Of course it does, don't be ridiculous. The difference between a faceless, directionless algorithm miscategorising videos and performing actions without direct oversight from a human being, and an underhanded (and, frankly, nonsensical) plot to rid the site of one particular set of videos out of the literally billions and billions of free videos that already exist on the site is palpably obvious.
It does effect the people who want to watch those videos, because once the humans at youtube are alerted about the problem, the videos are put back up, as in the case of the blender videos. But if it was an intentional human takedown, the videos wouldn't be put back up.
It also has implications on the future of all other videos. If it's actually an intentional plan to take down free videos, then that means we can expect the people who made this decision on blender to continue their plan and take down other free videos. But if it's an algorithm mistake, we don't expect it to become more widespread, and hopefully the algorithm will be tweaked so that it will actually become less widespread.
This thread is about a company (500px) intentionally taking down free content for business purposes to make more money. Saying that youtube is doing the same thing is false.
> once the humans at youtube are alerted about the problem, the videos are put back up, as in the case of the blender videos. But if it was an intentional human takedown, the videos wouldn't be put back up.
It could also have been an intentional trial balloon, to test the waters to see how much they can get away with. Politicians do that kind of thing all the time.
So you're saying that it was an intentional thing, and not just a bug? PhasmaFelis was agreeing that it was just a bug, and that's what I was replying to.
I'm saying that it very well could have been intentional, yes. Not in the sense of somebody at Google targeting Blender specifically (that's possible but seems very unlikely), but in the sense of somebody at Google trying to see how far they can push forced monetisation through algorithmic coercion.
I don't think we have enough information to say for certain what really happened.
