Saksham Shrestha, better known by his name Spark (@OrigamiSpark) is a budding rapper and music producer. For creators like Spark, one would thing the different platforms available on the wider internet would be the perfect space to showcase their creation. Unfortunately, the young rapper had to find out the hard way how restrictive and unhelpful such websites can be after experiencing the removal of his YouTube channel soon after the release of his music video ‘Nobody’ on Friday last week.
Shrestha has written an article, ‘Death of Content Creation’, where he writes more about what happened and what he thinks is the problem.
Spark’s NOBODY is now on YouTube again.
Death of Content Creation
Creators spend a huge amount of time and effort on a single piece of content. Usually the number of platforms for them to publish their content on is limited, even more so for video-based content. YouTube may as well be the most optimal if not the only option for good distribution of video-based content. Now picture creators, mostly rising ones, having to feel unsafe about the state of their own content on the one platform they can use. From the unnervingly easy process of taking down someone’s content to the hypocrisy of YouTube’s terms and conditions, it’s easy to grasp why content creators can’t feel secure about their work.
Google receives around 2.2 million takedown requests every day (2015). 920 million URLs were removed from March 2016 to March 2017. Most of these were legitimate reports. Most.
Many actual pirated links or controversial videos still roam free. What makes this worse is the fact that original non-controversial content gets taken down all the time. Videos that fully follow the community guidelines, along with the channels that publish them, are taken down often permanently whereas pornography is accessible on YouTube. More easily than you may think.
Recently, a very young music artist Spark (@origamispark) uploaded a music video on YouTube titled “SPARK – Nobody”. The video had:
- No nudity, nor any suggestive themes/content,
- No violent content, nor themes that suggest violence,
- Copyright rightly owned by the publishing body,
- No hate speech,
- No political or social agenda,
- No scams,
- No misleading content/title.
The entire YouTube channel was taken down within 5 hours of release.
“The video had been getting very positive reviews, so it was rather unexpected of the video and the channel being taken down. Our best guess is that some ‘troll’ or competitive opposition may have reported the channel since a hateful comment had been received only minutes ago. Either that, or the YouTube algorithms may have had a glitch, which isn’t helping either since YouTube doesn’t seem to rectify its errors.”, says Spark (@origamispark).
He also mentioned that he and a few other artists were working on:
- Finding the ones responsible for the incident by co-operating with authorities, leading to necessary legal action,
- Building an alternative platform for creators to publish and distribute their content without hassle.
This kind of incident happens not only to music artists like the aforementioned example, but also to local record labels and other YouTubers publishing content on under categories.
For the time being, YouTube needs some serious rework on how they obey their own community guidelines. On the long-term, there needs to be at least a few more alternative platforms for content creators to make optimal use of.
Written by Saksham Shrestha (@OrigamiSpark)
