11 ms·

YouTube (Un)Blocks Blender Videos

228 points by ycnews 8y ago

orastor 8y ago
Too late?
vortico 8y ago
This would be completely avoided if the service they used had good support. This is most important considering when choosing a service: Can non-standard issues be fixed quickly? Can I build a professional relationship with the company so I can ask them things that don't fit a typical "customer support" pipeline? Vimeo has great support and appear to be run by humans with emotions. Youtube basically doesn't have support. It is entirely machine-run like Apple, some national banks, your cable service, etc. A litmus test for determining whether a company has sufficient "support" is to check whether the following conversation is possible: "I really appreciate your service X!" "Thanks, means a lot. We're glad you like it!" If the response is "We'll pass that onto the team!" it's okay, but not great. If the response has the jist "This message is miscategorized", you're in trouble. If there's simply no channel to send that message, you're screwed.
- IBM 8y ago
  There's nothing about Apple, banks or cable companies that are entirely "machine run". In fact they're the exact opposite of Google in that they invest significantly in customer support.
  - vortico 8y ago
    Okay, then can you put me in contact with an Apple developer to discuss their software, or Apple to discuss a business deal, or a cable rep to negotiate a price? No, they're all too large for me to be worth their time, so I spend 98% of the time looking at a machine-served webpage or a machine on the other end of the telephone in their attempt to make me annoyed enough to drop my question. Those services are simply not profitable enough to justify the time spent talking to their customers. This is why I pay premium for services, which are often smaller with happy employees to communicate with me.
    - nickodell 8y ago
      I have had good luck with Apple support treating me like a real person. For example, I once called them about getting rEFIt and dual boot working on a Mac Mini, and the support guy did his best to figure out how to help me, even though it is definitely not supported and it is a very unusual configuration. Was I talking to an Apple developer? No, but I'm not asking them to implement a new feature on my behalf, so I don't expect to. YMMV.
    - dorian-graph 8y ago
      I made a stupid mistake to do with iCloud and after talking to the support manager who wanted to help, but there were some technical details they weren't completely confident in discussing, I was able to talk to a software engineer and decide what to do withe possible recovery options.
    - toomanybeersies 8y ago
      You don't think that developers might have things to do other than answer your support queries?
      - vortico 8y ago
        I'm primarily talking about companies that require more than basic customer support, not users who need help installing iPhoto (since this is Hacker News by Ycombinator after all). If you build your company upon the assumption that your target operating systems work without interaction with the vendor, good luck! Even if you're a $1m revenue startup targeting iOS or Mac, you will run into a blocking issue and discover that all Apple employees other than support and PR are outright banned from communicating with external parties about their products. No Apple employees are allowed to participate in their own public forums except in exceptional circumstances, and their "developer support" team seems to only be capable of copy-pasting vaguely relevant links from apple.com. Compare this to companies like Mozilla, GitHub, and even Adobe, who allow developers to be open and honest about issues that companies and individuals bring up. Apple, Google, and Facebook are the worst. Microsoft is decent and is fairly receptive to "user companies" if the issue is important enough.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    That Google doesn't provide support is a myth. They provide one of the best support I've seen for G Suite. You can get somebody on the phone no matter the timezone and the issues I've had with G Suite thus far have all been fixed. And Blender did mention that they had access to higher level support actually, due to their channel being popular. Support people however are often powerless and what happened to Blender seems to be human error. People speak of Microsoft's support being good for example. Remember the Skype transition to Microsoft accounts? I lost half my address book in that transition, contacted their support and they kept insisting that it isn't true and that I might be having a second Skype account. After several attempts with different people, I couldn't get them to transfer me to somebody technical that can recognize this is a bug. I gave up eventually and lost Skype IDs of people I've know for a long time. Microsoft's support is shit, it's as if it doesn't exist in some situations actually and yet people don't mention Microsoft as having poor support. Is that because you can get a dummy to read textbook replies back at you? I'll never know.
    - robin_reala 8y ago
      Support people however are often powerless I don’t think it’s possible to label someone as support if they’re powerless.
      - vortico 8y ago
        That's what the company calls the team anyhow.
        tyfon 8y ago
        They can't call them "customer deflection team" :) AS for the parents, I also have absolutely horrible experiences with Microsoft support, in fact last time I contacted them with a problem they hung up when they couldn't solve it.
      - bad_user 8y ago
        If the service / product has limitations that need to be fixed (aka bugs), then support is powerless because it depends on the policies, the timeline, the priorities of the development team. To give an example, also with G Suite, once upon a time when it was called Google Apps, I asked them to switch my primary domain to another domain — they couldn't because the feature wasn't implemented and they refused to manually change it, but they subscribed me to an early adopters program and several months later I got the feature available.
- MaxBarraclough 8y ago
  > "Thanks, means a lot. We're glad you like it!" If the response is "We'll pass that onto the team!" it's okay, but not great. Why rank them in that order? Is your point that the representative should feel like part of the team?
  - vortico 8y ago
    The ideal case is that the representative is part of the team. Perhaps he/she is in the same office or actually a developer. But it's okay if they're in a different team as long as they can open a communication channel if needed to say, clear up some confusion of a docstring written deep into an SDK by a developer.
- de_watcher 8y ago
  > This would be completely avoided if the service they used had good support. If Google wants to force monetization onto Blender then the response from a good support would be "we gonna force monetization onto Blender". And your post wouldn't be about the bad support. It would be more like about the starving Google or the shortage of money/freedom on the Internet. So there is no business point in the good support.
  - vortico 8y ago
    The primary reason seemed to be misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and the long delay between Youtube's eventual resolution.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  The only great customer service I've experienced at Google is with Google fi. Which is exceptional. Everything else is "don't even bother"
- duxup 8y ago
  I have programmed my machine to serve you in the manner you appreciate.... We will be glad you like it...
est 8y ago
I think the whole youtube drama can be summarized into one sentence: Someone at Google are trying hard to turn youtube into Google Video.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  No, I think it has to do more with money. I wonder if YouTube is still losing money, and might not even be profitable. It's hard to believe with all the revenue they post and the ads, but they do serve a lot of videos. Alphabet can't drastically change YouTube, as its brand is so closely tied to Google in the minds of a lot of people. (I'm still surprised how many people don't realize YouTube is owned by Google/Alphabet).
  - pests 8y ago
    Wait you say its brand is so closely tied to Google but yet don't realize YouTube is owned by Google?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Wouldn't blender tutorial videos be a good "Google Video" type video? I recall watching lots of lectures and tutorials on GV
simula67 8y ago
It does not seem like Google is in the wrong here. Unless Blender is willing to pay hosting charges, Google has no obligation to host these videos for free
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  Google made the option to mark a video as unmonetized in the first place, I don't see how it can be an uploader's fault for using an available option?
  - dingo_bat 8y ago
    Now they are taking that option away. They should get to dictate the terms of use of their free service, IMO. It's still a massive dick move. But what can you do?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - read_if_gay_ 8y ago
      Nobody has an issue with that, the problem is they're apparently doing that without any announcement or clear communication
    - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      > But what can you do? Spin up a peertube instance, apparently:)
    - Sylos 8y ago
      Well, you could write a blog post about it, so that Google gets the bad press it deserves for this dick move...
- djsumdog 8y ago
  We hear "it's their platform, they can do what they want," a whole lot. The trouble is the platform is almost a monopoly on user created video. You can't launch on other platforms and hope to be as successful as being on YouTube. Their discovery mechanism and massive user base gives them an incredibly unique positions. YouTube is from an earlier era, yet still after the dotcom bust. It was still on the rebound of the era of everything is free, we'll just make money on ads (like NetZero and Juno). That model was and still isn't sustainable, and their dominance gives them pretty unique control over media. Same with Facebook.
partiallypro 8y ago
I don't know why Microsoft or Amazon don't try to launch a YouTube competitor. Vimeo probably has the most reach for an acquisition, but those are more artsy/professional focused. I suppose Facebook is YouTube's largest competitor, but it's such a closed system that it's impossible to use in any manner that isn't strictly personal.
- vxNsr 8y ago
  Because even today youtube barely breaks even and its backed by the biggest ad network in the world.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    I know it wasn't profitable 3-4 years ago, but I believe it's fairly profitable now. But I'm not sure, I suppose the cost of running a video service can shift so drastically it's hard for it to be steady. I don't think Alphabet breaks out YouTube revenues/profit anymore.
    - hobofan 8y ago
      Last year the initial event of the "adpocalypse" happened, which both demonetized a lot of channels, and at the same time roughly halved what advertisers were willing to pay, even for complying channels. Since then a few additional waves of demonetization happened. Every time Youtube demonetizes a creator they are also demonetizing themselves. The combined effect of all that could have held back profitability significantly, especially considering that they are shooting for comparatively low-margin advertising business model compared to other platforms.
      - yoz-y 8y ago
        Isn't it the advertisers that are pushing for demonetisation?
        zaarn 8y ago
dang 8y ago
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17347560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17347560.
Endy 8y ago
I still stand by my earlier suggestion - break away from Alphabet; release videos directly through archive.org & Wikimedia.
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  Just to try it out, would this be an example of the kind of result you'd see at Archive.org? https://archive.org/details/CaminandesLlamigos https://archive.org/details/CaminandesLlamigos
  - Endy 8y ago
    Pretty much, I was more thinking about these: https://archive.org/details/lets-play https://archive.org/details/lets-play But, yes. And there's already at least some version of Big Buck Bunny up there, so it's not like there isn't Blender content in the Archive.
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      I was expecting some crappy 90s interface that was just a static listing of links to download videos or something like that, but this actually looks pretty good.
      - Endy 8y ago
        Isn't it nice when your expectations are exceeded? But seriously, Archive.org has done a lot in the last few years to improve its multimedia streaming - take a look at some of the music, radio shows, and audiobooks they have up there.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        Not to mention integrated WebApp DosBOX.
    - tyfon 8y ago
      That's pretty neat. I wonder what happens if it starts to being used like youtube. I see the top LP has 37k views, that's about as much as a video from a medium tier youtuber. The cost of storing/processing/serving videos is quite high. On a side note, I have finally gotten youtube red in my country and I immediately signed on. Will it send money to the "demonetised" videos that can't have adds or are they screwed out of youtube red money as well?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
akerro 8y ago
Don't negotiate with terrorists.
taneq 8y ago
Welcome to round N of "Google company only fixes farcical behaviour after it garners huge publicity and/or someone knows a well positioned staff member."
- superflyguy 8y ago
  That's true of all companies and has been for years.
  - falcolas 8y ago
    That doesn't excuse YouTube or Alphabet. And there are plenty of companies with proper support who will let you enact changes without having to create a PR storm or know someone high up in the company. See: Every company who hasn't had a PR storm yet continues to operate just fine.
  - evan_ 8y ago
    No it isn’t. If something goes wrong with the app I work on users can email, live chat, or call us and they actually talk to a human. That human, who is trained on our software, tries to help them solve the problem. If it turns out it’s a bug in the software, I or someone I work with will be notified and we will eventually try to fix the bug. If it’s bad we will drop what we’re working on and fix it immediately. That’s pretty much how it works at most places, afaik. Google chooses to be bad at this.
  - e40 8y ago
    Seems to me that Google started this trend.
    - superflyguy 8y ago
      No. I remember uk TV shows in the 1980s which featured people going through the official channels to get a problem resolved and it magically only happened when the guy from the company concerned was invited onto the show to explain what was going on.
tandav 8y ago
btw MIT-OCW is also unblocked
dreamache 8y ago
As a YT creator with 200k+ subscribers, shit like this scares me. Fortunately, I do not put all my eggs in one basket, and YouTube is just one of 4 ways I monetize my business.

228 points by ycnews 8y ago

Too late?

This would be completely avoided if the service they used had good support. This is most important considering when choosing a service: Can non-standard issues be fixed quickly? Can I build a professional relationship with the company so I can ask them things that don't fit a typical "customer support" pipeline? Vimeo has great support and appear to be run by humans with emotions. Youtube basically doesn't have support. It is entirely machine-run like Apple, some national banks, your cable service, etc. A litmus test for determining whether a company has sufficient "support" is to check whether the following conversation is possible: "I really appreciate your service X!" "Thanks, means a lot. We're glad you like it!" If the response is "We'll pass that onto the team!" it's okay, but not great. If the response has the jist "This message is miscategorized", you're in trouble. If there's simply no channel to send that message, you're screwed.

IBM 8y ago
There's nothing about Apple, banks or cable companies that are entirely "machine run". In fact they're the exact opposite of Google in that they invest significantly in customer support.
- vortico 8y ago
  Okay, then can you put me in contact with an Apple developer to discuss their software, or Apple to discuss a business deal, or a cable rep to negotiate a price? No, they're all too large for me to be worth their time, so I spend 98% of the time looking at a machine-served webpage or a machine on the other end of the telephone in their attempt to make me annoyed enough to drop my question. Those services are simply not profitable enough to justify the time spent talking to their customers. This is why I pay premium for services, which are often smaller with happy employees to communicate with me.
  - nickodell 8y ago
    I have had good luck with Apple support treating me like a real person. For example, I once called them about getting rEFIt and dual boot working on a Mac Mini, and the support guy did his best to figure out how to help me, even though it is definitely not supported and it is a very unusual configuration. Was I talking to an Apple developer? No, but I'm not asking them to implement a new feature on my behalf, so I don't expect to. YMMV.
  - dorian-graph 8y ago
    I made a stupid mistake to do with iCloud and after talking to the support manager who wanted to help, but there were some technical details they weren't completely confident in discussing, I was able to talk to a software engineer and decide what to do withe possible recovery options.
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    You don't think that developers might have things to do other than answer your support queries?
    - vortico 8y ago
      I'm primarily talking about companies that require more than basic customer support, not users who need help installing iPhoto (since this is Hacker News by Ycombinator after all). If you build your company upon the assumption that your target operating systems work without interaction with the vendor, good luck! Even if you're a $1m revenue startup targeting iOS or Mac, you will run into a blocking issue and discover that all Apple employees other than support and PR are outright banned from communicating with external parties about their products. No Apple employees are allowed to participate in their own public forums except in exceptional circumstances, and their "developer support" team seems to only be capable of copy-pasting vaguely relevant links from apple.com. Compare this to companies like Mozilla, GitHub, and even Adobe, who allow developers to be open and honest about issues that companies and individuals bring up. Apple, Google, and Facebook are the worst. Microsoft is decent and is fairly receptive to "user companies" if the issue is important enough.
- bad_user 8y ago
  That Google doesn't provide support is a myth. They provide one of the best support I've seen for G Suite. You can get somebody on the phone no matter the timezone and the issues I've had with G Suite thus far have all been fixed. And Blender did mention that they had access to higher level support actually, due to their channel being popular. Support people however are often powerless and what happened to Blender seems to be human error. People speak of Microsoft's support being good for example. Remember the Skype transition to Microsoft accounts? I lost half my address book in that transition, contacted their support and they kept insisting that it isn't true and that I might be having a second Skype account. After several attempts with different people, I couldn't get them to transfer me to somebody technical that can recognize this is a bug. I gave up eventually and lost Skype IDs of people I've know for a long time. Microsoft's support is shit, it's as if it doesn't exist in some situations actually and yet people don't mention Microsoft as having poor support. Is that because you can get a dummy to read textbook replies back at you? I'll never know.
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    Support people however are often powerless I don’t think it’s possible to label someone as support if they’re powerless.
    - vortico 8y ago
      That's what the company calls the team anyhow.
      - tyfon 8y ago
        They can't call them "customer deflection team" :) AS for the parents, I also have absolutely horrible experiences with Microsoft support, in fact last time I contacted them with a problem they hung up when they couldn't solve it.
    - bad_user 8y ago
      If the service / product has limitations that need to be fixed (aka bugs), then support is powerless because it depends on the policies, the timeline, the priorities of the development team. To give an example, also with G Suite, once upon a time when it was called Google Apps, I asked them to switch my primary domain to another domain — they couldn't because the feature wasn't implemented and they refused to manually change it, but they subscribed me to an early adopters program and several months later I got the feature available.
MaxBarraclough 8y ago
> "Thanks, means a lot. We're glad you like it!" If the response is "We'll pass that onto the team!" it's okay, but not great. Why rank them in that order? Is your point that the representative should feel like part of the team?
- vortico 8y ago
  The ideal case is that the representative is part of the team. Perhaps he/she is in the same office or actually a developer. But it's okay if they're in a different team as long as they can open a communication channel if needed to say, clear up some confusion of a docstring written deep into an SDK by a developer.
de_watcher 8y ago
> This would be completely avoided if the service they used had good support. If Google wants to force monetization onto Blender then the response from a good support would be "we gonna force monetization onto Blender". And your post wouldn't be about the bad support. It would be more like about the starving Google or the shortage of money/freedom on the Internet. So there is no business point in the good support.
- vortico 8y ago
  The primary reason seemed to be misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and the long delay between Youtube's eventual resolution.
paulie_a 8y ago
The only great customer service I've experienced at Google is with Google fi. Which is exceptional. Everything else is "don't even bother"
duxup 8y ago
I have programmed my machine to serve you in the manner you appreciate.... We will be glad you like it...

est 8y ago

I think the whole youtube drama can be summarized into one sentence: Someone at Google are trying hard to turn youtube into Google Video.

djsumdog 8y ago
No, I think it has to do more with money. I wonder if YouTube is still losing money, and might not even be profitable. It's hard to believe with all the revenue they post and the ads, but they do serve a lot of videos. Alphabet can't drastically change YouTube, as its brand is so closely tied to Google in the minds of a lot of people. (I'm still surprised how many people don't realize YouTube is owned by Google/Alphabet).
- pests 8y ago
  Wait you say its brand is so closely tied to Google but yet don't realize YouTube is owned by Google?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
oh_sigh 8y ago
Wouldn't blender tutorial videos be a good "Google Video" type video? I recall watching lots of lectures and tutorials on GV

simula67 8y ago

It does not seem like Google is in the wrong here. Unless Blender is willing to pay hosting charges, Google has no obligation to host these videos for free

simongr3dal 8y ago
Google made the option to mark a video as unmonetized in the first place, I don't see how it can be an uploader's fault for using an available option?
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  Now they are taking that option away. They should get to dictate the terms of use of their free service, IMO. It's still a massive dick move. But what can you do?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - read_if_gay_ 8y ago
    Nobody has an issue with that, the problem is they're apparently doing that without any announcement or clear communication
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    > But what can you do? Spin up a peertube instance, apparently:)
  - Sylos 8y ago
    Well, you could write a blog post about it, so that Google gets the bad press it deserves for this dick move...
djsumdog 8y ago
We hear "it's their platform, they can do what they want," a whole lot. The trouble is the platform is almost a monopoly on user created video. You can't launch on other platforms and hope to be as successful as being on YouTube. Their discovery mechanism and massive user base gives them an incredibly unique positions. YouTube is from an earlier era, yet still after the dotcom bust. It was still on the rebound of the era of everything is free, we'll just make money on ads (like NetZero and Juno). That model was and still isn't sustainable, and their dominance gives them pretty unique control over media. Same with Facebook.

partiallypro 8y ago

I don't know why Microsoft or Amazon don't try to launch a YouTube competitor. Vimeo probably has the most reach for an acquisition, but those are more artsy/professional focused. I suppose Facebook is YouTube's largest competitor, but it's such a closed system that it's impossible to use in any manner that isn't strictly personal.

vxNsr 8y ago
Because even today youtube barely breaks even and its backed by the biggest ad network in the world.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  I know it wasn't profitable 3-4 years ago, but I believe it's fairly profitable now. But I'm not sure, I suppose the cost of running a video service can shift so drastically it's hard for it to be steady. I don't think Alphabet breaks out YouTube revenues/profit anymore.
  - hobofan 8y ago
    Last year the initial event of the "adpocalypse" happened, which both demonetized a lot of channels, and at the same time roughly halved what advertisers were willing to pay, even for complying channels. Since then a few additional waves of demonetization happened. Every time Youtube demonetizes a creator they are also demonetizing themselves. The combined effect of all that could have held back profitability significantly, especially considering that they are shooting for comparatively low-margin advertising business model compared to other platforms.
    - yoz-y 8y ago
      Isn't it the advertisers that are pushing for demonetisation?
      - zaarn 8y ago

dang 8y ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17347560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17347560.

Endy 8y ago

I still stand by my earlier suggestion - break away from Alphabet; release videos directly through archive.org & Wikimedia.

themodelplumber 8y ago
Just to try it out, would this be an example of the kind of result you'd see at Archive.org? https://archive.org/details/CaminandesLlamigos https://archive.org/details/CaminandesLlamigos
- Endy 8y ago
  Pretty much, I was more thinking about these: https://archive.org/details/lets-play https://archive.org/details/lets-play But, yes. And there's already at least some version of Big Buck Bunny up there, so it's not like there isn't Blender content in the Archive.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    I was expecting some crappy 90s interface that was just a static listing of links to download videos or something like that, but this actually looks pretty good.
    - Endy 8y ago
      Isn't it nice when your expectations are exceeded? But seriously, Archive.org has done a lot in the last few years to improve its multimedia streaming - take a look at some of the music, radio shows, and audiobooks they have up there.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        Not to mention integrated WebApp DosBOX.
  - tyfon 8y ago
    That's pretty neat. I wonder what happens if it starts to being used like youtube. I see the top LP has 37k views, that's about as much as a video from a medium tier youtuber. The cost of storing/processing/serving videos is quite high. On a side note, I have finally gotten youtube red in my country and I immediately signed on. Will it send money to the "demonetised" videos that can't have adds or are they screwed out of youtube red money as well?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

akerro 8y ago

Don't negotiate with terrorists.

taneq 8y ago

Welcome to round N of "Google company only fixes farcical behaviour after it garners huge publicity and/or someone knows a well positioned staff member."

superflyguy 8y ago
That's true of all companies and has been for years.
- falcolas 8y ago
  That doesn't excuse YouTube or Alphabet. And there are plenty of companies with proper support who will let you enact changes without having to create a PR storm or know someone high up in the company. See: Every company who hasn't had a PR storm yet continues to operate just fine.
- evan_ 8y ago
  No it isn’t. If something goes wrong with the app I work on users can email, live chat, or call us and they actually talk to a human. That human, who is trained on our software, tries to help them solve the problem. If it turns out it’s a bug in the software, I or someone I work with will be notified and we will eventually try to fix the bug. If it’s bad we will drop what we’re working on and fix it immediately. That’s pretty much how it works at most places, afaik. Google chooses to be bad at this.
- e40 8y ago
  Seems to me that Google started this trend.
  - superflyguy 8y ago
    No. I remember uk TV shows in the 1980s which featured people going through the official channels to get a problem resolved and it magically only happened when the guy from the company concerned was invited onto the show to explain what was going on.

tandav 8y ago

btw MIT-OCW is also unblocked

dreamache 8y ago

As a YT creator with 200k+ subscribers, shit like this scares me. Fortunately, I do not put all my eggs in one basket, and YouTube is just one of 4 ways I monetize my business.