Where to discuss TYT

Logistics
1

There are at least four areas where TYT videos, Operation Hope, and other matters can be discussed:

discuss.tyt.com (this forum)
discord
The community portion of the TYT channel on youtube.
and the main areas of youtube where one can leave comments under the individual videos.

Thanks to TYT for doing this work.

There may well be other areas I’m not aware of. Reddit does not seem to have anything meaningful.

(TYTONREDDIT appears to have 435 visitors per week, but I don’t think there has been any posts in 4 years. Still, this appears to show some interest).

Taking a quick look, I do not see an obvious link to this forum or the others directly at tyt.com, but do see this URL:

'…https://tyt.com/hope…"

and partway down the page is this comment:

“…Chat
TYT hosts a planning room [link is to this forum] where the work of organizing can happen. This is a place for robust discussions, project planning, and community connection. We also have a Discord server for those who prefer to head over there…”

I’m not very into live chat for most purposes, but I do think it sounds like TYT scores high in building some engagement on that point. I’m not sure if live engagement is carried out through discord or this forum or something else.

All-in-all, I think TYT is aware of its various options that it is offering, and probably has a clear budget into which they must fit payment for good moderation, site administration, site design, chat organizing, payment to site hosts, and perhaps some things I haven’t thought of. I do not say that they are messing this up, and I have some blind spots and biases which mean that I should hesitate to criticize. These include that I am not so far particularly into trying to get involved in live chat, I haven’t personally been very into Operation Hope, and I didn’t tend to make use of the youtube community or mainstream discussion areas when I probably should have.

Also, in general, I do not so far seem to be able to make much use of discord, not only for tyt but for other topics.

Still, I do think it’s worth shouting out our thoughts and suggestions. So, for what it’s worth [cont.]

2

[cont.]

I personally think it’s a mistake not to make all forums discoverable and obvious on the tyt.com landing page. Something like a top-level menu item called “live chats, web discussion, and participation” and then a clear list of links spelling out where each of these is, and maybe whether paid membership is needed for any of them. i.e.: is discussion one of the perks of paid membership? (I am not sure, but I think part of the media revenue business at this point is being aware that some platforms may allow for members-only discussion?). One of the advantages of this improvement in transparency would be that there would be more robust discussion here in this forum.

I also think TYT might want to revisit this question of discussion on reddit. 400+ visits per week indicates there is some demand out there for discussion of TYT and its shows. If they do not want to re-open the official channel, perhaps place a clear unmistakeable statement on the page as to the various other places people can go for discussion.

There are several counter-arguments to my own suggestions, including

  • TYT may simply not want more web-oriented discussion than it has now.
  • resources are going into building and maintaining a good discussion community at discord and other locations. What’s wrong with that?

It’s possible that another suggestion might be to sunset this forum. Another possibility is to leave things exactly as they are. Maybe there’s already a good balance.

Miscellaneous note: Something for TYT to keep in mind, for those of us members who like to discuss controversial topics on the internet, is that some prefer to do this anonymously. For perhaps multiple reasons, this is harder to do across multiple platforms and multiple user names.

3

My two cents:

  • Discord has security issues; they are very bleeding-edge with the release of new features, forsaking security. I myself prefer more conservative open source forum software, like mybb.

  • Turks (either Cenk directly, or whoever he has delegated technical decisions to…) is well aware of the reality distortion that google does to youtube comments. If they want to encourage people to continue to post there (only to have them sometimes get suppressed by google…), that’s their party.
    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    [And Cenk, if you are reading this: it’s not just _my_ comments that got suppressed; I’m sure it’s many other comments that are similar to the way you express the plight of Palestinians…]

    I also think it’s foolhardy that Turks is not mirror hosting their videos on offshore peertube hosters, under an international domain. I see the days coming when google drops a video at the request of the admin, or DOJ does a take-down based on a fraudulent copyright claim. Again, that’s their party. Don’t come crying to us when that switch is turned off; you were warned that it might happen…

1 Like
4

Thanks for the thoughts. I don’t really know anything about youtube suppressing comments, but I’ll take your word that it’s a thing. What I do know is that youtube does sometimes seem very unfair to some creators, and this has made me want to search for alternatives to youtube, as someone who does pay them every month to watch videos there. But I haven’t really found any strong alternatives. Are you aware of any?

5

Well, if you are talking about channels being suppressed on feeds, the possible way to combat that is to make a composite page of all the prog channels last few posts. If you start checking there, you start not missing any single prog’s posts (as opposed to relying on a suspect algorithm, which can be biased with bots -or angry fed phone calls…) But that is contingent on progs recognizing that problem and agreeing to sharing their billings on that page with other progs.

They’re already sharing placement on youtube feeds, so I don’t see why they should not…

6

Hi, thanks. I’m not sure I understood your post, but I think we’re talking past each other a bit. I can find the creators I want to watch and don’t need help with this. I do hear some of my creators voicing that their channels are getting obscured by youtube and that this is driving their views and revenues downward. I am not personally impacted by this too much, but I do want to know where I can go to find a place to subscribe to that won’t involve the same google ownership.

Other things that bother me: youtube’s copyright violation policies and other complaint/strikes/appeal process is clearly not fair in some ways, and in some ways signals that they are ok with bad operators making malicious or spurious or outright false copyright complaints and harassing or outright ruining channels, at great cost.

In general, youtube seems ok to allow complainers to try to get channels banned for spurious reasons.

I do not like youtube’s apparent policies of incentivizing creators to bother viewers to click on like/subscribe/notify. … as if one of the world’s most ravenous information-gathering organizations is not capable of knowing which videos we watched, how much of the video we watched, and translating that into income for creators!!!

If I recall, youtube at some point put in a policy that seemed to incentivize videos longer than a few minutes. Blech. If such a policy is in fact there, please stop it. Let my creators say what they have to say in the amount of time they want.

And how about giving me the option to filter based on:

  • excluding videos with ai-generated imagery.
  • excluding videos with ai-generated scripts.

I’d also like the ability to start excluding certain types of videos that come up that I can tell are from some sorts of bad actors, but I think I want this exclusion type ability partly in my own hands and not the hands of google/alphabet. One example of non-sequiteur rage-baiting videos that I see, apparently from pop-up who-the-hell-knows-who they are creators, are some (but not all) of the videos I see on all sides of the Caitlin Clark phenomenon.

I have also seen some shocking blatant homosexuality-hating titles come up as complete non-sequiteurs on videos that have nothing to do with sexuality, which tended to indicate to me that google is quite failing in monitoring for some types of bad actors.

I don’t hate youtube. There are some things they do well, and I love how many people have been able to find some degree of creative empowerment and expression and success from services like this. But I always like to keep my options open as a consumer, and have been disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be any really strong alternative that I found. Have you found a good alternative?

7

I can explain with a simple example: often progs complain that their viewership is way down because they got removed from yourube feeds. So much so, it threatens their viability.

By having a palette of most prog channels in one place, showing each of their last three shows (linking to youtube…), people visiting that palette are sure to see their work. No longer is there solely reliance on the youtube feed algorithm (and its suspicious distortion probably done to curry favor with the politicos who regulate them!)

Strength in numbers. You would be creating a destination on the Internet for a replacement of youtube/google’s feed, focused on popular progs covering breaking news stories.

If you watch one prog channel, you probably take in others; right?

[FYI: I could make code to update a youtube or gitlab page to do that; but I would need a paycheck. Since I would like to see the takedown of tyranny, I put the idea out here for ANYONE to do! (sorry -I have to eat and pay the rent…)]

The Economy, Stupid
8

[edited]

Thanks for the explanation. I have understood for some time that the creators I watch (a number of them deal with politics,… probably more progressive than not… but many of whom have little or nothing to do with politics) have made clear to me that insidious actions seem to be taken by youtube, including (but not limited to) this question of altering our suggested feeds. Just to be clear, this particular matter is not a priority for me. I’m not that influenced by youtube’s feed in a way that bothers me at this time. [However, I would like to have a filter that removes all of the most obvious AI from my feed.]

I don’t personally have any problem with you developing some business ideas and putting them out there for like-minded people on a discussion forum. Part of being an active part of a community online is sometimes having ideas that could lead to creative/productive and even lucrative activity. I do hope you’re able to find like-minded folks and that it leads to something.

Getting back to the discussion at hand, with respect to how we view youtube, your focus here has some overlap with me, but is not quite mine. While I am concerned about youtube’s manipulative bs, there are a number of other criticisms I would make of youtube, and they all add up to me wanting to keep an eye out for a competing service where I can spend my money.

9

Yeah, it’s not for you; it’s for the youtube progs.

And if we don’t have prog ideas surfacing on youtube, we could end up fucked…

10

I’ve noticed that the progressive (for lack of better word) podcaster at parkrose permaculture has recently made clear that youtube has, a bit out of nowhere, really started coming down hard on her, endangering her channel. Not only were her views being curtailed I guess by the algorithm, but she got a couple of copyright strikes a bit out of nowhere. Setting aside the specifics, all I can think when I see someone who is just basically going about their business to express a valid decrial of an increasingly fascist state during a global political crisis… is that it does seem a bit fishy for youtube to be coming down on her in this way, and for youtube to be reducing her footprint in general.

11

Knowing how corrupt Team Bunker Boy is, “fishy” is too low-key an adjective! “Stinks on ice” might be more apropos…