YouTube's crackdown on suggestive content

"It's a bad week for Internet porn,"a Wired blogger reports. Indeed. Given the news from Ning and now with YouTube "cracking down on sexually suggestive content," as VentureBeat reports. Here's some of what YouTube's crackdown looks like: "Videos that are 'sexually suggestive' (but not prohibited) will now be age-restricted to viewers 18 or older [if younger ones are truthful about their ages when they register]. In addition, these types of videos will be algorithmically demoted on pages like 'Most Viewed' and 'Top Favorites'." Also, "thumbnails" (little still images that represent videos in YouTube) will be automatically generated by the site rather than chosen by the videos' creators. You see, people would put sexy "thumbnails" at the midpoint of their videos even if they had nothing to do with sex just to game the system and get them to rise to the top, and more likely to be seen. The result was index pages of thumbnails suggesting a lot more sex-related stuff than was actually there, making the site look more disturbing to parents than it needed to be and, for advertisers, apparently not a great environment for their ads. I touch on this in "Watch this video, parents!" Here's the rest of it from YouTube itself.