To address YouTube, once Kionon got banned, I decided to never make another account. I have had my videos put up by others, but ultimately, I am not popular enough for anyone to steal my videos the way others have had theirs stolen. So, aside from a few ridiculously desperate people, worrying about having my AMVs stolen on YouTube is not really practical. I'm more concerned about people sending stolen videos to contests, and I've had that happen too.
I barely use YouTube as it is. Surprisingly, only for MLP episodes, the rare music video, and when someone links something in #amv, otherwise I don't visit the site much at all.
trythil wrote:YouTube has some serious weaknesses as a community and archive for AMVs. Or, for that matter, any focus on video-oriented communities.
Concurred. But that isn't what YouTube was designed to be, regardless of their sad attempts to promote creativity. It's all about consumption. Passive consumption.
These weaknesses are:
- There's no promotion of a community as a whole; all you get is a comment feed. Only a small number of people at the top get any sort of significant exposure. You'll find communities based around YouTube channels in e.g. Skype chat rooms, but you won't find anything that ties them together aside from other scattered channels.
- Automated takedown and banning systems. These make establishing any sort of long-term presentation of AMVs impossible. Making additional accounts on YouTube to get around this is a standard practice, but it's also batshit insane.
- Automated advertising systems. This isn't quite as bad as takedowns, but it's still annoying.
All reasons I decided not to return to YouTube. Ultimately, making additional accounts paints a target on your back. If you continue to persist, eventually you're going to show up on the system as a high profile infringer. A note too, it wasn't the record labels that got me banned. It was Ghibli. And I live in Japan. And our copyright laws just got stricter. I have legitimate concerns about getting into real trouble here, because I'm dealing with copyrighted material in the country of origin where, since I live here, I am directly subject to the laws in question.
The .org has done a very poor job in demonstrating the impact of those problems for AMVers and that it has remedies for those problems.
The Org has done a very poor job of advertising itself as a place where these problems are remedied. I take partial blame for this, as I was part of a movement which was very concerned about the explosive growth of the Org around 2004-2006. I think many of us from the first generation were very concerned with making so much noise that we attracted too much attention and found ourselves in real trouble.
This viewpoint no longer applies. We are much too small of a fish in a much, much expanded pond of possible copyright infringement because of widespread video upload sites like YouTube and Vimeoh, and streaming sites like LiveStream, SlipstreamTV, etc. For a few years, we were the monolith which rose out of chaotic AMV distribution modes, mostly ftp servers, studio websites, basic peer to peer like morpheus, kazaa, winmx, and of course, at convention DVD/CD hand offs.
Now, the landscape has broken down again into chaos. Multiple international sites, the video upload sites, and plenty of us still have fservs, ftps, and studio websites. Our original mission to catalog all AMVs ever is dead. Has been dead for years now. However, I think we can agree that there is a new mission, which involves a much general higher quality of AMVs catalogued and stored here, as well as the community which generates that higher quality.
Here's how I think .org can remedy the above problems:
- It's much easier to promote a sense of a single community when you limit your focus. The Lip Flapper, active twitter feed, Facebook page, and site contests are an excellent start. I'm working on technical mechanisms to give those and similar activities more impact, e.g. real-time listings of active forum topics and new page layouts that give contests and special events enormous amounts of room on a page.
I'd like to see the return of Review, but frankly, I'm going to need a wider variety of possible moderators. I can't run it alone.
.org is a smaller target. YouTube has automated takedown systems and has to deal with tons of takedown notifications/counter-notifications a day. .org has had to deal with, uh, a few. (AFAIK, the only one that was made public is the Wind-Up Records issue.)
Concurred, which is why my own fear of reprisal has very much altered over the last few years. We simply aren't worth it.
.org can be reengineered to provide durability for videos. That's actually where a lot of my .org-related work has gone over the past couple months: devising a system that can keep serving videos even in the face of takedowns by distributing the .org database and application code across multiple locations and owners. Takedown is like unrecoverable object loss, and an event like FBI shutdown is really not much different than catastrophic hardware failure. There's technical measures to deal with both. (Now, technical measures alone won't get us to a point where AMVs are out of legal limbo, but they're needed to keep on the pressure to effect the social and legal changes to protect AMVs.)
I'd like to see this, but I'd also like to hear the admins chime on this. They are historically a very conservative bunch, and this is a fairly significant paradigm shift. One I agree with, and I think is only logical, but one that might make some of the admins skittish. Not to mention, Phade still casts a very, very long shadow over decisions which fundamentally alter the functioning of the Org, even on the backend. He might not be onboard.
We can advertise these as advantages and (once some more work has been done) demonstrate that we have a better solution than YouTube for AMVs. I think after that word will spread on its own.
How do you suggest advertising in the initial stages?
.org also needs a lot of work to whip it into shape. One concrete example: entering a new video. Do that on YouTube, and then try it on the .org. On YouTube it's a two-step process that you can execute entirely in your web browser. On the .org, it's eight steps -- six in your browser, one in an FTP client, and another step back in your web browser. It's a lot of obstacles for no goddamn reason.
Are you at all concerned that will open the floodgates and impact not only quality (which you addressed), but also cost?