It Begins: Vidme Calls it Quits

WOW!

One social media site is calling it quits already. Vidme released an eblast yesterday announcing that they would suspend their website.

Here are the details:

We’re writing to let you know that after careful consideration, we’ve
arrived at the difficult decision to suspend the Vidme site and apps effective
December 15th.

You can read more about our rationale for this decision here:
https://medium.com/@warrenshaeffer/120b40becafa

What this means for you:

New sign-ups and uploads will be disabled effective today.

Existing videos will be playable and exportable from your video manager
until December 14th, at which point they will be permanently deleted from the
Vidme servers. If you want to backup any of your videos, be sure to sign in and
visit your video manager and click the export button (displayed below). After a
few minutes, you’ll receive an email with a link to download your exported
video.

All paid channel subscripitions [sic] will be suspended immediately, and
subscriber-only videos will be exclusively accessible to their video owners.

Any outstanding earnings will be paid out upon verification within 60
days.

All Vidme paid subscriptions will cease as of today, and subscribers
will no longer be billed.

Please see our full FAQ for more details, and email us at hello@vid.me
with any questions.

Thank you for giving Vidme a chance, and we’re very sorry that we won’t
be able to continue to support you on the next stage of your creative journey.
It has truly been a joy to watch people from all over the world connect,
collaborate, and make new friends in this community, and we’re happy to know
that many of those relationships will long outlast Vidme itself.

Wishing you the best of luck.

♥ Team Vidme

So, it's possible for social media sites to crash and burn. That might be what has to happen to Facebook, Twitter, and the other left-wing social media sites can be forced to close down. MySpace was a big deal once, then along came Facebook. I think it's time to turn Facebook into the next MySpace.

Here's key details from the Medium article cited above:

At the time, YouTube was the only major platform that provided revenue
sharing — a system which often neglected creators with small or niche
audiences.

Let's not forget that they routinely silence and suppress dissenting voices. They are upending the algorithms so that individual bloggers, reporters, and activists can no longer share pertinent information. The left-wing Titans of Silicon Valley will not tolerate liberty and opportunity, nor do they prize freedom of speech, religion, or conscience. Conformity has been the goal.

But it's too late to stop the ascendancy of free expression and truth-telling. It's not going to stop now.

All of this was accomplished with fewer than a dozen full-time
employees, and in spite of increasing competition for audience attention from
the likes of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, who began spending billions of dollars
per year on video content.

Meanwhile, deeper-pocketed platforms such as Vine (owned by Twitter)
and Vessel folded, and Verizon’s Go90 struggled to find comparable traction
despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

I had forgotten about Vine, how they went bust. Twitter stopped using them. It would be really interesting if President Trump were to decide that he would stop using Facebook and Twitter because those platforms are so anti-American in their distaste for freedom of speech and differences of opinion.

The basic jist of what the social media industry is facing comes down to this:

There is extensive competition, and it's very difficult to bring in advertisers at the outset. On top of that, video websites have to vet the videos on their sites, or they end up in the mess which rocked YouTube recently, i.e. child abuse and child pornography videos were getting ads and earning revenue! Terrible stuff, and a large number of advertisers have begun to flee YouTube altogether.

One report from Vidme suggests that YouTube is still operating at a loss, as is Twitter and other social media engines. Why would anyone be surprised, though, since they routinely discredit, silence, or limit videos and content which they do not like.

Twitter banned Baked Alaska forever, even though he had a large following and was bringing in large numbers of men and women to watch his content online. A new set of problems have emerged in the free speech and the social media revolution sweeping the country. The large firms which make money are silencing people. The smaller firms which want to provide a free rein and voice to those without a voice are getting shut down.

Do we need government regulation to hold Google accountable?

Vidme is not throwing in the towel yet, of course:

While we’re disappointed to close something that we put so much of our
hearts into, we’re excited and eager to apply what we’ve learned to our new
product, which we’ll be announcing next year.

Final Reflection

I am not sure where this revolution goes from here.

I don't think that individual citizens and consumers should continue to aid and abet a platform which routinely undermines the rights of the consumers using it. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter are the major players on the social media stage.

Yet again, major media journalists and activists have done quite well in spite of losing Twitter or Facebook or other media. What is to be done, indeed?

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