Argent009/hissyfit

Members of the viral video community, this message is going to shock some, depress some, anger a few and hopefully just put things into perspective for a few. It related to what I've been trying to do with YouTube for the past 7+ months and what the outcome of it all is. The previous news items are still here, just click on the News link to see them. But this will take up the front page news for a little while for now.

Warning: The tone of this article is cry-baby

If you've seen my latest YouTube video, you know the majority of what I'm about to say, but if not, to summarize, what some may not know is that I've been working incredibly hard behind the scenes on a totally volunteer basis for the YouTube community and for YouTube itself. I've been handling in excess of 2000 emails a day with requests for help and information, trying to go through the YouTube site and get all of the problems that folks have and keep a tight record of them all and report these things to YouTube and prioritize them for them. I've been an unpaid slave for YouTube for months now and every effort I've made to try to help the community has been met with little more than token responses of "we're working on it". In the meantime, absolutely nothing has been done about a single solitary one of the problems that people have been concerned about.

While this has been going on, the site (And its community) has been under constant attack by a group of black hat hackers known as Bantown. A group that was responsible for millions of accounts being hacked on LiveJournal among other types of attacks, all of them very illegal and very sick. Some of the YouTube community has been hit harder than others. I've attempted to coordinate efforts among the members of the community to do something about this and at the same time have been trying to get the help and support of Google/YouTube. However according to them, in their own words "The Google legal team believes that they haven't done anything illegal" so they refuse to do anything about the problem at all. Just doing a search on Google itself will show you the kinds of things Bantown is guilty of and the fact that what they have done is quite illegal. But YouTube refuses to do anything about it. Furthermore they refuse to fix the pre-existing problems on their service. All along I've been putting in 12 to 16 hour work days, switching my hours up so I can contact the people who need to be contacted, talking to various federal authorities, attorneys, etc. I've asked repeatedly for Steve Chen or anyone at YouTube to call me or to accept my calls and have gotten a deaf ear on those requests. They answer my emails, when the things I say are things they WANT to answer, but frequently ignore what I'm saying.

Meanwhile, along comes LiveVideo, out of nowhere, this site has every single feature I've proposed (in detail) to YouTube, without exception. Yes, the implementation is slightly different from what I'd' do, but they'd have to be able to read my mind to do that. It looked to me like this was YouTube putting this together from the ideas I gave them. Which would be both good and bad. Good that they listened, bad that they wouldn't even so much as say thanks for giving us these wonderful ideas. But no, apparently this site is run either by MySpace or some people affiliated with that site and is totally separate from YouTube. So how did they nail down each and every detail of my suggestions to YouTube? You got me. I can't prove anything here, I offered those suggestions in an effort to help people, not to make a name for myself or get rich. Still it would have been nice to get some thanks for it.

So, did someone from YouTube leak all of these things to LiveVideo? Is it really just an amazing coincidence? What is it? I don't know nor do I care very much. But the fact is that I cannot continue to do what I have been doing. My personal financial situation is in the gutter at the moment and I've invested a lot fo time and money into this. Yes, it was my decision to do so, there's nobody to blame but myself. However there were promises from YouTube that were never fulfilled and you need to know this. By this point in time, many things were supposed to have happened that have not. Not the least of these is that all the bugs should have been ironed out. YouTube has the finances and backing to fix these things but they haven't fixed a single one of them. As a matter of fact, as we all know, every time the site goes down for maintenance it just means there will be new problems, not any kind of fixes. It's clear to me now that my patience and faith in YouTube was wasted and misplaced.

Having said this, I still want to help the community, but I'm not willing to do it through YouTube anymore. I'll still talk to people on there, but if you're looking for help, well, I can't say what's going to happen. I want to talk to LiveVideo's people and see where they stand. In the meantime, look on the left side of this website, see the donation button? I'm not begging, but, if I've been able to help you in the past and you want me to be able to continue to help you and others more in the future, I need some help now. I hate to do this more than anything, in fact, typing this crap is making me literally sick to my stomach. I'd rather just turn off the computer and disappear but people are telling me this is the right thing to do. I want to keep on helping folks but doing it the way I have been is literally having serious effects on my health. Now I know that the scum from Bantown will latch on to this and say that I'm just doing what they predicted all along, that I'm a nazi, a mercenary piece of garbage, etc etc. Whatever they want to say, so be it. They don't know me, they barely know how to tie their own shoes (or do they even wear shoes?) but the truth is a lot more complicated than a bunch of haters could ever understand.

I first need to raise money in order to get out of the debt I've gone into by being stupid and thinking that YouTube was going to be honest. After I've done that I want to make the "Ask-A-Tech" series something truely useful to everyone. I want to be able to answer all your questions and requests for help, either in person or in videos. But I can't do it on the hours I've been doing it and the way I've been doing it as some kind of slave to YouTube. I need your help here folks. If you can help, I'd appreciate it. If not then I'll probably stop doing most of what I've been doing, shut down most of the email accounts I'm reachable at and just go do something else. I leave it in your hands folks. I hate doing this, believe me, but I'm totally out of options now.

External Links

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