by Bazofts Revenge

Created on: June 30, 2007

I have found over the past 6 months or so that You Tube has been almost unusable for all but the poorest quality videos. You Tubes success has become it's greatest problem. When demand peaks the company's servers cannot meet the demands placed upon them. The results of this are videos which stall every 3 or 4 seconds and take anything up to 30 seconds to download the next 3 to 4 seconds worth of footage. This been the case I have barely tried to watch any videos in this time scale.

You tubes popularity has increased due to the fact that prices for video cameras have fallen dramatically and that nearly all mobile phones can record video footage. This means there are so many more cameras available with hundred of thousands of people uploading new Video clips every day. The quality of these videos are generally appalling especially those shot at concerts as the built in microphones are not capable of handling the volume of sound at these events. The resulting videos are generally unwatchable due to to the poor soundtrack.

As just about anybody can post a video it is down to those who are registered users to police the content. Therefore you tube users are to blame for the quality. Many users do not use any of the tools provided by You Tube to help clean up the site. These tools are 'flag as inappropriate' which can be found below each video or marking other user comments as spam and reporting abuse.

The 'flag as inappropriate' option is used to bring suspect videos to You Tubes attention. What you should be bringing to their attention is anything that violates the terms and conditions of use such as pornography, spam, racist, religious abuse, killings, etc.

Much of the spam in the comments comes in the form of adverts for drugs (slimming or Viagra)or chain letters. You can not only keep your own videos clean of spam but also 3rd party videos by clicking the report 'spam' option. Many so called users of You Tube are serial abusers and just abuse those who have tried to post something entertaining. These abusers tend not to have anything of any worth on their channel. These people could be reported as spammers but its best to just block their profile and delete their comments.

As for the content how many people can say that they bother to rate more than half of the videos they watch. How many people have clicked a link thinking it would show one thing and find it is totally unrelated, flag it as spam and rate it at 1 star unless of course what is on instead is actually very entertaining then let it be.

I think that most of the problems I have had loading videos have been down to network/PC problems not You Tube getting worse.

If we users don't use these facilities we can't moan that it's getting worse. With regards to You Tube's servers I understand they are constantly adding more capacity. Let us just hope we can have better service in the future.

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