Dealing with Youtube negativity

[Dutchie Abroad]

Hey everyone,

I've noticed that there is just so much negativity directed towards Youtube. As I was searching for forums, the main threads were always about illegitimate copyright strikes, people losing (or not receiving) their revenue, people complaining they don't get subs or watches and just a lot of negativity toward Youtube as a host in general.
Personally, this kind of gets me down. Eventhough I'm not in this for either the money or the subs (I'm just using Youtube as a platform to share my coming experiences in England with friends and family), knowing that there are so many things going wrong behind the scenes of this platform gives me bad vibes.
I see it here as well. Everyday at least three people post a thread (mainly in the wrong boards) just pushing their channel and begging for subs. I mean, is that really what Youtube is about? I came to this forum searching for a community of likeminded, creative people. However, I'm starting to think my mindset it quite different than most other small Youtubers.

Let me know your thoughts. Do you guys experience this the same way? And if yes, how do you deal with it?

 

[TheDutchTexan]

People seem to forget it costs them absolutely NOTHING to be on YouTube. The people complaining about all those things are usually the ones that aren't even close to making their living on YouTube. The ones that do make their living on YouTube usually vent in a video or their social media rather than "waste" their time on forums because they don't have time.

And those begging for views / subs are the same category. I have called people out on this forum, reported numerous threads of blatant self promotion where it is not permitted yet it keeps coming back. There is a lot of negativity because everyone wants to be top dog and everyone thinks it is someone else's fault rather than their own. It is 100% my fault that I am at 4.6K subscribers. I don't have what it takes to hit 100K. I accepted that a long time ago and scaled down my YouTube channel to a clear hobby, only producing 1 or 2 videos a month and never looked back. I laughed when I saw that I did not really use any monthly views and my subscribers kept climbing at about the same pace as when I produced 1 video weekly. Would I quit if I started to get 100 views a video every video? Yes, then I don't get the comments either and that is the reason why I do YouTube. YouTube brings in a little money, it pays for my Adobe subscription. But for my time? Camera's? Hell no. I am squarely in the negative. I love it though, and that is why I keep doing it. Just on a smaller scale than I used to.

 

[Idec Sdawkminn]

People expect things to go perfectly, so when they do, there is nothing noteworthy to talk about. Everything is as expected. When things fall below their expectations, then they talk about them. So anything that goes wrong gets mentioned. Also, when you have something this large and involving so many people, the chances of things going wrong are a lot higher. Most of the complaints I see are either people doing things they shouldn't and trying to get away with it, or having inaccurate expectations.

 

[OrbitGuy]

YouTube is such a huge platform that there are a lot of people who are here with different goals and different issues they are looking to solve with their channels. I think you should take the negativity with a grain of salt because as others have said with so many people on YouTube there are going to be problems, and often people feel they will get an answer here faster than trying to contact YouTube. I've had very few problems with YouTube since starting so not everyone thinks YouTube full of problems but lots of people on here have all kinds of different content and unique situations that they need help with.

I think you're in the right spot for a community of creative people, but there are a lot of different kinds of channels here with different goals. I've noticed there are groups of people within this forum, some who take YouTube very seriously and want to talk analytics and strategy down to the numbers and other people who are looking more for general moral support and encouragement/feedback. It's all great discussion to me and you have to realize different small YouTubers have different goals. I don't enjoy seeing lots of negative threads either, I'd rather talk about solutions and how to adapt and evolve but people get frustrated because growing on YouTube is mostly a slow process.

 

[AmberAndGolden]

I know exactly what you mean, some people complain about not growing fast enough or not getting 'enough' views could be doing 2x, 10x or 100x better than someone else, and sometimes I feel like that hurts the people around them just as much since it disheartens some people, who think they aren't good enough!
People need to chill out, Things don't happen overnight and while I understand that it can be frustrating or you can get impatient on some things, even I can be like that, but just give it a minuet, dang!
honestly, the main negative thing I have with YouTube right now is not having anyone nearby me who does YT, and I haven't found people of a similar size to me with the same type of videos, but thats nothing to do with YouTube itself, and it's nobody fault!

 

[Famous]

People are complaining because they're not having success on YouTube? When did this start?!

 

[babyteeth4]

I think it's the focus on money that's leading to much of the negativity. Back in the early days it was just a cool feeling to have people watching your creations. Nowadays tons of people are trying to make money from YouTube specifically, with secondary thought about the act of creating the videos themselves. When they don't succeed monetarily, they get bitter because they were never doing this for the love making videos.

Now I will say that a creator who is genuinely talented, hardworking and persistent and still hasn't found any kind of audience after years does have a right to be "down" once in a while! But if they enjoy what they're doing, they really shouldn't stay down for long.

 

[Minky Toy]

All we ask is that YouTube creates and maintains a level playing field for everyone. As long as they provide that, we're more than happy to let our motivation, creativity, and hard work take care of the rest. However, if/once they break that trust, it goes downhill, but I think YouTube are pretty reasonable...

 

[DeanDK]

I think people like to complain, and obviously people like to be heard.

If you just start a channel and check out socialblade you are ranked around 4-5 million in terms of subscribers.

So you can see how many channels there are on the platform. Even if we only take half of that value as being 'active users' and 25000 channel had real issues. That's only 1% of the total, which would seem pretty impossible to achieve.

That's my thoughts anyways.

 

[Dutchie Abroad]

Thank you all for the replies! It seems that the negativity is just a part of it. I do understand that is even just a small portion of the users complain, that it is stil a few thousand people. It's just kinda sad that they often have the loudest voice.

I don't enjoy seeing lots of negative threads either, I'd rather talk about solutions and how to adapt and evolve but people get frustrated because growing on YouTube is mostly a slow process.

This! People need to change their mindset, less complaining, more searching for solutions. I've already seen so many threads with people complaining about slow growth, but not knowing anything about thumbnails of SEO's. I mean, there is so much information out there! Just so some research.

All we ask is that YouTube creates and maintains a level playing field for everyone.

I don't completely agree with this. Youtube is a business, not a communistic platform. They don't have the obligation to make sure everyone who uses their services has the same chances a making it big. I do think they should be much more open in their communication and algorithems, but they have no obligation at all to cater evenly to all their users. They actually set up quite a clear division about what they can offer to which kind of creaters (a bit sad that you just don't really count under 10k subs, but eyy, you can't have everything).