YouTube Creator Blog

But Google is explaining their actions here, at least on a macro level.

The blog post at [0] as well as an email summarizing the situation was sent to every channel under the new threshold for monetization.

And any time a video is demonetized, they are given links to various help articles like [1] that go over what isn't allowed. You are also sent a link on how to appeal the decision at [2] They don't speak to an individual reason or reasons, and likely never will, because it's too easy to game that. You end up with people following the "letter of the law" but not the spirit, then if you decide to ban them anyway, you get called out for applying rules inconsistently.

There's a reason why our legal system has judges, lawyers, juries, and takes many years in some cases to come to a conclusion. This shit is extremely difficult to manage at any scale.

[0] https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/01/additional-changes-to-youtube-partner.html

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278

[2] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7083671#appeal

> Go ahead and let Youtube itself stay as a kid-unfriendly, algorithmically moderated wild west with hidden bombs of objectionable content spread around.

That's exactly what the FTC fuss was about, though. It's easy to say that until a parent gives their kid access to it and suddenly YouTube is advertising and recommending stuff to a child, which the law doesn't provide a safe harbor from (not for the content uploaders, either, which is going to cause a lot of problems). The FTC guidance was to identify kids instead by the content they were accessing. Hence Google's complaint: https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/12/our-comment-on-coppa.html (tl;dr skip to the "Treat adults as adults" section)

edit: now I'm confused because your comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21975870) indicates you already know your idea here isn't going to work for the FTC?

Spotify with 160 million users in 2017 paid out at least 2.225 billion in royalties to rights holders (It’s probably a little higher). That’s around $13.90 user. YouTube provides the same service (except with video) and CEO Susan Wojcicki says YouTube has 1 Billion MUSIC users a month.

The article is completely wrong. The blog post referenced (1) says only that "more than one billion fans come to YouTube to be part of music culture and discover new songs and artists". This doesn't translate into YouTube Music having 1B MAUs, nor it translates in any way to Spotify users.

The article is just a piece of low quality rubbish:

This is Google: Second largest corporation on earth, manipulating children to protect one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history. Disgusting

(1) https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/10/a-final-update-on-our-priorities-for.html

Official statement: https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/02/more-updates-on-our-actions-related-to.html

It's not "all".

> A small number of creators will be able to keep comments enabled on these types of videos. These channels will be required to actively moderate their comments, beyond just using our moderation tools, and demonstrate a low risk of predatory behavior. We will work with them directly and our goal is to grow this number over time as our ability to catch violative comments continues to improve.