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A welcome move for individuals who may have embarrassing content as Unlisted links. Future politicians will thank you. But... this will hit B2B product training
by btown 5y ago
A welcome move for individuals who may have embarrassing content as Unlisted links. Future politicians will thank you. But... this will hit B2B product training and product marketing libraries hard. Many companies I've seen have help pages with embedded or linked videos for features not updated in years, and many of those embeds are Unlisted videos so that they're only seen in the context of their help article, not promoted randomly by the YouTube algorithm. Some may have legacy content on legacy "X Corp Training" YouTube channels where nobody knows how to opt out of this policy shift. And especially post-COVID, they may no longer have the same technology and training teams, if they have any at all. They may not even have the YouTube login.
I could see a policy where YouTube made Unlisted videos Private that only had referrers from social media; this would be a welcome compromise to ensure non-guessability of URLs. But I can also see how this could become complicated and political. And companies using YouTube in this way aren't really contributing to YouTube's revenue materially, so there's not much incentive relative to the reputational risk of people guessing Unlisted links.
I shudder to think that healthcare professionals or heavy-machinery operators might be relying on these links to be trained in systems they use, will start to see broken links, will never report them back to the right people at their system providers, will just not get the full training, will make mistakes, and might cause harm as a result.
Security is not the only component of safety, and impacts need to be evaluated holistically.
- app4soft 5y ago> A welcome move for individuals who may have embarrassing content as Unlisted links. All those "early access" on Patreon.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- newsclues 5y agoMaybe critical training materials should not be published to YouTube?
- the_benno 5y ago"should not be published" is very different from "are not published"
- themadprogramer 5y agoagreed. YouTube as a platform has shifted away from hosting to "publishing" and edge-cases like this are unfairly tossed to the side.
- spartanatreyu 5y agoThere was a time, when YouTube was seen as free and open as Wikipedia.
- nomel 5y agoThere was a very long time when YouTube bled absolutely incredible amounts of money.
- SilverRed 5y agoThere is no better way to provide video content with a text document than to link to youtube. Sure they should have a private backup but until youtube stops working well like it has for a decade, it's still more reliable than any self hosted setup a company would build.
- laurent123456 5y agoThat may have been true, but these days can't you just put the video on S3 or any storage and play it using the <video> tag?
- kube-system 5y agoYou probably can, but the people who are tasked with delivering training videos likely do not have the technical ability to do so.
- randrews 5y agoSo your complaint is that a company might have put a forklift training video on youtube, as an unlisted video, have then forgotten the password to change it, then will hire someone and tell them to watch it, that person won't be able to and will then not tell anyone else that fact, and after all that they might then hurt themselves with a forklift? At what point is a hypothetical harmful scenario too absurd to care about?
- rattray 5y agoThe scenario you described doesn't sound absurd to me at all. Even at high-functioning companies, people don't report or fix glaring problems in documentation and training material. There are quite a lot of not-so-high-functioning companies in the world.
- easytiger 5y agoWell then you've got a decade of free hosting and the only negative consequence of it is it stops working. The reductive logic here is something else
- daniellarusso 5y agoThis is the best forklift training video I have seen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_–_The_First_Day_on_the_Job https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_–_The_...
- neartheplain 5y agoYouTube link (not unlisted): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAHzP4umE4M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAHzP4umE4M
- swiley 5y agoIMO: it's always been pretty dumb to use youtube for important things, doubly so important things that avoid the discoverability aspect.