Its odd, people get so up tight about the government spying on them, but then give facebook and googleplus ALL their personal details without even batting an eyelid. I don’t really so much care about that…. that’s the price of a ‘free’ website. However it really pisses me off that all of these sites will not just let me use the alias Thunderf00t. No, I have to use a ‘real name’ with real personal details, ‘cos building up a profile on an alias just isn’t as profitable as a profile of real person. Understand this social media sites, I don’t want to tell you ALL my personal details like where and when I was born. No matter how many times you ask these questions:
Thunderfoot, where did you grow up?
Thunderfoot, where do you work?
Thunderfoot, where did you go to high school?
Thunderfoot, which city do you live in?
Thunderfoot, where did you go to college?
What movies have you watched?
(questions that greet me on facebook)
I have no interest in letting you know every detail of my life and that starts with my name. I like the idea of anonymity on the internet, because ideas don’t have faces.
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
I have great memories of our group singing of ‘Always look on the bright side of life’ at the end of that conference! Telling ya, we have GOT to adopt that as our anthem!
We are responsible adults thank you, and do not need to be treated like children!
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…..anyway, I digress. However much fun conferences might be, they are effectively still a side show compared to the potential reach of the internet. Lets keep it real: the internet is a place where religions come to die!
-New media is a game changer in a way that conferences never were, and likely never will be!
In this sense, I see it as vital that we maintain a strong internet presence on viral media. Regrettably the secular/ rationalist community has a problem on youtube at the moment. Established players have been slowly drifting away, and because the barriers to entry are so high, there are not being replaced! To be honest, this is to me a far bigger issue than pretty much anything that is happening on the conference scene.
The way I see it we want people making good videos on a semi-regular basis. But how to encourage this?
Well I actually care about this a lot!, and so I am going to put basically all of the donations I received from last year into a fund to encourage this ($10 000).
So how best to do this? Well this is where I want your help, for many minds are better than one, and I have essentially no experience at doing this sort of thing.
So far my rough ideas looks like this:
The first thing is of course, while I will supply the prize money, I should detach myself from the judging. So far Eugenie Scott, Elisabeth Cornwell and ZOMGitscriss have suggested that they would be willing to help out with the judging. If you have any other names you would like to suggest, please leave them below.
I was thinking about three categories:
1) Merit grants. This is basically giving money to established people who have contributed much for little reward. Its just a small way for the community to say thank you for all you’ve done! I also think this would create a lot of good will among our established video makers.
2) Equipment grants. This is for folks are happy to spend their time making videos, but think that its a bit much to have to spend their own money to make videos for other people to watch for free. The solution is simple, buy them what they need, HD webcam, microphone, green-screen, etc. and everybody wins!
3) A video competition. Youtube is becoming an increasingly competitive attention economy, and what is really needed is people who are making competativley good media on a semi-regular basis. So I suggest that people get to submit their three best videos made over a period of 3 months with the winners taking home cash prizes, and getting their work featured on my channel etc. We do our best as a community to bring new blood in that are making good videos on a semi-regular videos.
So what do you think? Good ideas? How best to partition up the prize money?
That is, if you had $10 000 dollars to spend to invigorate the secular presence on youtube, how would you spend it?
This time a decade ago, no one had even heard of youtube, nor did the bandwidth really exist for the project. The emergence of Youtube was unforeseen by, well lets be real, everyone. Microsoft was left standing, as was Google. The access of users to cheap video editing equipment, and further simultaneously given access to the vast array of various uploaded media clips led to an explosion of creativity.
However as time progressed, expectedly those who did well acquired a disproportionate amount of the traffic. Now, I don’t have the figures, but a comparative handful of users provide the significant lions share of the traffic. This has had two detrimental effects on youtube.
1) The forum has lost a significant portion of its vibrancy, in that it used to be that you could come back to youtube in a week or twos time and everything would be different. This is not true anymore. You come back in months time and it’s pretty much the exact same people doing exactly the same thing. It’s no longer really youtube, but the ‘same old-same old’tube.
2) The barriers to entry are now essentially prohibitively high. As a few get a large amount of the traffic, the barriers to entry are huge compared to what they were when youtube was relatively a flat and fair forum. Indeed almost the only way to now establish yourself on youtube is with the help of someone who is already established, or to have an existing audience for whom you start making videos, or to simply have a truck full of cash to throw at the problem.
So is there a solution to this? Is there a way that youtube can regain it’s vibrancy? Well that’s where many minds are better than one and I ask for your take on this.
The following is my suggestion: One way to do this which is arguably dead before it starts is by biasing the YT search algorithms against established players. Now YT will not want to do that on several levels. Firstly ‘established players’ are the ‘cash cows’, they are the ‘known commodities’ that people come to youtube for. Secondly of course, those partner would be pretty unhappy having put all that work into establishing a channel merely for YT to come along and decide ‘bad luck fellas, but YT needs more variety’. It would also send a lousy message about the relationship between media producers and youtube. Finally of course, who is likely to fill this gap? Lamentably imitation is easier than innovation and for every youtube ‘celebrity’ there are probably 10 wannabe clones. Even if youtube were to tweak its search engine, would it really help?
Maybe a more viable alternative is to create a second ‘pool’ of users. A ‘youtube hatchery’ so to speak that allows small channels to grow free of the competition of the bigger players (a different front page). Limit the hatchery to users with less than 10k subscribers or so, and have a separate front page for them. The environment would allow people to establish themselves on a smaller forum before competing in the full YT forum where currently they get almost no attention.
Other than that, it looks to me like youtube has matured and hardened into its adult form, never to see significant changes again, or if it does, it will be more akin to glacial speeds!
Thunderf00t 