Iva’s WTF site – Squirrelism.net

Following comments to Mira’s most recent post, I came across Simon Owens’ huge rant, I thought I’d just finish Simon’s list (or at least extend it, in case someone else would like to finish it.

So, here are my additions to Simon’s 10-piece-list.

11.The front page of MySpace appears as an “Unknown error” 2-3 times a day.

12. They list “pagan”, “wiccan” and other similar stuff as religions, while if you happen to be an Orthodox Christian, which is one of the largest divisions of Christianity, you have to select “Christian-Other”. Come on.

13. They replied me to say that they’re sorry, but they can’t change “Yugoslavia” to “Serbia and Montenegro”. Then, when Serbia and Montenegro split, they didn’t respond to one single petition about us having rights to pick the countries we actually live in. My current location reads Beograd, Serbia, definitely not, Micronesia, Federate States Of. I didn’t want to put Yugoslavia and either way, that country was just a pale reminder of the huge happy one I was born in.

14. No RSS on blogs. No way to export or import shit in the civilised, real Web 2.0. way. So, when I post a blog here, I usually have to write a bulletin on MySpace, while my Facebook and LiveJournal have RSS and my friends on those sites know that I’d updated squirrelism.

15. No way to go to blog’s homepage when reading a blog entry. And that is downright stupid.

16. No limit in adding STUPID SHIT to one’s profile. Yes, seriously, I arrived to your profile to watch twenty-four YouTube videos.

17. The lame and shitty top friends concept. Whose idea was it to rank friends, anyway? I’m keeping my favourite musician as my number one, a work profile as number two and I added a couple of charities and nonsense links there as well, as I don’t want to rank my friends. A friend who’s totally obsessed with MySpace told me that he’d add me back to his top friends now that we’re talking again. I mean, WHAT? Do you really think I care if I’m your top friend or not? It sure is slightly flattering to me, but how are your other friends feeling?

18. Did I mention bulletins? At the very beginning, I did not understand what were those for, but now it seems that some people are using them for various exhibitionist purposes. Some of the suggestive responses I’ve seen in people’s surveys scare me. But surveys will need their own topic, as some of the repeating questions are just…marvellous.

19. The ego-factor. One of my closest friends has become a less close friend when MySpace became an important thing in her life. She was actually resisting to make an account there and then she realised what exciting work opportunities it might bring to her (she works in, let’s say, public relations). Now she’s responding with Haven’t you seen my calendar on MySpace? I was at [insert place here] for [insert the reason here]! when I ask I have not seen you in a while. Where have you been? Are you OK? Love you. Whenever I am ranting about her at home, I tell my parents that MySpace took her away from me.

20. Horrible spelling is spreading as the freakin’ flu. I don’t remember seeing misspellings such as actaully, mascarea, exems and such before. Now I almost tend to believe that people see misspelled words and think it’s the right way to write or, even worse, the cooler way?

That’s all I could think of right now. I will need one more entry to cover the phenomenon MySpace apparently is here in Serbia, but I don’t know if it’ll be interesting to people who don’t live here.

Also, I might write an entry to cover the (minor) good sides of MySpace.

My YouTube account was suspended today, due to an incredibly bizzare reason. This company owns the rights to lyrics of some bands, including The Rolling Stones, and I had a bunch of videos I have taken at their show here in Beograd up there, people were commenting on them and various fansites wrote me to thank me. It’s a bit insane that YT would terminate my whole account because of that, without even letting me delete the problematic clips by myself and keep the rest of my stuff. Also, it’s not like I had the clips there to profit from them, I had put them up because, well, I wanted people to see how it was at the show, I was extremely lucky to be on a great place and I took some really, really great photos and videos. Also, nobody said cameras were not allowed. The band saw me film, the security saw me film and they didn’t mind at all. Ron Wood smiled to my mom and me when he saw me take a photo of the band on their way to the “stage-B”. It’s not them, it’s the extremely crazy company (which, unfortunately, has an outstandingly beautiful website…how ironic).

I read further on ABKCO and it turned out they completely destroyed The Verve because the violin sample they used in Bittersweet Symphony legally was “too long” and that they even sue teachers who use songs’ lyrics on their lectures. I also read that George Harrison once changed one of his songs’ lines to Beware of ABKCO. So…apparently, if I had a video of people singing a Herman’s Hermits song at some kid’s birthday party, that would be a copyright infringement? How come nobody sued the lyrics sites then? Or owners of fanlistings? This seriously makes no sense.

Then again, if ABKCO are like that and killing people’s love for music and spreading their video material free of charge, what the heck is YouTube doing? They could’ve warned me and deleted the problematic videos, but they sure didn’t have to cancel my account and even ban my default email address. I am not used to being considered some kind of a public enemy, seriously.

It’s not the first time they showed their unprofessionalism, however. Apart from the fact that they let people upload videos that get horribly compressed and screwed up, that’s not the evilest thing they do.

I was not able to send and receive private messages for about three months this year. A couple of friends had the same problem, we submitted a help request, no one ever responded to us.

Back in the days when I was trying to get YT delete something owned by a friend of mine and published on my site, with the site’s logo in it they refused my complainment and said that I had no ways to prove it was ours. In the comments to that video clip, some people were offending me in a horrible manner, I reported that to and guess what? Nothing happened. It’s completely OK to call someone a w**ker and a c**t just because they want their work to be respected. Yeah, right.

YT don’t respond when one reports them nazi sites with videos of beating up people who belong to a different race or a different nation and similar horrible stuff that should not be online. I saw a profile owned by someone from that-place-that-is-and-is-not-my-country with a bunch of videos of Serbs being beaten up and descriptions such as: “That’s what you get when you insult a member of the [insert nation name here].” In a similar situation, MySpace, which I always mock mostly because of poor coding and spelling mistakes, reacted within a couple of hours and even send an apology. They apparently DO have understanding for small people. Also, they don’t suspend accounts on their video site for things like this, they just delete the problematic clips and send warnings and explain why it was deleted.

So, thanks to this, all my friends have been deleted, all my comments are lost, my RHCP, Muse and Buena Vista Social Club are gone; my TV clips from this year’s Eurovision are gone, even my clips of my friend goofing and Gigi are gone.

Then I created a new account and tried to add all the people I could remember from my old friends list. I added eight of them and then, when I tried to add the ninth, I got this message: “You have recently posted several messages. Please wait for some time before posting another.”. I mean…come on? I just want my friends, subscriptions and favourites back! How about taking care of kids who post those OMG LOL dis iz stupid but i hav 2 post it. if u dont report it in 4 mins ur mom will die messages?

Having created that new account, I started reuploading the apparently-safe material to it. Three of my short clips of John Frusciante from Green Fest (which can be downloaded in the oldschool way at this address) “failed” to be uploaded for an unknown reason. Why did I waste my time, then? They have millions of bucks, how come they can’t sort out their bugs?

I think I just have found myself a new least favourite site on the internet. Oh yes, and if certain know-it-alls respond to this in their known sarcastic manner, I shall never speak to them again.

Further reading:
Reasons YouTube sucks, by Angry Aussie
Why YouTube sucks?