Things of Your Day

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Wowā€¦

Blogpost with update on Youtube blocking our videos. Looks like we are forced to accept advertisement now. blender.org/media-exposureā€¦ #b3d

WTF. There must be more to this story.

One thing I know is that you can not embed your own advertisements into youtube videos in many circumstances unless you follow very explicit rules around it. Thatā€™s a core violation of their TOS.

You definitely did not read the story at all.

Also, I see a LOT of YouTube videos that include advertisements for sponsors and such, and they are definitely not taken down, even if they violate the rules as written.

ā€œThis video brought to you buy X!ā€ followed by 30+ seconds of promoting X that I have to skip to get to the rest of the video.

I did read the story, it basically boils down to: Blender had no ads and eventually grew to the point where they started losing privileges because of this (videos appearing in the united states) eventually they had their channel ā€œgo blackā€

I can extrapolate from that, that if you have no ads and grow to a certain size, official policy isnā€™t friendly.

Donā€™t make a TL;DR for Rym. Make him R!

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Speaking of Youtube and Laws, can anyone give me the TL;DR on this Article 11 and Article 13 shit going on with EU Copyright? I donā€™t know if itā€™s an actual issue but the only people really pushing it as an issue are bad reactionary Youtubers. Is it actually a big deal if it passes?

Boingboing and Cory Doctorow are flipping the fuck out over it, but thatā€™s not really much info, heā€™s like, privacy man.

Yeah, itā€™s potentially quite bad, especially if you happen to have a company that is built around user content and based in the EU. The main things are implementing upload filters (think like the content ID stuff on YT) and a ā€œlink tax.ā€ The idea is to allow the EU to get money out of the big US tech companies, but in practice it likely means killing small EU based companies that canā€™t afford to comply.

It also might create some weird backwards incentives. If I blacklist all the big EU news outlets that are asking for link taxes I can save money while also reducing their traffic and therefore ad revenue.

Itā€™s really hard to say what the long term outcome will be, link taxes have been tried and abandoned before and the upload filter doesnā€™t really seem plausible to implement as written.

Pretty sure they look at how much it costs them to distribute that volume of data vs the return on investment and decide that if you arenā€™t going to let us make a cut, we arenā€™t going to host your videos.

Which if they just said that, would be understandable even if a bit lame. Certainly the massive volume of monetized content can easily subsidize the very few non-profits that choose to go ad-free.

I know that a channel I follow, InRangeTV Is completely demonetized on YouTube, and is going strong with over 160k subs. Blender is just shy of 200k, so, the line between allowed to stream for free and not allowed to stream for free is probably not simply somewhere in that slim delta.

Of course InRange features lots of firearms training content, military and old west history, network security content, and in general hosts plenty of anti-big-media content that is critical of platforms like YouTube, and has made some news about vocally distributing their content over platforms such as Full30, Bit Chute, and even PornHub.

Meanwhile Blender isā€¦ a modeling program with a bunch of tutorials I guess?

Which one do you think YouTube would prefer remained on their platform?

Yet who remains?

Strange times indeed.

Now if we could just get them to stop flicking their butts everywhere that would be great.

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Itā€™s shocking (but not surprising) that a hugh percentage of all litter is solely composed of cigarette butts in New York, despite so few people smoking.

Frankly, the $500 fine for littering should apply to each individual buttā€¦

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I just read the NYC code and by my NOT A LAWYER NOT LEGAL ADVICE reading, itā€™s only $250 for a first offense, but if a cop saw you flick a butt more than once they could conceivably write a ticket for each one and its $350 per ticket after the first.

You would think someone could invent a cig where there is no butt left over, or where the butt just dissolves harmlessly in water or something like that. Then it could be required by law for all of them to be made this way. Would also be useful for other applications, like smoking other things that are less poisonous.

Problem is that if it dissolved in water it would also dissolve in your mouth while smoking it. Maybe if cigarette holders came back in fashion you could have disposable filter cartridges you put in front of the cigarette in the holder. In any case though even though it would be a good idea for cannabis, modern cannabis is so strong rolling a joint these days is pretty wasteful, you only need a pea sized bit in a pipe or better yet, vaping or edibles to get the desired effect.

Its called vaping.

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Which I also want to ban in public :wink:

Cigarettes have two problems: awful toxic smell and litter

Vapes have one problem: awful toxic smell

New York banned both in all public parks thankfully, but in practice no one gets a ticket for cigarette litter or smoking in a park unless the cop really has a bug up his butt.

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A vape is about as bad as a fart ā€“ it smells bad but it dissipates. I had a friend live in the guest room for about a year and they vaped in there pretty regularly and it still smells fine.