One question that came to my mind months ago when I first read about PragerU and others with high subscription numbers but low watch rates was: How many people subscribed in the past but do not check on a regular and frequent basis? How many people also follow too many channels/pages/sites and get inundated with 100 notifications as a time (if they check every couple days to once a week) and just cannot deal with that much content?
Youtube’s recent ejection of Steven Crowder and a host of other historical and teaching channels that happen to include documentation of past abuses just shows how ideological and incompetent their censor department is, but some of the numbers can be explained by “ascribe not to malice what can be explained by stupidity” though less stupid and on the part of the customer (well consumer of) Facebook/Youtube).
Another issue is the hosting companies do need to be paid one way or another. We can decry their sales of data to advertisers and quote the truism that “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” but the server farms full of cat videos need to pay for themselves somehow. I don’t think we can put the targeted ad genie back in the bottle and this I like Steve’s “pay me my cut” idea but maybe that can be combined with the “pick one: common carrier or publisher, not both” choice. Are you the largest newspaper in the city that everyone reads because you’re the largest, but risk the little weekly taking over because they work harder, smarter and get better news, or are you the natural monopoly that exist because there just is only room for one, and get considerations as long as you play fairly? I would think some might like to choose that common carrier status, because then they wouldn’t have to worry about kowtowing to various lefty rage mobs and just say “we’re sorry, we cannot remove him”… except I suspect the Jack Dorsey’s of the media world like imposing their doctrines on the Crowders and thus need to be forced into that choice.
For most of the Facebook users, a wordpress / blogspot account would be better than a freewheeling no-privacy Facebook account I think. Blogger just needs a standard ad frame, clearly marked, that appears on every free page and is enough to fund the hosting costs. Run over and you either are suspended a few days (the old slashdotting effect or Instalanche that took pages offline in the “old days”) or would ask you to pay a nominal fee for hosting and bandwidth. By now we could easily have apps that let us post pictures and video from phones and tablets to our blog platform of choice, be that MeWe, FB, Gab or bitchute.
4 replies on “reposting my comment on After Facebook”
Are you implying that social media companies are not shadow banning conservatives on their platforms? If so, I would disagree.
No, I’m not implying that, but I am implying that a secondary cause of the lack of views can be human laziness, stupidity or tech-ignorance.
Some people were probably well meaning and watched something someone forwarded/shared/suggested to them, and followed a video or channel but then never went back to watch more. I don’t know which option would have the greatest impact and I would suspect that most people prone to not returning would not have an account or subscribe.
I saw an article that the big techs are assembling an army of lawyers and lobbyists, so Bill’s idea that leftists in charge are more prone to doing something might be shared among certain powers.
I’m not sure I’d categorize it as a secondary cause – at least not for those like BW, Crowder and the like. I’ve been known to subscribe to someone because I stumbled across a video I liked, but after watching more found that they weren’t consistent in their content delivery and unsubscribed or just never went back. I would view this as a much smaller percentage of potential causes for the bigger names, but maybe higher on the scale for smaller content providers.
As far as the big techs arming themselves with lawyers, the battle between left vs. right is just beginning.
Someone elsewhere mentioned some numbers, mostly related the the PragerU lawsuit, and while I do believe that Youtube and Facebook would create programming to cut down various conservative causes I also have a belief that one of our conservative moles or a mostly sane employee (James Damore for example) would out something obviously egregious like that.
As for the lawyers, I think that’s as much them following the logical pattern of companies that have been lobbying for tech carve outs since learning the lesson Microsoft did, that not participating in politics doesn’t mean you won’t get swept up in it, and made party to a monopoly or anti-trust lawsuit.