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YouTuber Ruben Sim Must Pay Roblox Over 'Cybermob'

Andrew Orr ·

The Roblox Corporation sued YouTuber Ruben Sim over leading a “cybermob” on its platform and terrorizing players, many of whom are kids.

The original ban, according to Roblox’s lawyers, was issued after the YouTube creator harassed other players using racist and homophobic slurs, allegedly sexually harassed users, and uploaded photos of Adolph Hitler to Roblox. Sim disputed this characterization in a YouTube video uploaded last week.

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YouTube Moves to Hide Dislike Count From User Interface

Andrew Orr ·

YouTube announced on Wednesday that it will begin hiding the number of dislikes videos have on its platform.

And earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike button to see whether or not changes could help better protect our creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks — where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos.

YouTube is only making it harder to spot crappy videos at a distance. Now you’ll have to click on each video to be sure, or read the comments. More views = more money for Google.

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YouTube Rewind Scrapped Permanently

Charlotte Henry ·

YouTube is to stop making its annual ‘Rewind’ videos. The look-back clip was scrapped in 2020 because…2020, but the move has now been made permanent, TubeFilter reported.

The decision was made on what would be the 10th anniversary of Rewind. YouTube says it is not abandoning the project because of the widespread criticism it has received on more recent efforts, but because its platform has become so massive that it is impossible to encapsulate its vastness and diversity within a minutes-long compilation. Accordingly, YouTube says it will be passing the baton to creators, who have increasingly been producing their own homespun versions of YouTube Rewind in recent years. “Since Rewind started in 2011, we have seen creators from MrBeast [54 million views], elrubiusOMG, and Slayy Point, to so many more, create their own end-of-year videos, uniquely capturing the year from each of their perspectives,” a YouTube spokesperson tells Tubefilter.

AdGuard’s Shortcut Can Help Block YouTube Ads
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AdGuard’s Shortcut Can Help Block YouTube Ads

Andrew Orr ·

AdGuard, creator of a popular adblocker of the same name, started getting complaints from users that YouTube ads were slipping through. It turns out Google deployed a new algorithm for showing ads to logged in users (Read more here). AdGuard was able to create a shortcut that can block these new ads while they build similar functionality to block them with the AdGuard app. You don’t need to have the AdGuard app installed to run the shortcut. Download Shortcut

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Lawmakers Call YouTube Kids ‘Wasteland of Vapid, Consumerist Content’

Andrew Orr ·

The US sub-committee on economic and consumer policy sent a letter [PDF] to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki about its app for kids, saying it’s full of “inappropriate… highly commercial content”.

According to the letter, some videos appeared to be “smuggling in hidden marketing and advertising with product placements by children’s influencers”.

The letter claimed that one research team, which it did not name, found only about 4% of videos had a high educational value. Much of the rest was low quality content such as toy unboxing and videos of people playing video games.

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YouTube Hashtag Landing Pages Now Available to All Users

Charlotte Henry ·

YouTube made hashtag landing pages available to all users on Tuesday, Techcrunch reported. Although these operate differently from how they do on other social networks, they still provide another way for users to find content, and creators to get eyeballs.

Going forward, when you click on a hashtag on YouTube, you’ll be taken to a dedicated landing page that contains only videos that are using the hashtag. This page is also sorted to keep the “best” videos at the top, YouTube claimed. The ranking algorithm, however, may need some work as it’s currently surfacing an odd mix of both newer and older videos and seems to be heavily dominated by Indian creator content, in several top categories. The result, then, is not the equivalent to something like a hashtag search on a social network like Facebook or Twitter, for example, where more recent content gets top billing. For that reason, it may be difficult to use these hashtag landing pages for discovery of new videos to watch, as intended, but could still serve as an interesting research tool for creators looking to better leverage the hashtag format.