Attention Required! | Cloudflare
www.jeffgeerling.com

"this morning, as I was finishing up work on a video about a new mini Pi cluster, I got a cheerful email from YouTube saying my video on LibreELEC on the Pi 5 was removed because it promoted:

Dangerous or Harmful Content Content that describes how to get unauthorized or free access to audio or audiovisual content, software, subscription services, or games that usually require payment isn’t allowed on YouTube.

I never described any of that stuff, only how to self-host your own media library.

This wasn’t my first rodeo—in October last year, I got a strike for showing people how to install Jellyfin!

In that case, I was happy to see my appeal granted within an hour of the strike being placed on the channel. (Nevermind the fact the video had been live for over two years at that point, with nary a problem!)

So I thought, this case will be similar:

  • The video’s been up for over a year, without issue
  • The video’s had over half a million views
  • The video doesn’t promote or highlight any tools used to circumvent copyright, get around paid subscriptions, or reproduce any content illegally

Slam-dunk, right? Well, not according to whomever reviewed my appeal. Apparently self-hosted open source media library management is harmful.

Who knew open source software could be so subversive?"

  • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
    3·
    20 hours ago

    YT ads can be relevant to you based on data collected about you

    They certainly can be but if there are 2 advertisers and one is the most relevant and the other pays them more money, which one do you think Google is going to show you?

    The “sponsored content” parts of some videos don’t feel nearly as intrusive or out of place

    That’s because they’re typically read by the creator. Artists, essentially. Professional entertainers. And not ad companies. Some of them (looking at you Wulffs Den and J2C) are actually very entertaining.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      They certainly can be but if there are 2 advertisers and one is the most relevant and the other pays them more money, which one do you think Google is going to show you?

      With clickable ads my understanding is they have a model to guess how likely you were to click it and they chose the ad with the highest value of the likelihood to be clicked times the price they’d get from the click. It’s probably different with video ads, but maybe not, maybe they do likelihood to not be slipped instead.

    • chaospatterns@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      16 hours ago

      YT ads can be relevant to you based on data collected about you

      They certainly can be but if there are 2 advertisers and one is the most relevant and the other pays them more money, which one do you think Google is going to show you?

      The one that pays more because it’s an auction, but an advertiser that pays more for a less relevant ad to a user won’t be making as much money so there is an incentive to be more relevant.