Earlier this week, YouTube published a blog post outlining some updates they were intending to publish on­to their website.

http://youtubecreator.blogspot.com/2012/01/upcoming-improvements-to-accuracy-of.html

If you don’t want to read the entire blog post, the main idea of the update is to update subscriber counts so inactive and invalid accounts are no longer included in the tally of subscribers. For example, if someone has 100 subscribers, but 10 of those people deleted their accounts and another 10 of those people no longer use YouTube and have not signed in to YouTube for a long time, this individual’s sub­scriber count would fall from 100 to 80.

Seeing as I have a moderately strong and relatively historical presence on YouTube, some of my friends, readers, and subscribers have suggested that I write a blog post about this new update expressing my opinions.

First, I think it is important to look past what YouTube wrote in their blog post and take a look at their in­ten­tions, then consider the people who are opposing this change and look at their intentions as well.

I think YouTube’s intention for this update is pretty obvious – they want to make sure the subscriber count is a reliable measurement of a channel’s success, and want to avoid people abusing the sub­scription system and inflating it using methods that breach the terms of service. For the naïve who do not know already, yes, there are people who pay professional companies to increase their subscriber counts so it appears like they have more subscribers than they really do. As of today, searching for “buy YouTube subscribers” on Google yields about 63,600,000 (63.6 million) results; some of the results show com­panies that sell subscribers for as little as 10¢ each.

Just from this information, it seems like the only people who would oppose this update would be people who have used malicious methods to increase their subscriber count; if the updates rolled out, all their fake subscribers would be removed and they would be back on square one. However, people who have le­git­imately earned all of their subscribers are opposing this as well. The main justification they have is that removing inactive or deleted accounts essentially means they are removing old success. The sub­scribers that they earned a long time ago would not transfer over, and video makers want their success to be a cumulative measure of the things they did in the past as well as current success in the present.

It seemed as if YouTube actually listened to the opinions of the video makers and decided to reconsider their decision. A day after they initially released the blog post, they posted an update saying that they would postpone rolling out the changes of removing inactive and deleted accounts from subscription counts, but they said they would still roll out a system that would prevent people from continuing to abuse the subscription system.

Oddly, even though they said they would not cut subscription counts, it happened anyway. Someone I know who recently reached the 100,000 subscriber milestone fell back down to 99,000. The second most subscribed channel on YouTube supposedly lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers (but they were past the 5 million mark, so it wasn’t too drastic). I lost about 80 subscribers – I was at about 3200 on the 11th, but fell down to the low 3100s on the 12th.

My opinion about this whole issue is of support. It has always pained me when people who make terrible videos become moderately well-known (and sometimes even make money off of their videos) because they use methods that break the terms of service. For example, someone can buy thousands of views for their videos from a professional company. If they enable pre-roll advertisements on their videos, the amount of money they make off of those advertisements from the thousands of views far exceeds the a­mount of money they need to spend purchasing the thousands of views in the first place. Once adver­tisers figure out that there are fake people watching their advertisements, they are not going to want to advertise on YouTube anymore, which then negatively affects those who are using YouTube properly to make money, as they will not have enough well-paying advertisements to show on their videos.

One thing that I do think is a down side to this update is the shock value it will give to people who lose subscribers. For me, it was not much of a deal, because most of my subscribers were real and I only lost about 80. However, sometimes, people with more fragile emotions might be discouraged if they notice that they dropped below a milestone (such as the example above of a YouTuber dropping below 100,000) and lose the motivation and drive for continuing production.

Thus, I think a way to mitigate this is to have a subscriber count freeze rather than updating the public subscriber count. For example, if someone had 110,000 subscribers but dropped down to 99,000 real sub­scribers, their public subscriber count would show 110,000 subscribers and freeze at that number un­til their real subscriber count made it back up to 110,000. Only then would it start to increase again. This would be primarily beneficial for people who have been targets of subscriber count inflation by their fans – they had no intention to break the terms of service, but were victimized anyway because of others outside their control.

I think that popularity on YouTube has always been a hot and volatile topic, and I’m interested to see how this ends up within the next few days and weeks.

Sometime this past week, my parents went to an electronics store and purchased a Bluetooth earbud. The earbud cost a little bit over $20, but there was a $20 rebate, so it was almost free except for tax and the gasoline required to drive to the store.

Normally, when you purchase a product that has a corresponding rebate, you receive the rebate form so you can fill it out and mail it to the manufacturer. Oddly, for this rebate, we had to go to the store’s web­site and print the form ourselves.

When I went to print the rebate form, I noticed that it was a PDF with a huge picture of the earbud and a red background. The form only had about four lines for a name, address, and phone number, but the in­structions said that the information must be filled out on the original rebate form (which was the PDF I was looking at).

If you haven’t noticed the problem already, in order to claim this $20 rebate, I would have to waste tons of printer ink by printing out this unnecessarily colorful piece of paper. The worst part is, I have an ink jet printer at home, and not a roller or a toner printer, which means, if I were to print this rebate form at home, I would end up with a sheet of paper drenched and dripping wet with ink.

Being the resourceful person I am, I realized that if I were to instead take this PDF file to the local public li­brary, I could print it for 10¢ and not waste any ink at home. So, I downloaded the PDF file, emailed it to myself, and drove a few kilometers over to the library.

You think my troubles are coming to an end? I’m actually just getting started.

Upon entering the public library (which was recently remodeled in a way such that half the library now looks brand new while half the library still looks ancient), I navigated my way over to the row of com­put­ers. I moved the mouse around a little bit, but couldn’t get it to unlock, and got a message that I had to make a reservation first. Not knowing where to make a reservation, I went over to the adult services desk to ask for help.

I stood in line behind an old woman who was apparently having trouble with every aspect of her life at the same time and needed three people to help her at once. After waiting about five minutes, another library employee came over to me and offered to help.

She led me over to a random computer with no keyboard and told me to scan my library card to make a reservation. I asked her why they had a reservation system in place when they could just have people type in their library card numbers directly into the computer they wished to use, and she replied that the library gets extremely busy and they need to use the reservation system to keep the system running smoothly.

I looked over to the computers; there were about 12 computers total, and only four of them were in use. It was the evening of a weekday when you would expect it to be most busy, yet two-thirds of the computers were empty. I looked back at the library employee who was helping me, and she appeared to make a conscious effort to ignore the fact that a reservation system was completely unnecessary.

As expected, my reservation time started right away. The ridiculous part was that instead of placing me on a computer where I wouldn’t have to sit next to anybody so I could have my own personal space, it assigned me to a computer in between a large old man and an aisle everyone had to pass to get to the non-fiction section of the library.

After frustratingly making my way over to my assigned computer and opening up an Internet browser as the old man next to me watched in curiosity, I logged in to my email to open up the PDF file so I could print it and get out of the library as soon as possible. Logging in itself took about two minutes because the Internet was so slow; on top of that, I have two-step authentication in case someone hacks my password, so I had an extra page to go through.

After finally opening up the email, I went to download the PDF.

File size: 0.8 MB. Time remaining: 9 minutes.

The download speed was fluctuating between 1 and 2 KB/s.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with file sizes and Internet download speeds, let me put this simply for you: THAT IS A HUGE FILE FOR A ONE-PAGE PDF, AND THIS INTERNET IS SLOWER THAN DIAL-UP FROM TEN YEARS AGO.

After patiently staring at the computer monitor for nine minutes while the old man to my left and about a hundred passerbys to my right glanced at what I was doing, the PDF file finally finished downloading and I successfully opened it. I sent the print job to the printer that corresponded with what I thought was the printer near the adult service desk, locked my computer, and went over to pick up my document.

I inserted 10¢ into the printer and waited.

Nothing happened.

As if the reservation system wasn’t complex enough, the library thought it would also be a good idea to make it such that if you want to print something, you have to enable the printing job from another separate computer (again with no keyboard) before it begins to process.

After about 20 minutes, I finally got my one page printed and I walked out of the library.

I don’t know why people think it’s a great idea to make things eight times harder than they should be.

That’s Not How Internet Works

A few days ago while my family and I were eating lunch, my mom received a phone call from one of our rel­atives telling us that she had sent us a copy of scanned documentation that we wanted to see via email. About ten minutes later, after finishing lunch, we opened up my mom’s account and saw that we did not get the email.

My mom called my relative back and told her that we did not receive the email.

My relative’s response: “Oh, it must still be on its way, then.”

Follow-up to “Twitter! Stop adding random tweets to my favorites list!”

About a month or so ago, I put a note in my blog saying that I was having issues with Twitter randomly adding tweets to my favorites list. Once in a while, people would ask me why a particular bland tweet was in my favorites list, and I would have no response because I would not recall ever favoriting the tweet in question.

I asked people to respond to my question if and only if they knew a definite answer to my issue, and that ended up not happening. I got an unnecessarily large response, with most people saying “maybe you accidentally clicked the Favorite button and forgot” or “maybe you have a terrible memory.” Nobody gave me a remotely plausible suggestion.

Earlier today, just by chance, I noticed that hitting the F key while reading a tweet in your web browser will favorite it. I also noticed that all the tweets that recently appeared in my favorites list have been tweets for which I clicked the Detail link, which brings up the tweet on its own page and activates the F keyboard shortcut for favoriting. Taking into consideration the fact that I have an overactive left index finger and accidentally hit the F key a lot, the keyboard shortcut is the reason why I have accidentally been favoriting tweets.

I’m not 100% sure if that’s the true reason or not, but it seems like the most plausible explanation (and more reasonable than me intentionally favoriting a tweet and forgetting that I did it, over and over a­gain.

Correction Credit

Last for today, I want to give a shout-out to Arianne for submitting a detailed correction for my web­site.

In my blog post from October 31, 2011, there was a broken link that was supposed to point to a page on the Daily Post on WordPress.com. Instead of the URL working properly, it linked to an internal page on my website that did not exist.

The reason for this error was the fact that instead of using straight apostrophes when wrapping the URL, I accidentally used curly apostrophes (because I had originally written the post in Microsoft Word) and forgot to change them to straight apostrophes before publishing it as a PHP file.

I made it.

Today is December 31. I finished one year of daily blogging.

For those of you who have not been with me for my entire journey, I decided at the beginning of this year to blog daily with motivation from the Daily Post at WordPress.com. They recommended bloggers to set a new year’s resolution to blog daily. I, of course, made a new year’s resolution several years ago never to make another new year’s resolution again, and I have not broken that resolution. However, I still decided to accept the challenge of daily blogging, and it was a moderate success.

I thought it was pretty interesting to document a small portion of my life every day for an entire year. Although I don’t really like reading my own blogs or watching my own videos (which I heard happens to a lot of people once they start producing tons of content), I’m sure that later on in the future, I’ll look back at what I did in 2011 and appreciate that I left behind this many memories on the Internet.

I’m sure you would be able to guess this, but no, it was not easy, especially on the days when I didn’t really do anything interesting and had nothing to blog about. Those were the days when all I did was answer a Daily Post prompt or post a Daily Shoot photo.

And, I’m sure you would be able to guess this as well, but no, I am not going to continue blogging daily into 2012. I decided that in 2012, I’ll focus more on the quality of my posts rather than the quantity. You won’t be seeing any short blog posts anymore where the only thing it contains is a single random photograph or a single paragraph of text. Instead, future blog posts will integrate more relevant pictures and have more comedy in the content – similar to what I did a long time ago that got me my first wave of readers. Essentially, all blog posts from now on will be “worth” reading, rather than being “just one of those blog posts that exists so Parkzer can blog every day of the year.”

And, as we all know, my strength in writing lies in telling funny anecdotes to which many people can relate, so I’ll try to do that more often.

So, to everyone who has stayed with me since the beginning, I appreciate your support; to all new readers, expect a stream of good content to come your way in the near future.

I’m going to take a short break from blogging, so I’ll see you all in a few days.