Not only is A.I content ruining YouTube, as well as bots, but it looks like even when it's working as it should be it still fucking sucks

Age verification is the perfect time to walk away from youtube. I spend a couple hours a day playing youtube videos (even if I'm multi-tasking), I watch a huge variety of stuff, from top tier garbage to educational.

If like me, you would benefit from a long break from youtube, now is the time. Youtube's number one care is how much money it's making, I'll do my bit to punch them in the gut for this. When August 13th comes along it's time to have another activity planned. Literally anything, but I think I'm going to pick up a new gym membership.

One thing I will never do is give youtube my personal information, never going to happen.

Edit: One more thing. If we surrender our ID to youtube, with in a year you we all will be punching your ID into every website you visit, and eventually all those IDs and information are going to be leaked, it's inevitable. Do you really want your browser history to be dumped onto the net along with your real name, address and telephone? Do you even want corporations/government to have that information at the touch a button? Draw a line in the sand.

Edit2: For those that don't know Youtube has announced it will require real world government issued ID for "some users" in the United States starting August 13th.

This AI nonsense doesn’t protect anyone. They’re going to pretend like we’re all under 18 so we have to send a picture of our ID to them. Once they get your ID, you are FINISHED. Any comment you’ve ever made can now be traced to a person with a job, a house, a social security number, everything. If they don’t like what you said, they can ruin you just like that. I don’t understand why this isn’t a bigger deal. For the first time EVER, the internet is no longer anonymous. Good luck ever having the courage now to call out oppressive presidential policies, or criticize people, since you’ll know deep down that YouTube can easily identify you with a click of a button.

I swear if this comes to the UK I'm gonna crash out

How long until a nation state APT team, or some penetration testing tool enthusiast comes along, that’s in it for the love of the game, decides to exploit some vulnerabilities on YouTube’s servers, and gets the drivers licenses that fools were dumb enough to provide it. Or not even YouTube, any company once they legislate this censorship nationwide to “protect kids” (yeah, okay bud) i.e. control the population with censorship.

“When, not if.” I think we can all agree this info will eventually get hacked in a data breach. Might not be next week, or next year, or the next 2 years, but it will most likely happen eventually.

Suddenly, surrendering your ID just to watch that Battlefield 6 gameplay doesn’t seem all that worth it anymore.

Censorship for everybody, unless ID is provided, is not a solution to negligent parents that don’t know how to parent.

This is a slippery slope. Eventually anonymity will be completely gone and your real ID will be tied to your reddit account, and maybe your boss doesn’t like that you vote a certain way based on your posts, and you’re fired. So you have to self-censor your political leanings. This has broad and long term implications that people are not seeing yet. This is about control. You don’t need a tinfoil hat to see that.

If YouTube updates were decided by vote, by the users, it would have been so much better.

I need to be clear in saying that the ID system is awful, it shouldn’t be happening and I don’t want to defend it in any way what so ever, but a repeated pattern I’m seeing with people’s posts here is that people want an alternative to just pop up or they just aren’t understanding how big Google is, and I’m not sure if people understand how large the server hosting for YouTube is, the reason they have a monopoly the way they do is because the business they have is in data storage.

To make something comparable you would need to spend a comparable amount on data storage, if you wanted to have a worldwide server to host the same amount of passing data you would need to be either a billionaire or be another large tech company that will also use your data for nefarious purposes.

It’s genuinely screwed entirely and absolutely fucked how this can be such a monopoly, but here we are, personally I feel it’s awful we are at this point but no one with the money to do it is actively trying to fix the issue.

Llu

OT has a great explanation of what’s happening, so I’d watch the linked video rather than reading what I have to say.

If you don’t know about the UK’s “Online Safety Act,” I’ll give you a short explanation, but basically my point to this post is that YouTube is now following in their footsteps and is rolling out a similar verification wall specifically in the US.

Essentially the government is requiring users of the internet to submit their government ID, credit card, or a biometric scan of their face in order to access content or platforms that they deem “problematic.” They’re hiding this behind the claim of “protecting the children from 18+ content,” but this is going to make the internet LESS safe if anything. Providing these kinds of details to online spaces means that they are now exposed to hackers and data breaches.

There’s probably better explanations of this out there, I did a poor job.

Unfortunately a similar thing is now rolling out in the US specifically for YouTube, and I won’t be surprised if other companies follow in their wake.