#video monetisation

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[hotwaterandmilk]

An IRL friend of mine recently suggested I cut back on posting content because "maybe a dozen or two dozen people" like my posts and they weren't sure why I bothered when there was no money or engagement in it.

I definitely felt a bit like that a few years back, particularly when I'd see people repost my scans on other platforms and get tens of thousands of likes. If I'd shifted platforms and focused on engagement that could well have been me.

However, that's not really what I've ever been about. I share what I share because I like it and want other people who like these works to enjoy what I have in my collection too (or to discover new works they might not have encountered). Nobody has to engage with what I post though, I could get 0 likes/reblogs and I'd still keep plugging away because ultimately this is just a hobby and I'm just a fan.

I don't want to harp on with the cheesy "you should do things for yourself first and foremost" with hobbies, but at the end of the day my affection for certain series and artists won't evaporate just because my posts about them aren't popular on Tumblr.

I've been here for 14 years and have only just hit 10,000 followers. I'm not an important internet person by any stretch of the imagination and I think that's OK. If I'd been angling for something beyond simply being a fan of certain things, I can see how this might be considered failure. For me (personally) though, I don't feel like my hobby needs to have any form of hustle attached to it. This is what I do to express my affection for things.

Not everyone will feel the same way as I do about sharing content online and that's fine, we're all individuals and we engage with things differently. I just wanted to express this while the thoughts were still fresh in my mind.

Enjoy your hobbies in the ways that work for you. You'll find people who appreciate your contributions (big or small) wherever you go online and if you move onto different fandoms or hobbies, you'll find new folks who like what you do there too. Just don't feel locked into numbers as the ultimate way of judging your own love for media.

[dkettchen]

me, procrastinating on one project with another one: it's fine they're both for content I do this for the people and the people will receive SOMETHING sooner by me working on either one 😤

[thefirstknife]

While I 100% agree that if people aren't having fun they should take a step back/quit, I don't like the "if you're not having fun just go find another game" argument because it's so often used to shut down actual legitimate criticism from people who are otherwise enjoying the game but want genuine problems to be addressed. (I've seen it, for example, when people try to bring up bigotry in games and suggest maybe making some changes to remove it. I always get wary when I see people say it now.)

Oh yeah absolutely. There's real criticism that we have to be able to point out and discuss. A lot of the times people use this for any minor criticism someone has and I agree, that's often a way to shut down the conversation. Criticism in general is supposed to come from a place of love: you love something and you want to see it be better.

Unfortunately, in this case, when the community turns into ONLY negativity and criticism, it's kinda hard to believe they care about the game anymore. If people still had some positive stuff to engage with and were enjoying the game but had issues, then sure. But most of the negativity online right now is just purely rage bait. Bungie apparently has no redeeming qualities, and Destiny is dead. Misinformation is spreading about everything: all devs abandoned Destiny to work on Marathon (claim with no source that's accepted as fact and makes no sense: Destiny is the only game making them money, they can't abandon it before Marathon is out. Like, logically), monetisation is the worst in the industry (I genuinely don't believe that they play other games if they think that Destiny's monetisation is the worst in the industry), Bungie is maliciously banning people for fun (????) but also Bungie isn't banning people enough, Bungie is maliciously making server issues and didn't develop a "fix server" button in their office, game development is easy and Bungie is just lazy and the devs don't want to tell us anything because they're evil, Destiny is falling apart and nobody is playing anymore (just trust me bro), and most recent one which is possibly the most baffling of all - Bungie Foundation is a scam to write off taxes. Yes, that is currently discourse (which apparently gets recycled every year). Bungie Foundation, a charity organisation that's been going on for 13 years and is an independent registered organisation, is a scam. This is where we're at with the community mentality. And there's even more.

When we're at this point, it's truly something else. Like, if they believe conspiracy theories about Bungie and think Bungie is scamming them, maybe they just shouldn't play the game anymore. Why are they still here if they think this is all a scam? I would drop the game if I believed any of this so strongly.

Normal people having criticism and all is perfectly fine however! I did my fair share especially recently about the season pass pricing changes which I called a predatory practice and still believe it is. There's a lot more stuff to complain about while still enjoying the game and not basing your entire online existence and personality on hating Bungie. If they've got nothing else to do besides sitting on twitter shitting on Bungie, maybe it's time to move on.

I've also had my suspicions about the motives for hardcore Bungie hate after the incidents involving transphobic attacks on Bungie devs following the LF showcase, as well as all the crap about Nimbus and their VA. Given the recent developments about the general anti-LGBT+ mentality, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a contingent of people who are focusing on Bungie more than anyone else for how outspoken they are in their support for LGBT+ causes. Like, not to do some big reach or something but it's fairly curious that gamers online are adopting the anti-LGBT+ sentiments while Bungie is aggressively supportive. It just rubs me the wrong way that the one company that's committed to this and has been for years before most other companies jumped on the bandwagon is the one that they're choosing to paint as the worst villain. And the LGBT+ support isn't even all, as Bungie has other initiatives where they actively support women's right, reproductive rights, poc rights, disability rights and so on). I don't know, I've been a part of the gaming community for a long time and while there's been massive changes since the early days (and since gamergate days), the issues of bigotry in gaming remain. It feels particularly suspicious to, out of ALL companies, single out Bungie which invests in charities and progressive causes. Like, in the grand scheme of things, every corpo is robbing me blind, I know that, I have to give money to corpos to live on this Earth, so I at least want to give it to a corpo that considers me to be a human being and funds causes that promote my rights, instead of wanting me dead.

Ironically, all of this weird hate makes it harder to have actual normal criticism. It just gets drowned and lost in the sea of exaggerated bullshit and lies and conspiracies perpetuated by people who just don't seem to like the game anymore. At the end of the day, it's a video game. Whatever criticism we have, if it gets to the point where we just can't handle the state of the game, the best way to show it is to simply stop playing. A deluge of harassment on twitter will not bring about meaningful change nor will it adequately convey our criticism to anyone. If they truly want some changes, they would do this criticism in a way that matters, instead of creating a horde of angry gamers who will latch onto every lie and create a hate bandwagon.

[oifaaa]

you should draw every character related to superman in some way

I'm really not a professional enough artist to draw that many characters I would get bored after drawing 2 and give up after 5

[akuma-tenshi]

hey what if i killed you instead

[ahalliance]

me when an ad suddenly appears on youtube after i momentarily disabled my adblocker

[queen-helmaroc]

jesus fucking christ i am so tired of how every thing has to be censored online now?? i hate hearing grown ass adults say "unalive" and "grape". to me it feels like the intensity of those subjects are being watered down and im so goddamn sick of it

[electricleclerc]

i am a kym illman hater till i die

a sick fuck.

[vnillatree]

i want to do the konoyo loading meme but 90% of them got taken down bc of the song and i dont want to risk being mine taken down too CNSKCBSKFJDJ

[sangrialuvr]

[image 1: a youtube apology video from james somerton titled “A Measured Response”. the thumbnail is a shoulder-up image of somerton sitting in a chair with a mic in front of him, and the title next to him.

image 2: two videos by hbomberguy, who had accused somerton of plagiarism in a four-hour video. video 1 is his “Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response” video. the thumbnail hbomb wearing goggles and a lab coat, holding a syringe filled with a neon green liquid. video 2 is his “The War on Christmas: A Measured Response” video. the thumbnail is a split screen of him without the beard and smiling, and with the beard and glowing red eyes and yelling. on both sides of his face are various conservative influencers.

image 3: a tweet by @ Hbomberguy which reads “Huh” posted 26 February 2024]

You cant make this shit up

[bloodybabytee]

i’m thinking about fortnite (off to a bad start), it’s funny to think that the devs of that game tried (and frankly, STILL try) to convince genpop that there’s some semblance of a storyline/cannon to the game when in reality, that flew out the window when they forgot about what fortnite was SUPPOSED to be (a 4 player Co-op zombie defence game) and decided to switch to the battle royale gameplay model because it was more profitable. i’m studying to become a 3D games artist and i’ve seen the extensive concept art that went into establishing the fortnite visual language / artstyle and it’s sad that they’ve broken the fundamentals of their own creative direction on numerous occasions (and continue to do so, I.E. the peter griffin mess, the anime skins, that borderlands thing they did a while back, LEGO fortnite) all for the sake of monetisation. it’s so stupid to say- but this shit makes me believe more and more that games as an art form is dead, artwork is simply not profitable, but spongebob in my moody survival horror game??? SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY !!

[glossedchaos]

who on youtube decided that i had to watch 2 unskippable ads for an 8 second meme video?

[justaholeinmysoul]

Everyone knows unalive or muting words or writing them like k14l3r but I recently heard self terminate in a yt video and I was like dude

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

So I waste a lot of time watching youtube videos about shitty cryptogames. For those who have better uses of their time than I do and don't understand how cryptogames work and why there's six billion of them, let me explain.

The idea behind your standard cryptogame is that you cobble together some bare-bones crafting game or rpg or something, and you sell the players virtual real estate for real money. It doesn't *have* to be real estate -- sometimes it's NFTs that give you a play advantage or creatures the players use to fight or something -- but it's usually real estate. Cryptobros get in early and buy the virtual real estate while it's 'cheap', with the expectation that when the game really takes off, they can sell it for tons of money to other players. The real estate usually offers some in-game advantage (you can build on it, or you get voting rights, or you can tax shop owners on it, or something), but some games don't even bother with that and rely purely on "you bought it so other players will want to buy it from you".

Why does this fail, constantly? Because nobody cares about the actual game. Other games *have* successfully monetised this stuff, but cryptogames never succeed, because almost everyone in these communities are people who are just there to buy crypto stuff with the sole goal of selling that crypto stuff to someone else in the community. The games are never fun enough (or frequently, even playable enough) to bring in a real player base. They serve no purpose, fill no need, and bring in nothing except more cryptobros easily duped out of their money in the hopes of duping someone else out of their money. Asking "so why will players be interested in coming to our Virtual Libertarian Empire and making us any money?" or "how will this game make anyone money anyway?" or "when will this game become a game?" gets you kicked from their discords for spreading fear. Of course this game is gonna take off, bro. If it wasn't, would it be expanding so fast at this early stage? Would so many people be eager to buy virtual real estate in it? This is the next big thing in gaming. (Then the creators take the cryptobros' money and ghost them.)

Why am I bringing all this up? I dunno. Every time I see them putting a new AI Virtual Assistant in something I get weirdly reminded of cryptogaming. For... some reason.

[echoekhi]

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/