You (down the) Tubes

Here's just a quick rant about YouTube.
I liked YouTube for the most part. Viral videos can be fun for the most part, and let you feel connected to some kind of elite underground of Internet subculture.
But, lately, YouTube is beginning to break my heart a little.

The first problem: uncensored thumbnails. Whether or not the videos actually contain pornographic material, a lot of YouTubers are fond of making sure that the thumbnail advertising their video clip is. In many cases, the thumbnail is merely provocative...as if "merely provocative" wasn't bad enough. But every now and then you run into a video that contains graphic images. Youtube is supposed to have safeguards so that kids can't actually watch explicit videos, but there doesn't seem to be anything preventing them from seeing X-rated still frames frozen in the thumbnail. This is a problem YouTube needs to address.

The second problem: comments. This is a universal problem for the Internet, but even the most wholesome video often ends up being the host for a series of ignorant, hateful, an perverse comments.

The third problem (and this one is a doozy): perpetuation of hate videos. YouTube is supposed to investigate videos that are "flagged" by users as inappropriate, and sometimes this system works. Often, it seems not to...or to take too long to be effective. Even once a video is removed, it can just pop up in a different account, or it can just spread on another video hosting site. In the last two weeks, I have come across posts regarding Islamic terrorist videos and, even more terrifying, a whole channel dedicated to videos of some kid desecrating the Eucharist in a series of puerile and obnoxious ways.

I kind of feel like the rise of Internet is becoming a bit like the discovery of the New World or perhaps the Fall from Eden. Every time humanity has a fresh, clean world to explore with seemingly limitless potential and opportunity...he reduces it to rubble in a matter of years through greed, selfishness, and lust. You would think by now we would have learned our lesson. (This pattern certainly doesn't bode way for space exploration...)

Comments

[cornelius griggs]

well youtube and google are quite good about removing prolife or anti planned parenthood videos. Read Pewsitter.com and you'll see a boat load of links describing the censorship after a few weeks.

[PeterTerp]

One would think that now that google has been forced to accept revenue from pro-life organizations, it would want to generate more pro-life material if only so the ads have somewhere to pop up.

[Peter Terp]

Desecration videos are down.

Thank you, Youtube, for doing the right thing for once!

[PeterTerp]

And now the desecration videos are back up, as I hear...