First it was the Eucharist videos being pulled and now they’ve removed Pat Condell‘s latest video about Sharia law in the UK. Well this is getting ridiculous and I don’t like it one bit.

If there’s one thing that online services like this provide is a voice for all the people who’s opinions would never be presented in the traditional media. When those online services take our voices away because they just feel like it, I say that it’s time to move on. They already have a shaky relationship with Atheists but this should be the last straw for many of us.

Like so many things in life, they need us, we do not need them.

Without people using Youtube, it wouldn’t be the online power it is today. I can already foresee that many people will say that Youtube is what everyone is using and thus you don’t have a choice if you want audience. Well, like partisan politics, this is only in your head and it hurts you when you do not realise it. You do have a choice, you just have to use it.

At the moment, many users are protesting the latest ban by reposting the removed video. This is all well and good but, and I hope to be proved wrong, Google is too big, you made them too big. They don’t give a toss. Especially for a few dozen vocal atheists.

Do you want to protest? Take your ball and go home. Make a public statement and invite your subscribers to join you. If there’s anything Youtube is taking note, that is market share. If they were to lose 50k users overnight, they might stand up and take notice.

But where should one go? Well, there are of course dozens of youtube clones out there (many of them considerably better than) but that’s also a problem by itself, for who’s to say that tomorrow that service is not going to start banning your videos as well?

This is why I’m proposing you use something a bit different. Namely Vuze

What is Vuze

Once upon a time, there was a BiTtorrent client called Azureus. It was the best of the bunch. Eventually they decided that P2P can also serve as a great way to serve content without having the immense costs associated with hosting everything on your own server.

They became Vuze

Now you have a service where the content is not held by them but rather by everyone who is using it. They only handle the portal/library and that’s about it. When you publish something to Vuze, you get to keep it as does anyone else who has seen it.

Yes, Vuze does retain the right to remove content from the portal as well but looking from where they started, I believe they will not be as trigger happy as Youtube, plus if things get out of hand.

Other than that, there are a few other very solid benefits to using Vuze.

• You are not limited to posting Videos. You can post any kind of file you wish.
• You can upload at any quality you wish, at any size you wish, at any length you wish. No need to split in 10 minute segments.
• Did I mention that Vuze is a full fledged BitTorrent application? That means that you don’t have to use Vuze only but can use, say, The Pirate Bay as well 😉
• Friends and stuff but with quite a lot of extras. One of these extras is that you can share interesting torrents with your friends over a secure connection. I.e. torrents that you found in the aforementioned Pirate bay, or even your own homemade torrents for files you have on your disk.
• It’s free software. This means that it’s more ethical and it gets very fast improvements. Plus whatever happens, it will never go away.

So there you have one proposal. I’m certain others will have other services that are good as well but I tend to always side with the ones who have Free Software roots. Better for everyone that way.

Youtube has dropped the ball on Atheist heads one too many times now and unless people take a definite action, they’ll just keep doing it, similar to politicians who get elected no matter what.

And that’s my two cents on this.

UPDATE: It seems youtube has reinstated the Video. Apparently it was organised muslim activists who flagged the video for removal. If that is indeed the case, then Youtube needs to, at the least, give a warning to the ones that flagged it and, my personal suggestion would be to dissalow flagging from those people in the future. They’ve already proved that they abuse the system for their own agendas.