YouTube trying to suck so hard that it’s impossible to ignore

This is a rarity for me, writing on the same topic two days in a row.  Rarer still, I feel the need to vent even more anger about YouTube.  I’m compelled to preface it all by saying yet again that the free, easy hosting and distribution provided by YouTube means I owe them far more than they owe me and I’ll probably keep using the service no matter how much they piss me off.  But that doesn’t mean that I’m not justified in being pissed off.

Like so many services that offer so much (it often works this way with people too) it’s the little failings that make me really angry.  The fact that the comment system is completely screwed and the ranking metrics are fatally flawed continues to piss me off.  Based on the available evidence, these things don’t matter at all to the people running YouTube and they have no interest in listening to whining little shits like me.

After all, it isn’t as if all their shortcoming have reduced their user numbers significantly,  I was mildly surprised to notice last night that I’m rapidly closing in on my one year anniversary on YouTube (first video posted June 9th 2006) and I’ve posted my 331st video.  It’s a bit spooky how close I am to averaging a video a day over that time period. 

The latest thing they’ve done to piss me off is their heavy handed, inconsistent, unfair and totally opaque method of applying censorship.  The latest victim is a user I’ve recently become friendly with, his user name is JustA11en.  Side note – he’s from the Southern US, he’s conservative, we disagree on a range of topics but he’s intelligent and I can respect him.  Thank you god!  I was getting so sick of right wing discourse online being dominated by hypocritical morons.

JustA11en decided to do a joke that I’ve done before, putting a suggestive image in the middle of a video so that’s the thumbnail YouTube uses to represent your video.  Lots of pornhounds get sucked in, you get lots of views and if you’re as shallow as me you get lots of laughs.  It worked amazingly well for Allen (the actual content of his video was some VERY funny stories about his mum) and I promised to do a response.

The only trouble is, his video was deleted without warning with “violation of terms of service” being cited.  Now, there is absolutely nothing in his video that I can see that comes close to violating the YouTube ToS.  All I can imagine is that a succession of frustrated pornhounds sent in bogus complaints saying it was obscene and some fuckwit at YouTube with an utter lack of brainpower took it down.  He’s yet to get a response to his many WTF?!!?! queries.

I did my response so it’s probably only a matter until it gets taken down too (this has happened to me before as well but I suspect that was largely because I suggested it was conservative blowhard Michelle Malkin in the nude image).  But I’m fairer to the pornhounds in this video – there’s lots of fucking toward the end.  Enjoy (for as long as it’s possible).