Tuesday, November 7, 2017

The Long-Awaited Update, and What Is Next For TTOR

Hello everyone!  So much has happened in this ministry since my last post in February, and it's time that we reflect on what has happened, as well as update you on where this ministry is headed going forward.

Over the past 11 months, the Truth: The Objective Reality ministry has gone from being a blog with a YouTube Channel as a supplement, to becoming primarily a video ministry that up until recently has been primarily using YouTube to create and share apologetics videos.  At the moment, the YouTube channel has 177 uploads; as a result of self-promoting each and every one of those uploads like crazy, the YouTube channel currently has 315 subscribers and 27,264 views.  To put things in perspective, back in December of 2016, we had only 36 subscribers, and a small fraction of the channel views we have now.  It's been a great season of growth.

During this period of time, I myself have done five different podcasts with multiple apologists, I've given a presentation on the historical Jesus at the January 2017 meeting for the Institute for Creation Science, and I've become so well-known among young earth creationists on Facebook that some of them think I should do formal debates against evolutionists.

Not all is well though; It has come to my attention in recent months that YouTube has started to censor small channels and larger channels alike.  Back in August, we found out that YouTube has a new policy that allows them to put videos containing "controversial religious content" into a special limbo so that almost nobody can see it even if the video doesn't actually violate any YouTube rules.  You can watch my video on the topic here:



On top of YouTube's new policies about censoring controversial religious content, I personally found out that YouTube has been going hard after the small channels of my friends in the Doom SnapMap community.  FNSGaming, who had a few hundred subscribers on their YouTube channel, woke up one day to find that their channel had been given three community guideline violation strikes and had their channel shut down overnight without any warning or explanation given.  Rockhardgamer 45, who has over 500 subscribers on his YouTube channel, had his channel slapped with two community guidelines violation strikes overnight without any warning or explanation provided, and his channel is on the verge of being shut down.  Z Mann Zilla, who has over 260 subscribers, has lots of his videos getting de-monetized and re-monetized all the time without any explanations provided, just like on my TTOR channel.  If you want to see what some of them have to say on YouTube censorship, here are some of their videos:





The point in discussing what YouTube is doing to my Doom SnapMap friends is that since the TTOR channel is a small channel like theirs, and since YouTube is already messing around with the monetization of my videos, the reality is that one day, I could wake up and find out that YouTube has deleted the TTOR channel without any warnings or explanations provided.  All those countless hours spent filming and producing 177 uploads will have been for naught because they all got taken away in an instant.  Clearly YouTube is not a safe platform to be on.

Since YouTube is not a safe platform to be on anymore, I needed to find a good alternative video site to upload TTOR content to.  I tried GodTube for a while, but I didn't like how outdated GodTube's video player was, and I didn't like the fact that I would have to spend hours trying to make my content low-def enough to run properly on GodTube's website, so I left GodTube.  Then I heard from my Doom SnapMap friends that they were going to migrate over to a new video site called Vidme.  I followed them over to Vidme.

When I decided to look at Vidme to see what videos and channels they had for apologetics and creationism, I was almost horrified to see that there is almost no apologetics or creationist presence on Vidme whatsoever.  None of the apologetics ministries that I follow on YouTube, with the exception of Acts17Apologetics, have channels and uploads on Vidme.  Instead, I found that when I looked up apologetics and creationism topics on Vidme, the only thing I found was the videos and channels of internet atheists and skeptics from YouTube making fun of and attacking apologetics and creationism.   When I saw that, God and I agreed that TTOR needed to have a presence on Vidme, and so I created a channel for TTOR on Vidme.

Since YouTube censorship will only get worse, and since Vidme is a growing alternative to YouTube, the plan for the Truth: The Objective Reality ministry is to eventually transition completely from YouTube to Vidme.  We will eventually stop posting videos to YouTube (if they don't shut us down first), and Vidme will become the primary site where TTOR videos are uploaded to and shared with others.  However, there's a catch.

As a new channel on Vidme, our channel has a weekly upload limit of 3 GB per week, and we can't upload a video that is longer than 30 minutes.  In order to do away with those limitations, we need to become a verified member on Vidme.  In order to be eligible to become a verified member, the TTOR channel needs to have at least 50 followers.  Please help us today by creating a profile/channel on Vidme, and then follow us on Vidme by clicking on the follow button.

We have the potential to start the apologetics and Christian presence on Vidme that exists on YouTube, but it's going to take each and every one of you to help make that happen.  As Vidme continues to grow, if we can show other Christian ministries and churches that there is an audience for them over on Vidme, they'll start flocking over to Vidme, and we can put out enough content to counter what the unbelievers and skeptics who are already on Vidme are putting out.

Our Vidme channel link:  https://vid.me/_TTOR_