After reading several times about Flixya on the Revver forums, I finally decided to sign up and give it a whirl. My account there was “suspended” yesterday, and here’s the tale behind that rather amusing and ironic move…Shortly after signing up, I quickly realized that the site was like a bad mix of MySpace and YouTube. But before I get to the details, I must point out that I did get a few views of a view Revverized videos in the short time that my account was active. But, as I’ll explain more below, it’s impossible to tell if I ever earned any money by sharing videos (or photos or writings) there. Anyway, there was some tiny value in Flixya in the form of a few more viewers. That’s all the good I can say about it.Now for the bad (or at least ridiculous) stuff…
My first warning that there was something amiss at Flixya was that the site is promoted as a way to make money (front page says “Create your account and instantly start making money” — although what Flixya means by “instantly” is certainly not what most people think of regarding that word). Yet the TOS starts off by telling users that the site’s services are for personal, non-commercial use only. Now, color me and the dictionary confused, but the supposed purpose of Flixya (to share and earn money) fits the definition of commercial quite well. Abiding by the TOS would mean not creating an account at all (because you’ll “instantly” earn money if you do, which is a commercial use of their services).
I should’ve heeded that unintentional warning and skipped signing up. But curiosity drove me forward, fool that I would prove myself to be.
The next bad sign was the MySpace-ish “friend” spam — people, and by that I mean complete strangers, almost immediately started asking me to add them as my friend, claiming to have already added me as a friend (which sometimes was true). There was also heavy comment spam on profiles and content pages — the exact same comment from the same person posted countless times, devaluing the comment feature.
As if this wasn’t enough, the next bad sign was the YouTube-ish attitude toward copyright violation, i.e., “our terms prohibit it, but we won’t actually do anything about it unless specific instances are brought to our attention.” Obviously this leads to rampant copyright violations, which I could see right away. However, I couldn’t alert Flixya to the problem, because they apparently only want to hear from the copyright owner. Well, I can’t make myself the copyright police for every content owner on the planet, so I had no feasible choice but to try to ignore the criminal behavior so evident on the site.
To further the bad experience, the site itself is only weakly functional. As one quick example, you’d better really like every “friend” you add because I could find no way to un-add them. A more relevant example is the paucity of support for tracking earnings. They allow you to tie your account to your Google AdSense account, and they insert the relevant code on your content pages so that clicks on ads there will be credited toward your AdSense account. However, they don’t support channel tracking. As I was told by the person whom I had most noticed promoting Flixya, the only way to tell what you earn there is to ensure that any non-channel revenue is Flixya revenue. That is, every other place you use AdSense had better have a channel associated with it, so that the remainder tells you what you earned on Flixya. If you have any other non-channel ad units out on the Web, you’ll never know what was earned on Flixya versus via those other ad units.
So what should I do amidst all these warning signs pointing to the general worthlessness of the site? I should’ve deleted my account (if the site even supports that function, I’m somewhat skeptical on that point). Instead, I figured I would make the best of it. I would post content (videos, photos, blog entries) to which I was sure I had rights to share, rather than violating copyrights. I would only post real comments on profiles and content pages, rather than spamming like crazy. And I would only add friends who seemed to be “real” users (like myself) rather than intrasite spammers.
Ah, but that last point was the beginning of the end. I added somebody who said they added me as a friend, and I thought they might be a “real” user. I then realized they lied and had not added me at all. So, not wanting to be confrontational, I decided to delete them as my friend. Oops! The site doesn’t support that feature.
Feeling rather annoyed at the whole scenario, I posted a short and negative critique of Flixya to my Flixya blog. I’m sure some would say I was asking to have my account suspended by criticizing the host, but mature service providers don’t dump people just because they say something negative about the service. That description clearly doesn’t apply to Flixya, because my account didn’t last much longer. The next time I tried to log in, I was told my account was suspended and that I should contact them at their ‘abuse’ email address. I contacted them and they confirmed (indirectly) that it was my negative comments in my blog — not any violation of their TOS — that inspired them to suspend my account.
So what did I say in that blog? Just what I’ve said here — that too many Flixya users abuse the site by posting copyright violating content and spamming other users, and that the site itself has significant shortcomings. Rather than deal with my comments in a mature and professional manner, they deleted them and suspended my account. So, they suspended somebody who was doing the right thing (sharing lawfully and not spamming) in favor of those who abuse the site.
So here’s an analogy to consider. Someone could come here and post negative comments about My Vids Rock! — or even about me, or Johnny Pixel Productions. What should I do about such a message? Well, if I was Flixya, I could delete the message and disable the user’s account. But that is childish at best! Instead, I would either answer the comments based on their merits. If they were accurate (and let’s face it, nothing’s perfect in this world), then I would try to explain why the problems existed and what (if anything) was being done to resolve them. If the comments were not accurate, I would probably just say that and let it go. I certainly wouldn’t delete the message or delete the person’s account.
Anyway, I’m not angry at the loss of my Flixya account, and am actually rather amused by it. I’ve been thinking of humorous ways to turn my “education about Flixya” into a short little (Revverized) video to share with others. Not sure I’ll have the time for that, but it could be fun if I do.
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Stuart Whitmore
Johnny Pixel Productions, Inc.
http://www.johnny-pixel.com/
There are a few ways that we moderate. Generally, we do send warning emails, however, that’s not always the case. We look at each account individually and it’s on a case-by-case basis. However, due to the volume of members and
