So I have not watched TV in years, this mainly as I can find things online that are tightly edited to be a suitable length (3 minutes, 3 hours, if it is as long as it needs to be then great, those that get it right then rise up) and at a level that is not patronising or having to play to the lowest common denominator. Similar for various news reporting if I can instead watch a long expert analysis of a subject, especially at 2x speed which I don't think many TV recording boxes have an easy option for.
However Google (or technically alphabet), and its youtube subsidiary have taken to playing publisher (as opposed to data carrier) and moral police for things they don't like or think their advertisers won't like as and when it suits them. Same applies to facebook and twitter it seems but I have never even viewed those passively or seen them as all that great sources of anything -- at best they give us some nice phone camera footage of someone getting shot by the police to then debunk.
Now I am generally of the opinion that people should be able to talk. I might think you are a moron but sunlight is a wonderful disinfectant. That said I don't consider myself of any particular political views*, much less extreme ones, and I am having a hard time keeping track of things I want to keep track of. About as edgy as I get is I like computer hacking and hacking my devices (shocker for someone on this site I know) so this difficulty in getting to things has me curious. I could whine about it to a politician or on the internet but I would rather get things working. Fortunately I am not bad with the technology lark so I will go with that as my solution.
*I am not registered to vote (apparently it is not automatic any more, and even back then I was named wrongly on their lists because of a typo I did not care to correct), have never voted despite being around for way more elections as an adult than as a kid, no notable elected politician in any kind of free country has been all that troubling to me almost within living memory, a few nearly elected ones might have were it not for inertia, for those elected ones then some I would have preferred an alternative for but eh really, there are some silly new laws and some silly old ones but nothing that really keeps me up at night, never would consider donating time or funds to a political party and so on and so on.
Some of their efforts with/overreactions to copyright issues were initially somewhat troubling but nothing that could not be easily worked around. Today it is getting more tricky but not quite there yet, and amusingly it is causing some to change their behaviours (the legacy of channel awesome with the reaction clips from films seems to have been replaced with self made art, internet memes and stock pictures, the latter of which also causes some trouble for people) but that is OK too.
This is in addition to the end result of the incomplete search concept (originally it was a pretty good mathematical bet if I search for something then in the top 20 or so results there will be something I want so you don't have to do an exhaustive search of your database and if you only get the top 15 then all good) means that the simple use recommendations no longer works for me. Youtube internal search also used to be pretty good but not so much these days. Straight search also has been troubled for things I would have considered completely innocuous (amusingly often returning their secondary channels or sites way before their primary and still very active ones), and nearly no chance of finding something they deemed completely verboten (again despite being things I would generally consider reasonable talking points).
A few did find themselves banned for no good reason (or indeed no reason given at all) from such services but we can cover that in a bit too. I am not so bothered about demonetisation at this point -- a choice phrase that cropped up there is it is not censorship in the strictest sense but it is control so I will note things.
Now I never had an account so I did not have to do the subscribe, and then also do a notification bell, and also check I magically did not get unsubscribed and so on and so on, however it also seems the once actually pretty workable guest cookie recommendation has fallen short. Don't much care about comments either (depending upon the point in time I might even have blocked them, or had them blocked during that glorious period where you needed a separate domain's javascript running). Don't know what became of that comment anywhere gab thing at this point but it was interesting.
Unjustified banning wise then this seems to be the greatest gift youtube et al can give to somewhere like https://www.bitchute.com/ and https://lbry.tv/$/following/channels (to say nothing of more old school methods like https://www.dailymotion.com/ https://vimeo.com/ if they aren't already coming through with the goods). Several people are also starting to do exclusives of some merit on their platforms as well. Was pretty hilarious as well when some of those people went to what are normally porn hosting sites as well.
I also had to start kicking it more old school. This being if I find something I like I get to bookmark the video/channel name and go from there. Most people seem content to do collaborations, interviews and more which also helps find new people. Amusingly enough the so called alternative influencer network report was some atrocious science/analysis but did yield some interesting new things to look at (even more so when the retorts to it came in), though more on the political commentary than the engineering/machining/fixing things and history stuff I also want to watch (though fortunately they tend to do collaborations often enough). Some shitheads among them but there is also this thing called logical thought that allows you to dismiss silly discussion points, and I like to hear the opinions of many different people (being blindsided by new to you opinions can make things hard, and seeing how things develop is also of interest). I only follow a handful of them but the firearms channels are also having a fairly hard time of things too.
Amusingly I accidentally set my search option to yahoo the other day and it actually works pretty well which was pretty amusing and in some ways did better than duckduckgo, though duckduckgo still has good stuff and represents something worthwhile if plain old google is failing you. Not sure I would switch exclusively to either just yet but still worth noting in this.
I have means of downloading (youtube-dl tending to be my tool of choice for a while now) but have not quite yet felt compelled to create my own mirrors/backups of things. Long experience and multiple notable events going back decades says I should but eh.
Short version is to work around this tech company censorhip I like bookmarks and checking around my bookmarks, also need to use some search engines other than google. Obviously all adblock all the time, and I was pointed at a very shiny extension that allows you to skip the spots in videos where they shill VPNs or whatever ( https://sponsor.ajay.app/ , sadly only chrome, firefox and opera but with the exception of some of the legacy forks of those if you are not using them then you are likely beyond hope) but that is probably getting onto another topic.
So then what sorts of problems have you noticed and what are you doing to work around it?
However Google (or technically alphabet), and its youtube subsidiary have taken to playing publisher (as opposed to data carrier) and moral police for things they don't like or think their advertisers won't like as and when it suits them. Same applies to facebook and twitter it seems but I have never even viewed those passively or seen them as all that great sources of anything -- at best they give us some nice phone camera footage of someone getting shot by the police to then debunk.
Now I am generally of the opinion that people should be able to talk. I might think you are a moron but sunlight is a wonderful disinfectant. That said I don't consider myself of any particular political views*, much less extreme ones, and I am having a hard time keeping track of things I want to keep track of. About as edgy as I get is I like computer hacking and hacking my devices (shocker for someone on this site I know) so this difficulty in getting to things has me curious. I could whine about it to a politician or on the internet but I would rather get things working. Fortunately I am not bad with the technology lark so I will go with that as my solution.
*I am not registered to vote (apparently it is not automatic any more, and even back then I was named wrongly on their lists because of a typo I did not care to correct), have never voted despite being around for way more elections as an adult than as a kid, no notable elected politician in any kind of free country has been all that troubling to me almost within living memory, a few nearly elected ones might have were it not for inertia, for those elected ones then some I would have preferred an alternative for but eh really, there are some silly new laws and some silly old ones but nothing that really keeps me up at night, never would consider donating time or funds to a political party and so on and so on.
Some of their efforts with/overreactions to copyright issues were initially somewhat troubling but nothing that could not be easily worked around. Today it is getting more tricky but not quite there yet, and amusingly it is causing some to change their behaviours (the legacy of channel awesome with the reaction clips from films seems to have been replaced with self made art, internet memes and stock pictures, the latter of which also causes some trouble for people) but that is OK too.
This is in addition to the end result of the incomplete search concept (originally it was a pretty good mathematical bet if I search for something then in the top 20 or so results there will be something I want so you don't have to do an exhaustive search of your database and if you only get the top 15 then all good) means that the simple use recommendations no longer works for me. Youtube internal search also used to be pretty good but not so much these days. Straight search also has been troubled for things I would have considered completely innocuous (amusingly often returning their secondary channels or sites way before their primary and still very active ones), and nearly no chance of finding something they deemed completely verboten (again despite being things I would generally consider reasonable talking points).
A few did find themselves banned for no good reason (or indeed no reason given at all) from such services but we can cover that in a bit too. I am not so bothered about demonetisation at this point -- a choice phrase that cropped up there is it is not censorship in the strictest sense but it is control so I will note things.
Now I never had an account so I did not have to do the subscribe, and then also do a notification bell, and also check I magically did not get unsubscribed and so on and so on, however it also seems the once actually pretty workable guest cookie recommendation has fallen short. Don't much care about comments either (depending upon the point in time I might even have blocked them, or had them blocked during that glorious period where you needed a separate domain's javascript running). Don't know what became of that comment anywhere gab thing at this point but it was interesting.
Unjustified banning wise then this seems to be the greatest gift youtube et al can give to somewhere like https://www.bitchute.com/ and https://lbry.tv/$/following/channels (to say nothing of more old school methods like https://www.dailymotion.com/ https://vimeo.com/ if they aren't already coming through with the goods). Several people are also starting to do exclusives of some merit on their platforms as well. Was pretty hilarious as well when some of those people went to what are normally porn hosting sites as well.
I also had to start kicking it more old school. This being if I find something I like I get to bookmark the video/channel name and go from there. Most people seem content to do collaborations, interviews and more which also helps find new people. Amusingly enough the so called alternative influencer network report was some atrocious science/analysis but did yield some interesting new things to look at (even more so when the retorts to it came in), though more on the political commentary than the engineering/machining/fixing things and history stuff I also want to watch (though fortunately they tend to do collaborations often enough). Some shitheads among them but there is also this thing called logical thought that allows you to dismiss silly discussion points, and I like to hear the opinions of many different people (being blindsided by new to you opinions can make things hard, and seeing how things develop is also of interest). I only follow a handful of them but the firearms channels are also having a fairly hard time of things too.
Amusingly I accidentally set my search option to yahoo the other day and it actually works pretty well which was pretty amusing and in some ways did better than duckduckgo, though duckduckgo still has good stuff and represents something worthwhile if plain old google is failing you. Not sure I would switch exclusively to either just yet but still worth noting in this.
I have means of downloading (youtube-dl tending to be my tool of choice for a while now) but have not quite yet felt compelled to create my own mirrors/backups of things. Long experience and multiple notable events going back decades says I should but eh.
Short version is to work around this tech company censorhip I like bookmarks and checking around my bookmarks, also need to use some search engines other than google. Obviously all adblock all the time, and I was pointed at a very shiny extension that allows you to skip the spots in videos where they shill VPNs or whatever ( https://sponsor.ajay.app/ , sadly only chrome, firefox and opera but with the exception of some of the legacy forks of those if you are not using them then you are likely beyond hope) but that is probably getting onto another topic.
So then what sorts of problems have you noticed and what are you doing to work around it?
Or others 
