A few years ago, I started posting videos about Boy Scouting to YouTube to share them with other Scouts and Scouters. I soon began seeing more people posting Scouting related videos and thought we should have a channel group to post our videos. I began a YouTube group called “Boy Scout Stuff”. While most of the videos of the group were ones that I posted, there were others who began using to group. The group grew to 135 members and 176 videos.
A couple months ago I began having problems approving new videos posted to the group, and new members who wished to join. I thought it might be a problem with my computer at first, or that YouTube was having a few problems. I tried again tonight to approve 8 new members to the group but I was not able to get past the spinning ball. So I Googled the problem to see if anyone else was having a problem. I quickly discovered that many more group administrators were having the same things happen in their groups.
Google/YouTube has decided to drop support of YouTube groups. According to YT-Josh, who claims to be a Google employee:
Hey folks – bad news here I’m afraid. We’re no longer supporting groups and will likely remove them from the site in the next couple months.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we have some cool ideas about how to re-create groups in the context of collaborative channels. Probably going to take awhile, but stay tuned.
And again, sorry we can’t continue to support the old groups.
Well, thank you very little Google/YouTube! Not only did you quit supporting our groups, but you want to eliminate them? Once again, thank you very little.
It will be interesting to see what these new collaborative channels will be. Until then, I guess we have no choice but to sit here twiddling our thumbs with a group(s) we cannot change.
It sure makes me glad I have my podcasts.
