Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Video Bumping on YouTube

To those who are getting your subscription boxes flooded, let me explain. If you recall for My April Fools Prank I made it look like my channel was hacked. To do this I had to private all of my videos. Now I am making them public again. Sadly this is resulting in old videos even some 4 years old being published as New Videos. If you can deal with it for about 12 more hours I will be done.

I have reported this issue to YouTube as obviously this is a way to cheat the system if more people started doing this. As you know the subscription box only holds 14 videos so if a Partner wanted to get more views all he had to do is private and unprivate a video and it would go right to the top, bumping off other people who are not cheating.

YouTube has since responded to me and they are working on a fix to solve this issue. In the meantime all I can do is ask for your continued patience. I should be done in about 12 hours. You guys rock. About 8 months ago the video gaming community broke the story on video bumping and YouTube quickly patched it. However with the recent redesign of the YouTube homepage, it looks like this exploit is back. It will take about a week or so for YouTube to fix it. They usually push out fixes on Wednesday which has already past so we will have to wait for next week. This is why this glitch needs to be fixed. YouTube sadly is now all about money. Money comes from views so naturally greed will cause people to exploit whatever tricks they can do in order to get more views for themselves. Having your videos constantly at the top of your Subscriber's homepage is one way to increase views. This is so much more true now that the YouTube hope page features subscriptions front and center and not the most viewed videos of the day as before. Most people are not going to look for page 2 or three of their subscriptions. Page one at the top is where you want to be. So in order to level the playing field, YouTube needs to ensure that video bumping is stopped once again.