Sonic YouTube Videos in Danger -- Important Update!

[skull902]

8 hours ago, Wittymations said:

Hmm. I never really hunted down any Elsa videos. Figured they were just adult oriented videos using characters that just happened to be popular with kids 

Not necessarily Elsa, but since she was the most-used character in those videos, I guess it seemed natural to name it that way.

[buranflakes]

I've put several Hotel Mario edits on my channel and had a couple of them get automatically set to "made for kids," so I can personally attest that Youtube is using some algorithm here, and that to them Mario = made for kids. I imagine it would be the same with Sonic or any other "kid friendly" character. I've personally opted to play it safe and mark anything that could even slightly be considered "made for kids" as such, because I wouldn't expect Youtube to ever make even the slightest attempt at understanding that mixed audience content exists; all I expect from them is the most utterly black and white thinking imaginable enforced using the most utterly ignorant, ham-fisted policies and algorithms imaginable.

[DabigRG]

I kinda love that we have actual Youtube talent around to comment on this.

But to speak from experience, one of my nephews does seem to watch things that are clearly gonna attract kids, but occasionally have cursewords or somewhat sketchy material in them.

On 1/11/2020 at 10:25 AM, Wittymations said:

 

Like, I make Sonic satires with profanity, violence, and even sexual humor. Haven't really had any complaints.

Unless they're doing something very specific than just using specific characters in adult comedy situations.

Are you the "Now let me tell you why that's bullshit" guy?

[Wittymations]

2 hours ago, DabigRG said:

Are you the "Now let me tell you why that's bullshit" guy?

I can really only speak from purely anecdotal evidence. My experience doesn't really reflect what others may experience.

On the subject of "Elsagate" videos, I admittedly don't know much about the situation. Maybe they're intentionally targeting children? Might be why I never came across them. I'm gonna assume bright color icons, maybe the set up is more "Hey kids"y or something. Icon isn't the only thing that matters, set up is also very important. Hell, the whole presentation is important. I guess if a specific set of icon, title, and set up comes off very child oriented only only for it to dive into creepy territory, there's room for a complaint. More importantly, there's an obvious intent there.

This, I feel, would contrast with normal parodies. Like, me using Sonic characters for more adult oriented comedy could arguably be considered attractive to children, but this video certainly isn't designed to appeal to children. However, this one plays more straight family friendly being a direct remake of an Adventure 2 scene, even if Eggman is holding a gun. This one is my most popular one (and really old) but it's perhaps even more family friendly and could be argued to appeal to children.

In these listed examples, I don't have anything that seems to target children, of course that wasn't my intent. And I think intent matters more than anything with the COPPA thing.

But I'd really have to see these "Elsagate" videos. If it does appear that it's intentionally trying to lure them in for a spook or something, yeah. But if it's just weird, Spider-Man dating Elsa, that's more shitposty.

[DabigRG]

2 hours ago, Wittymations said:

I can really only speak from purely anecdotal evidence. My experience doesn't really reflect what others may experience.
 

Oh no, I was referring to a gif of Eggman saying that that a user had in their signature. My mistake.

As for the Elsagate stuff, I'm surprisingly not coming up with those types of videos on searches, so maybe they did something about them.

[Wittymations]

48 minutes ago, DabigRG said:

Oh no, I was referring to a gif of Eggman saying that that a user had in their signature. My mistake.

As for the Elsagate stuff, I'm surprisingly not coming up with those types of videos on searches, so maybe they did something about them.

Oh, you're referring to an actual user? My mistake, guess we're both using Eggman with heavy orange. No, I'm a fairly old user with long streaks of inactivity.

Don't think they're actually called Elsagate. "Gate" is just a suffix added to any controversial issue. Was a trend started by Nixon's Watergate. Arguably a fairly dumb trend.

[skull902]

Actually, since @Roger_van_der_weide posted in here, I was reminded of how Newgrounds submissions work and my god, could YouTube have avoided the trouble if they had done something similar (same goes for the ability to update videos but whatever). NG will give you a checklist of things asking if X or Y is in your video and will aggregate a rating for it based on what you mark it for. NG eventually didn't work out for me, but it was really simple and easy to use during the submission process in my experience.

1 hour ago, DabigRG said:

As for the Elsagate stuff, I'm surprisingly not coming up with those types of videos on searches, so maybe they did something about them.

YouTube changed the algorithm to make them hard to find. I know Cr1tikal made a video about the phenomenon but YouTube's "robust" auto-detection may have yeeted that one too despite it being criticism.

[Wittymations]

1 hour ago, skull902 said:

Actually, since @Roger_van_der_weide posted in here, I was reminded of how Newgrounds submissions work and my god, could YouTube have avoided the trouble if they had done something similar 

Newgrounds has always been fairly miles ahead of YouTube in terms of sensible features for content creators.

Unfortunately, they lack the audience that Googleopoly can bring

Sigh, I miss running with flash crews.

Anyway, another sensible feature is co-authoring. A common tool with Newgrounds, allowing videos to show up on multiple accounts for collabs. Not a thing on YouTube, despite collabs being common: have to rely on description and hope viewers have the attention span to read.

Guess there's end screens too.

[DabigRG]

1 hour ago, skull902 said:

YouTube changed the algorithm to make them hard to find. I know Cr1tikal made a video about the phenomenon but YouTube's "robust" auto-detection may have yeeted that one too despite it being criticism.

Oh, that'd explain it.

10 minutes ago, Wittymations said:

 

Anyway, another sensible feature is co-authoring. A common tool with Newgrounds, allowing videos to show up on multiple accounts for collabs. Not a thing on YouTube, despite collabs being common: have to rely on description and hope viewers have the attention span to read.

Guess there's end screens too.

The closest thing is Playlists of relevant content.

[Salamander]

My understanding regarding the (countless) videos regarded as falling under the "Elsagate" phenomenon is that they were quite specifically and often very cleverly targeted towards children for clear purposes of monetisation, and were equally clearly not satire - merely bizarre and unsettling.  There's a decent summary of the situation on Wikipedia, but broadly speaking, it doesn't appear to be simply a situation of people misconstruing adult satire.