Google is rolling out its age assurance technology that uses AI in Canada.
Essentially, the technology uses machine learning to interpret “a variety of signals already associated with the users account, such as the types of information a user has searched for or the categories of videos they’ve watched on YouTube,” in order to determine a user’s age.
I really wish there was a good alternative to youtube that more creators used. Peertube would be amazing but a lot of creators I follow with a little ad blocking do not share to peertube.
People make youtube videos because it generates income.
PeerTube can’t monetize content and every stored and transmitted bit costs money that has to be donated and the work is unpaid.
It’s like wishing non-fat non-sugar ice cream tasted as good as regular ice cream. Ice cream tastes good because of the fat & the sugar, just as YouTube is good because there’s money coming in and going out.
It wasn’t always this way, plenty of people made great youtube videos just for fun before there was any kind of “monetisation”. Sure, there weren’t the highly polished big budget videos (which would probably have been on tv back in the day), but there also wasn’t all the like-and-subscribe sponsored shit which makes the internet so unpleasant nowadays.
So yeah, I can’t disagree with this enough!
Those videos people did “for fun” also had massive exposure, because there was money coming in to pay for the servers to push those videos out.
Peertube offers neither much exposure, nor any money, so why? Why spend time making videos for a very few people who you will never meet?
I don’t like capitalism or monetization, but what you want is a logical impossibility without a funding stream, and I doubt there is one that isn’t problematic to some degree.
Places where independence can thrive are webpages and podcasts–both much cheaper to produce and distribute.
As I said, just for fun. Not everyone creates art for money or reputation. Obviously you do need someone to pay the bills though, hence everything Google has done with youtube over the years.
I get the impulse to create for fun, I really do. But once having created that art for fun, I can also see the impulse to want money from it, if possible, or to increase your social status. So as long as platforms offering reimbursement exist, they will have better and more content than free platforms.
And I’m also listening to what the YouTubers I personally follow say. One of my favorite youtubers is only youtube because TikTok stopped paying creators (and because algorithmically every video was a total crapshoot regardless of followers). A lot of creators I follow also make a big deal of Nebula, because that’s more a cooperative arrangement where they get a larger share of the profits…
I am well aware of this, it sucks.
Agree. At least YouTube allows capitalist-hostile small creators a voice; otherwise they’d be relegated to 7-minute segments of RT TV.