Presumably because The Weinstein Company, Moore's studio, wouldn't want to be seen as somehow legitimizing file-sharing. And it would like to keep your email address on file, the better to flog paid downloads on Amazon.com and iTunes, as well as the DVD, when those are available. But really, Moore doesn't want to make a dime on this thing. He just wants you kids to get off your butts and vote. Free Internet distribution serves his political agenda; paid downloads serve Weinstein's commercial goals. With two masters to serve, is it any surprise Moore's film is making an awkward debut?

Basic tools to help creators and other uploaders — like an upload status bar or a timer to let you know when an uploaded clip has been transcoded — are missing. For large clips, this can be maddening. Make a mistake uploading a clip? Good luck trying to replace the clip you've already uploaded with another. And if you accidentally upload the same clip twice, that's just time lost, since even with new descriptions set it'll be flagged as a "duplicate" and deleted. If your audio suddenly sounds terrible, its because YouTube forces it through a blunt compression filter. But hey, you can add funny captions to your videos!

When it comes to user experience for content creators, Vimeo and Blip.tv beat it soundly. But then why should YouTube care? If you want access to viewers who will inevitably slag you and your work in the comments, you'll have to put up with it to a degree. Better to post your content to YouTube via third-party tools like TubeMogul, which will also cross-post your video to multiple sites — making it the one-stop shop for content creators looking to publish that YouTube might have been.

Sure, smart kids can gloat about how they're doing better now than all those popular athletes in high school who got fat and stuck in dead-end jobs, but at least jocks know enough to wear cups.

Here's how Blip.tv's Hope twisted himself into this verbal impasse. In a spat with a viewer offended by Blip.tv's hosting of Feldman's videos, he embarked on a long anticensorship screed to explain why Feldman's 1938 Media would not be booted from the site. The viewer, identified only as "T.", then pointed to a line in Blip's terms of service which reads:

Content that is or may be deemed to be grossly offensive to the online community, including but not limited to, blatant expressions of bigotry, prejudice, racism, hatred and profanity.

Hope then suggests this alternative outcome to simply booting Feldman off the site:

... the profound impact of a deeply moving work of art. Loren's video should inspire works which outlive it by decades, which look forward to the future instead of the past, which give us a glimpse of the glorious potential of humankind. Works which send shivers down the spine and trigger paradigm shifts, which children remember the rest of their adult lives.