Youtube changes

People have been complaining for a few weeks about changes made to Youtube’s algorithms and suggested videos, and I can say that I’ve noticed some of these changes too. In order to keep myself from spending hours each day on Youtube, I intentionally limit my Youtube viewing to a small number of channels and in the past my Youtube experience had been very convenient because when I loaded Youtube on my web browser I would predominantly see videos from those channels. More recently, however, when I go to Youtube I’m seeing fewer videos from my preferred channels, to the point where sometimes I have search for those channels in order to find their content (a First World Problem, if there ever was one). In the place of some of the videos I’d like to see on my Youtube front page are things I’m not interested in, and also some stuff I really don’t want to watch. Seriously, why does Youtube think I’d be interested in watching wild animals decapitate each other? The majority of things I watch on Youtube are related to video games, so why is all this other stuff showing up? I’m hopeful that with time Youtube will relearn the sorts of things I watch and don’t watch, but for now I’m a bit annoyed.

Youtube Copyright Strike - Black Ops 3

Last week I got my very first Youtube copyright strike that rendered one of my videos unwatchable. I’m pretty sure that means I’ve come of age in the world of Youtube, and perhaps I should be honored that I finally earned one. The strike hit when I was uploading videos for last Friday’s commentary on Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. For whatever reason, one of the three videos I uploaded got a strike from Activision, the game’s publisher, for a small section at the end of the video. At first I figured I’d just cut out the part of the video that got the copyright strike, but as I was thinking about it I came to the conclusion that the part that I would have to cut was very important to the video as a whole, and the edited version would be very awkward for the viewer. I’m completely clueless as to why that video got the copyright strike while the other two passed through without incident, and I didn’t consider it something worth filing a dispute over, so I just deleted the whole video and uploaded another gameplay clip that I was originally not going to use. From reading other peoples’ comments online, it appears Activision has been very zealous to block certain gameplay footage of Black Ops 3, though the reasons behind this are unknown.

Let It Go

While on the flight from Paris to Minneapolis last November, I finally saw the movie Frozen. I also for the first time, and in context, heard the whole length of the hit song "Let It Go." I stopped regularly watching Disney movies sometime when I was a teenager, but I remember many of the songs from those movies, and I can't deny that Let It Go is an incredibly catchy song that will likely rank among the most popular songs in any Disney movie. Awhile after returning home, I went to Youtube and looked up the song to listen to it again. I quickly found it on one of Disney's official Youtube channels, but I also noticed that Disney had produce many other versions of the song in various foreign languages. One video that Disney had produced had the song being sung in 25 different languages (not simultaneously, but with a different singer singing different sections of the song). I was quite impressed with this video and noted that Disney had even gone so far as to include both Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish, making a distinction that not everyone knows about. There are even a few sections for languages from smaller ethnic groups, such as Catalan and Flemish. After watching the video it occurred to me that Disney is one of the few entertainment companies with means of producing something like this, and I scrolled down to the comments section to see what other people thought. I mean, this should be the sort of Youtube video that ought to get a lot of positive feedback, right?

Oh, silly me. I had completely forgotten that the Youtube comments section is the internet's cesspool for hatred and inflammatory remarks. Instead of celebrating the achievement of this video, there were instead a large number of commenters complaining about how their language wasn't in the video or how terrible a particular section was. This was rather disheartening and I soon closed the tab with the video and moved on. I haven't revisited the video in some time now, so hopefully the comments section isn't so abrasive now, but I do wish people could stop complaining for a minute and just appreciate when a person or organization goes through the effort to make something like that video.