We all love YouTube. It’s a great time waster, but also a great place to look for that classic scene from TV shows of yesteryear, clips of cats playing the piano or angry teenagers yelling about Britney Spears. The problem is, YouTube needs some ground rules.
1. Don’t give away the joke.
If you’re uploading a clip and the title is “Man drops tray of food” I know what I’m in for. It’s especially annoying if the clip is 3 minutes long and the food dropping in question doesn’t happen until the last 10 seconds (see rules #5). By giving away the punch line in the title, why would I bother to watch? The Sixth Sense wasn’t called “The Sixth Sense: He Was Dead All Along”. You get the point.
2. You’re not Steven Spielberg
When uploading a 45 second clip of you juggling, I don’t need a 15 second intro sequence. You know the sort; “Bob Smith presents… A Bob Smith Production… In association with Jim Smith International …”. When you actually make a short film, or if your video is longer than 10 minutes than go for it, but I don’t want to waste 30% of the total video length on your ego!
3. 1983 called..
If you are going to upload clips from television (which is illegal and makes you a bad person etc etc), at least use the technology that almost all of us have in our DVR’s/Computers and capture it digitally. The days of recording your favorite show on audio cassette so you can relive it later are history. There is no greater YouTube crime than clips filmed with a camcorder from the screen of a TV. There are however degrees to this crime. The above is probably the homicide of YouTube crimes. The genocide of YouTube crimes is filming your TV with a camcorder while you move it around as if you’re simultaneously experiencing a 7.0 earthquake and the audio is replaced with a background soundtrack of a screaming baby/group of people talking loudly/music from another source. If you haven’t taken any effort to “produce” this clip, why should I bother to watch it?
4. Shut Up
Simply put. YouTube commenting should be removed. I am yet to see a video on YouTube, where the comments thread hasn’t descended into a slinging match with at least someone criticizing the US’s foreign policy, why the Yankee’s suck or why everyone else on the thread is an idiot and should burn in hell. All of this usually on a clip of a kitten playing with ball of string… I’m serious. Comments on YouTube, no matter how they start, inevitably end up getting out of control. I know this is not a unique problem to YouTube and representative of internet behavior as a whole, but come on. Enough is enough.
5. Keep it Short
The shorter the clip the better. My attention span isn’t very long. I’m coming to YouTube for brainless time wasting. If your clip is of someone slipping on a banana peel, the clip doesn’t need to be 2 minutes long. Sure, there should be some setup so I can anticipate what’s going to happen (providing you haven’t already told me in the title, see rule #1), but if I have to sit through two minutes of someone walking around not slipping on a banana peel, just so I can see four seconds of them actually slipping.. I am going to feel cheated.