Web 2.0 Article: Why Youtube Sucks

posted by greedo

One of the hivi karibuni YouTube outage messages.

One of the recent YouTube outage messages.

For a lot of users, the world of online video sharing begins and ends with link. And, to a certain extent, it did for me too, up until a few months ago. Over the past few months YouTube seems to have become less and less compelling. In fact, I find myself using the site less and less and going to other upstart video sharing sites with greater frequency (like link, link, link and others).

Now I can't knock the success of YouTube. These guys pioneered simple, easy and addicting video sharing (the guys at link and link must be kicking themselves that they missed out on YouTube's winning formula). And the fact that they were acquired in a $1.75B Google buyout speaks volumes.

BUT...

All this doesn't mean I'm going to stick around. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Copyright crackdowns
Yeah, I know. It's not right. But copyrighted material is the reason we all went to YouTube in the first place (comon', admit it!). And, kwa all accounts, it's one of the signifcant factors that led to YouTube's stratospheric rise. Post-acquisition YouTube, however, can't swing quite as freely, so we've seen a marked crackdown on copyrighted video on their site ranging from rapid removal of movies, to tv shows to short tv clips and excerpts. The crackdowns also create a lot of uncertainty for uploaders. If I'm uploading something in that "grey" copyright area, should I bother with YouTube knowing that it might be removed the inayofuata day?

2. Server outages
This one drives me nuts. YouTube still seems to be the most outage prone juu 10 web property I've ever encountered. Whoever is managing the server operations, production upgrades, etc. should be fired. Late summer the outages were really bad. I remember several in a single week with one even occuring in the middle of the day. Even last night, during primetime surfing hours there was a lengthy 1-2 saa outage. I know they're dealing with growing pains, but outages just plain suck. If I can't count on your site to be around when I need a fix (and I'm already dinging wewe on point #1), then once again, I'm off to greener pastures.

3. The 10-minute cap
I know wewe can get a special account that lets wewe pakia longer length videos, but the 10-minute cap, herufi kubwa for free accounts is completely lame.

4. pakia Woes
Uploading to YouTube is like playing Russian Roulette. wewe never really know if your video is going to make it. Sometimes when it does, wewe get strange video artifacts from the compression/conversion routine (this has happened to me a couple of times with perfectly good chanzo material). I've also experience long 12-36 saa waits for my video to be fully processed and posted. This is painful when I need to get something up and available quickly. I've used several other sites for video uploads and have had the video post almost instantly following upload.

5. tafuta Indexing is Slowwwwww
The new trailer to The Simpsons movie premiered the other night and I figured I'd check YouTube to see if it was available. Of course, when I received tafuta results for Simpsons sorted kwa tarehe the most hivi karibuni clips available were from over 16 hours ago. And this isn't the first time I've seen this on YouTube. YouTube's tafuta index sasisho far too infrequently for a site with such a rich maktaba and constant inflow of new clips. I went to Google Video and sure enough, there it was (along with freshly added video in the tafuta results).

To be fair, YouTube still does a lot of things very well. There is no other site out there with the breadth and variety of video offerings and the huge audience means wewe have the *potential* to get your material in front of a lot of eyeballs. The hivi karibuni Google acquisition (hopefully) means that server issues, pakia woes and tafuta indexing will be improved with the help of a technology-savvy and deep-pocketed parent. And with the biz-dev effort to strike meaningful content partnerships with the large media companies there's bound to be zaidi legal content on YouTube. But all of this will take precious time (and lord knows we webizens are an impatient lot).

So while I will still be using YouTube for some of my video sharing needs, it's no longer my primary nor sole chanzo for online video. There's just too much great stuff being ilitumwa to Daily Motion, Bolt, VidLife, Guba, OUOU and other sharing sites out there (and as always, I'll be using link for organizing and grouping cool video regardless of where they're hosted - gotta upendo the eps on the link).

But enough of my rant, what do wewe think? Does YouTube suck? Are wewe using it less? Are there other alternatives wewe think are zaidi worthy?

Mochazz, CornChips and 22 others like this

26 more comments

loading additional comments...

ashlydabomb hate youtube

ashlydabomb na really qu people who like u tubhttp:/

davdna Reminds me of 56k dial up.

IceTheHedgehog Youtube changed the layout now it f*****g sux

canderson2750 youtube being a bitch to me everytime i click on a video it closes me out

CaCtUs2003 YouTube inconveniences me more and more lately. They've recently changed the home page from a simple format where you could add and delete modules you didn't or did like. I always came to YouTube just for subscriptions and I had that and my inbox on my home page. That was all I needed to know about. But now, it's called "Recent Activity" and they have a whole bunch of bullcrap I'm not interested in and I can't do anything about it. It's much harder to see the newest from my subscriptions and instead of seeing what they've uploaded, which is all I want to know, I get to see what they've rated, commented on, favorited, and "recommended for you". These modules are not removable and now they're there to stay. YouTube is going down the drain and I'm one of many users who will stop using their service if they keep ignoring their users.

dougklast Google is a nightmare. I wish they would go out of business. The web was a lot better without them.

itsthetin youtube has gone mental. or atleast alpha. i can watch a video for 3 seconds before it just stops. guess its high traffic, but come on ffs. they earn shitloads of money on this and i know they can afford higher bandwith. i guess google ceos want more money in their pockets. this is just horrid

burnjuan4me2 Now they have ads that they shove in your face and you can't fast forward or avoid them. Google and YouTube are ruining the net by there greedy corporat mindset. If I wanted commercials I would be watching television. I would call them asshole, but those are at least useful.

ali10 youtube is so stupid because it does not have games or quizzes.

ali10 arent we talking about justin bieber because he is so HOT. HELLO

Pitrocks14 I agree. YouTube banned me twice for Copyright. And I've noticed that they've insisted Google to tell users to use a cell phone or mobile phone to verify an account. I was about to create multiple accounts with videos abiding by the rules of copyright, but now I can't because I don't want users hacking into my account and trying to steal my phone number. What a bunch of geeks!

vlab I totally agree I am so pissed off with you tube for being a haven of trolls. All a person needs to do is change a lower case L with an upper case i and voila. I have someone impersonating me and you tube is dead beat their tools for reporting the behavior don't work on long threads. This person is talking about really gross stuff in my name and they could care less. Just raking in the money from publicity like a money whore.

vlab Update, the help and safety tool is still failing after 24 hours of attempting to denounce someone who is pretending to be me and writing gross crap on you tube. Bravo you tube for not caring.

vlab Oh and by the way if anyone will make t-shirts with the slogan you tube sucks on it I will order some for sure!

22tango I canceled my YouTube account last week and I had more than 600,000 views on my videos. I spent 20 years in television, working in news mostly, and taught a television class at a private university. When I started my YouTube account shortly after they launched, I was delighted... However in the past year, the uploading process (and the copyright problems, especially with those greedy bastards at WMG) made me throw in the towel. Some of my videos have scenes with very short duration edits, matched to music tracks having a quick pace, but YouTube screwed the videos up SO BAD (edits were no longer matching the music) I gave up and quit YouTube... I'll be looking for a more "user friendly" site soon to start re-loading my videos, most aviation related... Google "TuuTuuTango YouTube" and you'll see that I canceled my account... you'll probably still find a bunch of videos I had on YouTube by doing the above search... I also had problems with spammers sending me crap I had no interest in. And, weird people wanting to be "friends" with whom I had NOTHING IN COMMON WITH started sending me "request to be friends...) I'd go look at their profiles and wonder what hole in the ground did these people come from! HASTA LA VISTA YouTube... Google screwed up a good service.

22tango I opened a new account on DailyMotion today and uploaded a video. As it was "processing" I decided to look on DailyMotion for an airplane called a C-130. I've flown in the C-130 on numerous occasions when I worked in television news... GUESS WHAT, I found someone had stolen my video entitled "DYESS C-130 ABILENE, TEXAS" and they posted it on DailyMotion. The crook is from Mexico or Spain and he is taking credit for my video. I wrote to DailyMotion and they ARE NOT responding very fast. My name is on this video at 9:21 as well as my image as a jet is passing over my head and landing... I wonder how much more EVIDENCE DailyMotion needs before they pull my stolen video and block the crook who stole it...

casualcostumer I uploaded a video of my friend's dance recital, and it got flagged for copyright infringement because of the song playing at the dance recital! That is not right! I don't understand why so many of my videos get flagged for copyright infringement and they're just little fan vids that have a few hundred hits, yet other videos with over 100,000 hits are still up! It is NOT FAIR. It should be all or none. When my video is all the way at the bottom of the list and people are obviously not watching it, then why is it getting deleted?

TubalCain A little over a year ago I had a music page, it was a new undertaking for me, several months getting everything just right. Before that I had a normal account which I had for more than 2 years since I first discovered Youtube. My music page started to pick up momentum and within the first 2 months I had around 3k subs and I was getting a LOT of views, needless to say it was great! One day I log in and it asks me if I want to link my accounts, "Sure, why not..". Bad idea, a split second later Im suspended on both accounts.. Somehow the suspension went to a termination over the course of the next year for severe violations, copyright infringement, everything under the umbrella, they hit me with it. None of it makes any sense, I did not not infringe anything, I had a movie playing in the background, barely a 5 minute portion, the TV was on, big deal. I've seen entire videos of nothing but! People literally recording their TV's with cameras. My lacie HD had issues and all my videos went missing, Youtube now has all my videos and before I can even get anyone to help or respond, its terminated. All gone. Youtube (or anything decent online, i.e Myspace, Facebook) has sold out. Whatever starts as something great always ends up in the hands of some greedy corporation and it gets ruined. If it aint broke don't fix it dammit! Now I don't even want to do it again, this is some bs, I've done enough favors for Youtube, you need us more than we need you! Sick of the online trend of everything good slowly evolving to crap, DO NOT use gmail to make a Youtube account! Save yourself a major headache, now I got internal server errors because of those old accounts and its deja vu all over again. Highly trained monkeys wtf lmao, screw Youtube.

madisonsavanna My god I HATE HATE HATE hhhaaatteee the copyright thing. It's not like I'm saying I own everything in the video, if anything I'm helping advertise it. I'm not the one making the thousands of dollars off the content.

PuppyLover10009 STOP YOU HATE IT, ilove it. don't say it succcccccccckkkkkkss...

leviwellsy I used to have two accounts and this a**hole called JoshGeary2012 kept on flagging my vids for no f***ing reason and got terminated (ALMOST!!) so I closed it and made another account called LeviComedian, he still flagged my vids so I closed my account and switched to Dailymotion.

whogivesafack YES! Youtube SUCKS major crap. 1) Even if you upload had MINOR part of copyright material (like a very tiny part of the song in the background) you are delivered. You will be informed that your video has parts of copyrighted material. Can you SEND A REQUEST TO COPYRIGHT OWNER TO MAKE AN EXCEPTION? NO YOU CANT. The only thing you can do - is to send a "DISPUTE". Be assured, your video will be removed and your account will get one strike of the three, if you do this. YOU CANT RESOLVE THIS PEACEFULLY - you would need to send a DMCA Counternotice, for which legal action will be taken against you. A LEGAL ACTION JUST FOR UPLOADING SOME BULLCRAP. WTF?! Also, YOU will not be able to make money from your account ANYMORE (and not for this video!!!), and there is NO WAY TO TELL THE COPYRIGHTOWNER "OK, MY BAD, I REMOVE THE VIDEO THEN". NO! You will either HAVE TO SUE or YOU WILL HAVE TO LIVE WITH PENALTIES FURTHER! Even if you remove the material in question, you CANT undo the penalties! 2) The copyright owner can DO WHATEVER HE WANTS to your video. Previously, the audio was removed or video was taken down. While this was bad, it still allowed for the uploader to change the audio. Now? THE COPYRIGHT OWNER (NOT the uploader) can (and does) - blocks the video from countries(!) just because part of his audio was there, removes the video and blocks the account of the uploader (together with all good non-affected content) or puts insane amounts of ads (very very rare)! 3) The whole monetization thing have led youtube from video from users to users into MONETARIZATION TOOL to deliver LOW QUALITY content to users. Previously, you would find something funny uploaded by Bob. Now you will find a COMPLETELY MISMATCHED "RICKROLLED" video with title, with HUGE minus rating, that IS UP FOR AGES - because the uploader has put LOTS OF ADS on it. And youtube is the second "hand" washing the first one. Or you will find low quality garbage, designed ONLY to make you subscribe, so more garbage is sent. Or you will find a video in the searches, but it WILL BE BLOCKED for your country. 4) YOUTUBE ACTIVELY SUPPORTS RACIST EFFORTS. For example, I had a guy, who has openly commented Ukrainians are better than Russians. That Jews are ass***s. That Afroamericans belong to zoo. That war in Chechya was not against terrorists, but against civil population (Civilians, that were islamistic faschists, who were trained by Arab mercenaries, and who started to slave handling and drug dealing with border countries once left in peace by Yeltzin). That russian army sucks dongles. A lot of people stated that within any nation are idiots and that he should not judge whole nation by one person. But he went over and over nonstop, as antisemitic as it gets. His account even had several nazi videos. I reported him to youtube with all his "comments". Answer from youtube? "HIS BEHAVIOUR DOES NOT BREAK OUR POLICY". This is FSCKING LMAO! The ONLY reason why I am still at youtube - content from edudcational institutions. Where, you are never sure if it will persist, or their account will be banned just because someone used copyrighted music as a ringtone, and forgot to turn his mobile off during the lecture. Youtube became basically a TRASH BIN.

Sagifen thanks for sharing your ideas!

Mochazz Yeah, and what about the fact that you can't put your videos in the order you want on youtube. Okay, so you can make a playlist, but it's not the same. When I add a new video maybe i would like it to be #10, but no, it will automatically be #1 because it's the latest one. YouTube sucks !!! And don't even get me going about the way the video counts are totally inaccurate... Google Sucks !!!