Two days ago, I clicked on a link from someone, and didn’t think about it. What occurred was a popup from youtube and a threat “disable adblockers or your video viewing privileges’ will be frozen”.
Of course, I haven’t forgotten about youtube’s now complete shift from alternative media with original and creative content to scientific censoring machine with little non-contrived media and a huge appetite – well, an appetite that is greed. Of course, it’s their platform, but it is not one of a typical media setup where the content is purchased and conveyed to the customer. We are no longer the customer for youtube, we are the product. We’re the product of seemingly nice but piggish presenters of material who had an idea of the formula they’d follow before their channel started. I’ve watched some of them who were very apparently beginners never become accomplished at anything but sucking in throngs of people and selling to them no real knowledge, and tons of information worse than what was already in the public domain.
Why? Because the platform from every perspective but the viewers has become one of greed. Even accomplished makers can’t resist telling you about ” the tools they use ” with a revenue token link so that you’re tagged for a block-out period where they get a commission on anything you purchase. Even if you wait a while.
It’s not the same dynamic of someone trying to sell you something they made, it’s more antisocial. It’s someone coming up with a way to get you to spend money and give them some of it for things they had nothing to do with. it’s parasitic, and widely accepted now.
So, I quickly downloaded all of my videos yet not backed up and unlisted them. Once I have a chance to make sure I have them stored securely, they’ll be completely deleted from youtube.
Does it really matter? No. In a decade or so, I had 720k views on videos. I’ve never looked at view totals because I just don’t care, but it’s certainly the case that some of the videos were shit from a long term perspective. The information may have been news of some sort when they were new, but the info isn’t new now and getting through the videos was cumbersome because they were just blurted out on the spot.
Others that are novel and useful and perhaps long, but with purpose, get about 500-1,500 views. Nobody is really viewing them, and they would never get promoted because I refused to sign up for adsense.
The direction on youtube and the real lack of any progress in the woodworking world for people who might like to go to a shop and actually work by hand, or just work with minimal tools and without being sold something else where “minimal tools” is the gimmick (pushing classes or website access like Sellers)….it’s just a battle that’s sort of over.
And kind of the little hook in my shoulder, every time I think about it – youtube drops an ad at the beginning of each of my videos, I don’t have the option to cut that out. How much do they make? Probably about $30 or $50 a month. It’s not an amount they’d ever notice, but it bothers me that as long as the “faucet is running” so to speak where they’re getting ad revenue off of my videos, it’s not resolved.
It’s resolved now, and I’m relieved. I have no idea how much of the video group will be reposted elsewhere – it will certainly be a small amount of the stuff that has longer term value. Perhaps the jack plane video, something about saw sharpening and a few of the stone and sharpening technique videos. The rest of it had its day.
I never intended to make videos good enough to expect someone to sit through an ad to watch them. This site has a 13 gig data limit and to host all of the videos would cost a few hundred dollars a month given the cost of expansion and serving. Not because anyone is actually going to use several residential fios customers’ worth of data viewing my videos, but because there just isn’t any service out there intended to serve low volume videos that are large in terms of size.
Rumble is an option, but it’s pretty sketchy!!
You may think I’m a bit nuts about all of this, but I’ve thought about it for a while. It hasn’t exactly been something that weighs me down every day – 720k total views is sort of like claiming to be the guy who had the 179th best video cassette idea behind betamax and still wanting to be heard. I operate on principle wherever possible. I wish all of us did. We’d all have a better workplace, a better and more honest market of goods when we went out of the door, and a more honest media and alternative media setup. The incentives all go the other way, so it’s not that I won’t make a difference, it’s that I can’t. I can just determine what fits my principles and other than stating them, layoff and let people make their own choice without trying to turn my irk into group think.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
Hi there Dave,
I tried leaving a comment on WordPress where I have commented before – and lost several comments as well. The login process with WordPress, in order to leave a comment, seems stuffed up. So I’m using the reply function in email.
I hold my nose when viewing stuff on Youtube. Acquiescing in the deception and false representation makes me uneasy, although there is some good material out there that is relatively easy to discover. If I search for alternative sources on Google, I know my search is being manipulated by the same deceptions and limitations of their search engine. So I use DuckDuckGo and hope for the best.
Given that there isn’t an ounce of infotainment on your site, I’m not surprised that the views have not been very much higher. But that’s likely more than made up for by how seriously your videos are taken by those who viewed them. Your content is rich and packed tight with critical ideas and – for me at least – sometimes requires several re-reads to understand your turn of phrase as a non-American, not to mention the depth of the subject matter The effort is well worth it.
I see that several woodworkers are offering subscriptions to get their content on Substack. If that’s the route you take instead of Youtube, count me in.
Rob
Rob Collins 6 rue Sunny Acres Baie-D’Urfe QC H9X 3B6 Canada (O) 514.457.4990 (M) 514.833.4990
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Hi David,
I am so sorry that you finally pulled the trigger and removed all your videos from yt. I knew the day would come but didn’t expect it so soon. I was gonna ask for your permission to download all your videos as a backup but with life going on a lot this year, I procrastinated and lost my chance.
Anyway, I still believe there are a lot of options, much cheaper options to host your videos by yourself. Even an old fashioned ftp server would serve your purpose well if you decide to go down that route, I am sure your viewers wouldn’t mind what platform it is, it’s the content of your videos that matters and interests us the most.
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I’d recommend using backblaze b2 as the storage and cloudflare as the CDN, they would work great and wouldn’t cost much. There must be some wp plugin that could integrate the videos/images from cloudflare/b2 into here.
The following articles explain how it works in detail.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-serve-data-from-a-private-bucket-with-a-cloudflare-worker/
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010017893-Delivering-Private-Backblaze-B2-Content-Through-Cloudflare-CDN
Hope this helps!
If you need some help, you can reach me at ly0x52 at outlook.com, I will be more than happy to help you out on this matter.
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Unfortunately, you have to upgrade to premium wordpress to use plugins or widgets. I’m stuck with the basic stuff, but Rumble is probably a legitimate place for me to dump the videos.
I’d rather tolerate conspiracy theorists and deal with putting bigots on ignore once in a while than deal with the piggishness and censorship that youtube has waded into, and Rumble doesn’t cost anything.
If I change my tune and am willing to fork out more than about $125 a year to run a website, I’ll let you know, though.
I think you may have mentioned FTP elsewhere. Reminds me of my college days – FTP servers were gold. I ran an FTP server and one of the top three beavis and butthead sites on the internet from my college dorm off of a single PC. needless to say, end users were not pulling data at the same speed that they do now – mostly small pictures and .wav files.
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Wow, quite a bit to catch up to.
Yeah, YT is gotten to the point where all they do is seek rent. We kinda let it happen as we often do but that’s besides the point. The point is that having a platform like that can’t be free, so sooner or later a company will start to monetize their platform in some way. Rumble will do the same at some point, they’re currently in the “bait” phase of their life cycle. If they grow enough of course.
On YT it’s always been an arms race between a YT pushing ads and people using ad blockers. Every once in a while YT finds a way to circumvent an ad blocker only for an ad-blocker to catch up in a few days. I guess with the growing popularity of ad blocking YT added some intimidation into the mix knowing that many users will just buy into their threats and stop using ad blockers altogether. However it’s a small breach, this type of popups is reported by people on one particular OS using one particular browser and I think most ad blockers caught up already. Sure, YT continues to wage a war on its own users (i.e. mobile experience is so terrible one has to be a real glutton for punishment to use YT on any platform that doesn’t support ad blocking) the war is far from being over. Even if they pull plug on ad blockers in their browser and go as far as making a call to Mozilla HQ and force them to do the same – there’s still a ton of fairly low tech solutions to disable ads outside the browser.
The videos are yours (at least for the time being: there are rumors YT is changing ToC to forbid creators from ever deleting their videos) and you’re free to do as you pleased with them. It’s just you’re not really doing anything to YT but rather to your viewers. There’s no way to find your videos on YT, they’re never promoted by the algo, they’re not even searchable by a precise search term most of the time – idk whether you aware about it, it’s been like that way before you unlisted them. As a subscriber with all notifications enabled I’d just check the channel manually every now and then, because others push their content at such a rate that yours just disappear from the notifications drawer in an hour. What I’m trying to say is that most views you were getting was from people that already knew your channel. YT isn’t going to feel anything, they’ll squeeze a few pennies from viewers anyway. YT will still push rexes, wanderers and animal trades and their non-content in our faces because rexes and wbws pay for it, and for people looking for substance there’s now one source less. But again, it’s up to you, it’s not like you owe anything to anybody.
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Yes on all of that. Except I’m not waging war on YT to hope they notice or pull money out from under them, or whatever else. I don’t know when things changed on YT in terms of promoting videos – it’s been going on a lot longer than mine dropped in priority to the point that they can’t really be found. I recall Matthias Wandel and others talking about it happening probably a decade ago now.
Certainly never turning on adsense has made a big difference in the longer term. I can see a drop off around 2018 – though I’m not sure the automatic video ads regardless of adsense was around the same time. The data mining of various channels mean behind the scenes, anything could happen. Generating a lot of views wasn’t really the point, though -above a pretty low level, increased views just bring chair workers. As in, people who never get out of their chair to do any real woodwork, so their woodwork is sitting and imagining only.
And, yes, if rumble, or the next after them, or whoever else, grows market share and can monetize, they will do the same thing as YT.
Thanks for the heads up on the YT TOS potentially changing. TOS has divided some time frames of videos into different categories in the past – hopefully that would be a going-forward only thing, but I know little enough about the full TOS or rights to leave my videos up. Your mention encourages me to go delete them rather than leave them unlisted.
Plenty of other sides allow you to post media with no ability to delete it after a short period of time, so it wouldn’t be a surprise.
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It’s not that your videos have dropped, it’s other videos are very aggressively promoted. It’s a never ending battle: Google/YT tweak their algorithm every so often and a whole army of people (they call themselves “SEO”) reverse engineer the algo and tailor their content so it gets on top of the recommended and searched videos. Organic popularity is long dead and all those rexes in animal trades do employ these SEO people. Have you noticed how many one sentence comments under those videos are there and how mind-blowingly stupid they are? It’s ‘cos it’s 90% bots, click on any profile and you’ll see they leave same type of comments under a TON of really diverse set of videos. They don’t engage in conversations either. It’s business to the point that there’s a whole “Makers in wood” (or something like that) conference that talks only about online presence and brand promotion. I think you can figure what happens to your videos in terms of discoverability. And it’s just a tip of an iceberg.
Anyway, I’m probably speaking from an egoistical standpoint. Wanted to consult on resharpening a Japanese saw video the other day and it’s gone, as well as few others I used to rewatch every once in a while as a refresher. Now I blame myself for not making a playlist, since de-listed videos aren’t removed from everywhere, they just don’t show it on your public profile and exclude from search.
Btw, people that make a living with social content are kinda smart: they use these platforms to build a huge audience to upsell something to them later. Paul Sellers is a prime example, the referral salesmen, etc – it’s basically the first stage of a sales funnel for them. But it doesn’t work for the type of knowledge you share, for this model to work one has to be a crowd pleaser. Sellers appeals to people that couldn’t master basics after a decade — which could be attributed to some quite bad advices he gives, but mostly it’s the type of audience. Same for Cosman – just how many videos does one need for dovetails? and why those videos become more and more fiddly as he re-does them? All the rexes and wriggling panderers basically relay whatever is in trends these days, so it’s mostly a re-digested content from Schwartz through his blog of FWW magazine. It’s awful, but it brings audience. I guess what I’m trying to say is that for the type of content you create you have relatively good count of followers. You might think it’s low, but if you compare it to people doing content similar to yours it’s on par. I could go on a whole different rant, but gonna stop here, or my comment is going to run longer than the post I’m commenting on.
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>> but gonna stop here, or my comment is going to run longer than the post I’m commenting on.<<
Yeah, and when you're comparing it to my posts, that's really saying something.
By day, I'm an applied mathematician of sorts. I saw the algorithm long ago as predictable, easy game and from my principles, something I had no interest in. at the time, I guess i thought videos like my one about sharpening japanese saws – would elevate discussion, but I also had about 230 videos up – perhaps some were unlisted, but I just deleted 230 after you mentioned TOS changes.
I have all of those videos. I'll upload the japanese saw sharpening video somewhere and send you a link. Maybe I'll even upload it on rumble for now.
It's not that I didn't follow what sellers and animal trades and all of those people are doing, but it's beneath me. And I'm saying that as someone who is transparent and honest, but by no means the standard of any sort for societal empathy, manners and deference. I just think people like rex and animal trades are literally a problem in our society – it's a problem of greed and entitlement and doing something that adds no real value to society, but taking as much out of it along the way.
Even charity is corporatized and gamed for personal gain in our society now. Ever notice the tenor with charities or who does the most public giving to them? They're just used as a misdirection medium for advertising. Fortunately, some of those program dollars do actually help people in need.
I made a very conscious choice a long time ago to never do more than turn a phone camera on, talk, do, whatever, and limit editing to nothing more than splitting or adding videos. it was, of course, a dead end for any kind of promotion. You can maybe tell by how I like to push further and further on things, that I like optimizing or incremental improvement. The metrics in youtube are just cherry for that – you can look at all kinds of video aspects and see where attention drops off and just go narrower and narrower in focus until you only do what gets the most views, take advantage of the most people with affiliate links, and give as little legitimately good information as possible. Does anyone think Rex is good at anything other than youtube? I don't. I haven't looked in a while, and maybe he's become a master carver, but his progress was slower than a middle schooler would've been in a two times a week shop class.
I think paul lacks substance, too, but it's a different thing. he lacks – in my opinion – not only the inability to foster legitimate discussion on the comments in his videos and on his site, but no desire to tell anyone exactly what his history is or who worked on his projects (I see a chest in the white house that looks like Frank Strazza made it).
I think our society has become nothing but referral salesperson wannabes, who are not only nothing more than leeches, but they also want to try to push people looking for legitimate information in a different direction for their own benefit.
it's just the version of where we are. Long before even television, we just had that kind of nonsense at the street level or with large scale hucksters and con artists selling liver pills or even further back, lead pencils with only with a tiny amount in them.
if I sell chisels, I intend to buck the trend. I will sell them, I will make them – everything on them, I will list them, and I will describe them and do nothing to optimize SEO. it will be an experiment to see what happens if I sell something really good without saying who I am, and am able to get repeat customers because there is something of substance there. they won't be cheap, but they won't have me scrambling to try to make up for the money lost to middlemen or quality lost to cost or step cutting.
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By the way, as a private individual who could still have to look for a job at some point in the future, the inability to remove videos would be really obnoxious to me, especially if their status would be automatically changed from time to time. But youtube is really looking for the rex type (the mostly dumb audience – no offense to anyone who likes rex – I started dumb like everyone else, but fled from it when it was unproductive) and far and above that, the wide appeal channel makers that have large throngs of people who will buy MVMT watches or whatever else the $3 movement makes a $200 watch kind of buyer (who just doesn’t know that the watch is 90% marketing and 10% manufacturing and distribution/retail)
If you’re making a living with your “social media content” I don’t know how much you could be upset by it remaining sequestered forever. Private individuals will be more unhappy about that – I would be – but youtube’s penchant of building any audience is long gone. They’re trying to build creators and audiences but also now in fear of the mothership demanding more out of them because the google shareholders are unhappy with flat earnings – there’s no guarantee that margin expanding strategies will make sense or even be beneficial for them. BTDT in the past working at a prior company that was essentially in retrenchment while claiming not to be.
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