used to send us these lists, right? Spreadsheets with hundreds/thousands of submissions that were in "violation" of their advertising policies and practices. These lists would come with warnings like "indecent," "pornography," "hate speech," "violates Google policy," or "no content". But there was no way to understand what any of these labels were or why they were applied. No definitions were provided to us as a website to help us understand why things were flagged. You'd look up a picture tagged "hate speech" and it'd just be a furry standing without a shirt. You'd look up pornography and it'd be a fat fur chilling on the beach. And I don't mean furry levels of chonk but realistic. Zootopia pictures of Nick Wilde without pants as portrayed in the film? "Indecent."
There was a point where I'd go through hundreds of these submissions to try to find WHY they were in violation. I never could. There were always a handful of submissions that were in violation, but I'd wager 99% were fine. The best part? We'd contact our Google rep to ask for clarification on why these actions were taking and to help us understand what the warnings meant... AND NOT EVEN THEY UNDERSTOOD THE ERRORS. Google could literally not tell us why they had flagged these violations. It was entirely algorithm based.
After I purchased the site back we tried to get back with Google for advertising. They ghosted us. When Google decides they're done with you, for whatever reason, you get ghosted. Forever. I have contacted multiple reps over time and never once received a response. They apparently decide responding to your email isn't profitable and outright stop talking to you.
This decision by Google cost us quite a bit in losses, as it cut off one of FA's main sources of funding overnight. Things are VASTLY better now on that front, but 2021 was a quite a rough year.
We worked with another ad provider to get things back up and stem the losses. That same ad provider also happens to be a Google ad partner, and they tried to hook us back up with Google... who immediately said no. But this time, ahh, they provided an answer. Not to us, naturally, but our advertising partner. "We are no longer supporting UGC websites." User Generated Content. This means sites that exist based on user-provided content like FA are considered too high risk for brand safety so they pulled the plug. And not because of any one reason. Just user generated content.
Now consider what's happening with YouTube. They're not just suspending accounts of people they feel are in violation but outright deleting them. Videos are UGC, and they're cracking down on anything that isn't brand safe.
If you've been paying attention to what Google's been doing over the years you'll see this come up time and time again. Brand safety. This is the reason YouTube videos showing people drinking alcohol get demonetized. Curse too much? Demonetized. Talk about "political" issues like trans rights? Demonetized. They're pushing creators off their platform(s) across the board. It's not just YouTube. It's not just FA.
This has been happening more and more over recent years, and from what I can tell you I've seen behind the scenes, it's only been getting worse.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Coffee and donuts will be served in the lobby.
Too many bot accounts among other things. I'm not sure how much longer the site will last until a replacement comes (and who knows what'll happen with that one).
The sunken cost fallacy is basically why claims such as "YT (/ WoW, heck even FA) is gonna die because there is this new website" are just not gonna come true...
Oh well. Their site, their rules. /sigh
If you want people on your personal site / little-niche-kingdom though, I'll concede that a good way to do it is to direct people toward it from large social media sites - you'll probably have to post there regularly. That's why you get product updates and feature rundowns from companies posting on Twitter and YouTube. The important thing though is that your work is hosted on something you control (or by people you can trust). If you're banned, you don't automatically lose everything and people can still find you and your product.
Hell, look at the streaming landscape. In terms of content being available to consumers, we are in a MUCH worse place now than we were a decade ago. A major regression there, but there's not anything we can do about it because we don't own or control the copyright. No one really wants that for Youtube with a bunch of tiny content creators who are enabled because of the enormous potential audience.
If you want everyone to see you, you'll have to deal with their mass-appeal focused, Disneyesque, tap-water environment. You may find that difficult.
But that's what we have today. I'm free to use other sites. I'm also free to ignore the other sites. I don't use Rumble because I'm pretty sure that 95% of the videos there I'll find to be pretty distasteful, and there's no content there I would consider interesting or enlightening. I go to Youtube, despite their flaws. That's where the content is. If I was watching, say, a reaction video, chances are other reactors are going to want me to find them because they put out similar content, and I want them to be recommended to me because that's what I'm interested in. I'm certainly not going to be scouring five different sites all searching for the same thing. We know for sure that most small content creators' audiences would shrink dramatically without a large central searchable video service. And a very large number would have to exit the business entirely, not because people wouldn't enjoy their work, but because people wouldn't be able to find their work.
They tried getting a definition of child porn applied to loli and shota, the sexualization of underaged characters in anime and manga. Dumb idea? Sure, pretty dumb, but not really that much dumber than the various "cub art" bans that most furry sites have also imposed.
That's not "banning anime," unless the only anime you know about is loli and shota, in which case, please keep away.
And did it get anywhere? No. It was a proposal. It got shot down because member nations thought it was dumb and ill-advised. So it's not happening anymore.
And I shouldn't have to say it, but I despise cub/loli/shota content. Unlike some, I just know the difference between reality and fiction.
Actually I don't see that much difference -- the cub bans were imposed by payment processors who are the only way to operate a large website. You're not doing shit without them, so a ban from the big guys in the financial industry is not that distinguishable from a ban from the government. It's off the Internet either way.
Youtube/google wants COMPLETE control over it entirely to try to squeeze as much money out of you as possible for they are a company that actually believes in eternal growth as a business model despite it being literally impossible.
Well advertisers too are seeing this and acting accordingly. In a world where 50% + 1 of the population gets to decide the other 50% who don't conform to whatever is trendy that day must be alienated and wiped out at all costs, that's how a platform like Youtube is going to operate. Hope everyone enjoys the "safety" they never got as they pushed for this kind of culture, in a world that had every tool it needed to make it but decided to throw it all away because it got scared of its own shadow somewhere along the way.
Well at the end of the day any service that depends on advertisements has a reason to be brand friendly in terms of maximizing their profits which as a Tech Giant is logical for Google. To their credit they have been trying to push the subscription service cause they see the writing on the wall with the low effort and crappy ads they accept just to keep youtube profitable (I'm looking at you mobile game ads). I don't think its necessarily about brand safety, considering they do ads for a bunch of provocative content like Crowder/Shapiro etc. Marketing people have never been good at organizing sites and making good rules regardless so I'm not surprised.
Also, we do know many spaces that are extremely open in terms of content die off equally quickly when there aren't any sort of limitations on speech. It's why we tend to see general trends of left leaning people being on new sites while conservatives tend to stay on older sites and slowly trickle in to the new site till the process repeats itself. Its not necessarily about establishing a "safe space" moreso if I log in to twitter and see constantly trending stuff like Trudeau being "blackface hitler" every day I'm just going to generally distance myself from that community as someone who leans left.
Though we saw with tumbler for example that banning communities that are generally ostracized due to Apple's rules and regulations around speech to stay on the app store literally destroyed their reputation and competitiveness. You need to find a way to regulate speech in an effective (and consistent way) without disrupting communities that use your site. Something that inflexible moral and political stands have a lot of difficulty with.
that is all.
You can outright buy spots on the trending page. Want your political message at the top? Buy it. This is the reason so many "news articles" with a handful of comments, favs, and RTs about NFTs magically end up on the trending page. Everybody's like "How is THAT trending? NOBODY was talking about it." There's a reason for that, and that reason is money.
What you see as "sensitivity" is moreso bubbles forming from community isolation and companies trying to appeal to as broad a coalition as possible in order to profit. This is just how the market functions regardless of the laws your government passes as that is what we all as a society have decided to prioritize in order to have access to free services and games such as youtube or mobile content. YOU have become the product youtube is selling to advertisers and hence they want to cleanse as much of it of potential barriers to accessing those customers. The regulation that Youtube does to itself has no regards for your laws or government, and they sure won't respect you as an individual unless it hurts their bottom line.
I never truly understood why it all got the way it did, the extreme reactions we're seeing everywhere from ordinary people to governments and big corporations. I only know this isn't anything I ever imagined the 2020's could be back in 2010 when I dreamed of some utopian futuristic society, where there would be no control over culture let alone the very concept that there's a social category which must be wiped out. Sadly it's not a betrayal I will ever be able to put behind me.
This might come up as a sensitive measure but in all actually its a sound economic decision that doesn't care for what users think about the utility of the dislike button itself.
As far as features go, I'm more upset at their removal of annotations years ago. That was one cool feature Youtube had, then they suddenly removed them in a matter of months because like everything today "some people might abuse it a little thus it shouldn't exist for anyone ever".
It's not profitable. Google lost BILLIONS on YouTube for over a decade. It was hemorrhaging money for the longest time, but it was the single largest video site on the internet. The risk to fund, development, and build a community that can compete against Google would have the same problems due to the sheer extent of the costs.
We're looking into adding video to FA, but to do that we need massive storage, and the costs alone are one of the few things holding us back.
Nobody's going to risk losing billions of dollars on a site that may not be able to compete because the risks are too high. That's why there's tons of streaming services for curated content -- your Hulus, Peacocks, Disney+, etc. Because they know they can easily make their money back from that content, but user provided videos? Not so much.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar.....n-viewers.html
Google was losing billions upon billions ever year for almost a decade. It was hemorrhaging money, but they had a long term bet if they could keep it funded and running eventually be the only site left standing. Video support, storage, servers, and bandwidth on that level is next to impossible unless you've got a hundred billion to burn. And good news for them, they had Google money to burn.
But hey, it worked out for them. After decade of losses it's ultimately paid off, but at the expense of all the smaller indie creators who got burned on their path to victory.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/2.....reveal-q4-2019
Crazy to think about that you literally could go to a certain place on the planet, look at a bank of servers, and say "This is the entirety of FurAffinity, stored upon these data storage devices."
I do hope that things work out, and more investors help bolster the income of FA in lieu of Google's algorithm.
It's just like with Skype/Discord, or Twitter, or a number of other platforms. It can be an absolute dumpster fire, but unless the people/content they want are on the other platform, they won't move. And if they won't move, others won't move, and so on. It's just the natural resistance to change that many people have.
Anyone who thinks the internet is not a controlled device is only looking as far out as their fingers. Take a major step backwards and actually look at what's going on. What we have happening in the world (even as I write this) is very very scary.
V.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateof.....h=2dfa316f59de
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/03/fac.....me-record.html
Facebook has lost several hundred billion dollars in recent months. Apple got pissed and changed their software to essentially block Facebook. Seems great from a PR standpoint, but remember, Apple runs its own advertising company, too. Google is also taking action.
These companies aren't doing it for altruistic means but because it benefits themselves. The giants are slugging at one another to take them down, and it's a great fight to watch, but this still trickles down at the same time.
Rest assured I can fully confirm this is what's happening on Youtube, both as a content creator and as a viewer today. I had my channel nearly removed for the mere crime of creating animations... nothing sexual they had no nudity or anything, just because it's an individual doing animated films which only studios that pay them are supposed to do. I remember they downright accused me of creating porn... if I tried to appeal and explain they made a mistake, I'd either get ignored or punished with an even worse sanction.
Today artists I watch are slowly disappearing. I miss watching a channel called PassyVoreX which did musical slideshows with comics... I believe he asked the artists for permissions so no worries in that regard. He didn't even go through the usual 3 strike process: Youtube gave his channel some award one night, then the second he was simply wiped off the platform for no clear reason.
An animator in our community called Feedfancier posts some pretty good 2D animations there. Every few weeks he needs to reupload them, because they're either age-restricted or downright deleted for no explicable reason. I'm surprised his channel is still up, I expect to find it gone any day now.
So yeah YT is dead as a creative space. I suggest everyone to turn their attention to decentralized platforms at this stage. Yes you don't have ways to make money there, or if you do but it's cryptocurrency which is more complicated... at least they allow people to express themselves freely when it comes to creations! Youtube does not deserve to be kept alive as a platform any more... I don't get why they even let ordinary users still upload there at this rate, they should just make it Netflix 2.0 so it's official.
Had to xD in all seriousness, I kinda saw this coming, what with Jacksepticeye and Markiplier talking about it. We've long had a warning about this if you paid attention to both of them, even Pewdiepie talked about it, so that makes 3.
Here, I'll drop this tidbit here to give you an example:
Websites lost anywhere from 20-30% of their total funding due to GDPR unless they went full-on compliance.
You may say "but GDPR was a good thing to user privacy, right?" and I would agree with you 100%. FA is in compliance with GDPR... except for advertising, which we chose not to do, which means we lost on a huge chunk of funding as listed above.
GDPR runs on multiple levels. Website policies and advertising. We're compliant as a website, but not as and advertiser. To comply wiht the latter you have to install one of those very annoying cookie systems. "Hey, we need you to accept all of our cookies from this very specific page design to continue using the site!" but at the very bottom is a little button that says "opt out".
Implementing these systems has a cost, and a very significant one if you want to recover that 20-30% of lost revenue. However, nothing is free, even adding that system comes at a very steep cost -- especially if you somehow become non-compliant. Sites either had to absorb the cost to comply OR go without. Going without means advertising in the EU is pretty much demonetized.
But, here's the kicker: turns a vast majority of sites that spent the money and implemented those advanced first-time page cooking warning pop-ups weren't even in full compliance.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/40.....-ruled-illegal
I chose to lose money rather than go invasive because that's not the experience I want FA to have. As I said above, I'd rather return FA to 100% full community ads than rely on this shit, but unfortunately that ended up costing us quite a bit in the long run.
And again, just scratching the surface here. This is barely touching the larger problems of the industry that nobody wants to talk about, and this shit runs deep.
Edit: What about fundraising, can we contact FFTF a to help us with a fundraiser to make the Internet a place where freedom rings?
The problem is there's hypocrisy. As I wrote in another comment, they want brand safety but happily post on Twitter where the entire platform is flooded with porn, spam, and crypto/NFT scammers but then tell other platforms "No, this is bad." Yet it's perfectly okay with them on Twitter?
Rumble can easily serve as a video platform for the right, but it's going to deter a loooot of creators because of that.
I can see the day where YT will be all hard-left stuff where Rumble will be all hard-right.
Is it possible to be neutral anymore in 2022?
Tons of sites like that were created for people who wanted spew "shit" regardless of websites ToS and with little thought of the rest, because they felt they had the "right to do it" and any kind of limitation or appliance to their ToS is viewed by a lot of that people as "wokeness propaganda" or "hard-left" which by itself is very very wrong way to view the issue.
Big companies want money, avoid "conflict" and UGC can be full of that. If the content stays within a "margin" of acceptance they'll do nothing but if they don't then the drama will start, regardless of policial color.
That's why some sites ban "hate preachers", sexualized stuff, outright liars, stuff without scientific backup and other things that might spark "drama" or put them at risk. Not to mention tons of them tend to happen more on one "side" of the scale than the other one and those who "abuse" that are the ones who get the boot. They want money and keep the flow of it without drama.
I do think tho that stuff can be neutral but some people DON'T want that to happen, as their own views can't allow to such neutrality to happen and it's constantly changing because of the Overton window (but that's a topic for another place, hah.)
Sounds like they're against the "free trade of ideas" that UGC sites promote, and more for the "Corporate farmed content" of YouTubers that are part of a corporate owned "network."
I'm reminded of how the bigger streaming services are buying up the smaller ones, and forcing you to subscribe to "bundles" instead of just choosing which services you want and which you don't. Streaming starts killing off Cable TV, and then it becomes a CLONE of Cable TV.
*Does anyone else remember that bit from the movie "Clue," or am I dating myself with that reference?
I'm just awaiting the day when Google/YouTube bans Bowser, Sonic, Animal Crossing, Animes and all that stuff from their services. Because let's be honest, that is totally where they are going with right now. They are litterally shooting themselves in the foot.
Especially in the fact they do know that we are taking the Internet, not only the Furry Community but all the Groups for varied purposes, LGBT+, Charity Groups and so on.
In the last few months especially, with the Covid19 Pandemic; and the Cry-ptos nonesense that has been blowing out of proportions, we have to conclude that those tech companies are literally trying to make us believe and also self-believe that they are in mortal danger of going out; and ended up pulling the ALL-STRAWS-IN moves. Which is quite oof in itself.
Honestly I have no words to comprehend their decisions. For a long time many of their changes were questionable, including the decision of hiding the number of Dislikes in all videos on Youtube.
Sure, there are some members of the furry community who showcases innapropriate behavior, but to the point of pulling the plug and not giving a definitive reason of why they decided to ghost us? They do have a reason, but they don't want to say.
Plus, there's the rules they gave about what should and shouldn't be posted. Years ago I remember seeing a video about the choice of words Youtube did when making the rules about what kind of content people should or not upload. For example, there's the obrigatory rule of "No sexual content", but they use the word "suggestive" to explain, meaning if there's a video of someone making a stream without a shirt or anything covering their upper body, they could flag it as "sexual content"....which is bullcrap if you ask me.
I thank you for letting us know about this Neer. I wouldnt say its a surprising revelation, but one that gives me context on other big websites' decisions and actions going forward.
Even with the help of AI they cannot completely sanitize UGC off everything that could put them in trouble. We see that all over the place on youtube, not just with furries or questionable content.
So could Google do better? Certainly, but let's not forget they aren't exactly free to do as they wish either.
X could be anything. Transgender, LGBT, furries, gays, democrats, conservatives, people who prefer pancakes over waffles. This is about money, and if brands decide they don't want to fund things that they disagree with the advertising companies will cave because that dings their profits.
If advertisers are so concerned about ads on mature content, Then how does Adult Swim still exist?
If the data says people who watch Rick and Morty also really love Call of Duty games then that's a prime advertising spot for a direct ad campaign buy -vs- indirect ad platforms like Google who just serve targeted ads through giant pools of ad buyers.
There has to be a way to fix the situation. They can't just block furries or people whom support furries.
But that's also a reason we have FA+. I saw this shit coming and decided to try to build in our own kind of "Patreon" support system. That's a reason so many other sites are coming out with it, too. That's the reason every newspaper/journalist site now has some "You gotta subscribe to read this article." Because they've all been clamped down on.
And it's only going to get worse.
Yeah I'll stop but you get my point
Dragoneer, I know it must be a hell of a job keeping this site running and managing the insanity that is FA, but...I at least am thankful for a place like this. I don't know how often you hear this, and I know it's not related to the Google problem, but...like...it's good to hear from time to time.
Thank you for the incredible work you've done. Through all the drama, the conflict, and the idiocy that plagues this world, you've done your best to provide us a place where we can post art of all kinds, create communities and stories, and find help when we need it from people that care.
Thanks for FA, Dragoneer.
They had Snoop Dogg and Ninja both signed on for a four year contract but claimed they weren't "getting the audience" they were hoping for (across the board) when that's bs. Snoop Dogg, within a literal day of his joining saw the audience to the site triple and then when Ninja signed, it went off the charts. But Microsoft just shut it down. And right now, they won't even put the deed to the site, up for sale, so no one can buy it and remake the site.
this is not what i stand for we must band together
>Allow ads to blatently ignore those rules and even show explicit ads that target kids with stuff like FNF, Amoung Us, and Ladybug
>Ads with blatent false advertising/copyright infrigment and the infamous mobile game ads
>Big corporations can post what ever they want
>Elsa Gate is still a thing
>can't do what you want, just appeal to trends
>removing dislikes just to appeal to the big corpations so their feel feels don't get hurt, which allows scam vids to thrive
Basically as long as your paying youtube you could practially upload stuff uncensored and ripped from the deepest pits of the dark web for all they care.
They definitely go after their bigger creators.
Some of the creators that had their accounts deleted were axed because of "sexual content". Read: inflation. But inflation isn't inherently sexual, and is a VERY common trope in cartoons and animation. So that's the hypocrisy. Sure, you can make the argument there's a difference between real and fantasy, and I'd completely agree with you. But someone inflating a fursuit in a YouTube video is vastly different than a pure sexualized video.
Filling a bathtub full of Orbeez and you could be viewed a kink. Fill a pool with them and you get 50m views. Flood somebody's backyard and you get 150m views. It's selective.
After reporting several +18 pieces of 8 year old copy written characters and getting the response of "They look old enough, closing ticket" is part of the reason why I'm growing distant to FA.
If I'm remembering things correctly, the example of the paddington bear issue a few years back also come to mind where a company had to step in with FA before something got taken care of that did help with the overall image and trust topic.
I know there are other video sharing sites like GoogleTube, but they just don't have the features like they do to really interest people
I've been personally spending every night for the past week hunting and banning reminder abusers, throwing out quite a number of bans. Additionally, we've been shutting down toxic accounts or those here to be disruptive and cause problems, even subtly.
Moderation is always going to be a topic of discussion, but we've been working hard to take more direct action.
However, when the characters are copy written between the ages of 8 and 12, its still my opinion there's a problem when art of them getting railed is allowed.
But yes, several of the pieces I've reported were of Dot from Warner Bros as she's drawn in the shows. Making her 10.
just imagine need build massive superservers and end creating a secondary internet called furrynet or extranet or thing like that just to be able to talk with furries!
is crazy but at this rate seems like we gonna need do it in maybe 10 years :c
Impartiality and don’t want to stoke the flames of politics.
Something weird is going on with Youtube, and it's making me crazy.
Anyway, I'll go get myself some of those doughnuts now.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/.....done-this-meme
A few months ago they removed the legendary "I can't believe you've done this!" meme of the guy getting punched. It was up for aaaages, zero issues, then suddenly it's "violent content". While they did reverse it we gotta be honest. It was only reversed because of a major outcry from people. If this was a smaller creator nobody'd have heard a peep.
Weird shit's going down at Google, and I feel like we're really only seeing the start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qit3ALTelOo
One of YouTube's first major breakthrough viral videos. He was a big creator early on, but YouTube's algorithm destroyed his channel. He lost 96% of his viewer base, and posted in a since-deleted video a while ago that he was debating leaving YouTube. His video career was destroyed because YouTube's system favored clickbait thumbnails and "extreme" videos, putting people like Mr. Beast over people who actually subscribed to his channel.
https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/c.....aving-youtube/
But he's not a lone. Tons of others have had the same happen to them. YouTube's system favors major creators over smaller ones now, and those major creators have to adhere to much stricter standards. They still have UGC, sure, but they're pushing the entire system to favor more curated developers and people who have sanitized or more viral aspects. Or they're shrugging them off in exchange for "shorts".
This has been going on for years.
Even though there are other reasons such as these for just try to being safe than sorry, but still, this is a concerning issue for FA.
It just means that we can't use Google to help cover the bills and it ended up costing us a bit of cash to work around it. We're not shutting down, nor banning content like that.
But in the end, I am confident that as a community, we will find a way to survive. Even if it means finding a new enclave to dig out on the edges of the map.
This reminds of something that was highlighted when tumblr got hit. With all of the porn (and safe sex and LGBTQ resource blogs) banned, it became much easier to find alt-right content. It's already been documented that YouTube tends to funnel users towards alt-right content creators. It's bad enough our lives are dictated by corporate greed, but this sanitization invariably seems to come with greater exposure to more dangerous communities, communities that interestingly do not threaten the economic status quo.
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.p.....iew/10419/9404
https://www.theguardian.com/technol.....er-hate-speech
I'm also grateful so many furries are techies. I feel like I can trust them to find or build alternatives when it comes to things like this.
And boy, I've been around long enough to know what FA was like in the before times. Good times.
Nowadays, you got people who outright harass artists if they even think you draw cub or even make an aged up version of a character. They pick up their pitchforks as if they're hunting an actual predator. And I've seen artists who've never at all even drawn NSFW art targeted! Without naming one, I know one artist who liked to draw fat pictures of Tails. They were pretty talented, and drawn exclusively SFW content! Oh, but apparently fatfurs can only be a sexual fetish, so somehow drawing Tails fat makes you a pedophile? I must've missed that memo. And as for this artist, because they kept getting harassed more and more, they eventually nuked their gallery! Yeah, great going, assholes; you made an SFW artist destroy years of their own work!
Sadly I feel the same rule may apply to other groups eventually, such as the LGBTQ community. When you rely on being tolerated just because it's fashionable in a world ruled by set standards, your acceptance stops the moment that fashion changes and someone with a new agenda which doesn't include you takes over. Maybe it would have been smart to take the harder route and challenge people's broken perceptions and reliance on societal labels, instead of encouraging and indulging into them to avoid the line of fire which you still end up in.
Only alternative I can think of to youtube is Dailymotion.
I kinda wonder if as a community we could try to essentially have Google advertise something degenerate on our end, and I feel that the price isn't too high if it seems that cash grab games are popping up second only to shitcoins (which I think are also a thing as well, gotta love allowing actual scams a voice if true)/
- When an artist posts a SFW animation that doesn't even contain any nudity: Banned, animation bad!
True story, both parts confirmed either by me or someone I know.
We get all the BS mega corporations from every cyberpunk dystopia, but none of the cool stuff that's supposed to go along with cyberpunk dystopia.
I have a site for hosting non-furry/technical stuff. I could buy a second domain name and point it to a different folder on the same server to host all my furry stuff, including video. Right now. Maybe I will.
But I don't because I'm lazy, not because it's expensive... Hosting our own content is what we could all be doing. Big tech doesn't do very much for us when you think about it. Their business is to just make it easy for us to do things we were already doing so they can mine our information. They really don't even need social media for it anymore, since they can just siphon that stuff right out of your cell phone.
YouTube hosts a community, but they aren't the community. No social media platform is. Digg found that out the hard way. Facebook is learning it right now. YouTube will too.
Fuck yt.
"Verify you’re old enough to manage your account
If you do meet the minimum age requirements, you can verify your age with a government-issued ID that shows you meet the requirement. You may also have the option to verify your age with a credit card."
It's amazing to me how many people know this, but still give Google a pass because their stuff is "free", (It's not, you're just paying for it with your data), or because they put Google on a pedestal because they have this ridiculous idea that Google is morally superior or altruistic somehow. Which absolutely couldn't be further from the truth.
The reason they dropped their "Don't be Evil" slogan, is because they knew there was no way they could live up to it.
I was pissed off when I was just under 1000 subs on my YouTube channel and was close to my first YouTube payout when YouTube contacted me and said 'Yeah you're under 1000 subs. If you don't get to that point in the next month, we're cutting you off from monetization because we're now putting a minimum requirement on monetization. If you want it back after that, you have to apply for it, like a job, and we can approve or deny it like a boss.'
That's when I realized YouTube was no longer about their legitimate small creators anymore. It's all about the big boys and the real money rakers.
Then again maybe I should not try to understand, its uncomfortable enoght that it is the way it is. Always for the own profits. Always that.
Know what would be funny? If one of their managers decided that they do no longer support Youtube itself because of UGC, forggeting along the act that youtube is a branch of their own company. I mean just image they stopped funding of their own sub company.
Now image the mangers in the meeting wresling it out... I think that thought is rather cute.
wish I could forever fuck off their services but that's more work to do out of spite that they're really not going to care about, updating all the sites I use to point away from gmail is more hassle than moving my phone service from them.
Your second comment says things that I agree with 👍
Too many people want to control what we see and write and stuff. A friend of mine has said people need to just live with things being around and if they don't like it then don't look or watch it which I think is good.
I might have to get him if I have confused you on it
UGC is a tricky part as it's hard to analyze automatically, providing tons of false positives or issues and if you want money that might be an issue.
It's both related and not related to politics and the Overton window I'd say.
Good read by the way, quite interesting topic that I've been following some time.
Now, let's be honest, what they see as questionable in the present could be an issue for them in the future and if you're a business man or a big congolomerate you'll want to avoid those things. They want the greens coming.
About the other things you mention, I think you're kinda wrong on some of them or just kinda biased on your points, which is fine too, as you're entitled to that but you need to know political correctness isn't a problem by itself, nor being "woke". It's too simplistic to pinpoint all the previous issues to those topics (they ain't perfect as well but putting the blame on them is just too much).
Don't forget as well that all places have policies/rules and some might be more lax or more "in-tune" with what you like or think but if you join "anywhere" you'll have to abide to their rules. Their owners are the ones who ultimate decide that and they have their rights to choose what's in them for whatever choice they may want and if you go against their wishes you'll just end removed and that happens everywhere, be it on a store or an online place.
Don't mix liberty and licentiousness as well, as it seems a lot of people tend to confuse it. Accepting our society wants you to develop as an individual but without overstepping the rest (which was what a lot of people used to think was right) isn't that bad too.
The idea that society wants individuals to develop was a nice dream I once fell for, never again. Society wants slaves that can be tricked to serve the mainstream, all who don't must be eliminated through whatever means are deemed acceptable. But that is its own story.
In the long run it's always linked to money, want it or not sadly.
Youtube is officially a Christian server now, no swearing and no porn allowed.
ahh what fun it is to be in a world of mega corporations
I also have to wonder how much is this sanitization of everything due to trying to appeal to the Chinese government so they can open the monetization floodgates of that market? like the way Youtube and India played out.
Only time will tell whether we become a Government Absolutists society or not, Canada is going that way it appears. from the outside.
Censorship is never the answer, and those who advocate for it tend to regret it later on after it takes them out of the picture. It's quite sad how screwed up we have allowed society to fall into.
It's like sites that police speech because it is easily searchable but then allow pictures of murder and extreme violence and gore and whatnot else because that's still a-okay in the algorithm.
Unfortunately this will NOT tank Google because of the already looming failure of Facebook/META where Zukerlizardberg has already lost over $500BILLION in ad pullouts as advertisers flee to google again. Google is going to keep getting bigger and controlling more things in daily life till there is some form of regulation to stop them.
Unfortunately because of the said corporatocracy, that is going to be hard to do considering google is rich and powerful enough to influence elections and politicians to their side.
Art and censorship are a bad mix and it always hurts the art/artists/writers/readers. But google doesn't care because they have their corporate puritanism to enforce and absolute buttloads of money to make... The whole "Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" type stuff.
So the gays and furries get censored once again because they aren't "profitable" enough and too much of a minority to waste advertising money on.
Whoa You mean the censorship that the left tolerated/endorsed is now being used on us? Weird! Never thought I'd see that coming! /sarcasm
not corporations.
It's when a conglomerate can dictate societal standards independently from the individuals which comprise it that a dangerous pattern emerges.
You are you because no one else is,
so do not let others tell you who you are.
They aren't you.
Sure the site will probably be pretty small, but I feel it will grow over time. I am always open to others ideas on how to improve it. I plan on not running any bots on my website, and it will have a manual review process on all uploaded user content prior to being made publicly available. Sure it might be a bit of a chore, but I think I am prepared for it.
Tho, I will never stop my paid subscription here, I love your website.
(Is there any way you can read my "notes"?)