Talk about something coming out of nowhere, today I present you with a little insight into just how completely screwed up YouTube is. However, as with many things, we’re going about this in a somewhat roundabout way.
You know those play button awards that YouTube gives out to people who reach certain subscriber thresholds and, in the YouTube community they are seen as somewhat major awards. I personally see them as ego stroking myself, but that’s probably due to me being about 999,550 people away from getting one myself.
Anyway, the YouTuber Vexxed earned a play button for passing 100,000 subscribers. You would think he would have gotten on that simply said “Vexxed” on it, as that’s his channel name, but no. His instead says a racist hate phrase.
Why? Why would it show this? Well, it’s somewhat interesting. Sure, you can order fake play buttons from online sellers, but this one is legitimate – he shows the accompanying documentation to prove such, so this is a real, from YouTube item. The reason it has the phrase on it is because that’s what Vexxed wanted it to say.
Wait, what? Why would he do that?
The answer is, of course, to prove a point. In this exercise, he proved that there is no quality control or check system at all for this process! Even though YouTube claims it will check the submission, it clearly doesn’t, as there is no way this would pass any kind of screening.
The reason? Much like every problem with YouTube, it’s all completely automated. No human actually checks these things. Vexxed goes into detail in his video on this process while also bringing up something else that’s worth mentioning – where the buttons are actually made.
You would think YouTube, being an American company and having access to all the resources Google has, would make these items here in the states, right? Nope. I’m sure you can already tell where they are made, based on the title of the article. Yep, China. They are made, like everything else, in a factory in China.
Now, that I’m not totally going to give them shit over, but it shows how disconnected YouTube proper actually is from the process that, basically, no one from the company ever actually gets involved in the process. The only step humans are even involved in is outsourced to China where they could give a shit less what the button says – they just make it and move on with their day!
Moreover, the buttons used to be of higher quality – they’ve even cut back on that as time has passed.
Really, this goes well to show us just how terrible YouTube actually is. While it continues to put up this facade of being very personal, friendly, and human, in reality it’s as cold and automated as any other company. Humans are only involved where absolutely necessary and even then, they are just subcontracted out in probably many cases.
Watch the video for yourself though and see what you think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTeqkPpklfg
Also, as a bonus, here’s the video mentioned above regarding the factory which produces the play buttons, from YouTuber serpentza.