[HN Gopher] The cottage industry of YouTube obituary pirates
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The cottage industry of YouTube obituary pirates
Author : selimthegrim
Score : 28 points
Date : 2023-11-04 20:58 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| creer wrote:
| Fascinating. Arbitrage re-monetization of obituaries.
| slyall wrote:
| On the other hand the legit end of the business isn't that great.
| Newspapers charge for placement in print and then legacy.com or
| whoever will charge to have the information visible.
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| I encountered versions of this days ago. Someone I knew for
| decades died suddenly, unexpectedly, too young. Trying to learn
| what happened, I searched for his name and found YouTube videos
| and AI-generated "news" articles that spit out variations of the
| same public information. It was unsettling but also pointless,
| nothing but noise in a situation that was already so upsetting
| and confusing.
| ilamont wrote:
| There's a similar phenomenon on "Find-A-Grave"
| (https://www.findagrave.com) which was a quiet old-school
| genealogy site used by family historians and researchers until
| private equity took it over via Ancestry.com.
|
| The current PE owner, Blackstone, installed an ex-Facebook exec
| as CEO of Ancestry/Find A Grave who instituted a gamification
| system. Thanks to this engagement tweak, many deaths from
| accidents to natural causes are quickly "claimed" by random
| people. Quoting genetic genealogist Roberta Estes:
|
| _The problem is that finding your loved one's memorial, often
| with incorrect information, created by a stranger is unexpectedly
| jarring, at best. Especially to discover that your family member
| was only a trophy harvest whose memorial was created hours after
| they died. Then, having to ask (sometimes beg an unresponsive
| person) for the transfer of their memorial to you, only to have
| the creator's name forever associated with the memorial adds
| insult to injury._
|
| https://dna-explained.com/2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-a...
|
| What's particularly disturbing are the "memorials" created by
| strangers to victims of major accidents, mass shootings, and
| other tragedies:
|
| _Even with the photo and some information hidden, for now, the
| Uvalde victims' memorials are still listed. The one above is the
| same child's memorial as in Judy's article.
|
| Even after eventually transferring the memorial to a family
| member, the original creator is always still listed.
| Unfortunately, this practice of awarding points and forever
| listing the "creator" by Ancestry encourages and incentivizes
| "trophy hunting."_
|
| Family members and genealogists have been infuriated by the Find-
| A-Grave situation, but Ancestry's management team has basically
| shrugged and said "tough luck."
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(page generated 2023-11-04 23:00 UTC)