YouTube sees user rebellion

May 3, 2006 SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Hypergrowth comes with hyper-growing pains -- just ask YouTube. The online video-sharing site is facing a rebellion among the formerly faithful. Yesterday, blogger and longtime YouTuber Miel Vanopstal lost his cool in a post titled "Screw YouTube." Vanopstal complains that YouTube's recent upgrades have made the site significantly slower, and that new efforts to enforce copyright and delete otherwise questionable material strike him as arbitrary. He is particularly galled that a single alert notice from a "puritanically minded" fellow user can result in a video being deleted. "I've had it with these random rejections," he writes.

Vanopstal is hardly alone. A bitter Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle says that he was kicked off YouTube two months ago. Weinberg chronicles his dissatisfaction with the free (and reportedly money-losing) service, ultimately deciding that he has only one thing left to do: "Ruin YouTube" by systematically reporting all of the site's traffic-generating but copyright-violating videos. Microsoft's (Research) Don Dodge, who formerly worked at Napster (Research), adds a been there, done that post to the fray, noting sagely: "User-generated content is very difficult to manage and control."... read more

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