YouTube is at it again...
I mentioned earlier that they'd been killing off chemistry channels that had educational content and small numbers of subscribers, while happily monetizing less-educational stunt channels that did dangerous chemistry but had astronomical subscriber counts?
Seems they've also been aggressively killing off gun channels for, I dunno, showing things that aren't legal in California, maybe? Or that are unfashionable at (Rumbold eye-roll) boardroom level?
And now they're going after...
... wait for it...
... medieval history channels. Because Greek Fire or something. Really.
And these channels are being terminated without notice nor explanation, and with no opportunity to remove the suddenly-offending content (which may have been up for years before suddenly becoming a terms-of-service violation).
All of which brings to mind the Piranha Brothers:
Stig Well he had to, didn't he? I mean, be fair, there was nothing else he could do. I mean, I had transgressed the unwritten law. Interviewer What had you done? Stig Er... Well he never told me that. But he gave me his word that it was the case, and that's good enough for me with old Dinsy.
When your business depends on user-generated content, and you have people giving up their day jobs to become the sharecroppers on your plantation, producing the content that you need and being paid, at best, a relative pittance, you need to have good sharecropper relations. Otherwise, they'll get discouraged and leave (even if not forced out for unexplained reasons), and new ones won't even bother.
Having vague rules that may be retroactively re-interpreted on a whim, with no transparency, and with eternal banishment without explanation the penalty for a single misstep creates a hostile working environment for the creative people, and in the long run that's very bad for business.
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