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YouTube: Due to limited creator history we're limiting the number of views

205 points by wylie39 5y ago

webspaceadam 5y ago
Nah this seems to be fake, right? Haven't seen anything like this besides screenshots
- Aldipower 5y ago
  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.
rjmunro 5y ago
If this is about people broadcasting sporting events unauthorised, I wonder if the fact that the Olympics are currently happening is making this worse.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Does 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 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.
- sampo 5y ago
  > more context? Maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30177216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30177216
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    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.
- sennight 5y ago
  Supposedly it is targeting a very specific type of content: medical mandate protest coverage. Unfortunately this is a plausible explanation. https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-capping-viewer-limits/ https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-capping-viewer-limits/
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    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.
    - oceanplexian 5y ago
      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.
    - sennight 5y ago
      > 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..."
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        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.
- jsnell 5y ago
  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.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    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.
    - sennight 5y ago
      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.
      - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
        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.
- tjansen 5y ago
  My guess is that the purpose is to prevent people from creating throwaway accounts that re-broadcast sport events, movies and so on.
- fortran77 5y ago
  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.
  - logicalmonster 5y ago
    > 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.
    - Izkata 5y ago
      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.
- jffry 5y ago
  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 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.
  - sct202 5y ago
    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.
- kotaKat 5y ago
  Mobile live streaming requirements: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9228390 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.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    > 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.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    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?!
    - alternatetwo 5y ago
      They did, but the accounts got deleted probably. I was going from 1200-1000 on a mostly inactive account for years.
- theknocker 5y ago
- smitop 5y ago
  This video was archived while the issue was occuring: https://archive.fo/IMxlI https://archive.fo/IMxlI
WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
On the one hand, kinda scummy, on the other, do we really need more "Elon musk crypto scam live streams"?
jfsjhggdgdfg 5y ago
aquova 5y ago
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.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > 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.
- zo1 5y ago
  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.
- jffry 5y ago
  I found a benign example from Jan 8 of this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30178196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30178196
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
margofx 5y ago
I don't get the whole point, so we should just subscribe to the channel so that we can continue what we're watching?
deadalus 5y ago
Youtube Alternatives : Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  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.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    PeerTube has livestreams, and they're even P2P load-balanced; this reduces the cost quite a bit.
  - sebow 5y ago
    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.
nickdothutton 5y ago
Done to prevent live-streaming of terrorist activities/suicides etc?
- zelag 5y ago
  I think it's for those crypto giveaway scams.
kumarm 5y ago
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.
- draw_down 5y ago
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
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.
RicoElectrico 5y ago
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.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
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.
- tomschlick 5y ago
  > 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.
  - marmarama 5y ago
    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.
    - tomschlick 5y ago
      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.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        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.
svnpenn 5y ago
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. https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-capping-viewer-limits/ https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-capping-viewer-limits/
- 33ultra 5y ago
  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.
  - 33ultra 5y ago
    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.
33ultra 5y ago
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.
- tzs 5y ago
  OT: I'm curious why that is the thread that got marked [dupe]. That was the one that was posted first.
monkeybutton 5y ago
Was it really the bitcoin giveaway scams that instigated this, and not events like the Christchurch terror attack that was live streamed?
hnburnsy 5y ago
From Google support... https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9228390 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?
- causi 5y ago
  So basically a big old "fuck you" to anyone witnessing a noteworthy event. No citizen journalism allowed.
  - emerged 5y ago
    Live footage of an event actually happening is “misinformation” from their perspective.
  - namlem 5y ago
    Presumably it's to stop copyright infringement. People streaming shows and such.
  - Handytinge 5y ago
    Use twitch? Or any of the other hundreds of live video platorms out there.
- judge2020 5y ago
  the spam being targeted https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elon+crypto&sp=EgJAAQ%253D%253D https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elon+crypto&sp=...
tpoacher 5y ago
> "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.
sylware 5y ago
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.

205 points by wylie39 5y ago

webspaceadam 5y ago

Nah this seems to be fake, right? Haven't seen anything like this besides screenshots

Aldipower 5y ago
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.

rjmunro 5y ago

If this is about people broadcasting sporting events unauthorised, I wonder if the fact that the Olympics are currently happening is making this worse.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Does 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 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.

sampo 5y ago
> more context? Maybe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30177216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30177216
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  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.
sennight 5y ago
Supposedly it is targeting a very specific type of content: medical mandate protest coverage. Unfortunately this is a plausible explanation. https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-capping-viewer-limits/ https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-capping-viewer-limits/
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  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.
  - oceanplexian 5y ago
    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.
  - sennight 5y ago
    > 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..."
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      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.
jsnell 5y ago
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.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  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.
  - sennight 5y ago
    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.
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      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.
tjansen 5y ago
My guess is that the purpose is to prevent people from creating throwaway accounts that re-broadcast sport events, movies and so on.
fortran77 5y ago
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.
- logicalmonster 5y ago
  > 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.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    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.
jffry 5y ago
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 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.
- sct202 5y ago
  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.
kotaKat 5y ago
Mobile live streaming requirements: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9228390 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.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  > 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.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  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?!
  - alternatetwo 5y ago
    They did, but the accounts got deleted probably. I was going from 1200-1000 on a mostly inactive account for years.
theknocker 5y ago
smitop 5y ago
This video was archived while the issue was occuring: https://archive.fo/IMxlI https://archive.fo/IMxlI

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago

On the one hand, kinda scummy, on the other, do we really need more "Elon musk crypto scam live streams"?

jfsjhggdgdfg 5y ago

aquova 5y ago

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.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> 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.
zo1 5y ago
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.
jffry 5y ago
I found a benign example from Jan 8 of this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30178196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30178196

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

margofx 5y ago

I don't get the whole point, so we should just subscribe to the channel so that we can continue what we're watching?

deadalus 5y ago

Youtube Alternatives : Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
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.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  PeerTube has livestreams, and they're even P2P load-balanced; this reduces the cost quite a bit.
- sebow 5y ago
  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.

nickdothutton 5y ago

Done to prevent live-streaming of terrorist activities/suicides etc?

zelag 5y ago
I think it's for those crypto giveaway scams.

kumarm 5y ago

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.

draw_down 5y ago

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

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.

RicoElectrico 5y ago

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.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

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.

tomschlick 5y ago
> 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.
- marmarama 5y ago
  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.
  - tomschlick 5y ago
    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.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      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.

svnpenn 5y ago

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. https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-capping-viewer-limits/ https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-capping-viewer-limits/

33ultra 5y ago
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.
- 33ultra 5y ago
  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.

33ultra 5y ago

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.

tzs 5y ago
OT: I'm curious why that is the thread that got marked [dupe]. That was the one that was posted first.

monkeybutton 5y ago

Was it really the bitcoin giveaway scams that instigated this, and not events like the Christchurch terror attack that was live streamed?

hnburnsy 5y ago

From Google support... https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9228390 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?

causi 5y ago
So basically a big old "fuck you" to anyone witnessing a noteworthy event. No citizen journalism allowed.
- emerged 5y ago
  Live footage of an event actually happening is “misinformation” from their perspective.
- namlem 5y ago
  Presumably it's to stop copyright infringement. People streaming shows and such.
- Handytinge 5y ago
  Use twitch? Or any of the other hundreds of live video platorms out there.
judge2020 5y ago
the spam being targeted https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elon+crypto&sp=EgJAAQ%253D%253D https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elon+crypto&sp=...

tpoacher 5y ago

> "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.

sylware 5y ago

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.