The Linux Experiment is probably my favourite linux-focussed YouTube channel. Nick has been doing absolutely fantastic work and his channel being permanently deleted would be an absolute travesty and a clear mistake. He is producing high quality, thoughtful, inoffensive content. Here's to hoping the channel is rightly reinstated ASAP, along with an apology and explanation from Google.
What is Odysee? I'm intrigued because at first glance it seems to be better than YouTube in almost every way possible. Page loads are quick, if you turn off AutoPlay it actually stays off, the controls are actually usable on an iPad etc.
It's a peer-to-peer video client, with part of it's data being directly shared (similarly to torrents) and part via a blockchain. This makes it highly resistant to censorship and thus is where many people are moving their channels to.
It's worth noting that while based on LBRY (The supposedly censorship resistant blockchain protocol) Odysee is a bit more opinionated front end with restrictions on things such as pornography.
By the standards of "alternative" video sites there's a pretty diverse set of content including mirrors from some well known YouTube creators (KhanAcademy, EEVBlog, GreatScott, Veritasium, HarwareUnboxed, Not Just Bikes, EposVox) who don't produce heavily political content (whereas many other alt tech video sites are just 99% political content going a single direction)
Given goals towards freedom of speech, some content won't align with you politically (and some might), but there's enough decent content that you can potentially use it as an alternative platform successfully.
> Given goals towards freedom of speech, some content won't align with you politically (and some might), but there's enough decent content that you can potentially use it as an alternative platform successfully.
I find high curation is the only way I find a service like YouTube to be usable.
There's an endless sea of content on there. It's not important that I agree with it or not, it's important if it's quality, which the overwhelming majority of it isn't.
I'm looking at the landing page of odysee now.
* Why can't Wolverine shack up with doctor strange?
* 1 minute of Luigi in a bag!!!
* Top sleep hacks
* Guess how old this Korean actress is?
I can't block these channels or show disinterest even though I made an account.
My issue isn't the politicalness, it's quality and relevance.
>I'm looking at the landing page of odysee now. [...]
I think your examples are a valid criticism, it's just that many of the alternatives are far worse (depending on your standpoint)
FWIW I would suggest looking at the home page of YouTube in incognito mode, most of the videos don't meet my quality standards either.
* TikToks that will get you in trouble
* Medical Emergencies: When Acts Go Horribly WRONG!
* Family Guy roasting every country
>I can't block these channels or show disinterest even though I made an account.
Yeah I think appropriate filtering options are vital for less curated platforms to be more usable. That's not an impossible problem to solve, but I would have expected better options by now.
>My issue isn't the politicalness, it's quality and relevance.
I think it's mainly a chicken and egg problem, there's not as much quality content as I'd prefer so there's less relevant quality content.
My biggest hope is that a certain threshold can be met where more quality content will be added and people aren't scared by the preexisting lower quality content that they don't want to be associated with.
There's definitely a need for there to be some competition to YouTube (Google et al.), but it's a pretty large hill to overcome to get there.
Of course YouTube still has a very strong hand in regards to monetization.
The prominent Linux tech blogger, Bryan Lunduke left and denounced them this summer despite having been an early adopter and supporter. He had made a complaint on how they chose to give an exclusive spotlight to a partiuclarly trashy channel and then recieved a reply from their "Cheif Marketing Officer" which was itself shamelessly vulgar and trashy and boasted that such trash is "the Odysee Brand".
Lundukes explaination for leaving seems to be only archived in his subscription/free-to-view social network lunduke.locals.com.
For worthwhile content I hold more hope for rokfin - www.rokfin.com/discover
I have no general opinion about Odysee/LBRY, except that I expect it to fair as well as every other blockchain buzzword bingo social thing and every other YouTube compete, which is to say, I expect it to never gain traction in any sizable way (I would certainly never choose it as a way to build my video audience), but if the argument against Odysee is that it is too permissive of what content it allows (and the line seems to be stuff that is maybe trashy and not like, beheadings), I have to think most of the potential users/creators see that as a good thing.
Like, if the worst thing you can say about it is that a guy that refuses to say “damn” or “shit” or “fuck,” is morally offended by some of the legal content, I’m not sure that will matter to people who are looking for a platform that won’t kick people off the platform for arbitrary reasons.
> if the worst thing you can say about it is that a guy that refuses to say “damn” or “shit” or “fuck,” is morally offended by some of the legal content
But that's not what I described. Its not the content Lunduke had an issue with, it was the marketting decision to promote it with an exclusive spotlight, and then the following unprofessional communications revealing something really dodgy about the company. Conversations about it on reddit have been removed apparently. I found Lunduke has posted an account of it on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBZjUPavvs8
I mean, again, as someone who doesn’t care about Odysee one way or another (but certainly wouldn’t use it to build an audience), I’m not sure the people that do use it because of some sense that it is less restrictive than YouTube or whatever, are going to care.
I just watched his video and then I had to go back and look at the video Odysee promoted. Is it content I like? No. I don’t find a guy in a mask yelling funny or even entertaining. The whole thing feels very juvenile in a 2003 internet kind of way. Looking at the Odysee social media accounts, I don’t like or agree with a lot of their content or politics. For the record, I don’t like Lunduke's content either.
That said, I find his outrage curious and poorly argued. Lunduke can choose to host his videos wherever he wants and can have whatever opinion he wants to have about a platform. But throwing a temper tantrum because a service he shilled for happens to promote content he doesn’t like and then the people in charge of the company won’t kowtow to his demands still strikes me as both a) hypocritical and b) a position most people who are seeking a platform that is anti-censorship won't find compelling. If you believe Odysee is shady (and I personally think most businesses with no direct revenue path other and reliant on buzzword bingo like blockchain and decentralization are inherently sketchy) now because it promotes a guy who screams about ass fucking, but you didn’t think they were shady when they were promoting your anti-vax/anti-mask rhetoric or paying you to write spon-con, I’m going to roll my eyes and discount everything you say.
I mean that's an unfunny off brand pewdiepie, but like, who cares? It's not morally reprehensible or anything, not even really particularly controversial I'd say. It's vulgar in sort of a bland way
Veritasium is not political? He is, very. It’s just that you don’t see it. It’s not an accusation, just a reminder that the background noise is non-neutral, and he doesn’t contrast very much on your background ;)
Maybe the driverless car one can be seen as somewhat political (by advocating for use of self-driving cars), but it's not necessarily a polarizing issue split along US political party lines, at the moment.
Or do you mean the host of the channel is very political, whether or not any of that is indicated in any of the videos?
Maybe, inasmuch as it's espousing an idea that is generally more associated with one party than the other, but the focus is really that idea, and it's supporting evidence, not how it related to politics or the parties and how they view it.
I would hope people try to asses it on the merits of the arguments and examples, and not how they perceive it related to a specific political agenda they are for or against.
Eh perhaps, I revised the comment a few times here and there.
I guess I would say I'm aiming towards examples that are big enough to be notable and not just directly focused on political analysis or similar or type channels.
A lot of what throws somewhat sane people (I would include myself in that but of course I'm biased) off of using the alternate video sites is the second you load up the home page of something like BitChute or rumble and see nearly an entire page full heavily one-sided political content and many (justifiably) believe there's no content for them if they don't align there.
Odysee could use some more quality content for sure, but they at least operate in such a way that I'm not convinced they're only for one type of content and some of the creators I watch in Linux/technology space have somewhat of a presence there.
there is something called tilvids.com that hosts educational as well as edutainment content. a good fit for the linuxexperiment. either that or do like videos.lukesmith.xyz and build your own.
It is really not difficult or does not cost a fortune
Sure, racists are censored by big tech, but also hackers/security researchers (if they show exploits for example), qualified medical doctors/researchers who oppose the official position of the WHO, journalists that share disturbing news (Facebook have been long deleting records of atrocities in Myanmar for example), creators that show the method for recreating dangerous experiments, etc, etc. And that's not to mention the selective monetization and promotion as a backdoor form of censorship too.
I think this just points out a fundamental misconception that censorship only applies to the ideas you oppose to and nothing else. I believe it's fully correct for the word 'censorship' to be used in this context.
"Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
"The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice."
What this is really describing is what we now call the Overton Window[1], and how it's controlled to a degree. I think it's a mistake to think it can be controlled completely, but depending on the society and the makeup of the media control, more or less control can be exerted. China has much more control over it for their citizens than the United States or the media companies within it, most likely.
"Proposed preface to Animal Farm, first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972 with an introduction by Sir Bernard Crick. Ian Angus found the original manuscript in 1972."
The essay I linked to was written in 1945 - if you read it, it actually talks about the ongoing war etc, e.g.:
"... we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won"
It wasn't published until 1972, for exactly the reasons Orwell outlines in it. Indeed, publishing Animal Farm itself was hard enough - many American and British publishers refused to do so, on the ground that the book clearly satirizes the USSR, which was then a war ally.
Yes, exactly. The outrage and cognitive dissonance that people experience when they see the censorship happening these days can only happen because they actually believed the propaganda about free speech.
How adorable! You think "propaganda" is anything more than a post-hoc reactionary label often applied by those afraid of the outcome of widespread espousal of a controversial idea.
Yes, it exists. Yes, people are far more vulnerable to it than anyone thinks they are. Free Speech, however, is an ideal exactly in that we often in reality fail to attain it, but nevertheless should strive to.
Without the ability to articulate that which is ugly and repugnant to the common sensibility, one is divested of the capability of immunizing oneself from being led astray by someone already too far gone.
We should protect the ability to speak monstrous things that we are not intellectually blinded to their existence. For they will arise whether we talk about them in polite company or not.
Propaganda does not preclude very real variability over time. It's certainly quite true that, for a while now, we have been retreating from "peak free speech" in the Western world. This doesn't imply that said peak was perfect freedom - of course not! But the trend is towards less speech overall, and even more specifically, towards privatized censorship (so as to dodge legal constraints).
> If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
>…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Truth is not determined by a list of approved opinions, it can only be revealed by rigorously disproving everything that opposes it.
All these calls for censorship make me think we really are doomed to repeat history forever.
Everyone always seems happy to carve out their own exceptions to freedom of expression. Freedom, except for racism. Freedom, except for transgenderism. Freedom, except for porn. Freedom, except for violence. Freedom, except for political dissent or mis-gendering or the promotion or criticism of a religion.
As someone who falls near the middle on most issues I probably detest a larger percentage of speakers than anyone who's solidly on the Left or the Right, but I have no issue understanding that my freedom depends on their freedom. If the people I despise are not free to speak then neither am I.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
It stands to reason then that if all speech is truly free eventually some speech will be censored. America doesn't allow people to say "Fuck" on public TV broadcasts, therefore all speech isn't free. No one is harmed by a curse word. Worst case a child will learn the word a few years earlier than when they usually do, and yet we censor that anyway.
Therefore, you can't say that all speech is free speech on all channels.
What you say in person may at worst get you into an altercation or ostracized, but you have the right to say it. Once your voice is amplified out of earshot you are no longer truly free to speak as you will.
You can say what you want to say, yes, but the repercussions of your words amplify with every repetition. Not everyone is aware of that, and when you are on a platform where, by words, you can incite a group to violence safely from the other side of the country, you should have your speech monitored and censored if need be.
Go and actually read Popper and you'll find he was close to a free speak maximalist his views on when you shouldn't "tolerate" intolerance was an incredibly high bar that almost nothing ever hits.
My read of Popper was that we should be prepared to even use force against intolerant people who are not willing to engage in rational debate.
What Popper didn't anticipate is that the square of public opinion would become the internet, and a big question this creates is if the internet is a place where rationale debate and proportional representation of ideas is possible or not.
If the internet were to make the public square of opinion a place of irrational debate, I think Popper would be very much against it, and would want us to do something about it.
Here's a quote from him:
> as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols
So the condition he puts forward is: can we counter the intolerants on the internet by using rational arguments? If we can, than suppression (he claims) would be unwise, but if we can't, than suppression by force (he claims) might be warranted.
To me it seems he’s clearly saying that if they decide to use force then we should be prepared to respond in kind not that we should use force to suppress irrational argument. The end of the first sentence maps to the end of the second.
How I interpret it is not that we should use force to suppress irrational argument, but that if we are failing to counter intolerance with rationale argument in the public opinion, than we should be prepared to do even more to counter it, maybe even to use force. And then he lists examples of what he'd consider cases where more than just countering with rationale argument would be justified, and those are: denounce all arguments, not willing to discuss at a rationale level, not willing to listen, believing they are being deceived, using pistols and fists.
So, I should read 25 books to verify that your one sentence claim is valid?
Why not back that up with some relevant quotes to support your thesis, friend? That seems a decent thing to do compared to the litany of homework you callously threw at me.
>> Go and actually read Popper and you'll find he was close to a free speak maximalist his views on when you shouldn't "tolerate" intolerance was an incredibly high bar that almost nothing ever hits.
> So, I should read 25 books to verify that your one sentence claim is valid?
> Why not back that up with some relevant quotes to support your thesis, friend? That seems a decent thing to do compared to the litany of homework you callously threw at me.
Your snark isn't warranted. The Wiki article you yourself cited says where Popper introduced the concept and even speaks about what his limitations were.
I will let you read that again to find them, rather than providing a quote.
Honestly, given the comment being replied to started with "go and actually read" I think the snark is warranted if they want. Also, for what it's worth I think they were trying to modulate that snark a bit by using "friend".
If it's truly easy to realize what is being asked, a pointer in the right direction is useful. If it does require a lot of work, then providing some evidence to at least get someone started if not an actual reference would be called for.
In any case, I'm not sure a comment that boils down to "if you actually read X, you'd know that what you just said is wrong" is worth defending, regardless of whether you think it's factually correct or not. You could have just pointed out that there was evidence of this position and left it at that.
For what it's worth, I only bothered to reply because you're not the only person that took the comment that way. The strongest possible interpretation of the prior comment is "This isn't helpful to me. If you're going to state I'm wrong, please provide more information on how so I can address that usefully" which I think is a vary valid complaint to what it was responding to. Interpreting snark where it doesn't necessarily exist or providing additional snark in your own in response (not that you did this) isn't a useful way to move the discourse forward.
> The internet sucks for nuance, but "friend" in this context doesn't read as modulation to me, it reads as sarcasm (and thus intensifies the snark).
It does suck for nuance. The safest and most useful thing to do here (as a place that tries to keep things civil) is to assume it's not snark and treat it as sincere. If it was sincere, treating it as if it's not is causing more of a problem, and if it's not, treating it as if it is leads to useful responses.
> I don't think that's the case. There are a couple of other comments that read the GGP as unnecessarily snarky.
I think perhaps you misread me? I chose you as a representative comment to reply to because there were a few along similar lines. If it was just one, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
> The only thing I did that was unique was note that he didn't have to search through "25 books" to get the answer, because his own source gave it directly.
I'll just say that if that information was known to the original replier, it should have been included, and if it wasn't, perhaps the reply should have been reworded?
That you actually provided useful info is another reason I bothered to reply to yours. As one that actually provided value to the discussion, I hoped to steer any additional eyeballs responses might draw to a useful comment, rather than a useless one.
I don't want to clutter this discussion too much with meta forum etiquette stuff, which I'm already prone to do at times, so I'll try to refrain from any additional responses on this.
> I think perhaps you misread me? I chose you as a representative comment to reply to because there were a few along similar lines. If it was just one, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
When I use the word friend with a stranger, I mean it to say, "I have no ill intentions towards you". I'll look for a better way to express that in the future if the intent isn't coming through.
Maybe using the word "callous" made it seem that way, but that is an accurate depiction of what their response was, rough, without thoughtfulness, the reflexive expression of an above average mind unconcerned with how their message was received.
Just look up where he wrote about this paradox of tolerance? It was in a footnote. (To guard, I'd guess, against people deliberately misinterpreting his words in the main text and going "Ha, look at this doctrinaire free-speech absolutist." I've read the book that was in.)
Why does where it was written matter? Saying that it being written in the footnotes invalidates the argument is the logical fallacy of poisoning the well.
You would actually need to refute the argument directly for your assertion to have any weight to it.
- People make a big deal about renowned philosopher Karl Popper warning us of the danger and incoherence of tolerance towards free speech. I think this misuses his rep.
- The one-paragraph quote on the Wikipedia page linked above was Popper's full writing on this. You don't need to look further for it.
Others were already addressing the object-level arguments.
That's such a weird reply. You claimed, were told that it's not accurate, and then went on the offense with a slightly nicer version of "why should I read about the things I claim? How about you prove that it's not as I read on that one meme on imgur.com".
I didn't ask why I should read it. I asked for what to read. If they so much as selected the single book they're basing their claim on that would cut down their homework assignment by 96%.
I don't need chapter and verse, just a homing beacon would suffice.
Besides, we're roughly adults here. Someone saying "Nuh-uh" to an oft-quoted article has the gravitas of damp toast. Why shouldn't I question their response?
Because you haven't read the source you're basing your claim on, you've only read about it from other people who haven't read it and are parroting it because it fits their agenda.
What the hell kind of response is this? You try to puppet Popper's work, I tell you that's not at all what he said, you affirm you never read any of it and complain it's unreasonable to expect you to read it.........
Well, you're the first person I've encountered who has said that the well-known and oft-quoted bit of his work that I even provided a link to in wikipedia with quotes taken directly from is completely false in all regards.
You followed that up with a command to read more of his work without narrowing down out from which of his 25 books would provide any context to back your assertion up.
I just want a little more context than a single sentence from some person on the internet to re-evaluate my hypothesis. That shouldn't be too much to ask. Especially since you're asserting that you know more about the subject than the people who authored the Wikipedia page and every person who has written an article about it.
No, it doesn't. Went to the Supreme Court, and that is not free speech. "the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has become synonymous with speech that, because of its danger of provoking violence, is not protected by the First Amendment."
> Went to the Supreme Court, and that is not free speech.
No, it didn't go to the Supreme Court.
> "the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has become synonymous with speech that, because of its danger of provoking violence, is not protected by the First Amendment."
While the phrase may be used that way, its referencing nonbinding dicta (expressions in a ruling that are not germane to the decision rule for the case actually before the court) that does not reflect preexisting law from a case that has since been almost entirely overruled and is widely recognized as being an aberration that (in its actual binding holding) allowed extensive government regulation of core protected political speech.
It reflects neither the law before the decision, the binding case law created by the decision, nor the state of the law after the decision was rejected.
Okay, but how do you reconcile that with the fact that hate speech and propaganda has been a part of almost all atrocities ever done in the past?
Or put some other way, how do you reconcile that your freedom can be affected by someone's else's freedom? Like what if I use my freedom to turn others against you and have them hate you and berate you and bully you and ridicule you and refute you, and potentially have them vote for laws that take actions against you, or possibly have them commit hateful acts towards you, etc.
Not the OP, but basically you are complaining about humans. I am not convinced that by banning certain expressions you get any security against future oppression.
Stupid hateful people might get trapped by anti-hate-speech laws, but the smarter ones, precisely the ones you need to be careful about, are fairly good at avoiding them and may even use the threat of prosecution to raise sympathy from the part of population that dislikes the incumbent government.
Most European countries have vibrant extremist movements (left, right, Islamic) even though their freedom of speech is much more limited than the U.S. standard.
I see your point, and I think that needs thoughts for sure.
I think most people (including myself) don't know why some harbor hateful resentment and intolerant ideals. And it isn't clear how to deal with it. It's very possible that we need to resist the temptation to try and simply brush those people aside. But I think one thing that isn't clear is if one of the cause for this increase is related to the internet providing bigger megaphones to those smart ones who like to recruit members to their ranks.
And part of that for me is how recommendation algorithms on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube operate, it seems to be tuned towards sensationalized and hateful content. So it does give you the impression that those platforms are failing to educate people with values of tolerance, liberalism, freedom, and individual rights which the USA is founded on.
It's a great question though, you probably don't fight intolerance with intolerance, but at the same time, you might need to be ready to fight it if it comes to that. But how do you avoid having it reach this point?
I have no issue with people turning against, hating, berating, bullying, etc. me. These are simply matters of feeling and opinion. I do have a problem when other people feel entitled to escalate such conflicts by reacting to these unwelcome points of view with real, actual violence, including government censorship. Even, and perhaps especially, when these people are purporting to act in my defense.
Ok, but what are you referring too? Because I'm not sure I'm seeing any government censorship (except for maybe the voter suppression and the child protection laws as well as some of the anti-protest forces deployed by the government in recent protests like BLM). And I'm mostly seeing violence driven by hate speech, like the various shootings happening.
I would be very against government censorship or interventions against constitutional rights of free speech and right to assemble and protest, and right to vote.
Maybe I just don't have the data you have, but right now I'm not too sure I follow you.
I would posit there's little correlation between hate speech laws and hate crimes.
For example, the United States has no hate speech laws. In 2017 there were 2,024 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. Germany has very strong hate speech laws, both applying to private citizens and obligating online networks to censor them. In 2020 there were 2,032 anti-Semitic hate crimes in Germany. Despite restrictions on hate speech, Germany has four times the per-capita anti-Jewish hate crimes as the US, a country with no hate speech laws.
How about the UK? They have strong hate speech laws. You can get arrested there for teaching a dog the Nazi salute. In 2018 there were 1,201 Islamophobic attacks in the UK. Despite having a rabidly Islamophobic president at the time, the US only had 223. That's over twenty-six times the per-capita Islamophobic hate crime rate.
Always in tandem with propaganda I feel. So it would censor criticism of the regime, and any opposite viewpoint, while replacing all voices with the pro-regime voices instead.
I'm not sure this is the same as letting one freely voice their hate of another and propagate lies and falsehoods about them.
I guess you see it as let's just all use propaganda and defamation against each other, and hopefully that evens out where we all meet in the middle through constant bi-directional propaganda and hatred.
But I see it more as let's not allow the use of propaganda and hate anymore, because those things are at the detriment of other people's freedom, and you should only be free to do what doesn't take away freedoms from others as well, unless it has been agreed between both parties through a contract and a system of laws.
I don't really have a proof that one would have better outcomes over the other, but personally I find having a civil debate in good faith with rational arguments is more pleasant than to have a demagogue debate in bad faith using appeal to prejudice, emotions, desires, falsehoods and defamation. So I'd rather we as a society needed to engage respectfully, rationally and in good faith, and I wouldn't mind this to be enforced both culturally and by law.
I've heard the "slippery slope" and the "what if that just radicalizes demagogues even more" arguments, and the latter one I find more possibly valid. I feel the slope isn't that slippery personally, like the slope would only slip if the person in power was again a demagogue ruling in bad faith, and at that point it be too late anyways, since they'd already be in power.
Now the argument that it could radicalize demagogues further, by giving them more ammo to justify themselves, I think that's a more plausible prediction. I'm not too sure about this bit yet, so I could be convinced here, but I'd need to also be convinced that letting demagogues continue to have large public reach isn't itself a bigger threat.
In that case lets apply your principal evenly to all rights.
Freedom of movement: heading somewhere we don’t agree with, ok but you aren’t allowed to use public roads since we own those. Good luck getting to the voting station.
Freedom of assembly: we don’t support your protests cause, stay off public property, go hold your protest at your own house.
Freedom of conscience: fine think whatever you want but if you attempt to record it in any way we’ll block you.
A right without the means to act on it is nothing at all. You’re arguing for a society built like a prison. You should be ashamed.
YouTube, as well as other major Internet companies, have a near-monopoly over their sectors which leaves them lacking any competitive drive to be better, do better, or for people to go elsewhere.
Without realistic alternatives it is spontaneous (even if erroneous) to think about the implication of private infrastructure over public rights. But the real matter is an issue of scale.
I am convinced that sooner or later governments will wake up and that the tech giants will be broken up or severely limited: the European GDPR and the Chinese crackdown on the sector are only the first signs.
This is a slippery slope fallacy. Just because you can see a flaw with a system does not mean there is a flaw.
Sometimes the flaw is with you & or your line of thought.
In this case, equating "not being allowed to post far-right propaganda on every concourse of communication" is not the same as being harassed at your own home because people are allowed to protest.
Isn't the root problem here is the near monopoly held by god-tier corporations? Shouldn't FB/Goog have the right to moderate their content as they see fit? Shouldn't their network effect de facto monopolies be regulated so that there is room for other voices?
An illusion of truth can be created by repeatedly stating falsehoods by agents with an agenda to push. The question isn't about censorship, but rather how we can make our liberal democratic societies resistant to this type of manipulation, which inevitably results in terminal decline.
What I've come to realize is this asks far too much of the average person. Ideas do not win on their logical merits. Rationality is not the driving force of opinion for the majority of people. The alternative is probably worse, as some sort of totalitarian regime, but I just don't think billions of humans are capable of ensuring their own survival as a species
People have a right to speak, but they don't have a right to have their speech amplified by others. There is no right to broadcast. Mill would agree with this, assuming you could explain to him how broadcast media works, which didn't exist in his time.
Mill wasn’t talking about rights; he was talking about the propensity to suppress unpopular speech, why that’s dangerous, and accordingly, and the moral necessity (and implications) of open discourse.
(So we've already given up on "Truth is not determined by a list of approved opinions, it can only be revealed by rigorously disproving everything that opposes it" then. Fine. Truth is relative.)
No, what I'm really asking is, "What happens if innocent people start being hurt by the lie?"
What happens if you are seriously injured in an accident but cannot get medical help because the intensive care facilities are full of people who disagree with the truth? Thoughts and prayers?
> No, what I'm really asking is, "What happens if innocent people start being hurt by the lie?"
That would suggest we might benefit from a better mechanism for establishing the truth.
The best mechanism we’ve come up with so far is open and vibrant debate.
Do you have a better suggestion?
> What happens if you are seriously injured in an accident but cannot get medical help because the intensive care facilities are full of people who disagree with the truth?
The Rolling Stone story positing the above turned out to be entirely fabricated.
How would you propose we stem misinformation like that Rolling Stone article?
> Thoughts and prayers?
Open and vibrant debate.
> Does freedom come with any responsibility?
Sure it does, though assessing culpability is often a nightmarish impossibility, especially a priori.
Should we establish prior restraints on individual’s freedoms to enforce correct speech and beliefs?
"The best mechanism we’ve come up with so far is open and vibrant debate.
"Do you have a better suggestion?"
I do not. But open and vibrant debate only works when people are capable of determining when the debate has been settled, at least for the moment. And are willing to accept the settled decision.
Have you ever had a serious chat with a creationist? Of course, there is no positive evidence that can disprove the young earth theory, any more than you can disprove solipsism. The creationist argument ultimately fails because of the implications of its own flexibility. I've known people who claim that the faster they drive, the better they drive. Or that they are perfectly safe to drive stoned or drunk. fortunately, in those cases culpability is, as you point out, is easy.
Anti-intellectualism comes in many varieties. Someone can be so skeptical that they do not accept any argument because, say, Big Media and The Man are out to oppress them...somehow. Someone else can be so un-skeptical as to believe the first comforting story that comes along in spite of any facts suggesting that reality is harsher.
Open and vibrant debate is the only way to establish the truth, but truth is not established by popularity, nor by who yells the loudest.
"The Rolling Stone story positing the above turned out to be entirely fabricated.
"How would you propose we stem misinformation like that Rolling Stone article?"
I have no idea what Rolling Stone article you are talking about. Is it one of these:
Not really an answer to my question, but I'm sure it's very comforting to intensive care patients spending hours to days on gurneys in hospital hallways.
Freedom is easy if it doesn't come with responsibility, precisely because culpability is often a nightmare to identify. How many people are you willing to injure or kill in the name of freedom?
Should we just get used to the fact that there are no limits on lies and an idea just dreamed up by some rando on the internet is just as true as something from a so-called expert?
Marx was almost right: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
Postmodernism, the first time around, was the comedy.
It's sad that that was your instant thought. My experience so far with Odysee has been pretty good. It's no YouTube, but for the channels I follow, it's good enough. I hope it continues to to build momentum.
It definitely is sad, but the sad part is that it's a true comment on human nature. Every other application that advertises in this way has eventually ended up being primarily used for racism, glorifying violence, and spreading falsehood. What happens is that even if they attract good natured users early on, they are eventually discovered by people who have been run off of other platforms after publishing actually awful things, and then the good intentioned early users leave because they don't want to be associated with that newly dominant crowd on the platform. It's a constant pattern.
the only thing sad is that its the reality of the situation. Tor started off with some pretty pie in the sky ideals and now over half of its active use is for illegal activity. Tech censorship doesn't even register on the scales of stuff that is de-platformed from social networking platforms.
Given that CSA, human trafficking, etc. and political extremism were/are rife on Tor, I would say that just because you bought some weed from Tor, doesn't make it a paradise
This is not so far from the truth. In the past, censorship usually only happens to people doing something illegal, meaning copyright infringement, radical political content or other disturbing content (usually porn or violence-related). So most of those people have seek for alternative platforms where they are free.
But more and more the line is shifting, and we see censorship happening with far tamer content. Youtube specifically seems to crack down on security-related content for a while now. I've seen similar things happening over trivial content in the past. Things which nobody working in the business would consider as problematic, like how to setup VPN and firewalls. It's not really clear why this is happening. People at Youtube are claiming the content seems to be ok, but system says nope.
And people opposing powerful institutions, and people who are concerned they may be censored in the future, and people who love free speech and want to enrich any medium that promotes it, and people who have unpopular opinions, right or wrong... and some racists too. That's the way freedom works: some people use it to do good stuff, and some people don't. I believe it's worth it, even if some people might hurt others' feelings.
> We should probably stop using this phrase as a feature
> Instant thought was "ok so other than this channel it's all racism"
If you want to be in a place where only approved thoughts are allowed, there's plenty of places in the world and on the net that would accommodate you right now.
No need to turn every place into an arm of Mini-truth.
Fan fiction has a lot of problems with censorship as well.
Recently, Games Workshop went after all fan animations on Youtube based on the fictional sci-fi setting it owns; Warhammer 40,000.
I see you are getting a lot of pushback and I think its unwarranted. I agree with you, the phrase is becoming tainted. I would like a way to differentiate between places that are wary of the whims of power and places where opinions are so appalling they can't be a part of polite society. We currently talk about them the same, and there has been an uptick of the latter recently that makes being able to differentiate more relevant.
As a side note its sort of interesting to me how your un-popular, perhaps controversial yet not particularly offensive opinion is going to be censored from this discussion in which people are opposing your perhaps reasonable association with the phrase 'resistant to censorship'. "how dare they voice a dissenting opinion!" they might tell themselves, as they press the little button that will make your words fade away.
I gotta say thats something I really enjoy, being publicly wrong about something and getting educated, or some one else doing it for me and getting the chance to read some thoughtful stuff.
Normally I wouldn't consider downvotes to be worth mentioning, but I thought the irony here was special and worth observing :D
I'm the asker of the original question, and I actually agree with you on a lot of this. As soon as I read @fragileone and @iotku's excellent answers to my question my heart sank a little at the thought of a site even more racist than YouTube. Almost every site that pops up claiming an anti-censorship position is quickly filled with pretty abhorrent content. Downvoting someone on HN for pointing it out doesn't make it untrue.
It gets filled with all kinds of content, of which racism and other far-right talk is merely the most visible part because it's in the spotlight. But it's not just far right that's getting "deplatformed". Even politically, there are plenty of leftist groups that were wiped out from e.g. Facebook during the recent purges. All those people also have to look for other platforms.
I'm not saying there aren't other valid uses, just that racism is pretty much guaranteed on a no-censorship site. It _should_ be something that we can all agree on as being "bad", even when dressed in its Sunday best from the likes of Jordan Peterson.
We can agree on it being bad, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to censor it, and especially so when such censorship has an already-demonstrated tendency to quickly expand in scope.
Yeah, sounds like an unregulated place for all the people who were thrown out by those with at least some ethics left.
update: yeah, downvotes, whatever... "censorship" these days is often enough because people tell other people to use horse dewormer or drink bleach. It's not because they're having highly sophisticated discussions about global politics, but simply because they're actively harming people, spreading hate and whatnot. platforms should be able to decide whether they want to "poison" their living room by giving a platform to such content.
And the folks downvoting you would probably call themselves "free speech advocates".
Which in my experience means they speak from a position of high privilege to not see the massive negative effects of the hate speech they strive to protect. Or that their purpose on this site is to spread division and hate.
US guy detected. Go travel to Russia, China, Middle East and other funny countries, you would find a lot of interesting things which you can be jailed for, not just banned by gov request on social media platform.
If you talk about international platforms, you should kinda think about that.
And I think it's fair that people in Germany are not allowed to deny that the Holocaust has happened. Call it whatever you like but remembering this monstrosity is the least thing we can do and far-right idiots don't need to have a platform for telling otherwise.
> Here's to hoping the channel is rightly reinstated ASAP
I for one am not looking forward to this. Youtube is no longer an acceptable platform for distributing your videos. If a person who makes good videos is forced out of youtube, that can only be a good thing. Hopefully their videos will help make another service more popular.
Youtube terms of service are public and unacceptable. People who get burned by them had it coming.
If there was a clear alternative that’d be one thing, but there isn’t, and I suspect this creator is one of those high-quality-but-small-audience channels where they don’t have enough pull to bootstrap an alternative themselves. So it seems kind of naive to say “that can only be a good thing”.
Ultra-famous accounts with zillions of subscribers are likely on a first-name basis with the youtube admins who cater to them. The move out of the platform will of course start from below.
Markiplier, one of those ultra famous accounts who is on a first name basis with their rep, has posted a few stories about how content gets demonitized for no reason and even his rep has no clue why and is powerless.
And still there is nothing else that gets him close in reach and monetization. Even if only one out of ten videos is monetized that's most likely still better than anything else.
High-quality-but-small-audience might have an easier time than most, I suspect. To get niche content people have to be willing to trawl the internet.
Still wild guesses, but I'd be worried about mid-sized channels with a lot of ambivalent viewers, not really invested, not going to swap platforms. Although how all that factors in to various monetisation strategies is complex.
Anyway, the situation is really interesting. I don't think YouTube can pull off the censorship campaign that they are trying for. They're fighting some really fundamental economic forces - it is too cheap to get people a message if they want to hear it.
Does there need to be "a clear alternative?" A video host is a video host. I don't care where I watch videos, I only care about what I'm trying to watch. I never understood this insistence that a video has to be on a certain site. The more video hosting sites there are the better.
Media publishers, broadcasters, or netcasters (as with YouTube) serve a number of critical roles. Among these are both audience and advertiser aggregation.
Audient aggregation matters because once on site, recommendations and discovery systems increase the likelihood of some other site content being viewed or accessed.
Advertiser appeal matters if advertising provides a significant portion of site revenues (and it virtually always does, for large-scale properties). Advertisers themselves seek audiences, with particular interest in both size and composition. As with audiences, there are cognitive and organisational costs to maintaining multiple relationships, so that advertising platforms tend to grow and monopolise over time. Small niche platforms are of very limited interest.
Both factors intersect with other elements, including site infrastructure development and maintenance, such that large sites have vastly superior economies of scale. This includes a lot of activities and benefits with low public visibility including moderation, abuse, legal, and general business overhead effects.
The overall result is a pronounced tendency to create large and durable media monopolies. New technologies may disrupt earlier established entities for a time. But the old structures have an exceedingly high likelihood of re-emerging. More pointedly, technologies of greater efficiency only amplify the tendency to form, and the size of, such monopolies.
YouTube provides content curation in addition to mere video hosting. In the current state, I can open up my YouTube subscriptions page and see a list of all new videos from people I'm interested in. If every video creator hosts their work on a different platform, I no longer have a one stop shop for video consumption. I subscribe to lots of people on YouTube, but there are probably only two or three that I care enough about to go check a different site for new content.
The situation you just described does not match YouTube's value being in that it "provides content curation". The situation you described involves you doing the curation, and YouTube acting as a glorified RSS reader.
If you can subscribe to channels on YouTube and be satisfied with that content (and not from e.g. YouTube's recommendations for stuff you don't subscribe to), then you can do those same things whether the videos are hosted on YouTube or not, just like millions of people do with their podcast subscriptions that are never actually hosted "on" iTunes.
Is that something an average teen with an iPhone can do, or wants to do? And apart from the subscription feed, there's recommendations based on the videos you already watched. If creators were distributed across different platforms, this wouldn't work.
> Is that something an average teen with an iPhone can do, or wants to do?
Use an app that can listen to podcasts? Uh... yeah.
> apart from the subscription feed, there's recommendations based on the videos you already watched
So you're just going to ignore the context and pretend that you're saying something insightful? The comment you're responding to specifically pointed out that the original commenter doesn't cite YouTube's recommendation engine as the source of value for him/her.
Could do? Yes, it's as easy as adding a contact to your phone. Wants to do? I'm sure some do and some don't, but I'd argue that there's conditioning involved there by these services so that is irrelevant.
I can think of a simple engineering solution to the problem of recommendations, an open API standard to fetch them should a user want that functionality. So it could work, but the hosts don't want it to work.
But that aside, just because a service makes recommendations doesn't mean the recommendation engine is more useful than randomly finding things or getting sent things by friends. I'd argue that YouTube recommendations, at least in their current iteration, are less useful to users than their friend sending them a video they were subscribed to, following random twitter accounts that share content they enjoy, or even a chronological list of uploads sorted with content tags. You're placing a lot of value on something that frankly is a raging dumpster fire of hot garbage.
I think curation might be one of the drivers of the problems we have nowadays, I'd prefer a host that does no curation.
> If every video creator hosts their work on a different platform, I no longer have a one stop shop for video consumption.
Yes you can, use an RSS reader and subscribe via RSS. This problem was solved before tube sites were even widespread, and then the UX for subscriptions devolved, primarily because these sites want to lock you in and make you feel how you do. But you can still curate your own feed and have all your video content in one feed, I do it, you just have to use RSS.
Sure. On desktop I use Thunderbird, on mobile I use something called Feeder, it is a FOSS RSS/Atom feed reader with built in Webview so you can watch the video in app if you like.
YouTube and Bitchute both support RSS, also Peertube has RSS built in if you watch anything self hosted using that software, as far as all the other tube sites out there I'm not sure because I don't subscribe to anyone on those sites, but I would expect that they do more than likely as RSS is still a web standard.
All but Peertube I've found sort of hide syndication in some way to encourage their account based subscription because they'd rather you use that. It might take a minute when you want to subscribe on a new site you don't usually use to figure out their feed URL format.
It can be a little clunky to add subscriptions I guess, but how often are you doing that? What matters more is integrating all your subscriptions into one feed, you're watching every day multiple times a day, you're not subscribing every day.
> It can be a little clunky to add subscriptions I guess, but how often are you doing that?
And you're saying that as a techie. How do you think the average subscriber of Markiplier, Pewdiepie or Logan Paul would feel about that? Things like peertube will always be a super small niche because there are two dozen alternatives to YouTube and they all suck if you depend on YouTube for income. As long as those oopsies don't happen to the big YouTubers on a regular basis, the status quo will remain.
Plus, as much as people complain about YouTube recommendations, I found a couple small but interesting channels already. Imagine everything were distributed across ten different platforms.
> How do you think the average subscriber of Markiplier, Pewdiepie or Logan Paul would feel about that?
I don't care about them. People can do what they want. I'm not trying to revolutionize the world. I'm just trying to live life the way I want to and help people who are interested in doing things that I do.
It doesn't require you to be a techie to copy paste a URL. It's as easy as adding a contact on your phone.
I watched an interview with Jaron Lanier yesterday actually talk about YouTube recommendations, he talks about an experiment, click the top recommendation and let it play 10 times and see what you get. You have to keep in mind just because they've been helpful a few times doesn't mean they're more helpful than no curation at all. Confirmation bias exists. Remember YouTube before Google owned it? Most of the content was not as good as it is now but it was still much easier to find new interesting things. That algorithm is superior to anything that's been implemented since, and honestly every iteration makes it worse. The fundamental difference with it was that it recommended based on what other people watched, not based on some hand waving about getting to know you and your preferences.
If everything were distributed across ten platforms then viral spread of content could only occur organically. That would be amazing.
What do you mean by clear alternative? Feature parity? There's at least 10 nearly feature-compatible software out there. I can name five without looking it up: PeerTube, LBRY/Odysee, Cinnamon, Nebula (okay this one's a bit of a stretch because you can't outright sign up and post videos, you need some creator to invite you), DTube.
Thing is none of them will make you YouTube money, so smaller creators don't bother, while larger ones usually just cross-post stuff, leaving no incentive for their audience to bother with the alternative.
These networks, no matter how they work under the hood, are obviously the problem, as they are single points of failure.
Run your own stuff. Most channels will not have enough visitors/viewers to kill a shared webhosting package, so there's no big deal in doing this on your own.
So "the network" in context of sites like Facebook or YouTube is a fancy marketing term for "the website." Peertube servers actually federate, so there is actually a network there.
You don't have to federate. As host, you can host whatever you want (you are of course subject to laws in the country you're hosting in) and censor whatever you want on your server. You can basically do anything you want.
If you host adult content like pornography it is very likely the larger federation will not federate with your server, and for adult content that isn't pornographic in nature it is probably best to require content warnings.
How are people gonna view the description if the channel is suspended? The web is already a clusterfuck, perhaps its most powerful incumbents should be subject to certain restraints. I'm sure you can make this argument better without engaging in name calling and emotional attacks.
AIUI creators can post links or to other services? So you can link Patreon, or link Twitch or what-have-you, and people can then find your content elsewhere.
Presumably, it's better financially for big channels to keep users on YouTube.
I just scrolled through their main feed and every other video was some kind of alt-right misinformation rant (COVID is fake, Joe Biden is dead/dying/has dementia, Antifa is killing kids, etc.). Just based on that alone I want no part of it.
Most of the content on any such platform is going to be the kind that was banned from mainstream platforms for whatever reason. But it's not just alt-right agitprop that gets banned. And any individual targeted group is not large enough to maintain a viable platform of their own. So either we have a public platform place with the stink, or we have none at all.
I think the complaint isn't that the content exists there, but rather that it makes up the vast majority of what is found there. If the majority of Netflix content is trash that I wouldn't want to watch, why would I continue using Netflix? I think the big issue here is that there hasn't been a need for opposing content to be published on the platform, and until there is it will remain slanted one way. This in and of itself will further reduce adoption by the opposition, as seen above, because of how immediately off-putting it is.
You might continue to watch Netflix because the shows you do like are exclusively available there, and just ignore the rest of the library.
It's not that there hasn't been a need for other stuff to be published - it's that there hasn't been a proportional need. Which is exactly what I meant: any alternatives to established platforms are going to have the preponderance of content banished from those established platforms, in direct proportion. So if the purges on e.g. YouTube mostly target right-wing extremism, but also target some other content, then that's the distribution you're going to see on alternative platforms. But what other choice do you have, if you're interested in that other content?
You can nearly always find some other route to a given piece of content, or just lose interest in consuming it. Very little content is sooooo compelling that it overcomes all other considerations. Otherwise people who had problems with YT would just set up on a big porn site, which tend to have good infrastructure and long-term viability (at least for as long as people want to keep watching porn, which is probably forever).
The difference is that Netflix isn’t promoting and profiting off of hate speech and disinformation. Odysee apparently is. I’m sure there is content on the service that I would enjoy, but having to wade through the garbage to find the gold doesn’t appeal to me.
But you don't have to wade through anything. With the service being there, somebody can send you a direct link to the video, and it'll play. In this scenario, you don't interact with their catalog at all, but you still rely on the service for the video to be available in the first place.
This was exactly my point, thank you. Unfortunately it seems like expressing my desire not to see hate speech is an unpopular position here. I expect better from the HN crowd, but there it is.
I’m sure you’re correct, and I know how to use a search bar, but my issue is that their main feed is full of garbage and hate, something I don’t want to see every time I go to the service. I get the need for a censorship free service, I just lament the fact that they always end up as cesspools of hatred and idiocy.
It appears to have been banned when the author offered an illegal sweepstakes.
Contests and sweepstakes are carefully regulated in America, with slightly different regimes in all 50 states. You should not run one unless you have gotten legal help with it!
Let's presume you're right and this is why the channel was legitimately deleted.
Was there a warning? Was there some communication with the owner saying "Hey, what you're doing violates or Ts&Cs"? It seems like if there was, the owner would be tweeting that he disagrees with the deletion rather that completely not understanding why it happened.
Putting more humans in the loop would be more expensive, but it would help end these puzzling situations where creators don't know why they've been told to stop creating.
> Algorithms do whatever humans program them to do, which can be delete, warn, email, slack, or call phones.
I think it's worth noting that algorithms like these are deployed specifically to take employees out of the loop, and adding a communications step would almost certainly pull them back in.
> Communicating which rule the video broke could be done without an employee in the loop.
Potentially, though another consideration the algorithm implementers have is to make it difficult to "game" them. If it provides feedback, you make it easier for someone to figure out what will slip through and subvert the it.
This is why algorithm creators are as guilty as any executive that comes up is with stupidity like this. What happens to executives should happen to algorithm writers!
However, there is still less manual work being down if videos are flagged via an algorithm versus checked one-by-one by a person. Though, results may vary.
The error message claims that an account has not existed or has been deleted long ago, not "you violated our ToS and are permabanned no appeals kthxbye". Assuming this recovery attempt was started within whatever Google considers that short time, it implies something else is happening.
One possible guess would be the account getting hacked, somehow moved to a different address, then deleted. (I have no idea how primary e-mail addresses work for Google/Gmail accounts, except that what used to be a standalone YouTube account got merged into a Google account which once I created a gmail address for it suddenly had a different primary e-mail address, so there are ways for stuff like this to change and "brand accounts" complicate it further on YouTube).
That doesn't make much sense though, given that many of the tech YouTubers (LinusTechTips, JayzTwoCents, to name a few) have done hardware giveaways fairly regularly. "We're giving away RTX 3080s and 3090s to verifiable gamers" is the recent trend. LTT is in Vancouver, but JayzTwoCents is in Southern California somewhere, and therefore, the United States.
LTT weren't giving them away though. First come first served, and you only got the opportunity to buy them at MSRP, instead of scalper markups. They werent given away for free.
There was a giveaway of a Tuxedo laptop[1]. Whoever wanted to participate had to comment on the video announcing the giveaway, which apparently goes against YouTube's TOS (as far as I can tell comments count affects YouTube's algorithm).
If that's it, it's a ridiculous premise. I won some music equipment from Sweetwater by liking and commenting on a video (though not sure they would be able to verify the like).
I expect things like this to continue to grow as we rely more and more on algorithms in all walks of life without thinking through true recourse options.
If true, the channel owner was trying to game the system to make their channel look like it was more popular than it really was.
An analogy would be like a TV host telling the audience to watch the show on five televisions so that they would get a higher Nielsen ratings and then get more money from advertisers. No TV network or advertiser would be happy about that.
In other words, if this is what was really happening, this channel was essentially trying to scam YouTube into thinking they were more popular than they really are for their own monetary gain.
To me it seems like this channel deserved what they got, if the allegations are true.
I even doubt that the channel was automatically removed by an algorithm. Maybe it was flagged by one for human review. Just because a company doesn’t contact you doesn’t mean a human wasn’t involved in your particular case. Furthermore, just because Sweetwater got away with it one time doesn’t mean it’s not against the TOS.
I’m just speculating, and I don’t have skin in the game.
Sweetwater is not "getting away with it." They have verified legal clearance, and the owner of linux experience does not.
Your concerns about "scamming" aren't relevant. Many of YouTube's most popular channels do this sort of contest, and there is no hard ban on this type of thing.
I don't think you deserve the downvotes, this is click-fraud and I'm not at all surprised that it got axed. I'm sure it with enough media outrage and a private mea culpa from the creator it will be reinstated but on first blush I think this was the right call.
Perhaps they're fallacy fans who dislike your use of 'begs the question' (an archaic term that does _not_ mean 'raises the question', which you mean here).
Seems glitchy though, I can't sort by "most popular", it suddenly says "this channel has no videos". Hopefully that's just an old cached result that will clear up at some point.
The fault is on YouTube’s reliance on automated systems, making permanent decisions, without human intervention. However, in my humble opinion, people are naturally lazy. The humans who might be charged with reviewing automated decisions are no different. Especially if there is a cultural or language divide.
Preventing illegal sweepstakes, even if accidentally illegal ones, seems like a good rule for YT to enforce. That being said, banning accounts without a process to solve the issue until there’s enough public furor for a moderator to notice is a bad system. If someone repeatedly breaks the rules, fine permaban them. But having a fake appeal process is pretty annoying, and makes me not want to do business with Google in general.
YouTube has been changing in weird ways in the last year or so.
The amount of propaganda on the platform is ridiculous, though very frequently disguised as "news" or "educational". As someone who's been around quite a bit, I can also imagine that it doesn't look like propaganda to average Americans (I'd be glad to be wrong on this).
A great deal of content is just plain sophistry too. Inspecting comments, it seems that most viewers don't pick up on this.
At the same time, finding reviews or alike for products or services is near impossible -- the platform is filled with generic reviews which are indistinguishable form ads.
I can also imagine that it doesn't look like propaganda to average Americans
It looks like propaganda to us too.
We're not quite as dumb as the rest of the world thinks. That said, I suppose everyone's a bit dumber than they think they are, so take my statement with a grain of salt.
The way that they've changed search to only link to checkmarked channels is infuriating. When Kabul was falling I wanted to see older videos of the embassy, from when it was opened, to see the buildings and how extravagant they were. I couldn't find any, though, because no matter what I searched I got videos from news channels released within the past 24 hours about evacuating the embassy. The war on "misinformation" needs to stop.
>The amount of propaganda on the platform is ridiculous, though very frequently disguised as "news" or "educational".
I certainly don't see that on the youtube channels I frequent, but admit that the 'news' is typically op-ed disguised as news.
An alternative theory is that they (youtube) pushes 'news' since it pays well and is quite popular. 'News' tends to come from official channels over time with a kind of network effect. Those channels are all Pravda. The fact that it's propaganda is not necessarily a youtube choice but a major news organization choice.
Watch one "conservative news" video and it will do a complete 180. Ads for "rations", "preparing for the end of the world", "how to be self sustainable", tons of PragerU propaganda, and some of the most low quality l BS you'll ever see from political ads.
YouTube delivers content based on what you've watched.
Yeah I watched some 'forgotten weapons' and 'demolition ranch' videos, and it was wild how quickly my feed changed from science and history stuff to conservative talking points. I spent a rather long time marking videos as 'do not recommend this channel, I dislike this video' etc, before things returned to normal.
Another simple way to address this is to remove uninteresting videos from history, then recommendations go back to normal. We have to do it on our kids account periodically.
I just fully revoked Google from keeping any data on my viewing habits and for some time now my YouTube main page has been a rehash of popular videos from my subscribed channels (and the occasional cat video). I sure don't miss the craziness desperately trying to get me to watch as much as possible.
I watched something right wing, I can't remember what, and for years YouTube was bombarding me with crazy half-truths and memes. I tuned them out just like most of the other bullshit I get bombarded with all day, but I wonder how many people have been radicalized this way..
I watch a lot of lefty "news" and infotainment. I still get ads for the conservative propaganda, survival rations, prepping, etc. I think it's because I also watch a lot of firearms hobby content.
Kinda silly, but it does make me chuckle that people like Ben Shapiro, PragerU, and 4Patriots are subsidizing my lefty youtube subscriptions.
I mostly consume guitar technique & music theory videos, yet I still see ads suggesting I might want to buy & bury a plastic tote full of MREs out in the wilderness just in case. Maybe it's because I live in Nebraska? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Same here, 95% of my YT consumption is related to advanced music theory. The (constant) ads that drive me up a wall are the "learn to play guitar" services that feature children practicing their first guitar notes. Ive heard this from other musicians too - the algorithm thinks everyone is a novice.
What’s particularly fascinating is how there is an almost complete absence of a leftist equivalent on YT. There are some leftist channels here and there, but you’re not going to get bombarded with communist ads after watching one video like you might on the right.
I like to tell myself that's because real lefties adhere to the doctrine of Gil Scott Heron, The Revolution Will Not be Televised, even though they won't understand 99% of the cultural references
In my country we still have a old school communist party, and despite their radical ideas like saying north Korea is a democracy or support maduro in Venezuela, when you hear their political campaign is all about raising minimum wage and a restricted House market. In the other way, when we look at the far right party, it's all about how the immigrants are eating tax money or defending a small government with a total control for one leader.
So it's not that radical left doesn't exist, it's just that they drop their guns and what's left it's not that loud.
It's strictly a function of funding and the economic power of the interested parties. Rich capitalists are, naturally, invested in promoting policies, ideologies, and politicians that will 1) keep them being rich capitalists and 2) make them richer capitalists. I don't know, but am fairly confident in stating, that there are not rich communists waging a communistic propaganda campaign in order to keep them being rich communists and making them richer communists. Certainly not in the Anglosphere, anyway.
You’re not wrong, but leftists also tend to spend an inordinate amount of energy and resources fighting internecine battles rather than trying to convert others. This does make it rather hard to do things like run self-reinforcing YT campaigns, assuming YT would tolerate them.
Late night show Zondag met Lubach put this to the test: https://youtu.be/FLoR2Spftwg (English CC available. Skip to 11:48 if you just want to see this bit.)
They created a fresh account using a fresh browser, clicked the top result for “PCR test reliable”, then some recommended videos. Just three clicks in they get to 9/11 and qanon conspiracy videos. By then their home feed too is full of that stuff.
Calling PragerU propaganda is like calling an Western history book written by a religious person contraband. What exact points do you take umbrage with or is this just a signal to your political preference?
> Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented.[1]
PragerU's "About Us" Page:
> Prager University is the world's leading conservative nonprofit that is focused on changing minds through the creative use of digital media. Taking full advantage of today's technology and social media, we educate millions of Americans and young people about the values that make America great.[2]
I'd also encourage you to check out their "What is PragerU"[3] brochure (PDF) which goes into more detail.
PragerU is the one funding advertisements with wild, baseless, and often scientifically dishonest "research". I don't recall traditional universities doing this. They firmly market themselves as "conservative intellectuals", telling you the "real truth" liberals won't recognize. I'd call that propaganda by definition.
Anything you see on the front page of youtube, i.e. you didn't specifically search for it, is most likely being promoted by some ad agency or think tank somewhere down the line. Meaning it's propaganda to some extent.
The exceptions to this rule are, of course, independent creators that the algorithm latches onto, but the algorithm only promotes videos that people are gonna click on and generate revenue for Youtube. That is, in a way, controlled propaganda too.
I see "African grey parrot singing along to I can see clearly now", "Cucumbers are cat's enemy - Funny Pet Reaction | Purr Purr", "Cockatoo Farts and Runs Away", "House Relax: Ed Sheeran, Martin Garrix, Kygo, Dua Lipa, Avicii, The...", "Venezuela 1-3 Argentina | Eliminatorias a Qatar 2022 -...", etc.
This is because yesterday I looked at videos of Alex the African grey parrot.
As far as I can tell, there are no ad agencies or think tanks involved here, except I guess that Atlantic Records made Ed Sheeran more popular than he was already by promoting him. I think this is pretty much purely "videos that people are gonna click on".
I see the "House Relax" one when I go to YouTube in a private window without signing in. It seems to be one of the "stock" links that YouTube shows complete newbies that have never been there before (as far as it knows), so I'm guessing it's pretty strongly advertised presumably at the behest of the ad agencies.
I do, always, see three or four covid-19 videos when I go to the main YT page. Whatever you think about their message, they look like propaganda to me.
The current “ivermectin is a dangerous horse dewormer” debacle has been the biggest example of a moment where I’m not sure whether everyone is lying at this point. YouTube censored a few videos with actual experts and doctors who were discussing ivm.
Yes we had issues with HCQ in the beginning, but ivm is being actually studied right now by Oxford Uni/NHS in their big covid trials in the UK… it’s amazing what a hit job the media is doing on it.
There's a difference between trials and it being suitable for public use though, right? It is undeniably a horse dewormer, and has had some use on humans, but not as a covid treatment.
For me, it's about preventing people that aren't medical professionals from self-medicating with a potentially harmful substance. Plus there's been some less than stellar suggestions of covid treatments in the past ranging from dubious to lethal. If it turns out to be safe, then doctors will no doubt prescribe it as necessary.
It's in significant use in humans as a dewormer, though. It's used in humans to treat river blindness which is caused by a worm. It's also used for the prevention of worms in dogs. It's fair to call it a dewormer, even if you disagree with including the 'horse' part.
Correct, and while it's use as an anti-viral has been noted pre-covid we don't understand what it's method of action is, or why it sometimes behaves as an anti-viral.
I'm not recommending using drugs we don't understand or have a full picture of. I am recommending to stop calling it horse dewormer. At the very least call it an anti-parasitic in use in the 3rd and 2nd worlds.
Two people in my circle were taking IVM pre-pandemic to treat rosacea and lyme disease. This is not an obscure drug in the 1st world. It also doesn't need to be an anti-viral to work on covid - it's already a general anti-inflammatory. Inflammation of the lungs is why people can't breath and often die, and that inflammation is due to the body's own immune response, not the virus itself. The virus is gone by that point. But our standard protocol at first symptoms does not include treating potential inflammation, so by the time people get to hospital it's often too late. It's not good.
You can drop the '3rd and 2nd worlds' part. It's used for the treatment of parasites in the 1st world as well.
I'm not a infectious diseases expert, but to my knowledge the viruses that it's been found to be effective against are all mosquito borne; it's just as likely related to it's toxic action on mosquitos in general. Still, it's all baseless conjecture on everyone's part. If someone cares to throw money at it, it's something that can be investigated.
At the end of the day just get the widely available vaccine and move on with life, like you would for other viruses that we've got vaccines for. I feel like we're all making this way harder than it has to be just so we can all continue to yell at each other.
Ok, I'll be more specific. Using the word "horse" is like calling other medications that are used on people and dogs as "dog" medicine.
The qualifier is not necessary. Truthfully, they should just call it ivermectin and describe what it actually is, how it has actually been used, and the current state of research showing that currently has little proof of effectiveness though there are trials ongoing.
I figured that term had taken off because people were acquiring it from farm stores or pet supply places, so they were literally buying "horse dewormer", as it might be labeled on the packaging or signage. Same as they do for other off-prescription medications (antibiotics).
My point about “horse dewormer” is that some articles in the media list it as just that without mentioning at all that it is also human medication. Look at the recent articles about Joe Rogan, they couldn’t stop themselves.
Afaik the only difference between human and animal ivm are levels of impurity.
That's because people are literally buying and eating horse dewormer. Its in a package that says "horse dewormer" on it. It's sold at livestock stores in the "horse medicine" section. The media is 100% correct to call what people are poisoning themselves with "horse dewormer".
I bet you get mad at the news for reporting rain because water exists in other forms, and has other ways of moving about besides rain right?
It's really hard to poison yourself with ivermectin if you're a vertebrate. Apparently the total number of poisoning cases in the US, a country of 330 million people, is about 500, and the vast majority of those cases had minor or no effects; people were just worried. So if you buy horse dewormer in a livestock store and take it, you'll probably still be fine.
Did Joe Rogan literally buy and eat something from a package that says "horse dewormer" on it? You willingly ignored the salient parts of the comment you responded to (ironically providing more evidence of the very phenomenon that they're trying to discuss).
Which brings up another point: some pharmacies are refusing to fill it, even when prescribed by a doctor. If you want to place the blame for people getting "horse dewormer", such pharmacies deserve part of the blame.
Too bad most of the people who want horse dewormer were the same people who wanted the "pharmacist conscience" laws that allow pharmacists to deny their veterinary prescriptions. Who would have thought that such a law would come back to bite them.
Since you dodged the question, it's worth asking again.
The complaint, stated by sprafa, is: "Look at the recent articles about Joe Rogan, they couldn’t stop themselves."
... to which you responded, ignoring the complaint and doubling down, right before kicking it up a notch with a personal attack/shameless attempt to strawman ("I bet you get mad at the news for[...] right?").
So did Rogan literally buy and eat something from a package that says "horse dewormer" or not?
I mean, it's quite likely the ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine has some effect against the virus in the early stages of infection, but their use needs to be balanced against their side effects, of which there are many. It's like how bleach kills cancer cells, but you really shouldn't be treating cancer with it...
I mean, it's great that you personally believe something, but to make ethical medical decisions we need lots of clinical data. If your belief is well founded, which it damn well might be, the data should bear that out.
The data on the safety of Ivermectin is very well established.
It's well-known to be very safe with pretty minimal side effects and extremely low serious side effect rates despite the billions of doses handed out over the past decades.
The real question is about its anti-viral properties. We know they exist, but don't know why or to what extent. Further, we don't know if they extend to COVID and we don't now if the effective dosage is high enough to increase the rates of side effects (especially bad ones).
The result is extremists on both sides saying wild garbage. Either it's the salvation of mankind hidden from you by the grand conspiracy or it's toxic horse dewormer that will certainly kill anyone who even approaches it.
This is a real problem. If I were researching Ivermectin and COVID, I'd be scared that loonies from one side or the other might attempt to hurt me or ruin my life over their delusions.
We have lots of clinical data, their belief is well founded, and the data does bear that out. It's as if you commented without even skimming the Wikipedia article about ivermectin.
> IVM is as useful as eating dirt in relation to COVID, until proven otherwise with studies
Um. No. IVM is useful or not useful regardless of whether studies have been done.
Studies are useful for finding out whether it is useful, but they do not affect the result.
If people take it now and then it turns out it's a miracle cure that halts ageing the people taking it now will have benefited. If instead it actually causes incurable cancer in five years the people taking it now are in the shitter. These things are true or false regardless of whether we know them and regardless of whether we got that knowledge from formal studies.
In fact, most of the "people are dying because they're injecting themselves with horse dewormer" story can be traced back to a rolling stone article that quoted a doctor who said so. The only problem was, they actually quoted the doctor's name as well as an actual hospital he supposedly worked at - and the hospital issued a statement that that doctor neither worked there nor had they treated any Ivermectin overdoses (https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/rolling-stone-s-ive...). In other words, "people overdosing on horse dewormer" is actual misinformation... which isn't being censored.
Relying on one source for information is wrong, the hearsay article which reported what the doc in Oklahoma said without verifying the claims about ivermectin overdoses was wrong.
What is not wrong is this:
According to the National Poison Data System (NPDS), which collects information from the nation's 55 poison control centers, there was a 245% jump in reported exposure cases from July to August — from 133 to 459.
On the one hand, it's nice to know this number is low, on the other hand the numbers are likely under-reporting. Low toxicity doses and symptoms are likely unrecorded. Self medication with prescription drugs is a bad idea.
No. The Rolling Stone debacle literally just happened.
The idea "most of the story" is traced backed to one bad article, from two days ago, when it's been a story for over a month is ridiculous nut-picking.
To be fair, the bans usually were about china fabricating the virus on purpose and releasing it with intention, accompanied by racism against Asians. This is pretty different from the accidental leak of a research-object, which is now the accepted theory.
The media did themselves and the public a disservice by gluing the two theories together and blending them. Several friends - college educated, intelligent professionals - were confused enough to approach and ask me about the lab leak/release theories.
The intentional lab release theory is the stuff of nonsense conspiracy theories. The accidental leak theory has always had some support but is now more widely accepted (but will likely never have hard proof).
For a time, both were bannable offenses on Facebook, Youtube and others. Likely because the media glued them together and assigned them both as "disinformation".
It wasn't really the media doing that. It was more a combination between nut heads, meme heads with their umbrella-connection and the first panic. The media just amplified it and rode the wave, as usual. And after the message was out, it was hard to turn it around. And I guess the platforms were just unable to distinguish between them, as also had more interest to wait till the nutty wave died down.
Not sure what you mean. These articles are all from 6+ months after the first panic. At that point, the theories were already long merged and spreading wild. They were already present from the first days in January 2020, when China's situation became epidemic. And this didn't really change till spring 2021 when everyone cooled down a bit and sanity returned a bit.
> To be fair, the bans usually were about china fabricating the virus on purpose and releasing it with intention, accompanied by racism against Asians. This is pretty different from the accidental leak of a research-object, which is now the accepted theory.
No, both versions were lumped into the same bucket.
"most plausible theory" according to whom? It's not a theory, it's a hypothesis with little tangible but evidence due to the nature of chinas control. It could have happened, it may not have. The problem with lab leak discussion on YouTube/Facebook is it was heavily associated with politics, and incredible unsubstantiated claims. "Experts" from nowhere, hired degrees talking about a lab they know nothing about, anonymous and convenient unheard of "researchers" supposedly "exposing the lab leak". The disinformation was incredible. Even if lab leak did happen - very few had the actual proof or good arguments to back it.
I've used the "pour-on" version of IVM which is used on livestock. I could hardly avoid it: we were deworming and branding a herd of cattle; the method of application was to pour IVM on each critter's back and spread it with your hands. Doing so probably put enough ivermectin in my system to kill any parasites I had 50 times over. Never suffered any consequences AFAICT. I have noticed that the guys who regularly do this are extremely healthy but they're all cowboys, so a selection bias is likely present.
I don't think it absorbs that well through the skin; there are topical ivermectin preparations that are supposed to be safer for kittens and the white-footed dog breeds that have a defect in the enzyme that detoxifies it.
In general, though, people panicking about ivermectin poisoning is ridiculous. Mass ivermectin administration is a common parasite-extermination measure.
When we use pour-on we just pour it on. I've never seen any instructions to rub it on with your hands. Liquid that gets stuck to your hands is liquid that isn't still on the animal's skin where it will have therapeutic effect.
But sure, it's completely safe for human beings to be exposed to ivermectin. WHO wouldn't recommend it otherwise.
The dose makes the poison; nothing is completely safe to be exposed to. The lethal dose of ivermectin is about 10 mg/kg orally, so it's about 250 times more poisonous than table salt, which from my point of view puts it in the "dangerous poisons" category. But that's about 30 times the standard therapeutic dose, so it's pretty unlikely to happen by accident.
However, that's the standard therapeutic dose for parasites. To work as an antiviral it needs to interfere with viral replication somehow, and since viruses replicate using normal somatic-cell metabolic processes, you'd probably have to take a high enough dose of ivermectin for it to interfere with normal somatic-cell metabolic processes. That, in turn, means you're going to see side effects you wouldn't see at the normal antiparasitic doses.
Nevertheless, there isn't in fact an epidemic of serious ivermectin poisoning, horse dewormers or no. Maybe one in ten million people in the US, less elsewhere.
Weird this needs to be reiterated in Covid 2021....What do you think "media" should be doing? Remember, media =/= op-ed journalists that you want to have the same opinion as you.
"media" should not have to do anything by anyone's standards. it is a omnipresent, global, ever changing opinion glued transparently to percieved values and morays of the time.
If you click on a link/article that says "X will not work and we do not like it", then that media outfit is doing exactly what it needs to do as a media outfit.
Any large communication platform has a choice: either accept some form of content neutrality or become a petty and chaotic tyrant constantly reeling from one public backlash after the other. YouTube made its choice. Now, random videos and channels get demonetized, content gets deleted for no reason and people covering basic news speak in code to avoid the wrath of the idiot AI. In the background Google publishes batshit crazy research papers that call automated propaganda "AI fairness" and relies on a horde of underpaid serfs bordering mental breakdown to make final decisions on content moderation. Welcome to the predicable future of your bad decisions.
> either accept some form of content neutrality or become a petty and chaotic tyrant constantly reeling from one public backlash after the other
No, there is a middle ground that Google, with its army of engineers, could implement in a weekend:
1. You stop trying to assume you know what advertisers want their ads to be displayed on.
2. You implement a basic, fixed (but can be expanded) ACL-type system based on categories such as "hacking content", "politically sketchy content", "sexual content", etc.
3. YOU LET THE GOD DAMN ADVERTISERS DECIDE FOR THEIR OWN GOD DAMNED SELVES WHAT KIND OF CONTENT THEY'RE OK WITH ADVERTISING ON.
4. You end up spending LESS on content moderator salaries, and end up with FEWER unhappy advertisers because THEY can align their principles with the content. Hak5/Sparkfun would be fine advertising on Linux Experiments. I'm sure MyPillow would be happy to advertise on a Q Conspiracy channel. The demand for this feature is unquestionably there.
5. You stop playing God and pretending that the concept of global "community standards" means anything at all in a world with 7 billion people and hundreds of thousands of disparate interests-based communities, each with their own disparate community standards.
2. You implement a basic, fixed (but can be expanded) ACL-type system based on categories such as "hacking content", "politically sketchy content", "sexual content", etc.
Who or what ensures that the Q conspiracy channel is properly categorized as "politically sketchy content" and not "hacking content"?
The reality is no amount of computer code will fix a human problem.
Your plan fails, lets say they implement what you do. Let say that company X advertises but only on the safe subjets. Then my immediate attack will be:
"Company X advertises on a website showing jailbait sexual content" or "Company X advertising on a site promoting Q Conspiracy".
You are going to fight an uphill battle explaining to people the naunces of the system, which is a losing battle.
Your comment doesn't make sense, Youtube still show those videos in the current system it just doesn't run ads on them. So if it was an issue then it would have already happened, the fact that it doesn't mean that it isn't an issue.
Yes there are still jailbait videos on YouTube, but Google is already heavily moderating and deleting videos. The more "extreme" ones are already being deleted and moderated, what is left is probably more of the tamer ones. The amount of jailbait videos or hate videos or whatever you see now is probably 1/10 or less of what would be there if it was a free for all.
What is being proposed is no moderation of content. The advertisers can choose what to show ads on, but that's it. In that case there would be a flood of these contents. Then its easier to attack them.
> You stop playing God and pretending that the concept of global "community standards" means anything at all in a world with 7 billion people and hundreds of thousands of disparate interests-based communities, each with their own disparate community standards.
I think you're confusing the Internet with YouTube. The Internet has no global content standard, but this is not the world that YouTube lives in. It lives in the world of ad-supported services which has been repeatedly very clear about its minimum expectations regarding community standards. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=adpocalypse
> YOU LET THE GOD DAMN ADVERTISERS DECIDE FOR THEIR OWN GOD DAMNED SELVES WHAT KIND OF CONTENT THEY'RE OK WITH ADVERTISING
Have you talked with advertisers? They're really twitchy about this stuff, they even have vendors for brand safety they'll want to include in their ads or have you integrate with if you're a platform like YouTube to rule out ads on anything that could show their brand in a bad light.
I don't use YouTube, but I thought this was what the demonetisation was - the creators were getting a trickle of revenue, but most of it was gone, sounds to me like the impacts of it being considered not "brand safe" and most advertises enable such controls reflexively.
> 2. You implement a basic, fixed (but can be expanded) ACL-type system based on categories such as "hacking content", "politically sketchy content", "sexual content", etc.
The problem: for some of these, the definitions, the legality status and the liabilities (especially around "politically sketchy" stuff) may differ wildly between jurisdictions. And you will always have trolls mis-labeling their content on purpose, or content that is to be classified as "gambling" in the US but not in Germany... the list of issues is endless.
> 3. YOU LET THE GOD DAMN ADVERTISERS DECIDE FOR THEIR OWN GOD DAMNED SELVES WHAT KIND OF CONTENT THEY'RE OK WITH ADVERTISING ON.
And then they will still have headlines "Youtube allowing Nazis, antivaxxers, incels and other threats to the general public". Not to mention the legal issues (e.g. Nazi content is banned in Germany/Austria, LGBT content in Russia, a whole boatload of stuff illegal in India with jail threats for local staff)...
> 5. You stop playing God and pretending that the concept of global "community standards" means anything at all in a world with 7 billion people and hundreds of thousands of disparate interests-based communities, each with their own disparate community standards.
You will always need some sort of "global minimum standards" that ideally is at least somewhat of a common ground in Western-allied nations. And that means: no Nazis/white supremacists, no Qanon, no antivaxxers, no incels, no adult content/gore, no drugs (tobacco/alcohol/illegalized drugs), no gambling, no glorification of violence.
Why Western allied nations in particular? I'm also not sure that list is as universal as you think. For instance, the no drugs thing would likely not apply to the Netherlands.
Simple: Western nations are a somewhat coherent cultural sphere.
Adding in India (with its current war against Twitter and anything that dares criticize Modi), the Arabian and other dominant-Muslim countries (women's rights, LGBT, democracy) or Russia/China (which are essentially dictatorships) into consideration would add way too much illiberality to be acceptable.
How do you know this could be done in a weekend, let alone a year, in a way that will make YouTube’s stakeholders happier than they are today? You seem to know an awful lot about this.
“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” —H. L. Mencken
Most of these platforms start off trying to be content neutral and end up adding more moderation as a result of how badly it ends up hurting them. There's only so many times advertisers are willing to have their brand shown next to child pornography (ie, reddit's former /r/jailbait) or hate speech.
If complete neutrality was an answer these companies would be doing that, since it's the cheapest option.
It seems to me that content neutral (neutrality? neutralness?) and copyright violations are there in order to build eyeballs and brand. You use them for growth.
Once the size is there, you curate. Profit becomes the issue and the tendency is to simply become cable TV with thousands of channels.
I wonder how you could architect video access for content that gets peoples' knickers in a twist but is still legal. There's loads of single points of failures still. TV settop box access, smart TV/Roku access, the difficulties and expense in storing and serving up video, etc.
> There's only so many times advertisers are willing to have their brand shown next to child pornography (ie, reddit's former /r/jailbait) or hate speech.
I’m not sure advertisers care about this as much as people claim. YouTube’s censorship really ramped up in 2017 after Trump was elected, and was fairly limited before then. I don’t think they had trouble with advertisers before then all those years. I could be wrong - have any sources that could help?
Many times advertisers honestly just don’t know. You’re spending a lot of money across a lot of different channels, and then all of a sudden somebody says, “uh-oh, we’re getting dragged on Twitter for advertising on $bad_page.” You definitely don’t like child porn or covid disinformation or anything like that, and the tweets make you look like an idiot, so you email the owner of $bad_page (some sort of advertising network, or maybe a site like Reddit) and say “if my ads are ever on this page again, I will pull my budget from your entire network.”
I greatly dislike the conflation of things like jailbait (which is mostly provocative clothed images taken voluntarily by teens) and classic child pornography where a 6 year old is brutally raped.
One is harmless the other involves lifelong trauma.
It's not necessarily harmless. JB includes nasty creepshots. And even if the subject took the photo themselves, it's unlikely they wanted a bunch of weirdos on the internet to lust over it. And if they somehow did want that lust, it's even more unlikely that they fully understood the consequences.
All of that can end up being very harmful to one's mental health. And that's not even accounting for the people who try to physically go after those children after seeing them and convincing themselves that they "love" the child.
That subreddit was exploiting children for sexual gratification. It wasn't just teens, and it wasn't people posting purposefully provocative images. It was children living their normal lives and having their pictures exploited for the sexual gratification of perverts.
It's Kafka-esque, really. Google has always thought it is smarter than everyone else and that has led, inexorably, to it establishing itself as the final arbiter of truth. Except Google is a dysfunctional, distracted, neurotic, schizophrenic entity, like all organizations, with an ever-changing set of in-fighting fiefdoms and warring executives.
Worse, growthism forced its "Organize the world's information" mission into "Swallow and monetize the world's information" with an added helping of "know exactly what every person wants, even if they don't know they want it yet."
any day now, the moral, upstanding, self-restrained capitalists will buck the profit motive and save us from the unsavory sorts who rule our world today.
I feel we pretty badly need to revisit laws surrounding social media platforms in the US. I'm not sure what the silver bullet is here, but the way platforms have almost limitless latitude to filter and shape discourse on their platform and also virtually zero liability for that same discourse seems like an obvious problem.
Unfortunately the average senator is over 60 and the companies that own these platforms have deep pockets.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
In this case, looks like someone hacked authorization to the channel and deleted it. This is probably not "channel taken down for violating policy," but instead "channel deleted by 'owner.'"
The wording in the email from Google suggests they don't yet have enough info to trust the inquisiting email comes from the channel owner (source: my own experience proving email account A and email account B were the same person).
Don't forget the police playing copyrighted music while they abuse you to stop you from filming them. When the police are ahead of the tech, you know the People are f'd.
The problem is that ThePirateBay will not pay you per view. YouTubers stay on YT because it pays out a slice of ad revenue and not because it's just a convenient distribution site. Making those videos costs an insane amount of time and money - which means that most YTers can't afford to do it for free.
Any kind of YT competition needs to figure out on how to keep the revenue streams intact.
That's why I wrote "an archive of my OLD videos". They probably don't generate much revenue already.
Also, ThePirateBay does not compete with YouTube even in the cases of the same content being available on both the platforms. Most of the people want to watch the videos on-line, go to YouTube naturally and won't bother using torrents. Sophisticated people who want an off-line copy just use youtube-dl anyway. The actual YouTube audience will only go to ThePirateBay when they really can't access the videos on YouTube.
Another "google's customer support is only available via online mob outrage" situation. Just pathetic, who isn't embarrassed to work for Google at this point?
Wow. It's hard for me to imagine how he crossed any line worthy of deletion. He's one of the best Linux voices on YouTube, and seems like an incredibly nice guy.
His content can be seen on Odysee[0].
Chris Titus Tech has a video covering this[1].
Honestly, I try to watch everything on Odysee these days, anyway, just to try to continue de-Googling my life.
I was doing this YouTube survey last night. This was one of the points I raised in the survey. That a channel with 10 years of videos can be deleted without notice.
I hope he can get it back, it is a great resource for well researched news in my oppinion.
I just tried out /e/ recently after learning about it on his channel
Once again, using the private platform argument here: YouTube (owned by Google) reserves the right to terminate and de-platform anyone's account who has been in violation of YouTube's guidelines and terms of service.
You can criticise, protest, appeal, scream or throw a tantrum about it, etc but you should finally see that this can happen to anyone sitting on private platforms like YouTube.
YouTube will never change and it will only get worse.
I hope cases like this lead more people to understand that proprietors of private services do have so much control (even if they often wield it soberly), and persuade them to consider decentralised or protocol-based open alternatives.
As ever, Tony Benn's five questions are instructive: “what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you?”
Do private platforms have unlimited latitude? If not, what are the underlying philosophies underlying current limitations, and can those be seen to imply that other limitations should be made? Should private platforms have unlimited latitude?
Those are discussions that could be had. "Private things are allowed to do whatever they want" is not only a thought-terminating cliché that avoids all ethical or tactical judgement, but a simple falsehood.
Who is arguing that? No need to create a straw-man argument.
> "Private things are allowed to do whatever they want"
Who are you quoting here?
So YouTube (owned by Google) doesn't reserve the right to terminate and de-platform anyone's account who has been in violation of YouTube's guidelines and terms of service?
I already said the offended users can appeal, didn't I? I'm just saying that not only this can happen to anyone, but YouTube (Google Inc.) will not change and we'll see more of this regardless if it is automated or not.
Nobody. But if the fact that Google reserves the right to ban people for reasons described in its ToS is an argument for something, I'd like to know what else it could be an argument for. Who cares what Google reserves?
edit: I'm being sloppy. "Google reserved the right to delete for this reason," and "private things that reserve rights get them", and "Google is private" equals "Google gains this right." This would be an argument you could make. However, you haven't made this argument.
Are you making an argument about choosing youtube? I might be mistaking a pragmatic observation for a political/legal discussion.
That's not the issue here. The issue here is letting automated systems having final say on such destructive actions as terminating an account entirely, with no concrete way to appeal. From what I am aware of, few channels wrongfully suspended get reinstated through support but rather through public outcry on the likes of Twitter.
I don't think that's in disagreement with the parent. Whatever means YouTube uses to determine who to drop and who to keep is irrelevant because the point is that if you host content on someone else's servers you are giving them control.
I don't think so. The original comment says that YouTube has:
> the right to terminate and de-platform anyone's account who has been in violation of YouTube's guidelines and terms of service.
The problem here is letting automated systems, with a history of producing false-positives for content that didn't violate the Guidelines or ToS, having final say on account termination, with no concrete way to appeal - To me this is a fair criticism.
If the original comment says "the right to arbitrarily terminate and de-platform anyone's account", then I'll say that you have a point.
There is apparently a large contingent of people on this site holding the belief that if your private platform is large then the government should step in to force you to host things you don't want to host.
It's kinda funny, because it's effectively saying that they want to nationalize tech companies for being successful.
For over 100 years we have had laws and rules that prescribe that when a firm or industry reaches monopoly statue they must act as a common carrier and not discriminate. Been that way since telephones and railroads. People should understand history, this is not a new challenge and the solutions are already on the books.
Personally I think anything that's a natural monopoly should probably be the purview of the government anyway, since that's as close to an entity acting solely in the public good as we can get.
However, I also don't count any current social media entity as a monopoly.
>For over 100 years we have had laws and rules that prescribe that when a firm or industry reaches monopoly statue they must act as a common carrier and not discriminate.
Was that because they got big, or was it because they were granted a government monopoly?
Can you provide the legislative history that supports this? According to wikipedia airlines, cell phone companies, cruise ships, and shipping companies operate as common carriers, even though none of them are controlled by monopolies.
> Natural monopolies exist. This libertarian talking point of "there wouldn't be monopolies without government intervention" is lunacy.
I'm not a libertarian, but I can still see the difference between "it would be really expensive to lay another set of phone lines" and "the state forbids you from laying another set of phone lines".
> Can you provide the legislative history that supports this?
No, I'm not a lawyer/historian.
> According to wikipedia airlines, cell phone companies, cruise ships, and shipping companies operate as common carriers, even though none of them are controlled by monopolies.
Airlines, cruise ships, and shipping companies, do not own the 'land' (in the georgist sense) that they traverse, so they're just completely irrelevant to the discussion.
As for cell phone companies, you may remember that a certain company known as AT&T was famously broken up into dozens of smaller companies (that have since re-congealed). Also those companies are legally required to interoperate with each other, ie: your T-Mobile phone will "roam" on AT&T's network.
> I'm not a libertarian, but I can still see the difference between "it would be really expensive to lay another set of phone lines" and "the state forbids you from laying another set of phone lines".
As far as I'm aware, the state, does not forbid anyone from laying another set of phone lines or railroad lines or roads, for the same reason that it doesn't forbid anyone from violating conservation of energy.
If you think about it, publicly traded companies are precisely that: nationalized. They exist as partly as government fiat, and partly of managerial control, but not as property. They are, by necessity, of somewhat unknowable, and almost always unaccountable ownership, ownership so diffuse it may be regarded as a generally representative subset of and equivalent to the general public. As such, can any public company be regarded as private? Or treated as private? Their ownership is public, and no individual, or small, knowable, and generally convenable group of people can say: these are our servers. On the contrary, a group of people equivalent to the general public, a subset of them in fact public or pseudo-public institutions (pension funds, university endowments), are the owners. As such, public institutions should very much be treated as public entities. After all, it is the general public which owns them.
Publicly traded companies have a main goal of making profits for shareholders.
This seldom aligns with the public's interest. For many (most?) companies, only the rich have any voting power, whereas the majority of the population just has to follow along.
Publicly traded companies are like a democracy where you get more votes the more money you have. The implication here is that your voice/needs are only important if you're rich, and are unimportant if you're average or poor (which kind of explains why the US is the way it is).
But, the actual incentive structure of "who controls the corporation?" is not shareholders, whose ownership is a) so diffuse as to be unknowable, sans documentation from a stock exchange b) very often held by proxies, with voting rights exercised by those proxies as well [1], c) nearly impossible to coordinate, even when the majority of shares in in private hands, and d) frequently bought back and owned by management itself. Looking at this structure, one can say that the actual control of the corporation is held a) by the people that manage it, b) by the people that capitalize it (not the same thing as stockholdership) and c) by the people that regulate it. c) is very clearly the government. You could make a very good case that b) is indirectly the government as well, since it comes from banking institutions who receive money to lend from the federal government, or rather, the ability to create debt.
My point is that, given the diffusion and non-coordination of ownership of a publicly traded company, combined with the effect of regulation, (and if you know anything about regulatory capture), the coordination of regulation with the large interests being regulated, public corporations may be treated, quite reasonably as public.
[1] Something to the tune of a fifth of all shares of Fortune 500 companies are held by Blackrock, Fidelity and Vanguard, as a part of how they issue index funds. These financial institutions are the ones who execute the voting rights on those shares, not the people who bought the index funds. See: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/the-new-power-bro...
The government should step in to enforce data standards and data-transfer functionalities so that large tech companies do not have oversized monopoly like influence due to natural network effects.
It's not saying that at all (nationalising companies is a very specific action that doesn't have anything to do with what you described).
That said, I don't agree with your premise which appears to be that this is bad. Converting something that is basically a utility already (i.e. everyone uses it and everyone expects to be able to. It's almost unthinkable to have daily life without it) to a nationalised company would be a good thing.
For the record, I'm actually quite in favor of not leaving necessary infrastructure in the hands of private companies. Although I don't think social media sites are necessary infrastructure personally.
> There is apparently a large contingent of people on this site holding the belief that if your private platform is large then the government should step in to force you to host things you don't want to host.
I am part of that group. I am willing to accept a free-for-all till a company reaches a certain size as far as its user-or-customer base is concerned: something between the population of New Zealand and that of Australia. Beyond that it should be answerable to the people.
I also think supranational corporations should either be banned or very tightly regulated.
Is nationalisation evil in itself? The private sector just doesn't have sufficient incentive to serve the public over their own interest. We've seen this time and time again.
Oh very much it is. Come to the lovely Eastern Europe and see for yourself how good national owned companies are. Full of useless bureaucrats put there to ensure voters so the ruling party can continue ruling. Also in huge debts which are paid by more taxes so the working people pay for the lazy.
Unless the human race somehow chains itself to selflessness, nationalization + democracy is a sure way to destroy any organization. Now privately owned is not much better but in theory can be replaced with a competitor. Not so much for a national organization.
Source: Living and suffering daily in Eastern Europe.
On the other hand, outside the Eastern Europe many of the state-owned corporations work pretty well, and usually the service goes down the drain after selling them off - see UK railways.
I'm from Eastern Europe too (actually Central Europe - if you know what I mean, you'll know exactly which country), but I've been living in the UK for many years so I have a different perspective.
Privatisation of the British railways was a disaster, and the creeping privatisation of the National Health Service is a disaster in the making as well. As far as I'm concerned, when we're talking about well-understood, national-scale services, private sector almost always starves the service out of greed or is outright incompetent.
The US has basically been a communist country since the 70s when it passed the ADA requiring businesses not only to serve the disabled but spend money to make sure disabled people can access their services.
There’s basically no difference between the US and the USSR ever since.
That's actually a good point, except that the ADA only concerns itself with accessibility to content, not the content itself. What we're talking about is forcing businesses to hang up signs for NAMBLA on their bulletin board if they let anyone hang stuff up at all.
>YouTube will never change and it will only get worse.
Private entities can be swayed by their customer's demands. Not saying that YT _will_ be swayed, just that this sort of creator outrage has a place in the market system, and "throwing a tantrum" over their bad behavior doesn't always have to be met with "private entities can do whatever they want!"
That actually sounds like a good test for monopoly status- do you have to worry about what your customers want/desire or are you so entrenched that you don’t care?
I'm sympathetic but not a video creator, but I wonder why don't people band together and sue, or alternatively pressure their state attorneys-general to bring a civil enforcement action? Yes, yes, arbitration clauses, but there's a doctrine in law called 'unconscionable contract' and a demonstrable pattern of unilateral kafkaesque behavior by YT is a good start for any attorney.
As I have pointed out over and over market solutions don't work when there are huge power/capital differentials involved. Hoping some plucky little underdog product/service will lead to an exodus isn't going to happen.
Back in the day, Google ate Yahoo's lunch (along with Altavista, Lycos and everyone else) because Google had a genuine search engine (in the form of a graph database) whereas the incumbents were operating directories, and the classification/curation couldn't keep up with the volume of information being crawled. For those who were not around at the time, it's hard to communicate how different the products were. Incumbents let you search but also offered a huge number of categories, like a library catalog. Google looked like a joke website the first time you visited due to the lack of any categorical or navigational options, just this over-confident search field...except that it worked. It was like sorcery.
The reason I mention this is because in economics there's a concept of elasticity of demand, of how attached you are to a thing you already use or consume. Generally, you want to stick with what works. This is especially true where network effects come into play. Competitors that offer X + some incremental improvement usually fail; their best outcome is that X buys them and incorporates the incremental improvement (which is sometimes the competitors' ultimate goal). To lure people away from a successful product the additional benefit to the buyer has to be more like 100% than 10% or 20%, and that rarely happens. If you look at Youtube's contenders, they fall into specialized categories such as art stuff like Vimeo (extra access control, higher video quality/ delivery options), Twitch (emphasis on livestreaming and social, especially for gamers), Rumble (for Freeze Peach aficionados), Pornhub and the whole adult entertainment ecosystem, or high-end commercial content streaming.
So if you dream of beating YouTube in the market, you need to either occupy a niche they don't want to be in (most of which have already been occupied) or offer something that's radically different for the consumer. Being distributed/ FOSS/ blockchain/ whatever isn't it because only nerds care about that stuff. Nerds don't rule the marketplace, even when they build the marketplace: 95% of people do not care how something works or that it serves a higher purpose. It needs to offer a wholly different user experience, and really, it's kinda hard to see how you're gonna radically rethink TV.
You have a better chance to do something amazing in virtual reality or internet navigation in general, and provide a native offering in which Youtube is diminished to the minor status of a channel owner, ie your UI/brand is The Thing and YouTube is just a minor service provider icon below the content.
So the alternative is to address the situation legally. Monopoly complaints won't work, because the nice capitalists at the University of Chicago have institutionalized the idea that monopolies are fine as long as the public is happy, and the huge # of consumers using YouTube vastly outweighs the small # of creators who are pissed off with it, so good luck with your public interest argument. However, there might be some mileage in attacking the contract terms or alleging that YouTube has implicitly defamed creators by suspending them without explanation. Or you could go in a different direction and argue that YouTube is a sort of public utility, though then you need to decide whether you really want online video to be regulated by FCC.
Litigation would be expensive and stressful and would need to be a collective rather than individual undertaking, and a selective one at that - folks like Linux Experiment are sympathetic plaintiffs, folks like Logan Paul are not (you may think this shouldn't matter, but tough luck, it does). Chances are that such a case would almost certainly fail, but the object would be to make discovery and the trial excruciatingly embarrassing for youtube, which would mean refusing to settle and (probably) looking for specific performance like YT submitting to supervision of some kind in the form of a consent decree, rather than mere compensation. If you just ask them for money you'll (maybe) eventually get some but nothing will change, because asking for money is essentially the same as saying whoever has the most money gets to be king of the market and Alphabet has plenty of coins to toss in the direction of the peasants.
The potential upside here is not winning in court (a vanishingly unlikely possibility) or getting a big check to shut up and go away (nice and what your lawyers want, but basically selling out your principles), but either a change in the law from Congress (ha ha good luck) or a shift in the public's thinking about how contracts should work, the distribution of obligations, and how much market power is acceptable.
How can Nick prove a negative? How about Youtube shows what violated the terms? Why can't they back up their claim with evidence, instead of Nick being forced to provide proof to disprove a claim without any?
That was not my intention at all, I was rather discussing the state of propaganda, which is an interesting field in itself.
I can see how it can be easily mis-interpreted as partisan politics. I'll abstain from getting too close to politics, little politics is what's keeping this site quality up.
I live in a red state and my experience is the opposite. I suspect it might be that when your view is the majority in your area, you're more inclined to shut out opposing ideas as "fringe". It's the "I don't know anyone who voted ___" effect.
I think this phenomenon is the result of a confirmation bias. Half of all people are below average intelligence, so if you live in a majority democrat region most of the stupid people are going to be democrats the same for majority republican regions. Add to that the social friction with going against the herd, the friction must be worthwhile to the person so it is more likely a lot of thought went into someone's conclusions if they're willing to make their life more difficult for it, ideological minorities like that are (probably not remotely near astronomically) more likely to be a more thoughtful. Both of these pressures skew the majority political leaning in any region below average intelligence and have the opposite effect on the minority.
This might be the most reasonable explanation. In the end, the republicans I talked to were very reluctant to hint they vote republican, so in general they would approach issues much more carefully. It still doesn't fully explain the democrat behavior.
I definitely know more democrats than republicans (my area votes 80% democrat). But they are highly educated people (think U Chicago, Georgia Tech etc.) still believing every opinion their favorite news outlet sells them. I find that disturbing. Not the fact that they believe most of the party lines, but believing and defending ALL of them, like the party can do no wrong.
My experience is also the opposite fwiw. To be fair, I don't think I know any democrats who actually like the party. They're more "not republican" than democrat. Maybe the democrats you've talked to are the true believers. The only example I can come up with that matches your experience is my dad, so maybe it's generational?
That is exactly my experience of most Republicans in a red state. Every Trump talking point, every coronavirus conspiracy, it all gets eaten up. There are exceptions, to be sure, but a surprising number of otherwise thoughtful people accept it all unthinkingly.
This is just a long-winded way of saying $my_team good, $your_team bad. In my experience anyone who identifies primarily with a political party rather than a political philosophy is far more likely to be guilty of this.
As someone who straddles the lines in the sand, I actually agree that conservatives I interact with seem to be the more open-minded cohort these days, but it's pretty marginal. The big difference is the amount of self-back-patting that liberals do about how "open-minded" they are and their agreement with standard narrative condemning conservatives as closed-minded or uneducated. Though, even that is mirrored by the other side to an extent.
That is the most ironic thing. In the same breath I hear complaints about "half the population is brainwashed by you know who" and then a narrative taken line for line from the other side. And the funny thing is...I agree with a lot of the Democrat opinions, I just feel very uneasy about such a big cohort thinking exactly the same, with no nuance - it reminds me of state controlled media in a communist country.
Also, if you don't know the channel and want to check out his videos, you can still watch them on Odysee - https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment.