In case you missed the news, there was an ‘incident’ at youtubes headquarters recently… Here is a summary:
A woman shot and wounded three people at YouTube’s headquarters in Northern California before killing herself, police say.
Police have named the suspect as Nasim Aghdam, 39, and say they are still investigating a motive.
They say there is no evidence yet that she knew the victims, a 36-year-old man said to be in a critical condition, and two women aged 32 and 27.
Aghdam had in the past posted material venting anger at YouTube.
The more interesting part of the story is this:
She appeared often on YouTube and in one of her videos criticised the platform for discriminating against and filtering her posts.
On her personal website she accused YouTube of taking steps to prevent her videos from getting views.
“There is no equal growth opportunity on YouTube or any other video sharing site. Your channel will grow if they want to!” she wrote.
I know there is a ‘mental health’ angle here, and also a ‘gun laws’ thing here, but I’d like to focus on what I think is more interesting, and more widespread and more relevant to what i do, and the people who read this. In summary, this was a woman with an active youtube channel, who was obviously very invested in growing her channel and earning money from it. This was very important to her. This was SO important, that when she felt (rightly or wrongly) that youtube were preventing her getting the views and monetisation she expected, she actually went to kill people.
The scary thing here (apart from the obvious) is the huge disconnect people have between what they think the job of a third party company that they are uploading content to is, and what it actually is.
Youtubes job is to make money for alphabet shareholders. They are a private company, not a government organisation or a utility. When you upload videos to youtube, you are quite clearly stating that you agree with their terms and conditions, terms which that company has the right to change at any point. When you talk about YOUR youtube channel and YOUR subscribers, or YOUR facebook page or YOUR facebook followers etc…. be aware that this is just a fantasy. This is an artificial construct put together by marketing experts because long ago they discovered that implying ownership where it was not true (for example ebay referring to YOUR item, before the auction ends) gives you a greater sense of investment in the ‘product’. The accounts on facebook belong to facebook, not you. They might have a database of connections on THEIR servers which allow you (at their discretion) to communicate with other accounts that they also OWN, but do not in any way kid yourself that you are in control or have ownership of your facebook page, your twitter account, or any other third party social media site you are ‘invested’ in. That goes for twitch too, obviously. Youyr streaming career is a single mouse click(by someone else) away from being obliterated, and you would have ZERO recourse.
I love being indie, and unlike a lot of newer indies, I understand the meaning of the word independence. True independence is way, way trickier than the false sense of independence you are given by social media firms who are basically just using you as social data contribution vectors. Unless you PAY for something, its not yours, and youtube lets you have an account for free…
I’m fairly ‘invested’ in youtube, as I have 60+ Production line blog videos up there, but I am fully aware that I cannot make it a cornerstone of my business. I have 10k twitter followers, but I also value those at close to zero, as ultimately I have no control over them, or my access to them. This blog, is a notable exception. It runs wordpress (which is free) but its hosted on MY server, which I pay monthly rent for. Nobody can discontinue my wordpress account and shut down this blog. So even if twitter, facebook, youtube all turn the screws and close off my access to ‘my followers’ I still have this blog, my forums (remember… ‘your’ steam foruns, belong to valve), and my email mailing list. How independent is *your* community?
Never confuse the illusion of independence and control with real independence and control.