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Haven: critical thinking missing again

Sigh, here is another glaring example of people's lack of critical thinking.

Everybody used to love YouTube. It was a platform where regular folk uploaded material that they created with their own imagination and hard work.

The result was a stunning array of wildly varying video material, some of which was brilliant, most of which was mediocre and a little of which was absolutely awful.

However, the bottom line was that there was always something new and something that would appeal, if you took the time to find it.

Then, over the years, the beancounters at Alphabet pressured their subsidiary (YouTube) to generate more and more profit from all this content.

As time rolled on we saw the little banner ads at the bottom of videos replaced with video advertising that rolled before some content. It was mildly annoying but seemed like a fair trade for the fact that all the content was otherwise free.

Sadly, that wasn't the end of it.

The length, number and frequency of ads has gradually been ramped up over the years that followed and now it has become as bad as, if not worse than, regular broadcast TV.

Even worse, YouTube has diluted the advertising spend that it shares with creators to such an extent that those creators are now forced to litter their content with "sponosor" segments and brand-deals, just to pay the bills.

In the past few months YouTube has also announced that it wants to turn the platform into a shopping channel and is pressuring creators to include references to products that can then be bought through links on the videos. Creators get a commission on the sales but so will YouTube.

The final insult has been the dramatic increase in the use of AI in the creation of content.

Not only has YouTube offered creators a raft of different AI-based content creation tools that they can use to generate video ideas, thumbnails and even entire videos but we're also seeing the appearance of AI-slop factories. These are automated systems based on AI that often just steal other genuine creator videos and then "tweak" the script, narrate it with an AI voice and use some visuals scraped off the internet.

These slop-factories are behind channels can churn out hundreds of videos per day and although most of those videos only get a few hundred or a few thousand views, the sheer number of them being published means that it's highly profitable for those who run them.

The irony is that some of these channels have even issued copyright takedown notices against the videos they've copied and slightly "tweaked" -- so as to reduce the competition those original videos might pose. YouTube, in its own usual AI-braindead way, more often than not blindly takes down the original video and sometimes even issues copyright strikes against the original creator whose work has just been stolen.

At the top of this column I said "Everybody used to love YouTube" and the key phrase there is "used to".

As a result of all this hardcore push to generate revenues by endless advertising, product shilling and sponsorship deals, both creators and viewers are getting turned off.

When you try to squeeze too much blood from a stone, eventually the stone crumbles and YouTube's "crumble" moment is not too far away.

I've proposed my own alternative to YouTube based on a distributed network of servers with multiple "discovery" portals but don't have the time or funding to actually implement it. Of course I've also kept a very close eye on the space which is "competition to YouTube" and I've spotted what I believe is a huge scam.

I'm talking about a system called Haven which is presently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter.

Why is this a scam?

The biggest red flag is the crowdfunding target they set -- US$10,000.

Anyone who believes they can create an actual competitor to YouTube for US$10K is clearly either just looking to steal people's money or utterly delusional.

YouTube has invested billions of dollars in server capacity, bandwidth, admin and other costs, how the hell are they going to compete with a target of $10K in startup funding?

However, it's clear that the desire to find a YouTube alternative is breaking people's brains because as I type this they have already raked in almost US$200K, twenty times the target.

Haven doesn't claim to be just another YouTube competitor however, they're leveraging the huge hate for AI content to convince people that they'll be creating a platform that is free of AI. They also boldly claim to have technology that will poison uploaded content so it can't be scraped by AI systems for training data.

I'm sorry but I've seen no sign of anything from them that would provide a level of poisoning that wouldn't easily be circumvented by the most elementary AI system. More vaporware.

It seems that people's desire to break away from YouTube is so strong that it's clouding their commonsense and judgement.

With this in mind, I may revisit my decision not to go ahead with my idea, an idea that would certainly be practical and achievable, producing real results and provide levels of organic growth that truly could compete head on with even the giant that is YouTube.

At the very least, it might convince people not to throw their money away on the scam that is Haven.

Carpe Diem folks!

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