that goes a long way to explain why the hit count came down. and, this is very sneaky - because i experience no signs of censorship. i can see my posts. if i go back to the page, my posts are there. i get no error message. but, if i log out of the site and come back, i can no longer see the posts.
that is behaviour that couldn't possibly be designed with anything other than political censorship in mind.
let's see if i can jam this....
i may have been targeted specifically because i had a habit of removing posts made to my posts. but, let's be clear about a few things.
(1) it was my post. i had the functionality to remove the responses to my posts. and, frankly, i believe i had ownership of those posts. no rules broken, there.
(2) i was actually very enlightened in the way i did this. i'm trying to save the conversations i had. that means plenty of people didn't get deleted - and there were plenty of interesting back and forths.
now, of course, some of the morons that ended up with deleted posts may disagree. but, that's a function of their idiocy - and the problem in the first place. just because they don't realize they're buffoons doesn't mean i have a responsibility to listen to them.
it's just another symptom, really. youtube was perhaps too good for it's user base, for a while.
i don't feel i have a choice but to stop posting here, seriously. they've reduced the platform to something that is essentially useless for anything but trolling. but, if that's what they want, they can get ready for some of it...
what i'm saying is that i may have gotten a very high number of complaints, because i deleted a large number of posts.
but, if you saw those posts, you'd understand - they were personal attacks, baseless insults, unsupported arguments and just flagrant idiocy.
the difference is that i didn't cry to an authority figure. i just removed the posts. then, the people that were posting nonsense and insults complained that their posts were being removed, and i'm the one that ends up getting silenced - while they keep on posting stupidity.
should i have reported them instead of taking matters into my own hands?
no.
the system was designed so that people could police their own content, and that was actually an ideal way to do it.
1) the owner of the video could decide if they wanted the thread there or not; if the owner of the video removed the thread, it appeared only in google+.
2) the owner of the thread could decide who was allowed to comment on the thread, and which comments were allowed to stand.
this allowed for people to moderate their own content - this is the anarchist ideal of self-moderation. it's easy to see why i liked it...
but, people didn't seem to understand the system, or thought that they should have the right to comment on other people's posts, whether they liked it or not. they weren't able to get the abstraction of personal property rights. so, they complained to authority figures, who had to step in - and i'm the one that got punished for it.
again: it's not a situation where i wish i had reacted differently. it's a situation where i'm learning that this is a bad platform, and that i need to adjust to it's failings.
the other option was that my content, while it existed, would not have been the pleasant conversations that people became accustomed to seeing my name attached to. instead, it would have been full of people posting personal insults, back and forth name-calling, strawmen arguments, unsupported arguments, stupid memes - everything else on youtube, essentially. and, then i would have stopped using the platform quite a long time ago. it was either that i cleaned these threads up and pissed a lot of people off, or that i didn't use the system at all.
and, you just have to laugh, right? people wanted in on my comments because they were high profile enough to be noticed. but, that relied on my ability to screen the garbage out. in the end, the garbage i screened out seems to have ganged up on me and has gotten me declared a spammer, out of spite.
but, i wouldn't have had anything worth noting if i had let anybody and everybody go ahead and vomit all over my posts.
in the end, i got nailed for using the system as it was designed, and actually succeeding in making it better, and the youtube comment system has remained a nest of absolute stupidity. if anything, it's worse now than it's ever been.
i can't regret that. rather, i have to point out that i'm a victim of stupidity.
listen: this is how the world works, right?
where's the alternate history where everybody listens to jesus, agrees and goes to smoke a fatty in the park?
mass idiocy is normal. intelligence is always persecuted.
they hate you when you're clever....
the reality is that any other outcome would be unheard of - astonishing.
really, i should be content in realizing that i'm lucky that i haven't been lynched, yet.
i'm almost done in clearing the page down. i should get close to 1500 pages in the end. it's probably 1500/2000 or so. i'm sure the lost ideas will regenerate elsewhere, eventually.