Youtube Crypto Ban was a "Mistake"

Boxmining

6.9K views 493 5 years ago

Description

On Christmas Eve YouTube removed videos related to crypto and issued content strikes on a majority of crypto channels (including Boxmining!). I give my account of what happened and what needs to be do...

On Christmas Eve YouTube removed videos related to crypto and issued content strikes on a majority of crypto channels (including Boxmining!). I give my account of what happened and what needs to be done to decentralize video content in the future. #Youtube #Crypto #Banned 👍🏻Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/c/boxmining 🚀Latest Crypto Updates: https://www.boxmining.com/ ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Recommendations▬▬▬▬▬▬▬● 🔒Hardware Wallet: http://boxmining.co/ledger 👍🏻Brave Browser: http://boxmining.co/brave 📲Enjin Wallet: http://boxmining.co/enjin 👍🏻Unstoppable Domain: http://boxmining.co/unstoppable 📲Binance Exchange : http://boxmining.co/binance ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Community▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬● Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/boxminingChannel Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/boxminingChannel Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CryptoSpartans/ ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Social▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/boxmining/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/boxmining Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boxmining Steemit: https://steemit.com/@boxmining ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Disclaimer▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬● I'm not a professional financial adviser and you should always do your own research. I may hold the cryptocurrencies talked about in the video.

AI Analysis

What a mess! The YouTube crypto ban was a major debacle over the holidays, where a wave of crypto content creators, including Boxmining, had their videos removed and channels struck for supposedly "harmful or dangerous content." This incident really highlighted the immense power of centralized platforms like YouTube and raised serious questions about the future of content decentralization.

Here's a breakdown of what happened and the lessons learned:

* The Christmas Eve Calamity: On December 24th, Christmas Eve, a video titled "Daily Angry Koreans Protest Ban" (ironically about a cryptocurrency ban) was removed from the channel, flagged as "harmful or dangerous content." This is usually reserved for things like selling nicotine or unlicensed medical services, which clearly wasn't the case here. This deletion wasn't just a single video issue; it led to a content strike on the entire channel.
* Channel Strikes and the "Three Strikes and You're Out" Policy: A content strike bans you from publishing new videos for seven days as punishment. The scary part is YouTube's "three strikes and you're out" policy, meaning three strikes result in channel deletion. Another wave of video removals and strikes hit on December 25th, putting the channel just two strikes away from being completely wiped out. This was terrifying because the channel represents years of work and a vibrant community built not just by the presenter, but by the viewers' input and support.
* Widespread Impact: It wasn't an isolated incident; many other cryptocurrency content creators experienced the same sudden removal of videos and channel strikes, making it seem like a coordinated attack or planned censorship against crypto content.
* The Unapologetic Reversal: Luckily, all the bans were eventually reversed. YouTube reinstated the struck videos and removed all content strikes from the channel, almost as if nothing had happened. There was no apology letter or clear explanation, just a vague statement implying it was an "algorithm mistake" and that everything was now "fixed." The presenter feels YouTube's attitude was very much a "worship us" kind of deal, despite the distress caused.
* The Power of Community Support: One positive takeaway was the overwhelming support from the community. People raised awareness and sent messages, which the YouTube content team seemed to respond to. The presenter believes that without this collective effort, it might have taken much longer for YouTube to address the issue, or they might not have at all.
* The Danger of Centralized Power: This incident strongly highlighted how powerful and dangerous a centralized entity like YouTube (and its parent company, Google) can be. They have complete authority over what content is hosted and can remove anything without obligation. This level of control over information flow is seen as incredibly risky for the future, as a simple algorithm change can silence huge communities.
* The Nuance of Decentralization: While decentralization sounds like the obvious solution, the presenter doesn't blindly jump on every decentralized bandwagon. The easy part of decentralization in social media is the technical aspect of hosting content and hashing it onto a blockchain. However, the real challenges lie in:
* User Adoption: Getting a significant number of people to actually use a new decentralized platform.
* Content Discovery: How do users find content on these platforms if there isn't a robust discovery mechanism or a large existing user base? Uploading a video to an empty platform is like a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it – it doesn't really serve its purpose.
* User Retention: Many decentralized platforms struggle with retaining users, leading to declining engagement over time, which makes it harder to justify publishing content there.
* Looking to 2020: Realistic Goals for Decentralization: The presenter acknowledges that creating a full alternative to YouTube is a massive challenge. For 2020, the focus should be on identifying these challenges, setting realistic goals for what a decentralized platform can achieve, and trying to retain users, perhaps by focusing on specific niches.
* Continued Vigilance: Even though the immediate crisis passed, the incident served as a stark reminder that centralized entities have the power to silence communities with a simple algorithm change. There's a clear need for something to be done to address this vulnerability.
* Don't Forget to Subscribe: Despite the issues with YouTube, the presenter emphasizes the importance of subscribing to the channel and enabling notifications, noting that YouTube sometimes automatically unsubscribes people – an ironic reminder of continued reliance on the very platform that caused the problem.

Transcript

Hey everyone, it's Michael and welcome back to Box Mining. So I'd like to say first off, what a mess. This holiday week has been really messy for me because, well, I had to deal with this debacle where YouTube tried for a few days to censor content creators making crypto videos. Now, I'll just give you guys a first-hand account of what happened from my perspective. So let's give you a quick account of what happened. So on the 24th of December, which is Christmas Eve, I received this notice wher...

Hey everyone, it's Michael and welcome back to Box Mining. So I'd like to say first off, what a mess. This holiday week has been really messy for me because, well, I had to deal with this debacle where YouTube tried for a few days to censor content creators making crypto videos. Now, I'll just give you guys a first-hand account of what happened from my perspective. So let's give you a quick account of what happened. So on the 24th of December, which is Christmas Eve, I received this notice where one of my videos named Daily Angry Koreans Protest Ban, referring to a cryptocurrency ban ironically. This video is removed from YouTube as it has, well, what YouTube claims to be harmful or dangerous content. Usually this is reserved for the sale of nicotine, alcohol, unlicensed medical services, etc. And I can assure you that none of that was going on in this video. But anyways, YouTube chose for this reason to remove this video and I had to appeal it because, well, yeah, they kind of decided that I was guilty and now I have to kind of prove that I'm not. Now, it's not just a video deletion, which is kind of scary, but when this happens with YouTube, what happens is that the channel gets a strike. So the entire channel gets a content strike. And when this happens, you get banned from publishing videos for seven days as kind of a punishment. And this is really designed for, I guess, creators that get really offensive. Like if suddenly I just stripped my clothes off, off naked and jumped around a little bit. Yeah, that's kind of what it's designed for. It's designed to punish maybe nudity or something crazy like that. But anyways, it got applied to me. And the problem with this strike is that it banned me from publishing videos. But more importantly, there's a three strike and you're out policy on YouTube. So this will constitute one of the strikes. More strikes appeared the other day, which is exactly what happened. So you can see the first video that got struck on the 24th of December that's here. And then the next strike that appeared is on the 25th of December, a new wave of videos got flagged, got removed, and then the strike on my channel. Now, the scary part, of course, is that because these strikes were happening every day and other YouTubers were experiencing this too, it pretty much meant that the entire channel will be deleted in two more days. So two more strikes, I'm out, the channel will be gone. Aha. Which is what kind of scared the crap out of me, actually. Because, you know, this channel, not only does it mean a lot to me because I spent a lot of my time building it, but also this community as well. Because it wasn't me that was just building it. It was also about a lot of you guys who were like, oh, talk about this, talk about that or consider this. The knowledge is not built up by just me, but by everyone here. And losing all the videos and losing the entire channel and the community over some stuff that happened in 2018 without any guidance. That's kind of crazy. So that was exactly what happened. It happened to a lot of other cryptocurrency content creators and a lot of communities as well. So let me bring up this list. Crypto, Crypt Zero. He brought up, made a big list. That was what's happening. And it almost seemed as if YouTube was planning a strike against cryptocurrency content. Now, luckily, we know from the after effect. Luckily, right now that banned the reversal, all that happened, that's going to be being completely reversed by YouTube. So kind of no apologies. You just wake up one morning and the videos that were struck were reinstated and the content strikes are removed. So I have no longer have any content strikes on this channel. So obviously something went wrong on YouTube and they went to explain this to be something to do with the algorithm, some very vague reason, no apology letters or anything. They were just like, yeah, some stuff happened. We fixed it. Now you should be happy. Worship us kind of like sort of deal. And this really kind of this whole incident for me personally kind of taught me a few things. So number one, I think I would like to say the community was extremely, extremely supportive. We had so many people raising awareness and YouTube content creators or the YouTube content team actually responded a lot to these messages, which is great. You know, without you guys, without the support of this entire community, I don't think YouTube content team would have taken a look at us and it could have taken a long time for this to happen. Next, it also showed how powerful a centralized force can be. So when it comes to media like this, the fact is that YouTube, they have complete authority on what they can do. In fact, during this whole incident, there was research and YouTube have also said this bluntly in the past. They're under no obligation to host anyone's videos. So it's just like you can use them, but yeah, they have the final say on every sort of content on their platform, which is of course scary. So yeah, it taught me a lot how centralized power, especially when it comes to video services and also above that to Google, the parent company of YouTube, they control so much search flat traffic, they control information flow and being all centralized in one entity is going to be very dangerous in the future. So that's just a note for myself. Okay, so it's centralization bad and I bet everyone's expecting me to jump on the decentralized bandwagon and say, oh, all decentralized services are good, but that's not the case at this current point because right now we have the ability to decentralize accounting. So we have kind of Bitcoin being a form of value transfer across nations, across the world in a decentralized fashion. But we try to extend that to social media and it's not as easy as just putting a tech in place. So this is why I'm not immediately jumping onto every single decentralized platform. I've jumped on them in the past, but we've kind of discovered one big problem, which is not just hosting the content. I think hosting the content, the tech part of how to host that content and putting a hash in the blockchain, that's kind of the easy part. But the hard part is how to actively get people to use said platform and more importantly as well, how to allow that platform, the content to be discovered. How do you do content discovery? I mean, there was a saying that goes, if a tree falls in a forest, but no one's there to hear it, would it make a sound? And that's exactly the case of uploading a video. If you upload a video to a platform that there's no one on and there's no one to share it and it's hard to access. Does it really count? I mean, is that what we really want? Or do we want a platform that is like YouTube that has a lot of users on it and really good content discovery? So people constantly come back to that platform and discover better and better content. And I believe that we want the leader. I believe you watch you want a full alternative to YouTube. And the sad fact is, is that there's so many challenges to creating that. And I think the next step in 2020 is to identify some of those challenges going forward. Be realistic about the goals, about what we're trying to achieve with a said decentralized platform and try to retain users, maybe of a certain niche. So that way people constantly come back. One of the biggest issues right now that I'm facing is kind of, I've used decentralized platforms in the past, but kind of the number of people going there decreases over time. That retention rate is low. And as a result, it becomes harder and harder to justify publishing on that platform. So anyways, those are some musings for the future. And I think the challenges are ahead. It's pretty great. But at the same time, now that centralized entities, they've reared their heads and a simple algorithm change can silence huge communities. We know that there's something that has to be done. So I'll leave on this hopeful note, guys. I'm also going to make a new video coming up soon about the biggest events of 2019. So like kind of the year end review of what we have achieved this year, some challenges that I had and what we can learn, the biggest learnings from 2019. So make sure you're subscribed to this channel. Yeah, that's really important now. And make sure and double check that you're subscribed. Apparently some people got unsubscribed automatically by YouTube. And make sure you click the notification bell to get notified of new videos that really matters or content discovery. So anyways, make sure you don't do those two things. And I'll catch you in the next video. See you soon.