Tag: Soapbox

YouTube Partnership Program Rule Change Rant

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

So, I am going to rant for just a bit, bear with me…

-Mounts Soapbox –

“Ahem… I set a goal to be a better filmmaker, content provider, and maker five months ago.  Part of that goal was to reach the 10,000 view threshold to monetize my YouTube account.  I did not plan to quit my J-O-B, or be internet famous, I just wanted to use it as a milestone for progress toward the goal and I nailed it on January 4th!  10,000 views!!  I was so stoked that I woke my wife up way too late one night to tell her.  My account was under review for 2 weeks and I was finally officially monetized for two days – two WHOLE days – before BAM!!  I was demonetized with a huge group of small and smaller content providers.  Son of a…

While this was a while in coming, it looks like the process/decision was sped up when a guy with 15+ million subscribers named Logan Paul posted a video of a suicide victim. 1st, what a fucking privileged asshat.  WTF is wrong with people?!  He should be forever ashamed, and spend a great deal of his YouTube revenue on suicide prevention and advocacy.  What should’ve happened following the public and advertiser outrage was YouTube suspending or deleting his channel, but that dude generates SERIOUS ad revenue, so… What happened instead was that YouTube took him off the top-tier ad group and YouTube punished the SHIT out of the small folks by demonetizing channels with less than 4000 hours of watch-time AND less than1000 subscribers to ‘protect their core values’? Makes zero sense and this guy will continue to post and earn $$$ even at the lower tier.

OK, fine, fuck’em.  I was not doing this for some mythical pot of gold.  This setback is just going to make me dig deeper.  I am 10% to the new threshold and I will keep slogging on. Keep making and doing. Post better and better content.  This will make me leaner, stronger, bigger, better, more… A better speaker, better filmmaker, I will get lighting and sound for my videos dialed, have awesome content, and be a better person from it all. Success doesn’t teach half as much as adversity.

To all effected by the YouTube demonetization BS: Don’t quit! Keep slogging on. Keep making and doing. You too will be all the better for it. Send me your channel and I will follow you and help with the watch hour threshold. As I said, I had just hit the monetization before all of this and we will get there again.  It will take some hard work but, we can all help each other out.”

– Dismount Soapbox –

 

No More Facebooking at the breakfast table

/ Matt Talley / 1 Comment

I quit Facebook.

My wife drug me into it after years of refusal and I turned very quickly into one of those constant status checkers that everyone hates, but just couldn’t stop…

It is the data mining that finally got me. I had to get pissed off before I could put it down. Products were suggested because I went to a website 9 months ago, books were suggested “out of the blue” (Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America is on EVERYONE’S top pick list… Sure…) from my Amazon wish list, a friend suggestion was made for the cop that sends out monthly neighborhood safety bulletins for our neighborhood in Seattle. The friend thing was the final straw…

A couple of years ago my shop was broken into and a ton of irreplaceable (father’s and Grandfather’s) tools were taken. The guy who did it was a contractor we used. Facebook has gone through my e-mails and can see some e-mail traffic with the douchebag and BOOM! Facebook thinks we should be friends and keeps reminding me. Nope. It makes me mad every time I look at my phone now.

I have a large enough social media presence even without Facebook and if you REALLY want to see what I had for dinner, cute pictures of my dogs, travel shots, or some forwarded rant you can find me on Instagram, Tumblr, or here on my own site – which celebrates its 12th year in September.

~Matt

Short political rant about Seattle’s mayor.

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Excuse me for a second while I mount my soapbox…

My mayor kind of sucks. I voted for him. I was hopeful. That hope has now dwindled into remorse. While I am happy with the Transportation Master Plan (light rail & bike spending in particular), I am disgruntled over an entire neighborhood’s request for a safer street/speed enforcement/re-striping being ignored and requests for meetings never answered by even a junior staffer – 35th Ave SW has ceased to be a residential street and has become a defacto highway. The alley vacation brew-ha-ha with Whole Foods pisses me off as there has been an empty hole in the ground in West Seattle while contractors and landowners have been in and out of bankruptcy court for about four years. Now that the construction on the building that will house Whole Foods has started again, the mayor pulls this shit out of his hat. After all this time, seriously?! I want Whole Foods in my neighborhood. My property value wants Whole Foods in my neighborhood. Whole Foods is an “Anchor Store” and with its completion and this year’s opening of Trader Joe’s next door, that corner of West Seattle will blossom and the vacant car lots will be replaced by retail and apartments and coffee shops and something other than fenced off parking lots with grass sprouting from the cracks. In the asphalt.

The gvn buy-back this year turned into a fiasco with an open air market place under the I-5 when the program’s money ran out. The mayor’s push for gvn free zones in city businesses is mis-guided, leaving patrons and business owners at the mercy of someone who is intent on doing them harm – all the while public safety/police reform are arguably McGinn’s weakest issues. There has been two years of May-Day crazy with ineffective leadership, report after report of continued police misconduct, an un-needed delay in choosing a new police chief… A push to keep bars open later so that even more alcohol could be consumed – we need more drunk people out even later to keep Seattle safe… The proposal to fire 200+ much need city employees was just weird.

I don’t think he is the anti-Christ or the fourth horseman or Gozer, but I wouldn’t invite him to a BBQ at the house. I don’t see a shining replacement for him on the horizon that I can get behind and cheer for and pin my hopes to. For the record: the current mayor of Seattle kind of sucks and I am a little disgruntled about it.

-dismount soapbox-