There is a massive YouTube and Instagram industry of outright faking craft and cooking tips. They're not just bad or a stretch, they're intentionally fabricated, made at scale by TheSoul Publishing with 550 employees. That's because making cool things looking surprisingly easy goes viral way better than actual reality-grounded instructions, and for the adtech giants nothing matters except the number of clicks.
Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer cake in a toaster, the fakers already cash in on the views. Usually the risk of these faked craft hacks is just cut fingers and kitchen fires, but the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos take it to another level of lethality.
> Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer cake in a toaster
Our 12-year-old recently tried to make himself "cheese on toast" by putting both cheese and uncooked bread into the (almost brand new, upright) toaster. Aaargh!
Cue the house full of smoke, a stern reprimand, then a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster, followed by several empty runs with it outside to let it get properly hot and burn off the last of the fatty residues.
He was, at least, quite sheepish about his learning experience.
At the risk of sounding like a salesperson, I'd like to mention a feature of basic/classic Dualit toasters - namely, the optional and elegantly simple sandwich cage. [1] The cage is designed to take two slices of bread with a filling (in my usage, always heavy on the cheese). You put this into the toaster slot, which is vertical, and safely make cheese/whatever toasties. So, your 12-year-old had the right idea, but not the right toaster.
FWIW, and now going full salesperson, Dualit toasters are low-tech and minimalist. The timer is clockwork. There is no automatic pop-up function; you can depress a lever to raise the toast during cooking to check its colour, if you like. All parts are serviceable/replaceable. I've had my bog-standard Dualit (plus two cages) for 20+ years, and so far I've not had to replace even a heating element; and this with usage at least five days a week.
Using a real oven for this is kind of a massive waste of energy. I got a smallish countertop convection oven and it's basically replaced nearly all uses I previously had for a small toaster oven and our proper mounted oven that takes 8 million years to preheat, along with a good chunk of microwave uses. The big one only gets used for really big stuff now, maybe once every few months at most.
Dunno man, mine takes less then 5 minutes to get to about 150°c. I never measured it but just activating it before I take a pizza from the freezer is enough time to get it fully preheated. It really depends on the quality of the oven i think. There isn't that much more Air to heat so the wasted energy is less then you'd intuitively expect. And regular sandwich irons take at least as much energy, because it's not an enclosed space, consequently bleeding a lot of energy into the room
Your oven is miraculous compared to every fixed oven I've ever had access to.
At any rate we're talking about toast here and an oven broiler only has one setting (usually): all the way on, so you're using as much energy as it takes to brown a steak just to crisp up a bit of bread.
It's not really about heating up the air, anyways, toasters and broilers mostly directly heat things. A toaster (or toaster oven or countertop convection) just has the elements closer so can direct more energy into the bread and less to.. everything else.
Toaster ovens and toasters are at most 1800W appliances. Typical electric oven elements are in the 3000-3500W range. If you're broiling, toaster ovens are much more efficient.
Ovens I've used take roughly 15minutes to warm to 400F (200C), regardless of if they are electric or gas.
If you apply the same anti-consumption calculation to everything in life I applaud you wholeheartedly.
That said, you can buy a toaster oven for $30 from Walmart, and that cost covers the energy, material, transportation, and labour, plus markups at each stage. If you assume a $0.10/kWh energy cost, you might have at absolute most 100kWh of energy used in manufacture. That puts the oven/toasteroven breakeven point from an energy perspective at no more than about 60 hours of heating element usage.
When I was reading the GP comment, I immediately thought of the Dualit toaster. I'm not at all affiliated with them, but I own the classic as well as this sandwich cage and I cannot recommend it enough. They are expensive, but user-serviceable parts means that everything broken can be easily replaced from the logic board to the heating elements.
I think we should support companies that not only support right to repair, but look towards quality and longevity of their products. Dualit makes the case. Bonus points that their classic series are hand built in-house!
It's a fun idea, but I must say I have discovered quite by chance that an inexpensive toaster oven is the tool for this job - as well as countless other jobs.
Not just toasting bruschetta - it's secretly a $60 patio oven, opening the door to things like baking fish mid-July without heating or smelling up the house.
This is my take. Mid 40s and I’ve never owned a toaster in my adult life, but the toaster oven gets frequent use. However I don’t make plain toast ever. I suppose if I did, especially in the AM, I’d see the appeal.
I still don't see the appeal, what's the advantage of the non-oven toaster? Maybe it is quicker or something? But the toaster oven is a timed device anyway, just run it while the water is boiling for coffee...
Upright toaster is very quick and low risk of burning even when left unattended. I my experience, that timed example falls apart unless you're right there to take it out of the oven. I don't drink coffee so have no reason to hang out in the kitchen. I'd start it then go to my room and get dressed and return to my toast on my own time. However, my toaster oven behaves like a real oven and holds heat even when the elements turn off, I'd have to do a lot of experimentation to figure out the right time/temp setting. Figuring out the desired setting on a upright is incredibly easy. Once set, it's set and forget. You just push the button, walk away, return when you want to eat your toast.
Toaster's smaller and easier to clean. Quicker to start, if only slightly. Probably faster. Wouldn't be surprised if they're more power efficient per slice of finished toast. Toaster oven, being large and having so much functionality overlap with a normal stove (and microwave, to some extent), is far less common (at least in the US) than the smaller and more focused toaster. Most two-slice toasters you can easily stuff in a drawer or cabinet. Toaster ovens demand permanent counter space.
Non-oven toaster is better at making toast. They do a more even job on both sides. Toaster ovens never quite get it right and bread placement is finicky, too close to the door and it often doesn't brown well especially in cheap models. I still use a toaster oven because it's more versatile but it IS worse at making toast.
I think it’s likely those people just don’t want toast bad enough that they’d be willing to cook it that way. Juice isn’t worth the squeeze type thing.
Meanwhile if you’re in the cohort that enjoys homemade toast, enough very infrequently, you almost immediately find value in owning even a $10 toaster.
Yeah I'm pretty confused as to why people are suggesting all toasters with super-dupe sandwich cage thingies. Why care about the orientation of your food while it is toasting?
It's easier to evenly heat a vertical slice of bread, for one. Most times I've used a toaster oven I've ended up with one side cooked much more than the other. Plus a horizontal toaster oven takes up a lot more counter/cabinet space, which is at a premium in a lot of kitchens. (I don't have a fancy toaster or fancy sandwich accessories, but I do really like the idea of multiple-use appliances.)
Generally I'm salty at people going full sales mode. But this time? I'm not even mad
Sandwich cages are the kind technological solution people in general just have something of a blind spot against. Made myself a note if I decide to buy a toaster when I move next year
Removable stainless steel tray at the bottom of the toaster. The metal panels that the toaster rests on are easily accessible too. It doesn't have a spring-loaded "pop", but rather there's a lever on the side of the toaster to lift or lower the toast.
it is closer to a panini maker that you'd think... lets call it a poor mans panini even if it isn't very cheap.
The cage is very stiff and squeezes the slices very tightly together. So get the bread thickness and filling right, and it doesn't drip much/at all, and the slices will stick together. Crusts help. So it's not unlike a dedicated panini/sandwich toaster.
It's not perfect, a dedicated device is worth it if you're going to use it a lot and/or you have the counter space.
I've been looking for a toaster that works as well as the ones made 60 years ago. And for once, a marketing page has me convinced to pry open my wallet.
But there is no link or button anywhere on the page that tells me how to buy one. :(
In the UK, you can find Dualit stuff in stores that have a kitchen appliance section (John Lewis, say). I've seen them in shops in Germany and the Czech Republic, too. Not sure where you're based, though. Mind you, there is a little shopping trolley icon at the top right corner of the page ...
They're engineered for restaurants so they're absolute overkill for any home use. Your home toaster isn't going to successfully pump out 400 slices of toast per hour.
They're engineered for home use, that's why they are sold at home depot, on amazon, and in retail outlets.
Restaurants buy proper commercial gear, from hospitality supply depots. You don't buy restaurant ovens, and gear, from amazon or home depot. A strong tell is, restaurants aren't looking for candy red, enamel coated stuff. They want stainless, and their gear is hidden away in the kitchen, and they don't want to pay a penny more for trend.
Honestly, why would you say that? There is nothing about this that is commercial.
A 30 yr parts warranty is what tells people it's actually well engineered.
Searching for "Dualit toaster" on Amazon brings up their classic line as the first result. While available in a range of colours both the four and six slice versions are advertised as "Built for commercial use." https://www.dualit.com/products/original-toasters
My aunt had the six slice version rated for 240 slices an hour when she ran a bed and breakfast. I've also seen the four slice one in smaller cafes. All in the polished stainless steel finish of course.
I want to give a shoutout to a similar but much nerdier design, which is no longer sold. Kenmore (rebadged as De'Longhi) used to make a single long-slot toaster with an adjustable width all the way out to about 2 inches. I have one. The heat element isn't amazing, and it, like the Dualit, is manual lift with a timer. But critically, you can move the toaster elements manually together or away from one another with a lever on the top of the toaster. In other toasters, the elements are fixed in position regardless of the bread width. As a result, this toaster is amazing for big thick hand-cut slices of bread. And no need for a sandwich cage at all: you can put entire hoagies in there.
The cage holds the bread slices together, creating more friction for the cheese to counter the gravitational force. So somewhat surprisingly, little if any cheese drips out.
This morning I was making toast in my cheapo toaster and was reminded of the Dualit a customer brought in last year for me to repair. The date code was 1997 and it sounded like it was the first heating element replacement it had needed in that time. I thought the one side/two side heating element switch was particularly clever.
Honestly I was just impressed that the parts were available. Most consumer-grade toasters use nearly-identical mechanisms, with zero available replacement parts (maybe a crumb tray if you're lucky).
Considering their two-slice toaster I just looked up is $300, it better have repair parts available for the next, IDK, 50 years at least, not to be a complete rip-off. I expect I'll go through a half-dozen toasters in my life, and probably won't spend that much total (inflation adjusted).
That was the same conclusion I came to. I replaced my $20 toaster from 2015 with nearly-identical $30 toaster in 2020. I had looked into a lot of options to avoid the unified toaster box mechanism, including building my own, and eventually decided that the value proposition just wasn't there (especially considering how infrequently I make toast).
Right, I'm sure it's worth it for someone who's really into toast, and I get the whole buy-it-for-life thing, but I try to be a little selective about what I go that hardcore with, and a toaster doesn't pass that test for me. Shit, that's almost a quarter of what I recently paid for an entire stove, or about half the price of the cheapest stove that store had.
Conventional toasters are so cheap it makes no sense to try to repair them. Plus they aren't built to be repaired at all. When my last one died I tried taking it apart to see what went wrong (element burned through as it turned out) and see if I could fix it, but the whole mechanism was basically as single piece put together with spot welds and rivets, and with part markup being at least 2x or 3x initial cost there would be no way repairing it would make sense. I could gripe about it being cheap junk designed to fail, but it lasted over 20 years and browned thousands of slices of bread.
If some well built toaster that won't fail costs more than 4 times what the cheap toaster does, then it probably doesn't make sense to buy it. Especially if you can't guarantee that the well built toaster will actually last a lifetime.
If it cost only 4 times as much I'd probably consider it, but 10+ is just a really hard sell unfortunately. I had to scrap a perfectly good toaster because I couldn't find a replacement for a cracked plastic part that is supposed to make or break contact in a switch and engage the electromagnet. It would still toast fine if you held down the lever, and it pained me to toss it, but I couldn't source or fabricate a safe replacement part.
I'm sure the manufacturer(s) don't want to worry about self-service causing house fires though, and it costs a lot to create, maintain, and distribute a stock of replacement parts for what ultimately is a disposable appliance. I just wish I could find a solid basic consumer/prosumer toaster in the sub-$100 range.
Replacing tiny broken plastic parts is the main reason I now own a 3D printer. Granted, a toaster is one of those places where the relatively low melting point of PLA or PETG might be an issue, but it is still very useful to be able to fabricate replacement parts that are otherwise impossible to find.
Even better is how I can redesign the replacement part so it doesn't fail in the same way next time.
In theory you want anything with a finite lifespan to not need any repairs or maintenance during its lifespan and only fail once its lifespan has been exceeded.
Repairing isn't supposed to make sense, you get the next, better iteration of the product.
In practice, products fail way too early and for easily avoidable reasons justifying the need for repairs.
A story from an academic summer camp where I used to work:
In the dining hall one morning, a teacher sees three kids putting ice cubes into the toaster. The teacher walks up to them. Two of the kids dash away, leaving the third to fend for herself.
Teacher: "What are you doing?"
Student: "Putting ice cubes into the toaster."
Teacher: "Why would you do that?"
Student: "To see what would happen."
Teacher: "Okay. Let's think about this. What happens to ice when it gets hot?"
Student: "It melts?"
Teacher: "Yes, it melts into water. And what happens when you put water into an electronic device like a toaster?"
Student: "...it goes boom?"
Teacher: "So should you put ice into the toaster?"
Student: "No."
Teacher: "Thank you."
This is a camp explicitly for gifted & talented students, by the way. They are exceptionally talented in many ways, but they're still 11 years old.
> This was a camp explicitly for gifted & talented students, I might add
Believe me, they're the worst ;)
My son recently got on the wrong train to get home from school, it was one that was "fast" that is it doesn't stop in the place where we live, his train sailed straight through our station and the next several stations, before it finally stopped somewhere and he got off.
At this point he (rightly) whipped out his phone and called me for help/advice. I checked the train timetables, figured out that although I could have gone and picked him up in the car, it would actually be quicker - and perhaps a learning experience - for him to get the train back.
So, I told him "go to platform X and get the train at HH:MM and it will bring you home".
He went to platform X, but unwisely got on the first train which arrived, which unfortunately was a delayed - fast(!) - service. So, he ended up going in the other direction on a fast train - and (again) not stopping - straight through our station, until his train eventually reached somewhere it did stop at.
At this point he phoned me in tears. I got in the car and drove there to pick him up.
We filed that under "learning experience". We seem to be having plenty of them...
When I was 10 or 11 on a camping trip I watched an adult make sopaipillas, on a propane camp stove no less. So the morning after I get home I get up at 6AM and try to recreate the recipe from memory. My mom is a bit a of health nut, so for flour I used the whole-wheat we had available and instead of a frying oil I used olive oil. I turned on the gas stove and smoked the entire 2000sqft two story house out with a grease and burning dough fire.
Even if a video I could watch online was available in the 1990s, the recipe would still fail no matter how safe the instructions were because I misunderstood the base concepts. My mom taught me safety in the kitchen afterwards.
I was that 12-year-old. My brain still works this way when tackling novel problems.
If I may suggest, instead of reprimands (I'd imagine your kid knows they'd messed up and won't try this experiment again), use these situations to teach your child about forming hypotheses, questioning assumptions and doing reality checks before starting an experiment.
Horizontal sandwich toasters are the popular kind of toasters around my parts. It can make from plain toasts to fully stuffed sandwiches and are not that hard to clean either. I guess Americans will consider them more as a grill though.
Panini presses are less common here only* because they take up more kitchen real estate than a smaller upright appliance and can be reasonably replaced by a skillet. "George Foreman grills" were in vogue for a few years in the 2000s, but I rarely ever see them now.
Same as a panini press. We've never owned a toaster, which seem weird to some. We use our panini press instead. It's a flat model without any grill marks. Easy to clean and makes perfectly even toast.
The bread dries out in our press also. You can see steam being released before it gets hot enough to smoke.
One bonus way I like to make it for myself is keep the lid open and only cook one side. This leaves one side moist and other crispy. Downside to toasting one side is it's slower due to no pressure.
Cooking both sides with lid down is quicker, but you have to be careful with the height setting you use. We know how to make it perfectly now, but when we first got it we were making squished cracker-like toast.
It's still different though, enough for me to have a preference. Maybe I didn't or can't articulate that difference or you find it a close enough substitute (or outright preference). Moisture content aside, toasting by warm air and radiant heat and toasting by direct contact with hot metal plates creates enough of a difference for me to have a preference. Minor differences in cooking methodologies can make significant changes to mouth feel and other aspects that factor into taste/flavor.
> Our 12-year-old recently tried to make himself "cheese on toast" by putting both cheese and uncooked bread into the (almost brand new, upright) toaster. Aaargh!
I know it's tempting to blame modern technological monstrosities for this nonsense, but kids were lighting toasters on fire before the internet.
Source: lit a toaster on fire, prior to the January 1983 IPv4 migration on the ARPANET (and long before I knew what any of that meant).
The "cheese on toast" anecdote was told in response to someone blaming modern technology for "outright faking craft and cooking tips". Contextually I gathered that modern technology might be part of the conversation.
That's one way to read it, but it might just be a related anecdote that the poster wanted to share. Without any explicit mention of blaming modern technology I don't think it's fair to make the assumption that the text is doing that.
Just because you respond to something doesn't mean you are either refuting it or agreeing with it.
Are people using the word toaster to refer to two different appliances in this thread? In American English a toaster is a device that holds bread vertically between heating elements. There's a similarly named device called a toaster oven which is essentially a standard electric oven that's been shrunk down to countertop size.
> a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster
I'm not (currently) a parent, so this may be off base, but I am currently in the crunch part of the process so looking to learn:
Is there not a better opportunity for this to be a learning experience by making it a couple of hours of your kid's time to do that cleaning? I know my adult life has benefited from my parents' insistence that I clean up my own messes, and 12-year-olds are certainly capable of generating elbow grease.
Yes and no. Punishing your kid for some dumb but innocent action has the potential to make them too cautious. Additionally, they might damage the toaster because they have no experience on how to properly open and clean it and that would make things much worse. That's especially true if your kid might be neuro-divergent - e.g. kids with ADHD tend to be clumsy but cannot help it, they might be 30% behind in motor coordination. So your 12yo might have the eye-hand coordination of a 7-8yo, and I would not let a kid that age clean a toaster on their own.
IMO, the best course of action would be to not ridicule or reprimand them but explain how this wasn't the best course of action and then clean the toaster together with the kid - that way they learn how to do it and don't feel like an idiot. And you don't have to fume over what your kid did wrong but spend some time together.
Obviously, if your kid actually IS dumb and reckless, things would be different.
I certainly agree that modulating the level of supervision of the cleaning to the kid's abilities is warranted, but I still think they should be involved to the end.
I don't see it as a punishment to make the kid stick around and help with the cleanup to the extent they can; rather, it's an attempt to practice conscientious habits (if you make a mess, you stick around to see it cleaned up even if you need help to do so), in addition to the specific learning experience that some things are really hard to clean, so we should be careful in our experiments with those things.
As cleaning a toaster most likely involves sticking things into it (like a brush, maybe even a knife to scrape off the burnt stuff) and you also don't want your kids to stick stuff (especially metal) into a toaster, I'd say it's safer to skip the "elbow grease" lesson in this special case.
About ten years ago, I bought one of those small countertop toaster ovens that is roughly big enough for four pieces of bread to lie flat in it. It became the best $100 I've ever spent. We cook everything small enough to fit in it, including toast with cheese :) . We've since only used our regular full-size oven maybe half as often, because this small countertop one is so much faster and more convenient
No need for an actual toaster, although this one takes a minute or two longer. As an added bonus, my mother-in-law hates waiting that extra minute or two, so that's a big win in my book.
So drop it off at a salvage location. OP was complaining about salvaging it, like it was necessary. If you want to do is as a fun personal project, go for it, but it is wasteful of human time to salvage something that cheap rather than add it to a scrap pile for a professional salvage company to process in bulk.
As a bonus, the kid learns that if you arent careful with your items they may break and be gone. you dont waste hours of your time on something that should cost about 1 hour of your time at work max.
Edit: Agree to disagree, but my post is still a valid position to hold and im open to conversation. but sure use downvote as a dislike button - we are all familiar with where that gets us.
okay guess im an asshole. go use a salvaged toaster in your kitchen. for $20, id rather not risk burning my house down or teaching my kids to put their hands inside the toaster but to each their own
Replacing it teaches the kid that if you break something, it magically comes back like a respawn in a video game.
I'd be very tempted to work with him to help clean it; let him do much of the grunt work whilst I helped and supervised (though to be honest I wouldn't be that hard on my kid for doing this unless he had been told don't do it beforehand. I've done enough boneheaded things in my day!).
>The salvaging actually helped the learning experience immensely - shows the kid that carelessness can have lasting consequences.
If the kid was present for it. Otherwise, its very much just another "oopsie" they did that mom and dad clean up behind the scenes and they have no idea what the difference is between ruining a toaster and spilling a glass of milk.
So what would the learning experience consist of then?
> If the kid was present for it.
OP mentioned several hours of work + dry runs in the garden. Pretty hard to miss that, unless they're perpetually glued to their screens (which would be the bigger concern). PS: Also, unless you take your kid to a physical store, the new toaster will pop up even more magically than the cleaned one.
the learning experience is that the toaster they were familiar with is gone because of what they did. very simple. I guess I am the only one here that doesnt want to fuck with toaster repair. they arent worth it. they can cause fires and give electrical shocks.
honestly, the last thing i want my kid to think in that situation is that it is okay for them to put their hands in the toaster. Which they might do if they see me do it while cleaning
which is why you unplug it before working on it and make a BIG point to the kid of both hazards, and how essential it is to remove power before working on something, AND to do test runs in a safer area like outside, etc.
>>the last thing i want my kid to think in that situation is that it is okay for them to put their hands in the toaster
I'd say that you don't want them putting their hands in WHILE IT IS POWERED or HOT. Important distinction, and best started early and often. They'll see it sometime, better to have them have a context so they can tell the difference between doing the same thing when it is smart (powered down and repairing), vs Darwin Award candidate level stupid (when powered); then they can evaluate other's actions and draw the right conclusions.
If you are confident enough in your ability to convey the entire full safety message to your kid and take full responsibility for anything they do as a result of that information, then go for it. I'm just saying for $20 it isnt really worth it. I dont want my kid fucking with electronics outside the designated use-cases it was built for, period. Cheese in the toaster? item needs to be cleared by a professional again. I dont care if I feel personally competent enough to clear it myself. I have very easy and safe alternatives.
Odds are the toaster company doesnt want you mess with it either. This isnt the old days where you can just use some elbow grease and fix everything on your property. Liabilities need to be managed. Electrical items need certifications. Doing it yourself takes hours. It's just a lot of things that are unnecessary to deal with over a toaster.
If I am going to teach my kid anything about fixing electrical items it's that if it isnt working then he (or she) should unplug them and then he shouldnt touch them until certified to do so. It'll encourage them to look at the bigger picture of the problem.
Sure, as an adult we can see through red tape and feel cool about it and want to teach the same to our kid.. but it's really not worth it. Kids that are smart enough to learn the will likely experiment with new things they learn. Just because they safely unplug the item before working on it doesnt mean it's safe to plug back in afterwards.
It's totally reasonable for an individual to say "it's not worth my time and effort to fix this, I'll just replace it." Taking a moral stand against repair-and-reuse in general is weird. Some people are on a budget where replacing even a $25 toaster is not a painless expense. Some people don't like producing unnecessary waste.
And throwing it away without replacing it punishes everyone in the house for the kid's mistake.
>Taking a moral stand against repair-and-reuse in general is weird
Nowhere did I do this, and the claim is confusing because I am a supporter of repair-and-reuse in general. People are extrapolating from me saying specifically that a toaster is not worth it. Toasters cause house fires. I would always sooner replace it for $25 than salvage one.
>And throwing it away without replacing it punishes everyone in the house for the kid's mistake.
A lack of a toaster for a day or two hardly punishes anyone, and the child sees that other people can be impacted by their recklessness.
> Some people are on a budget where replacing even a $25 toaster is not a painless expense
Yeah, I am one of those people actually. I have an emergency fund that I would happily use for this 1-off incident.
What better way to teach that than have them understand if they dont respect the way something is supposed to be used, they might break it?
Could be fun to sit with them and take apart the toaster and assess it together and see if its worth cleaning or replacing and explaining why. But I wouldnt spend 2+ hours cleaning it by myself and then complaining about it
there's a lot of relevant things i could get into on it. in short though, disposable items are cheaper and despite what a lot people think - most of us are broke.
after you adjust to dealing with disposable items a lot.. you kind of grow out of the feeling that every item is special and needs to be repaired to max extent and kept for as long as it can. It feels anthropomorphic / overly sentimental to do that. the moral argument gets the curtain pulled back and there's very little substantiating it. imo, at least. Curious if you can shed better light on your moral stance here tbh. im not die-hard on this subject and would happily update my views if convinced otherwise
I respect that you have a productive hobby interest in repairing items, and for the most part I share that. But I dont see anything wrong with throwing something away that could be salvageable. Once it stops working, it is just parts and material and I now become part of the demand for toasters. What's wrong with letting toaster specialists handle toaster demand? In the time it takes me to repair a toaster, the specialists can produce 100 of them. and thanks to people like me buying from them rather than doing it myself, they remain productive members of society and get to feed themselves. And I get a couple hours back to do something else to potentially improve society or my personal life.
All that said, I do think there is a lot more we can do with waste management to better deal with disposed parts and materials, though. A lot of how we handle disposed goods is definitely wrong. we mix materials with food waste and it makes everything gross and expensive to work with. food waste really should be a hard split from everything else but maybe one day
except it isnt functional. it is covered in burnt cheese that will take hours to fix. it's a huge waste of time to clean off burnt cheese from such a tiny piece of material.
collect a bunch of similar materials from the dump and bulk clean them all into workable materials again with a pressure washer in the same amount of time.
Work an extra 2 hours, use the money to buy a new toaster, and spend the rest on food for the homeless.
the moral argument is bullshit. it's a waste of your time, and the only reason you dont think so is because you get personal enjoyment out of fixing things (i do too)
Or the other trick is to microwave the uncooked sandwich slightly (10-20 seconds) so that the cheese starts to melt and then toast it so bread and cheese both get toasty without burning.
1) toast two pieces of bread until they are dry and quite brown, this is important (to remove the water ) so that the bread does not heat up in the microwave
2) while it is toasting, cut up cheese for each slice, I use quarter inch thick 1“ x 2“ pieces, usually four per slice
3) after the bread is toasted, put them on a glass plate and butter them, then cover each with the slices of cheese
4) microwave 30s until the onset of melting
5) optional to add cold deli meat the sandwich after microwaving and combining
6) cut into fours and serve with optional dipping sauce
The dry toast and the melted cheese have a very good texture and taste and it takes about 3 minutes to make.
I make this for children often and add a bunch more cheese and meat so that four pieces of toast can be the main part of a simple lunch for 8 kids (each cut into quadrants).
Just the other day youtube suggested me this cutsie "what to do with old microwaves" video that just had the corporate jingle music over a video of a guy building various things out of microwave transformers without any kind of narration or warning of the danger.
Considering people are actually dying trying these microwave tricks, this is no longer a theoretical concern.
"For entertainment only" is such a cop-out, do whatever dangerous thing and show step by step instructions but then slap on a "for entertainment only" on it so you're safe from legal repecussions.
Excellent point. As a matter of legal principle in the United States you can't unilaterally disclaim liability for future injuries. Signs that say "not responsible for accidents on these premises" don't hold up when you run a retail store where people are expected to freely to come and go as they please.
More concretely: a perfectly reasonable judge could decide a dangerous step-by-step how-to guide negates the prior "for entertainment purposes only" warning. There's a reason Jackass frequently had skull-and-crossbone warnings and didn't show much of their set up, just the results
these are with a low voltage high current winding, instead of the standard 2000v winding, though, which is much safer. The danger of the unmodified microwave transformer isn't really so much that it has exposed mains voltage (although obviously you should be careful around that, too), but that it has 2000v+ and it's galvanically isolated, meaning no GFCI/RCD will save you (and obviously the 2000v will also do a much quicker job at passing lethal current through your heart/other organs)
Comparatively, a spot welder is "just" as dangerous as any other mains-based experiment. Not safe, but you have a pretty good shot at surviving, even if you get zapped.
It's a really common project for them. Certainly a better option than a jacobs ladder or fractal wood burning, since you have to just take the usual mains voltage precautions, and not worry about arcs and other high voltage schenanigans
> Remember, if you've got lathes and welders and assorted tools and materials, don't throw out an old microwave because you can use part of it to make a wire hot.
exactly! Plus, they do throw out 98% of the microwave... just to save a clump of iron which is one of the more easily recycled materials. Admittedly, it's in layers with resin between, but I'm sure that resin will cook right off in the massive slag crucibles.
Contact with live microwave oven transform secondaries has about a 70% fatality rate, if we believe bigclivedotcom. Eating salad has about an 0.001% fatality rate.
Actually I think I have overestimated the salad fatality rate here by orders of magnitude. If one out of every hundred thousand salads killed the eater then many, if not most, people who eat salad regularly would die of food poisoning or choking on salads rather than (as they in fact do) of heart disease, cancer, and infections.
Care to elaborate? I've been eating salad my whole life and I'm just fine. But then again, I also cook eggs with runny yolk, so I guess I'm just a renegade in the eyes of the food safety folks.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, or if you actually live in a country with poor safety standards on produce and it is a risk for food-borne diseases to eat uncooked food.
I'm clowning on safety culture. It is not very dangerous to disassemble a microwave. Many people have died from eating salad, because fresh greens arrive liberally coated in goat shit. Also, you do not need to cook pork to 160°, that is an abomination.
A glaring example of how the advertising business model incentives lead to the worst outcomes for everyone. People working at TheSoul Publishing literally waste their lives producing straight up harmful content and the consumers either get brainrot from watching it or risk serious injury and death from replicating it.
Banning advertising (or using strong regulation to make it non-profitable) so that people can directly pay for the content they want to consume. Content that provides value will survive, clickbait and this kind of crap will die off since nobody would pay for fake crafts (and those who did will ask for a refund when they try replicating it and it doesn't work).
If YouTube leaves up the dangerous videos, but removes the videos warning of that danger, then they should definitely be held liable. This is literally the worst thing they can do. Doing nothing would be better.
Automated moderation is no excuse; they designed that moderation, and they did a really poor job of it if it leaves the dangerous videos alone but removed those warning of the danger.
It reminds me a bit of YouTube removing original content videos because of fraudulent copyright claims by Big Content, except this time people can actually die. YouTube needs to clean up its act and be held liable for this stuff.
Scary. I recently did some research into what's behind the 'Jungle Builders' channels (two guys pretending to build flashy, but completely dysfunctional, pools somewhere in a forest with little more than their hands as tools). Seems to be a similar scheme, it doesn't invite viewers to recreate, but they leave a lot of litter and moscito-infested concrete pits behind. Most of them are actually in the same tiny forest somewhere in Malaysia that looks like a v2 of the Banksy theme park now.
There is a whole genre of people building "by hand" underground pools and other crazy structures in the jungles. Aside from being terribly unsafe, if you look closely you can often see marks in the dirt from machine tools that they forgot to smooth away in the soft clay.
Here's one, although I don't like it because I feel like it's overdramatizing a bit. With construction quality this low, my hinge is that the jungle will claim back those spots fairly quickly, but the (drainless!) water pits will remain moscito breeders for a considerable amount of time (and wildlife trap hazards for some time).
Yeah I wondered if this was some kind of “traditional” construction with modern style. But water-based masonry seems like a suspect choice in a rainy climate.
On the other hand I was wrong once back in the 90s.
I was looking for the aftermath specifically. Not just the channels where the structures are built. So I searched “jungle builders aftermath” and “jungle builders today”.
For documentation purposes, I googled “jungle builders are a scam,” clicked the second result which is a Reddit thread and found this in the comments 4-5 parent comments down
What I don't understand is the posting of these videos on Facebook by seemingly fake accounts. I'm in a bunch of yard sale groups and random unrelated accounts are constantly posting these hack and engineering type videos that are like 20 seconds of 50 different useless things with no explanations or other information. There's no ads displayed, there's nothing being sold or promoted and no links or way to find out more about the video.
Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money or why is this being done?
I guess my theory is somehow facebook rewards total views and then they are monetizing some other content.
> Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money or why is this being done?
Could they be building an audience to exploit later? IIRC, that's the tactic the Russian Internet Research Agency used -- build an audience with memes and cat pictures, then pivot to political propaganda.
> Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money or why is this being done?
I suspect these are trying to build reputation for the account posting them. The bizarre, inexplicable videos will get watched by a lot of users wondering WTF they are, which may cause further content posted by those accounts to be ranked higher in feeds.
The account can later be resold, used to post ads or even sell courses to become a "successful" social media influencer using the account's own metrics as selling points.
> the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos take it to another level of lethality.
The problem is, they're thinking too small. The 2kV supplies in microwaves aren't big enough.
If you used the PSU from an old single-digit-megawatts klystron TV transmitter, then you'd have about 50kV at 50A or so. Now this sounds dangerous, but believe it or not, this would be far safer to work with than a microwave transformer.
What, you don't believe me?
Of course it is! If you got a shock off it, your arm would vapourise long before your heart stopped!
Not just fabricated for the views, but reactions too. For each debunking video, some will follow the actual videos to see how bad they are. But the viewer intention doesn't matter - clicks are clicks.
The one reason I still have Youtube, after getting rid of everything else Google, is the effort I out over time into getting rid of a whole bunch crappy content proposals on my attached account. Every once in a while I have to block some channels, overall it is acceptable. Once in a while I end up on Youtube without being logged in, man is it a mess. As bad as the proposals on Internet Explorers starting page I see at work.
My wife thinks it is weird that I watch so much YouTube, because when she goes to YouTube (not signed in), she is inundated with so many spammy/scammy videos. I told her it has taken me almost 15 years to curate the feed I have. And some days I have no new videos I want to watch, so I rewatch old ones.
Really? I kinda like the '[discipline X professional] reacts to [relevant movie clips]'-type videos (like 'Navy pilot reacts to new Top Gun movie'). You find them so terrible?
> I kinda like the '[discipline X professional] reacts to [relevant movie clips]'-type videos (like 'Navy pilot reacts to new Top Gun movie').
Those are exactly the ones I'm talking about
> You find them so terrible?
Yes. All noise, no signal!
If you want to watch videos about Navy pilots doing their jobs, go right ahead. Why watch Navy pilots "reacting" to a Hollywood movie?
The average Navy pilot must know as about as much about filmmaking and acting as Tom Cruise knows about actually flying a fast jet (as opposed to being filmed sitting in the back seat and not being allowed to touch anything[0]) ?
Tom Cruise is a really bad example, because he actually does have a pilot license since 1994 and is allowed to fly some jets. [0]
I'm not looking for advice on how to make a good movie (or how to fly a plane, for that matter), but on some perspective how (un)-realistic those movies are. I think overall that sort of scrutiny does some good in terms of making movies less unrealistic (compare 80's action movies like Rambo to modern productions), producers consulting not only ex-soldiers but also physicists, doctors,...
> Tom Cruise is a really bad example, because he actually does have a pilot license since 1994 and is allowed to fly some jets
Some jet ... but not the jets in the movie!
So what's the point in getting a Navy pilot to watch him "flying" them? Apart from - of course - being able to make clickbaity videos showing their "reactions".
> perspective how (un)-realistic those movies are
Erm, why? Movies are movies.
There's loads of excellent stuff to read/watch about actual fast jet flying. Far more interesting and, well, real.
> So what's the point in getting a Navy pilot to watch him "flying" them?
They don't comment on his flying but on other aspects, like the training scenes, mission tactics, and also on the flying (by professionals) that is depicted.
> Erm, why? Movies are movies.
You might feel that way, but even then you'll have to admit that a lot of people don't make that distinction to that extent (especially kids) - so they'll end up imagining they have an idea what it would be like to be in certain situations.
> Far more interesting and, well, real.
How would I know what's realistic and what's not (in areas so far outside of what I do) if I didn't rely on people with this knowledge?
> If it's realism you're after, how about listening to a professional talking about their profession?
I actually do that too, why the false dichotomy?
> Why bring Hollywood into it?
Because I've already watched the movie and now I want to know what to make of it. Claiming that it's all completely unrealistic 'because Hollywood' is a far more uninformed position than listening to an expert give a balanced account. Watching a documentary and then assuming that that gives me the required knowledge to make a realistic assessment sounds completely delusional.
And why do you care so much that the title is designed to induce clicks? Every outlet from solo influencers to NYT/WSJ-style media giants creates their online content with this mindest nowadays. It's only clickbait if the content doesn't live up to what's promised in the title.
> Because I've already watched the movie and now I want to know what to make of it. Claiming that it's all completely unrealistic 'because Hollywood' is a far more uninformed position than listening to an expert give a balanced account.
It's a action movie. It's designed to entertain you for a couple of hours. Did it entertain you? Did you enjoy it? What did you think of it? What did you like? What didn't you like?
Spoiler: You know the plot was completely made up, right?
I honestly can't understand why one would want to seek help on YouTube to know "what to make of" an entertainment experience which is an action movie with a made-up plot.
Maybe this is an age thing :( I guess I was watching action movies before the web was born.
I've seen a few videos recommended to me that are psychologist/therapist reacts. I'm pretty sure psychology and therapy without ever meeting and talking to the subject is generally considered unethical quackery.
Psychology/therapy may be a bit of an outlier in that sense, we wouldn't expect a nuclear engineer to have physically inspected a failed reactor before talking about accidents. And even they may have relevant things to say, psychology/therapy isn't only about individual diagnosis.
That's simply an appeal to authority, right in the title. I'm an programming professional and most react videos I could make about the art would be better served in another format. Not to mention it's tailored to clickbait.
Appeal to authority is a good point. In terms of clickbait, I feel that applies only when the content doesn't live up to what's promised, and I found the content quite decent in several cases.
Dunno, I have used both since I was like 13. Also, we used to weld and do all sorts of things (acetylene torching, lathe, casting, grinding, sawing, milling) mostly unsupervised with very little instruction in middle/high school metal shop. I don't remember any accidents.
Hello, Mr. or Ms. Survivor Bias! I used to cut firewood with my father using a 3 foot buzz saw made over 100 years ago*, and had but only the most token of safety guards (ignore the giant power take-off belt that's just waiting to consume some of your loose clothing, and you with it), yet I still have all limbs, fingers, and toes!
And yet I still think it asinine to shrug shoulders and say, "I dunno, nobody I know ever got hurt, yuk, yuk, yuk." If one cannot see the potential for harm in such scenarios, you are one of those accidents waiting to happen.
Speaking of a 3 foot buzz saw, my grandpa is rebuilding a sawmill with a 54-inch blade powered by a 1990's corvette engine. Fairly certain someone is going to get hurt on that one.
Not nearly as dangerous as the cars those kids were driving a year or two later.
It's deeply unfortunate that the parental attitude towards tools these days is never "learn to use it safely" but rather "Hide it away! Don't you dare let MY kid near filthy manual labor!"
The college that I went to had all the engineers learn how to run a metal-turning lathe. ME, EE, BME, I think even the Computer Engineers had to learn how to run a lathe. They put us through a safety class first, which mostly consisted of how not to run a lathe (no loose clothes, no long hair, no jewelry below the elbow, no necklaces, etc). The only injury that I know from that class was from when we learned how to run welders - one of the guys caught his shirt on fire with an oxy-acetalene torch.
Yeah, lathes are dangerous, but no more or less dangerous than a lot of other things in the world. Cars are dangerous. Turning on a light switch in the wrong context can be dangerous. If you approach this stuff with the proper respect and caution, you should be fine.
Lathes are only seen this way because they can go very big. The instant death accidents happen with the big ones, especially the ones designed to quickly remove lots of material from big metal pieces.
Otherwise lathes aren't more dangerous than any other piece of machinery with exposed moving pieces. In particular the ones designed to turn small pieces of wood can't do much harm.
Don't leave the chuck key in, wear eye protection, no loose hair, no loose clothes, don't be stupid and you will be fine.
… where the glue gun has orders of magnitude more power and speed and the “use electrical resistance to create heat” portion of the show necessarily happens OUTSIDE the housing. It’s a cute comparison but a MIG welder is a lot more dangerous than a glue gun.
I’m also gonna pick a nit here and say “like a hot glue gun” is what you say about a MIG weld that is done entirely improperly. If the filler material is just acting like glue, you might be sticking metal together but you’re not welding. So this tongue-in-cheek description also misleads newbs into creating bad welds.
It’s possible to weld so poorly that you are really brazing, not welding. And what a hot glue gun does is really analogous to brazing rather than welding.
I discovered when I first bought a MIG that there's a world of a difference between "I have a welder" and "I am a welder". I used to be bloody good at oxyacetylene, too...
"That's because making cool things looking surprisingly easy goes viral way better than actual reality-grounded instructions" <- I feel like this might be the soul of the whole "no code" movement and why it bugs me a bit.
There's also a lot of really really bad "electrical engineers" on YouTube, particularly from India I notice, who build stuff that runs directly off the mains with no isolation.
Oh and the anti 5G maniacs ripping people off for magic stickers
Yes. But also, since the giants do only the bare minimum of automated moderation with no oversight and no checks and balances, the systems are easy to game by bad actors.
See the example of someone on HN saying his wife lost Whatsapp account for reporting spam - the spammers probably retaliated from hundreds of fake accounts. Same with this youtube video. Same with people gettong reported az spam ehrn criticizing certain nations.
And the giants of course do not care, why would they.
> for the adtech giants nothing matters except the number of clicks
Yet another example why advertising is a cancer on society.
In a market not corrupted by advertising, this kind of garbage content wouldn't exist because nobody would pay for it since the content they show is false and misleading.
But with advertising, the payment is automatic, non-refundable and happens preemptively even if the person doesn't consume the majority of the content (sometimes a single click is enough), therefore it becomes more profitable to mass-produce fake content designed to solicit clicks rather than content that provides true value such as information or entertainment.
Ann Reardon's (subject of this article) channel calls out these other channels and she even tries to recreate these fake crafts to prove they are fake.
Yes! The fact that one of Ann Reardon's main interests is in debunking stupid/dangerous craft and cooking videos, and yet her video is the one getting taken down, is an important irony that seems lost on the author of the boingboing post, and many other commenters here.
My kids and I love watching her videos, especially for iron-stomach Dave eating whatever she cooks, and learning the occasional Australian slang ("<adjective> as" == "very <adjective>")
I feel sorry for Dave. How many times do you think he's come home to an absolute mess, weird kitchen smells and Ann has just mumbled something about YouTube?
She's definitely one of my favourites, and I have a copy of her cookbook that I use a lot.
Now I want to try to make a three layer cake in a toaster. I'm sure it can be done with the right technique and tools. Even if it's wildly impractical and will yield a tiny result.
Ann Reardon, the subject of this article, is a good scientist who's been debunking these 'food hack' videos for years. She eventually branched out into debunking other things like this.
I've always been impressed with her tenacity in challenging this sort of thing while also managing to educate and entertain. It must be soul destroying trying to fight this endless tide of misinformation, which is constantly boosted by the youtube algorithm.
Glad to see this comment. I'm a huge Ann Reardon fan, and her original video that got her into this "debunking" theme is still great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6abePkXncCM
Still, it's a little depressing that someone who made great, inspiring, detailed and actually feasible cooking/baking content found that they couldn't really pay the bills with that content, but instead it turned out that debunking all the BS on YouTube was a better way to actually get paid.
I'm a huge fan as well. She does an amazing job, and seems to be one of the only people on YT who is actually pointing out all the BS a lot of these "crafts" and "baking" channels are.
And she communicates a lot with YT trying to get them to remove some of the more dangerous "hacks" and I believe has also been successful with certain attempts in the past.
I see these constantly on instagram, and usually comment something skeptical, but it is drowned out beneath 500 comments of just heart and fire emoji’s. Maybe these recipes existing as just theoretical things you could do are enough for most people.
I thought it was just annoying that they're often on the top results of searches and thought of them as just digital clutter.
But for people to post outright dangerous and deadly instructions is negligent at best and I would say more accurately in the realm of manslaughter at least.
Who are the people watching this stuff? I assume it's largely women and parents, as a lot of the "hacks" are beauty or parenting related. I watched a few minutes and all the ideas were just... terrible? Ranging from silly to impractical to dangerous.
Stay At Home Mom is a massive market segment with a lot of purchasing decision power. Long-form advertising targeted at SAHMs is nearly as old as the advertising industry itself. This is just the next iteration.
Video does particularly well with this segment (as opposed to text) because of the nature of parenting and housekeeping -- lots of time spent on your feet with busy hands and occasionally available eyes. The same reason radio/long-form podcasting is popular with truckers. Or text with office workers (relatively speaking). It's entertainment you can engage with during work hours between or during tasks.
Plenty of people hate this shit and still watch it because they got tricked. I watched (skimmed) like 12 videos yesterday trying to find a hack to locate my empty AirPods case. There’s apparently no way to do it but each video had a more infuriatingly false title than the last.
It would never even occur to me to watch a video on finding my AirPods case. Either there is an article or forum post for it, or I need to post a question on a forum, but no way am I sifting through the garbage that is YouTube.
Plenty of my searches will lead me to a solid stackoverflow / reddit / quora / forum answer but another large percentage only seem to lead to the blog equivalent of the offending YouTube videos, hyper tuned to show a description that leads me to believe it's what I want but delivering nothing.
Same. It's probably a generational thing, with the split at maybe 20 or something where video became both searchable and trivial in terms of bandwidth.
But, to be fair, the Google-as-front-door internet has become totally useless for these types of tasks as well. Those wiki-style pages with huge walls of text offering nonsense advice are a plague.
If you don't mind explaining: how? I constantly find myself on those (very heavy) pages and haven't found a good way to avoid them except to restrict my search to certain domains (SO, Reddit, etc.)
I guess it is mostly heuristics learned over a couple decades. I use an ad blocker (Wipr), so if there are problems loading the page, that is a flag. If it looks like an SEO churned out page with lots of links and poor sentence structure, another flag.
A lot of times, you do end up on Reddit and SO, but there are some good forums available if you dig deep, especially for car/HVAC/home maintenance related stuff. Sometimes you have to join a forum and post a question.
I am hoping I can teach mine to be sufficiently literate and good at reading to prefer scanning through text rather than watch video. I assume many others have thought the same, who knows if I will be successful.
to be fair I can't google for shit anymore either. Try to find an actual review or more information about an item and the first 90 results are SEO spam and places selling said item.
I'm not sure cases have Bluetooth - I think they use either of the inserted AirPods as a proxy to communicate its status to the phone (the power pins must have a minimal communication protocol to allow the case to talk to the pods).
I sometimes find myself watching similar content for a bit like a kind of engineering "reality" show. no real goal in mind and absolutely no intention of doing any of the things though. Knowing now that they put out videos suggesting people mess with live transformers... i think im over it.
Certainly there must be some kind of liability here. One could never air these kinds of instructional videos on TV.
As the defacto online video experience, YouTube has both become the FCC and NBC - both the governing body and the distributor, yet they take none of the risk and assume no liability of either.
YouTube's moderation is ridiculous, and it demonstrates the problem Google has in general. They don't like paying actual people to moderate their sites, and rely on automated systems and bots to do everything for them. So, if there's ever an issue (or you have a bunch of scammers mass reporting you because you debunk their 'work'), then YouTube/Google seems to think you're the problem instead of the scumbags.
We need things to change here. We need Google to moderate their services properly, and we need these scammers to get arrested/sued/whatever for misleading info, and putting people's lives at risk.
What's beyond belief is that even the auto moderation is useless. I've cost count of how many video's I've seen the comment:
"It's finally here: someurl"
*On every single video comment*
Or:
"(Username:Whatsapp±SOMENUMBER):
Chat up for more info"
Again, on every comment. It seems like Youtube just doesn't care in the slightest to bothered with the most basic auto moderation of the most overtly obvious spam.
> We need things to change here. We need Google to moderate their services properly,
Human moderation isn’t perfectly consistent, either. It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually.
What are people willing to give up in exchange for a human-moderated version of YouTube? Would we be okay if they charged a $3 “moderation fee” on every upload to cover the cost of paying someone to watch the video and evaluate how it fits YouTube’s rules? The big creators wouldn’t care, but the small time videos would immediately stop being uploaded and competitor websites would become popular overnight.
I don’t see demands for perfect human moderation of YouTube uploads as realistic in any way.
Exactly. A rogue moderator might make the wrong call on a video, but unlike an algorithm that call won't affect hundreds of videos at once. And also unlike an algorithm the moderator might be a different person the next day. So mistakes are not magnified the way they are with an algorithm.
Could this be a browser plugin? No idea how "invasive" a plugin can be, but ad-blockers and privacy plugins seem to be able to change a lot on webpages (including blocking ad videos on Youtube).
So theoretically it seems possible to build a plugin that moderates comments on web pages ... "No one expects things to be perfect" ... so it does not hurt to try?
> It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually.
You could flip this around, however? Why is YouTube promoting videos that no responsible human has reviewed?
These videos don't just trip and fall into people's feeds. They're selected by YouTube's recommendation algorithm, presumably targeting maximum engagement. That decision is automated, but it's still an editorial decision -- it's not based on an objective, chosen criterion like "most recent" or even "most viewed."
This isn't how YouTube is currently structured (nor the other social media platforms), but I think it's fair to suggest that if a platform is in the business of picking and choosing winners, it should bear at least a moral responsibility for the content it promotes.
YouTube could set a views threshold to make manual reviews scale. My guess is 99% of what people watch is the top 0.1% most popular videos which makes things manageable.
Highly dangerous video seen by 5,000 people not a big deal. Highly dangerous video seen by 5,000,000 people is.
And this small percentage of popular videos are made by a smaller amount of reputable or disreputable channels. Give me the tools and a few months and I'll clean up the English-speaking toxic content by pruning it at the source. But that won't happen because removing these dangerous, stupid, click-bait farms hurts the business. Fine, whatever. But stop claiming moderation is "impossible" or "too expensive." That is a heinous lie.
> Would we be okay if they charged a $3 “moderation fee” on every upload to cover the cost of paying someone to watch the video and evaluate how it fits YouTube’s rules? The big creators wouldn’t care, but the small time videos would immediately stop being uploaded and competitor websites would become popular overnight.
That would actually be pretty ideal - most consumers watch YouTube for the bigger channels and popular content anyway, so they would stay on the platform, which would validate that revenue model. The smaller producers and consumers would both leave, which would help build competitors to YouTube. The big producers who remain will be slightly disincentivized to spam low-quality videos (including those text-to-speech automated ones that some people here have found). And, Google will have no excuse for not using humans to moderate videos anymore (can't cite "cost concerns" when you're literally pricing it in).
> Human moderation isn’t perfectly consistent, either. It would be extraordinarily expensive to expect YouTube to have humans moderate everything manually.
Those aren't just random channels though, they are top youtube channels, surely they can manage to review the most popular ones at least...
And we're talking about tips which can make people die if they follow them, that's the most clear cut case, there's nothing opinion based.
I'd be happy with a law that said Youtube were responsible for people who hurt themselves copying videos which they were recommended which were wildly unsafe.
If the result of that is Google has to charge people a moderation fee for videos they then recommend, then fine, that's the cost we have to pay.
What about a $3 fee that automatically comes out of the ad revenue when your video exceeds $Arbitrary limit (they could start at 200,000 views to start with).
Moderation is very complicated especially since it can be subjective based on the background and skill level of who is watching the video. Would it be possible to crowd source this? For example, I could add a filter to my search saying exclude 'profanity' and videos with profanity would be removed. Or exclude videos that are 'dangerous' or 'for entertainment only' and those would be removed. My thought is that we should use the shear numbers of persons watching the videos to our advantage. Honestly, I sort of do this by looking at the comments since many times you can gather the flavor of the video based on the comments. This could also be used to political bias. Videos with a right-wing leaning would get tagged as leaning right and vice-versa. Also, content creators would be incentivized to accurately tag their videos and perhaps the algorithm could penalize content creators with discrepant self-tag versus what viewers tag as.
This case pretty clearly crosses the line into criminal negligence / manslaughter / murder. If they were are book publisher or TV network, someone at Google would be facing jail time.
The "moderation" for Shorts is just spectacular! And I don't mean good.
The amount of back-to-back "Hi I'm Elon Musk and I'm something something bitcoin something something..." deepfakes is astounding. There are a handful that are seemingly pixel for pixel identical, yet as much as you report them over and over again, they only seem to shown more and more.
Then there are the countless sexually inappropriate ones that also fills the stream.
The gruesome ones showing rats/mice getting spiked to death, animals suffering on the side of the road after they've been hit by a truck/bus/car, so on and so forth.
Okay, so assorted cryptocurrency scams have obvious financial incentives, and I assume the sexual ones are trying to get people onto a paid site. What's driving the animal gore videos? I can't think that there's anything to sell there; is it just people uploading stuff for the shock value?
It's 4-5 distinct animal gore videos but through different user accounts, so i don't think it's just people uploading stuff. Maybe there are accounts (compromised or just bots) racing against each other bringing content over from TikTok?
And who knows what happens when you click on links in the description or follow instructions in the overlays. I swipe away before the gore comes and haven't read any of the descriptions or overlays.
Yeah, it's not just about moderation being automated, it's about automated moderation being based on crowdsourced flagging. The debunked will always have stronger incentives than the debunking. Actually the debunking don't even have any incentive to flag at all, because they require the scandal to vlog about. It's worse than the SEO battles.
> we need these scammers to get arrested/sued/whatever for misleading info
Don't you think that it's the broadcaster that should be penalised? It is Goo/YT that is promulgating the misinfo. The scammers/creators would go away, if Goo/YT moderated as if their income depended on it.
Eh, both are to blame here. The platforms/broadcasters for hosting this content and not removing it when it's proven to be dangerous/illegal/whatever, and the creators for making such content and putting people's lives at risk. It's like the situation with fake products on Amazon; yes Amazon shares some of the blame for not policing their marketplace, but we can't let the scammers/counterfeiters off the hook either, since they're deliberately trying to scam people.
Plus these folks likely wouldn't go away, they'd just go to other places to distribute their 'wares'.
But @mrtksn (the GP?) states that google doesn't publish it, rather it's published by the author/uploader.
I think that's sophistry.
If I visit Youtube's website, search for "xyz", and play the first result, which happens to have been uploaded by "abc", that's analogous to visiting guardian.co.uk, and reading the top article on the page, bearing the byline "Paul Mason". Paul Mason didn't publish it; The Guardian published it.
The legal fiction that a system like Youtube or Faceache is not a publisher is to protect independent message-boards from being sued, e.g. for libel. But I think even a tiny indy message-board, with say 100 users and no income, is still a publisher. I don't see how you can draw a clear line between the tiny indy publisher and a giant one like Youtube.
And I don't see how you can draw a clear line between something like Youtube, and Guardian Online. Both publishers accept content submissions from multiple authors, review them (The Guardian perhaps not so much), and make them available to the public, possibly with amendments (e.g. overlaid or prefixed with ads).
So I'm sorry: I can't see how Faceache or Youtube is not a publisher, while The Guardian is.
If the laws relating to what you can and can't publish are wrong, then they should be fixed. But simply declaring that a system is a "platform" doesn't make it not a publisher, and doesn't fix the defective publishing laws.
I would agree that at a certain point there's a responsibility of Alphabet recommending videos that can literally cause viewers to accidentally kill themselves.
I would love to know how many hours of video get appealed each day. I'd be willing to bet there isn't even close to enough money to pay people to make decisions on all of that.
I am SHOCKED that Google wants to make money and does not care if they hurt people in the process! SHOCKED!
If google had to moderate YouTube in any meaningful way they would go broke, not only because of how much it would cost, but also because of the lawsuits.
There is a reason we have regulations in the United States. It is so things like YouTube never happen in the first place. If they were treated as publishers in the first place we would not be having had this problem.
YouTube is a broadcaster with millions of independent program directors. Until it is seen as such my the Feds nothing will change.
I can't watch Electroboom because he always gives himself shocks in every video. Don't care that they are small or it's set up, I can't stand watching it, makes me ill. Seems to be interesting stories he's telling otherwise though, so it's a shame.
I think he's great. Often you have people preaching cargo-culted safety rules without communicating the reasons for them, when you then see other people blindly disregarding those rules without apparent ill effect that reinforces people to do stupid things.
Mehdi/Electroboom shows you what you can do, and why it's dangerous; usually by shocking himself, blowing something up, or having stuff catch fire. He isn't teaching mindless, disprovable safety culture, but showing you the actual boundaries you have to respect. As such he has both videos of "let's shock me with lowly increasing voltage to see when it starts to hurt" and "ranting about badly wired wall sockets and lack of GFCI in this hotel room".
I'm a fan of ElectroBoom, but I have to agree, some of them are pretty horrifying to watch. The Jacob's Ladder video sticks out in my mind - I still can't decide whether it was staged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g1z47U_kZQ
Some of the shocks are completely fake. For example, in the classic electric guitar video [0], if you advance frame-by-frame and capture the frame containing the flash [1], it is obviously Photoshopped in. Poorly, I might add.
Not everyone is the same or thinks the same way. Maybe I'm more scared of electricity than others, don't know? (Extended) family have died in accidents, too, so it's a well-respected hazard in my family.
Are you really saying that telling clueless people that they will get painful shocks encourages bad safety habits?
If you show a kid a video about someone intentionally putting e.g. a fake hand on a stove and it getting severe burns and faked screams, what's the likelihood of a child following the video to get the same sick burns vs a video showing that it is perfectly safe to touch the stove?
A video showing work, while ignoring safety pratices, promotes bad safety practices. People that know to work save will still do, people wothout a clue will start DIY projects ignoring safety. And get hurt. I consider this to be a bad thing.
One of the funniest videos on the internet is Electroboom's "how to make a electric guitar", it looks like it changed the title at some point, I guess for the reasons in the article, but I was on the floor the first time I watched it and he panned down to the plug.
It's disappointing how most of the articles and videos criticizing the dangerous content don't explain why exactly something is dangerous. They just scream "omg high voltage" "one mistake you're dead" and so on. I honestly think they are worse than the source; it reminds me of the medieval experimenters and alchemists being oppressed by the conformist public.
> It's disappointing how most of the articles and videos criticizing the dangerous content don't explain why exactly something is dangerous.
Which videos are you talking about in particular?
Both the Ann Reardon and the Big Clive video explains exactly what makes this experiment more dangerous than others people do.
The Big Clive one in particular goes into interesting details about how a ground fault circuit interrupter works, and why it doesn't protect you in this case.
> They just scream "omg high voltage" "one mistake you're dead" and so on.
The ones I have seen don't scream. They calmly explain that the voltage generated in this setup is much much higher than the voltage the average experimenter has experience with.
About the "one mistake you're dead". That is the crux of the matter. People should be aware of how thin the margins are, and how few guard rails protect them in any particular situation.
> it reminds me of the medieval experimenters and alchemists being oppressed by the conformist public.
It's not hard to figure out: microwave oven transformers are generally considered one of the most dangerous things you can find in a household appliance when misused because they put out enough voltage to reliably punch through even dry skin (which is usually a fairly good insulator which mitigates a lot of the severity of most mains voltage shocks), while still able to generate enough current that when it does form a circuit through you it will not only hurt because cause your muscles to tense up rigidly, burn you badly, and depending on how (un)lucky you are, cause cardiac arrest. It also (as explained in the Big Clive video) bypasses the safety equipment in most houses designed to mitigate shocks from mains-powered devices. Fractal wood burning also involves a bunch of salt-water which only increases the risk. "Only one mistake needed to kill you" is not hyperbole (it's possible to survive shocks from MOTs, but it's not the norm).
"Only one mistake needed to kill you" applies to other things we do every day such as crossing the street or driving a car.
I don't understand why the warning videos were banned, and don't know what potentially dangerous practices that the "fractal woood burning" videos show, or what safety practices they omit, but working with electricity at mains voltages or higher obviously requires due care and attention.
When crossing the street, other people in cars don't want to actually kill you, and those crossing are generally aware and cognizant of the danger. The biggest mistake you can make is 'forgetting to look before crossing'; a lot of the time that won't kill you.
The setup here is very different.
The voltages involved in the wood burning process is far outside of most people's familiarity; your intuition for electricity just doesn't apply.
We're not just talking 'mains supply can be dangerous'; electricians routinely work on switches and such without bothering to shut off the circuit (even though this is typically ill-advised). Mistakes with mains, whilst they _can_ kill, usually just result in big bangs and breakers being tripped.
What you think 'protects' you just doesn't; your insulating gloves, shoes, wire covers, even air gaps; they could just fail you, and badly.
Even aware of this, knowing 'touching the probes kills me', a tiny mistake, such as 'brushing my insulated leg on the piece of wood I am working on, easily made despite being careful, has a very high chance of instantly killing you.
The only way I could see to make this process 'safe' is to not be in the same room as the equipment when it's connected to the power.
If you read the article, Reardon's video goes over exactly why fractal wood burning is dangerous. She doesn't go into extreme detail but I think it's enough for the layman to understand (i.e., you can get electrocuted easily, and a gfci won't save you). bigclivedotcom's video above also goes into why fractal wood burning is dangerous.
> I honestly think they are worse than the source; it reminds me of the medieval experimenters and alchemists being oppressed by the conformist public.
I can kind of see where you're coming from here but in this case I think the right thing has happened.
It actually does "take a PhD." Having insulated wires can still be dangerous with a high enough voltage because of dielectric breakdown. Furthermore even if you don't get electrocuted but have a vacuum chamber with high voltages you can get irradiated.
What I would have liked is, "OK this here wire is where the high voltage is, if you touch it you will get hurt and possibly die. If you need to manipulate it use long wooden or plastic tongs. Do not use gloves because of dielectric breakdown possibility." You get the idea. Not "just don't do it."
The very first comment in the thread links to a video which does the exact thing you are wishing for. The video explains why the experiment is stupidly dangerous then gives tips on how one could make it safer. (But not safe.)
Note, it has nothing to do with plastic tongs. The main danger, according to the youtuber, is that you turn on the aparatus, get momentarily distracted, and forget that it is on and touch the wood or the electrodes.
He offers multiple mitigations:
- indicators which show when the transformer is energised. He in fact recommends two separate paralel indicators. An audible one and a visual one.
- momentary switches where you physicaly can’t forget them on. Two switch in an “AND” configuration, where you need both of your hands to actuate them, so you can’t accidentally try to adjust an electrode with one hand while the other is energising the system.
He in fact goes further and recommends some fancy specialist switches, which turn off if you push them too hard as a result of a muscle spasm from an accidental electrocution.
So now you need to make a complicated electronic setup with multiple independent indicators, and specialist switches and yet the project is still not safe! There are still multiple things which can go wrong where a simple and inocous action leads to instant death.
It is a thing which is easy to do unsafe, and relatively hard to so safe.
At which point can we simplify the advice to the general population into “don’t do it”?
Honestly, the How To Cook That video that was taken down goes way further into the technical details than I expected it was going to when I first watched it, and correctly explains how the transformer works and how that stops the only protection device (RCD/GFCI) from being able to operate.
At the end of the day, for almost all of the viewers of the channel, adding meaningful protection and doing the wood burning safely is simply not within their capabilities.
The Big Clive does pretty well of doing a “still don’t do it, but here are some ways that it could be made somewhat safer” explainer.
It is interesting to see that also exist channels that monetize how to make these experiments less likely to kill you using a 15 minutes video explaining some physics and one diagram.
More legit than the ones that kill you faster but still part of the same game, specially seeing the title “The most deadly project of the internet”
Safe by Big Clive standards, who had (on his original website) a "chandelier" made from GU10 bulbs, bare stainless rod, and the little terminal blocks from choccy block connectors, all gloriously exposed and at 240V.
I've seen either that Big Clive video or one very similar to it, but I swear the one I saw was long before April 2022. Perhaps early 2021 at the latest, if not earlier. I haven't actually watched very much Big Clive this year.
Unsure if this was a re-upload, or remake of an older video, or if I have totally lost my grasp on time???
It's terrible how little basic electronic safety is practiced in virtually all of these videos. When we handled high amps in university, we had 3 hours of lecture first simply explaining safety precautions and how to handle accidents.
Not to mention, the burnt wood looks so gaudy and uninteresting. I would hardly call it fractal as it only goes 2-3 levels usually, and artistically doesn't usually make sense on furniture etc.
It probably should have been more than 3 hours given that you likely mean "voltage" not "amps".
Before everyone jumps on me, "it is the amps that kill you, not voltage", I understand electricity quite well and in this context, saying something like "handling high amps in a university" is almost certainly not what was taught.
Yeah, usually when someone parrots the "it is the amps that kill you, not voltage" line, I have to remind them that the amps depends on the volts.
A car battery is capable of hundreds of amps, but if you touch the contacts with your hands, you won't feel a thing, because the voltage is too low to overcome your body's resistance.
I imagine if you wired the leads to your tongue, your tongue would probably explode though.
It's advisable to remove rings if there is any way they could short across a car battery. The battery has very low internal resistance, so you can get a sizeable part of a kilo-amp flowing, which due to "P = I^2 R" can generate an impressive amount of heat. In fact some owners of certain Russian motorcycles with a propensity (Ural, Dneipr etc.) were able to weld bits back on in the field by using the carbon contact breaker points to do rough arc welding.
Which doesn't contradict you at all - I'm just saying treat car batteries with respect.
Current flowing through your body is what kills you. But it doesn't flow through you just because it is a high-current supply (think car battery for example). It flows through you because the source voltage divided by your impedance is what controls how much current flows through you. Impedance is the general concept for resistance and basically indicates how current and voltage are related. The higher the impedance, the less current flows. Wearing rubber gloves would increase your impedance from hand to hand significantly.
So while high current does kill you, what causes it is high voltage. What is considered high? Depends on your impedance (ex. are your hands sweaty or dry?).
When dealing with high-current systems, there are safety procedures and concerns, but they are generally different than high-voltage. The systems I have dealt with are more about burns than electrocution. For example accidentally shorting out a fork lift battery can be spectacular in a bad way.
There's no particular safety concerned when you're playing with hundreds of kilovolts in a typical school. You need it when the thing you're messing with has the capability of delivering a lot of amps.
When you get shocked by a Van de Graaff generator, you do get high voltage, as well as high currents. The missing ingredient is time. The shock takes a very small time, so the energy delivered by the shock is very small. Skin-effect also helps.
What you care about is how much charge is at that high voltage potential because current is charge/sec. Charge due to stray capacitance can be quite dangerous because if you don't know what you are doing, the amount of stray capacitance can be higher than you expect. I would be very careful doing anything with kilo-volts using a circuit, as opposed to a static charge device, such as Van de Graaff generator.
415 volts on a 30A breaker, like you might find in an undergraduate electrical engineering lab, is very lethal. I'd hazard a guess that's what the OP is talking about.
Relevantly in the case of microwave oven transformers, your impedance depends on the voltage because a high enough voltage can and will arc right through your skin into your soft, low-impedance innards. You can do this safely with a commonplace Tesla-coil-driven consumer plasma globe by putting just enough aluminum foil on top of it to arc through your skin, leaving cute little black charred spots, but in short enough bursts that it won't stop your heart.
You haven't explained anything unsaid in this thread, including by me, but merely completely ignored my argument that there are far more hazards with electronics than merely fatal electrocution.
An analogy: while technically what kills you due to a fall is called “gravity”, that’s not the whole picture. In actuality, it’s the height you fall from, which allows gravity to build up enough velocity to kill you when the fall ends.
Despite the fact that you’re experiencing the same gravitational acceleration from both, a one meter fall, while being potentially dangerous if you’re not prepared and allowed to land right, is not likely to kill you. A 100 meter fall, on the other hand, is likely not survivable by any means.
This seems like the opposite situation. Gravity doesn’t kill you from a fall (just like voltage doesn’t kill you from electricity). Gravity makes possible the sudden acceleration that kills you, which is analogous to the voltage-induced current.
What they're getting at is that while it is the amount of amperage that goes through your heart that determines your likelihood of dying, you need a certain voltage to overcome the resistance of your skin to achieve such an amperage. Anything under around 50v is generally safe to touch, and often high amperage applications are under that limit.
So the reason high voltage is more dangerous, if it has sufficient amperage backing it up, is that the higher the voltage, the better its ability to pierce your skins resistance and flow through your body to begin with.
It's the Ohm's law: V=IR. Amps (I) kill you but your body has rather high resistance, at least kilohms (even when wet), and it depends on the voltage partly. So low voltage even with high amps current do nothing to you.
High voltage is not inherently dangerous. In a dry climate you can easily develop ten thousand volts by lying down in a bed without bedsprings with a long acrylic blanket and pulling the blanket over your head hair with your feet. You can get multiple-centimeter-long branching sparks of static electricity from your finger. The only danger of the activity (to you) is that you might produce enough ozone to irritate your lungs. But the energy of those sparks is limited by your body's capacitance to the blanket.
If you do this in a vacuum you could get X-rays, and if you do it near your cellphone or laptop you can kill them. But it's not dangerous to your body.
However, high voltage with enough power behind it to burn a Lichtenberg figure through your body can kill you pretty darn quick.
electronics die off ESD w/o the xray. I didn't mentioned ESD on purpose as indeed what really matters is energy/joules. If you have a source capable of high power but for too short time it won't be that dangerous either.
Thanks for clarifying, I didn't mean to imply that X-rays were necessary to kill electronics with ESD, just that they could be dangerous to a human, physically, even at low power levels. Killing electronics with ESD indeed does not require vacuum.
High amperages are really only dangerous (in terms of electrocution) with higher voltages. As voltages get low enough, our bodies' resistance means that there won't be enough current passing through you to hurt you. The dryness of the contact point makes a big difference (several orders of magnitude), but even with wet hands, it is pretty much impossible to hurt yourself with < 12 volts.
The risks with low voltages and high amperages are from shorts causing rapid heating.
A magnetron is a vacuum tube which works by swirling space charge around. Vacuum tubes are "electronics"; the word "electronics" was originally invented to distinguish vacuum tubes (where it matters that the charges are being carried by electrons) from previous electrical devices such as relays, resistors, condensers, motors, generators, and inductors, where you can pretty much ignore the nature of the charge carriers.
It was a class on embedded electronics and robotics. There are more hazards in electronics than merely electrical hazards. e.g. exploding capacitors, toxic fumes, etc.
I'm glad you assumed a very limited scope of danger being direct electrocution death because in my class I learned there are many compound forms of electrical accident. To quote NEC textbook:
"Even low-voltage installers can still experience unsettling shocks, especially if they are working in an unsafe environment, such as if they are ungrounded or standing on a wet spot,” Johnston said. “While it’s unlikely that such shocks will cause serious injury by themselves, they certainly could literally knock someone off balance, which could be a real safety risk if an installer were standing on a ladder.
“In addition, an arc in a low-voltage system has the same potential for igniting explosive materials as one in a 120-plus-volt system. Chapter 5 of the NEC provides rules for installing electrical wiring of any voltage in a hazardous (classified) location, specifically those locations with high concentrations of flammable or combustible liquids, flammable or combustible vapors, conductive and combustible dusts, and so forth.”
I cant see how 9v dc can shock you aside touching the leads with tongue... or using any step up electronics.
As a kid we used to test batteries voltage with the tongue, 9V had a distinctive bite, compared to 4.5V. Even today I can tell the output voltage of a multimeter (in its ohm mode)
I dont know what they did in the uni, I thought it was some wielding or power delivery (CPU and GPUs nowadays deal with 200A+)... So I honestly thought it was high amps, all of them are proper fire hazard.
I think the people replying to you to nitpick are missing the forest for the trees.
You (and many people) have to wait until university to learn this stuff if you didn't seek it out yourself (how-to's and electives in school). This kind of knowledge should be taught at a young age to demystify it.
A few hours in uni (and how many people never even go), to learn life-saving information
When I did appliance repair microwaves were treated as bombs. You didn't test your components live, you always unplugged first, etc.
Still walked into another tech working on one (cabinet-mounted up high), with the cover off, barely on a wobbly stove-dolly and his expensive Fluke multimeter out with leads in hand.
I noticed the plug still lifted up into the cabinet so I peeked in and sure enough it was plugged in.
Big red warning signs on the power cable, the covers inside and the cover outside all had warnings. Dude had been through the same training I had, and still thought it was a good idea. "I'll just stay away from the high side",he said.
edit to add this microwave had an external fuse. All you had to do was unscrew it and check the fuse inside- which was bad. He hadn't had to do any of the stuff he'd done prior to my arrival. They'd had an electrical surge when the power had gone out and the fuse had caught it. This tech had been on the job longer than I. end edit
Even people trained and with knowledge make mistakes and sometimes are just plain stupid.
People without knowledge can be dangers to themselves and others.
Texas had a rash of house explosions a few years ago from people raiding copper and power wires from empty houses with live gas lines.
I think the answer is educating and many people as possible, from as young an age as possible.
A friend of a friend disassembled a microwave to repair it, and accidentally put one of the radiation shields back on backwards. It ended up killing his wife (lots of cancers) a few years later.
So, yeah. Don't repair microwaves. It's really not worth the $100's you'll save on a replacement.
Near UV isn't, but the photons still carry considerable energy to push chemical reactions over the edge. Whereas microwaves are far, far below the visible spectrum, and none of that causes cancer.
A microwave injury is serious stuff, but it seems like a huge stretch to attribute a later cancer to that exact incident.
> Near UV isn't, but the photons still carry considerable energy to push chemical reactions over the edge.
In my opinion (I am an amateur biologist) there is no need to deploy considerable energy to mess things at the cell scale: Most interactions there occur because of thermal noise.
Furthermore most protein interactions depend how they are folded which involves different fields, including Van der Waals forces. Van der Waals forces carry an energy of 4 to 40 meV per bond which is in infrared range.
So even infrared can mess up the internal working of cells. It could be that even lower frequencies also have a biological effect:
(Non-thermal effects of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields)
> “2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) from the World Health Organization (WHO) released a statement adding RF electromagnetic fields (including microwave and millimetre waves) to their list of things which are possibly carcinogenic to humans.”
WTF. This was the exact opposite of my understanding until today… ie that non-ionising radiation from the likes of microwaves was not carcinogenic.
Possibly carcinogenic. Some things we know for sure are carcinogenic, but even then what we know is that exposure increases risk in a population by so-and-so percent. It's much harder to work backwards from one individual case of cancer and finding out what the cause was.
It's highly irresponsible and downright cruel to accuse the husband of killing his wife by botched microwave repair based on so little evidence.
What was the location and extent of the original microwave injury? Did the cancer originate in the same spot? What is the proposed mechanism of action? How long is "a few years later"? Can it be ruled out that she didn't have cancer at the time of the microwave incident? What other causes has been considered, other known carcinogens, or a family history? Who made the claim in the first place, did the oncologist blame the husband?
Wait until more DIY EV servicing videos start appearing. If you short something across a decent size EV battery it will be converted into plasma and deposited on your face.
50Hz AC drops to zero volts 100 times a second, which makes the arc easier to extinguish. "Self-extinguishing" is a deadly exaggeration, though, as you know if you've ever seen a high-tension line being connected or disconnected. Arcs are only self-extinguishing when they deplete their energy source or destroy what they're arcing to.
Caveat: I'm kinda dumb and this is a Cunningham's law situation.
tl;dr
Because in a DC situation the current is always high so the temperature through the air is always high so the air remains a plasma and remains a good conductor the whole time.
OK I = V/R is how we talk about currents. Current (I) equals the potential (V) over the resistance (R).
An electrical spark is where the potential across an air gap is high enough that the air—normally a good insulator and thus a poor conductor—breaks down into plasma. In that state, the air is hot enough that the electrons that would be bound to the atomic nuclei can flow the way electrons in metal do. This means that the resistance of that air gap goes from being a high number to being a low number.
In the case of a DC spark, we have a constant high potential and with the plasma state a low resistance, so I = V/R = big/small = big current. Since we are putting a high current through a conductor, the temperature of the conductor goes up, and the plasma remains a plasma. It stays a good conductor the whole time.
In the case of an AC spark the AC potential goes from some big positive number of volts, to zero volts, to some big negative number of volts, to zero volts, to some big positive number…you get the idea. At some point I=V/R goes from being big/small to zero/small, which can be long enough for the air to cool off and stop being a plasma and be a bad conductor. So when V is a big (positive or negative) number again in 1/4 of the period of the signal (probably 1/60/4 = 1/240 seconds) the air might be too cool to conduct the current. Then V/R would be Big/HUGE = effectively zero current.
Remember: I'm just some weirdo online. This is not advice. Don't mess around with electricity.
> Not to mention, the burnt wood looks so gaudy and uninteresting. I would hardly call it fractal as it only goes 2-3 levels usually, and artistically doesn't usually make sense on furniture etc.
There's some point I could make about how this is the worst art anyone has ever died for in history, but we'd end up in the weeds.
My weeds were a bit more like how in our current cultural moment our (US centric) romantic ideas are now their worst versions. Entrepreneurship: join an MLM or become a crypto weirdo or try to start a drop shipping business as advertised in a YouTube preroll ad; Self sustenance: make a bunch of consumer choices that mark you as an individualist while doing nothing to make yourself self sustaining; political engagement: be a shitposter or maybe become a conspiracy freak since it's mainstream now; passionate self expression: die making high effort, high risk, zero reward, looks-worse-than-woodburning-by-a-mile arts and crafts that are on top of it all incredibly cliché.
At least Luis Jiménez's deadly mustang sculpture looks cool!
When I was young and stupid, I did this. Suddenly felt some tingling sensation in my fingers, threw the leads away and jumped back. Most certainly saved my life and drilled in my head how dangerous it is.
Still get a sinking feeling in my stomach whenever I am at some switching station below the 380KV leads, remembering that day. Especially after knowing people who got into 120KV, and what happened to them...
Electricity is dangerous. In every form. Period. Keep your fingers away from it when you don't know what you do. Household appliances can not only kill you on the mains side. Microwave transformers, flyback circuits, burner igniters, HV Car Ignition Systems...
>Electricity is dangerous. In every form. Period. Keep your fingers away from it when you don't know what you do
An additional problem here is that the risks are different in different forms. Here, it sounds like people are approaching the technique based on their experiences and assumptions about mains electricity, or even car batteries.
2 kV is high enough voltage that arcing is a risk. Things they'll assume are insulators and safe, or even usable as protection, may be conductive through dielectric breakdown: in the case of wood, that's the whole point of the technique. Even air won't necessarily be safe if they're handling things so closely, especially if it's humid, in which case they could get breakdown at well over 1 mm. Meanwhile, GFCI/RCD is useless, because of the transformer.
I had one the other week where I was replacing an outlet in the kitchen. I flipped the kitchen breaker and the lights and appliances all turned off. I skipped the important step of actually testing the outlet and stupidly assumed it no longer had power. Turns out it was on a different circuit from the rest of the kitchen. The outlet was stuck in the wall box so I reached a flathead screwdriver in to try and pry it out, and turned my screwdriver into an arc welder for a second. Fortunately I wasn't hurt and only got a melted screwdriver tip and a smoky smell out of it, but I'm definitely not going to let myself make that mistake ever again.
I made the mistake of not testing _all_ of the wires in an outlet a couple of months ago.
I used a non contact voltmeter, and had shut off the breaker to the outlet I was working on. Little did I know that the jackass that did some previous wiring in the house had run wires from a different breaker in to this box. It was done in such a way that I didn't fully realize it could have separate live.
My palm below my thumb touched the live and neutral and gave me a pretty solid shock.
I'll definitely test every single freaking wire in a box from now on. F people who try to play electrician without knowing what they are doing!
I saw an electrician who did know what he was doing change a fuse board incorrectly. He accidentally swapped one end of two different ring mains so that they were in different breakers! Same result as yours. Always test every live wire. Those glowing voltage sniffer screwdrivers can be pretty handy.
I discovered an outlet like this in my house. Had a lamp plugged in to the outlet (since I could see it from the breaker box) and was sequentially going through and flipping each breaker off, then on again. The light never turned off...
Look at the slotted screw heads on outlet face plate. Are they both aligned vertically/horizontally, or are they at odd angles?
If they are both aligned, the outlet was probably but not necessarily last worked on by a real electrician. If the screws are at odd angles, the outlet was probably but not necessarily last worked on by a DIYer.
Real electricians align the screws, as a sort of professionalism and a nod to any future electrician who might work on that outlet.
Where? Here electricians leave cable offcuts, stripped insulator, plaster around on the floor so consistently it’s a meme (I know because for some reason I was getting tradie reels popping up flipping through Facebook).
We have a joke at work that you know that an electrical engineer (and not a licensed electrician) did the wiring if it’s too neat (for example, a colleague of mine seriously has cable trays through his roof cavity)
I have one even better, just to show how you can't be sure...
Replacing an outlet. Shut off the 2-pole breaker for the shared-neutral circuit it was on. Outlet tester showed the outlet was off. Pull the receptacle out. Used a multimeter to test each wire contact to ground; all were 0v.
Only when I disconnected all the wires did one of them develop potential because somebody had apparently tied a neutral wire to a hot in another box, but I still don't understand the situation and had an electrician address it.
So even testing each individual wire isn't certain unless they're all hanging free, unless you make the assumption that things were wired correctly in the first place.
> The outlet was stuck in the wall box so I reached a flathead screwdriver in to try and pry it out, and turned my screwdriver into an arc welder for a second.
I've got a screwdriver that incorporates a non-contact AC current sensor. Mine is a Gardner Bender SDT-354 [1] that I think I bought at Home Depot or Lowe's.
When the current sensor is turned on if you bring the tip of the screwdriver near a live AC wire an LED in the handle starts rapidly blinking and a beeper starts rapidly beeping.
It once may have saved me from a nasty shock. I have an outdoor light over the garage that is controlled by a light sensor, and the light sensor was going bad. It would turn the light on when it got dark but not turn it off in the morning. So I'd flip the breaker for that light off and then back on every morning.
When morning when I went to open the electrical panel in the garage I got a shock from the panel door. I went in and got the current sensing screwdriver and went back to the garage to see if I could get an idea of what the heck was going on.
As soon as I stepped into the garage the screwdriver started blinking and beeping. A little experimenting showed it would go off anywhere in the front half of the garage that was more than about a meter above the floor.
It turned out that the metal garage doors and the metal rails their rollers rolled on and the metal tracks the garage door openers pulled the doors on were all connected to live AC.
I got the fuck out of there and called an electrician.
What happened was that in the shed next to the garage that houses my well some critter had chewed through some of the insulation on some of the wiring for powering the well pump. I'm not sure how but that somehow made the cover and door of the electrical panel and all those metal parts of my garage door system electrified, but without stopping the well pump from receiving power.
Yeah I have the standalone tool and it's a must-have for electric work. While replacing some switches in my house I thought I had the right breaker (sidenote: those breaker-detector tools are like magic, much better than the "is the light still on?" method). The lights went out but when I jammed my tester in the gang box it started beeping. I ended up needing to flip off 2 breakers (took me a while to find the second one) before it finally stopped beeping. From that moment on I promised myself that no matter how "sure" I was, I would ALWAYS stick the tester in before reaching in, even if I hadn't touched the breaker box between working on a switch.
I've been bitten enough times in software alone by things I was "sure" about, I don't take any chances when it comes to electricity.
An important habit when using testers: test the tester first on a known live wire. You don't want to find out the hard way if your tester has stopped working.
It's not necessarily that the handle is conductive after all (it likely isn't, but there are conductive polymers out there -- I've made some in Chemistry class), but rather that it hasn't been tested and certified for its insulating properties (e.g. the VDE 1000V classification). They're covering their ass by saying that it's not intended to be an insulating handle because they didn't design it to be.
It amazes me how often strange anomolies slip through safety procedures. I use a voltmeter to check before working on wiring, and like you, have still managed to grab a live wire more than once. Last time, it was a situation much as yours - had the breaker off for the circuit I was certain I was working. And I checked with the voltmeter. But like a damned fool, I only checked the hot to ground voltage, and not the neutral to ground, or hot to neutral. Yep, you guessed it - the outlet was on a circuit for a different room, and was miswired in a junction box, reversing neutral and hot. I got the full benefit of the 120v. Fortunately, standing on a dry wooden floor in rubber soled shoes, I was a lousy path to ground, but still a dangerous situation I have no desire to repeat.
Every electrician I have met, has had some kind of shock in their career. Mostly it is a small induced current issue, which can easily kill you if it knocks you off a ladder....
No matter how many times I see someone changing computer parts while the power is still connected, if I'm doing it I always unplug the power then pressing the power button to ensure it's unpowered
You won't get hurt working on a live computer unless your power supply is dangerously engineered (stick to well known named brands) or wide open (don't open it up unless it's been unplugged and sitting on a shelf for months) for the same reasons pointed out elsewhere in these comments; the voltage simply isn't high enough. It won't even induce a perceptible amount of current (unless you do something stupid like stick your tongue on it), much less a harmful amount.
You'd be surprised at all the stuff you can get away with on a live computer. For example, did you know that AHCI (SATA) and PCIe (and thus NVMe) are both hot-pluggable and hot-swappable? ... and that you can hotswap RAM (with a cooperating motherboard and OS) and even CPUs (on multi-socket boards)?
Sata is hotswappable. IDE was not. And I believe m.2 would be if the connector was designed a little different, because that’s all u.2 is. Compact Flash Express is, but again, that’s NVMe and splitting hairs between u.2.
Typically on hot swappable devices it’s been common to make the ground pins a little longer than the rest, ensuring that those will make contact first. The issue with hot swappable devices aside from a sharp initial draw is “grounding” the circuit to an IO pin before real ground is made. Most default low potential IO pins won’t enjoy taking the full load of the device while the ground plane is missing connection.
Oddly to me, many new PC BIOS ship with SATA hot swapping disabled. IDK why. You can plug the drive in it’ll spin up, but no data transfer will happen until you reboot. Safe, just ineffective. I recently had to learn this the hard way.
I think this is something the OS can override. If I remember correctly I could discover a hotplugged SATA device in Windows by using "Scan for new hardware" in the Device Manager.
More specifically, the system's firmware AHCI hotplugging configuration only applies to the system firmware.
That is to say, if hotplugging is disabled on your SATA controller, then the firmware won't see a new SATA drive if you plug it in while the machine is running. So, for example, you won't get a UEFI boot menu entry for it if you go to the boot override section that presents all of your storage devices.
Once the operating system takes over, that's all a moot point. Whether hot-plugging was disabled in your firmware settings or not, if the OS supports it, it will work. Both Microsoft's AHCI driver (msahci.sys) and the Linux "ahci" kernel module (or built-in) support hot-plugging.
On my Windows desktop with an Intel SATA chipset, hot-plugging a drive did cause Windows to briefly drop all other drives on that controller before re-enumerating all of them, which lead to a BSoD because one of those drives was the drive with Windows itself on it. However, this was solved by installing Intel's chipset-specific driver (Intel Rapid Storage Technology, iaStorV.sys) and tweaking the registry to have that one start at early boot instead of msahci.
The idea is also that pressing the power button will also help discharge some capacitors as the power-supply tries to supply power. Not sure to which degree this works to make things safer, but trying it won't hurt.
(Note this will _not_ make a powersupply safe to open up)
On a dumb device where the power button is part of the actual circuit, let’s say an old radio this will work.
On a PC, the power button isn’t hooked to anything but the chipset or some micro or an upstream circuit that tries to start a micro. Which means to have any effect, that processor needs to be executing code, or needs to have enough power to start the chipset itself. Both of these are unlikely to have any effect on CPU capacitors or caps in the power supply.
I’m fairly certain this is placebo at best on a modern PC.
It definitely kicks the power light on for a bit under a second on my 2010 era desktop. The (high end, low wattage) power supply is delivering enough voltage to keep the motherboard power controller up.
I have no idea if it discharges all the different voltage rails. I don't like having the fans try to spin up while I'm mucking about, and it stops that from happening.
Of course, from an equipment damage perspective, grounding yourself to the case ground is much more important than discharing the PSU capacitors.
I usually physically unplug the computer, push the power button, then open / touch the case (I'm in a humid climate).
I've never had an issue (ignorging fires, but those happened when the computers were intentionally energized).
You need about 24 volts to overcome the skins resistance. Most PCs use some combination of 3, 5, and 12 volt rails so you should be fine, as long as you avoid licking anything.
Edit: Some PSUs have -12 +12 rails, I suppose if you were really unlucky and grabbed both at once the 24v differential could give you a zap.
The -12v rails are typically low current though. The real danger is a poorly built supply or an electrolytic capacitor exploding in your face (had this happen once).
Incidentally, does anyone know what the -12v rails are used for? Some kind of reference?
RS-232 drivers like the old MC1488 were run off plus and minus 12 volt supplies. DRAMS like the MK4116 also required a low current -5V bias supply. And there were other chips that possibly needed a -5V supply. Since the -5V was low current you could generate it off the -12V with a simple linear regulator.
You can wet your fingers and get way lower, but I’ve never had anything much at 24V even when trying. At that low a voltage it may come down to frequency of the source.
Obviously your tongue gets way lower, as is 9V lickers know already.
I remember watching some electricians rewiring some stuff at my old workplace. We were moving into a new office, and had to have some light switches changed for the new zone.
The electrician popped open the switch plates, yanked out the old switches, clipped the wires, stripped the wires, wired up the new switches, and screwed everything back together.
It was all live (like 300 volt live), as the lights turned on (queue spark), as he wired the new switches. He was not wearing gloves. It was all barehanded.
It obviously can be done, and I've heard folks more experienced than I say "all ya gotta do...", and I'll admit that I might have even wired a switch/outlet myself without flipping the breaker. And a pro could probably get away with it for a long time.
But it just sounds like something that is one distraction away from a bad day.
In the UK, as far as the Health & Safety Executive goes, who are the people who will be hauling you up in court if your screwups cause injury or death, they go to great lengths to discourage working live if at all possible.
That said, it is sometimes necessary. I've replaced a circuit protective device in a live electrical panel in a commercial setting before. As you point out, avoiding distraction is a very important factor. That means no chit-chat, no-one overlooking and critiquing what you're doing, noise to a minimum, all of the tools you'll need prepared up-front, etc.
Meh, for 120V or 220V worst can happen is you get a little shock or trip the breakers. I don't bother shutting off power to household circuits either.
I heard from HV vets that one acquires a habit of keeping one hand in the back pocket when working on substations, industrial installations, and such. :-)
Not sure where there would be 300V for light switches/fixtures though. Some bespoke factory setup?
The lights were using some higher voltage. The Operations Manager mentioned it to me, while the work was being done. Apparently, it's standard. Something like 320 volts (don't remember the exact number). I had not heard of it, beforehand.
230V AC is the RMS (root mean square) voltage; if you rectify it to DC, it comes out to 325V. Put another way, the /highest/ absolute potential difference between line and neutral in a 230VAC system is 325V.
And remember that RCDs or GFCIs are not the panacea they may seem like at first. All it takes is an unreferenced secondary and voila, ground faults are invisible.
a galvanically isolated transformer, i.e. a voltage that is not referenced to ground, meaning an RCD/GFCI will not be able to trigger if you touch it and it starts zapping you
Well — so is an empty room, because there is no air to breathe.
Pretty much everything is dangerous in some form. You can die from excessive water ingestion. You can die falling from a bicycle.
I don't think blanket statements like yours are helpful in actually making things safer. Safety low-voltage electrical systems are designed to be safe - not perfectly safe, but comparably safe to other ambient risks of life. We can't bubble-wrap everything. There is no 100%, only a question of how many nines you want after the dot on 99%.
But regardless, the videos at issue are quite obviously not in the "99% safe" category and YouTube's behavior is egregiously inacceptable.
I had a similar experience in completely different circumstances. I was hiking in the mountains with my dad and some friends when a storm cloud rolled over us. It wasn't raining yet, but one of us noticed that if he raised a metal hiking pole above his head there was a tingling feeling. We all were trying it when my dad caught up and said "what are you doing you idiots, drop those poles, crouch down, and start praying".
Thankfully there were no strikes, and after a couple of minutes the cloud had passed. Electricity is dangerous!
Playing with microwaves carries many risks. Even without getting electricity involved, the magnetron contains beryllium oxide which can be fatal to humans if it gets into the lungs. Just to disassemble one, you need to know what the magnetron looks like and not try to disassemble it.
Like many other appliances, it has capacitors, which may remain charged for a long time too. Those are dangerous too.
I got zapped by the capacitor of a photo flash twice. I studied electronics, I was being carefully, and still I messed up. The second time I was being even more careful and I thought the capacitor was discharged. I'm not even sure how it happened, I was holding the PCB by the edges.
Google takes 45% of YouTube's advertising revenue. Videos criticizing their most popular channels directly impact their profits. The company doesn't care about protecting content consumers, it only cares about their customers (advertisers) and maximizing profits. They tolerate content creators since they actually get them views, but otherwise they would rather run ads 24/7 if people would watch them.
And thus, the video was deemed worthless to the whole system (unfortunately).
But that's of course short sighted: even a court could find youtube reckless if they selectively remove videos of caution while leaving up dangerous videos; if both are left up they might get off free.
I'm only now leaning of this phenomenon, and I'm absolutely floored that something like fractal wood burning has claimed the lives of 34 people (known), and there's a general laisse-faire attitude around it.
By itself this is close to the deadliest mass shootings in the history of the United States in terms of human casualties, even though the emotional impact is not the same.
Some kinds of deaths are more "media-ready" than others.
Deaths from mass-shootings, terrorism, plane crashes, and shark attacks are given too much weight. Deaths from falls, drowning, and medical mistakes are given too little weight.
Even within categories it's inconsistent. Most deaths by gunshot are suicides. And almost all murders by gunshot are ordinary pistols as part of ordinary criminal activity (not mass shooters).
With a dislike counter at least that could signal something is amiss with these videos, but now you just see thumbs up everythings cool guys and the comments can be moderated by the uploader to remove anything negative.
Downvotes hurt the feelings and egos of enough people with the power/leverage to get it changed. Particularly: politicians, corporations, and youtube executives themselves (e.g. Youtube's Rewind videos getting trashed with mass downvotes.)
Thank you for reminding me that viewers can't even vote down to try to inform others of how bad those videos are. YT's leadership needs to be replaced.
At scale, whack-a-mole take-downs and trying to idiot-proof the internet just feel kinda futile.
A suggested (IANAL) alternative, for "dangerous ways to maim or kill yourself" YouTube content:
- A "Report Being A Dangerous Thing To Try" YouTube page - with a few drop-downs, to summarize why it's dangerous. (High Voltage, Poison, Explosive, Fire Hazard, Dangerous Animals, Motor Vehicle Stunts, etc.)
- Verified-as-dangerous videos stay up, but get a few seconds of skull-and-crossbones warning. With a death count, and "report yet another death" link. That last has a high enough bar ("crippled-for-life doesn't count, include official death certificate and certified police or medical report, ...") to make it clear that there are real dead bodies behind that body count.
Unstated goal: Encourage less-stupid people to realize that following cool-sounding directions from the internet could maim or kill them. Whether or not anyone has yet gone to the effort required to get a specific video flagged as deadly.
Warnings like these can become diluted if the context of these reports are not specific enough. Listing rock climbing free solo deaths on videos of people top rope climbing will get an eye roll from people and make it easier to disregard. It's also not fair to communities that understand the risks of what they are doing to see these reminders of dangers they are already aware of.
Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of social media companies. YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and it’s clearly impossible to have humans review all of it. If we humans did review every single minute of video, the subjective element of moderation would still lead to headlines like this where someone could identify instances of inconsistencies.
Given that she re-uploaded the video and I’m watching it on YouTube right now, I assume the initial moderation strike was more of a mistake. Or more likely, maybe it was reported by a number of people who were upset by it for some reason and it entered an auto-moderation queue.
I have a hard time getting too worked up about news stories of singular moderation mistakes. Does anyone realistically expect YouTube to have perfectly consistent moderation? Even HN, a significantly smaller community, has very uneven and inconsistent moderation due to the user-influenced flagging features.
> Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of social media companies. YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and it’s clearly impossible to have humans review all of it.
Yes, this is the root of the content tech boom of the last 20 years: we’ll cut corners to make publishing and distribution as cheap as possible and displace the remaining cost to third-parties (advertisers, data buyers) so that nobody actually involved in the content has any accountability.
And the negative consequences of this approach are rapidly becoming clear to society. We’ll be spending the next 20 years trying to bring those consequences back in line with our values and societal needs.
It’s like technical debt, but for societal projects instead of engineering projects.
That's true. However, bad moderation is most harmful when clickbait-for-profit gets profitable enough to have their boiler room crew mass-report responsible people debunking the clickbait.
This is the bad stuff. It's also the stuff that can be caught with enough anti-spam effort. The example in this article fits that model: A toxic creator farm getting away with a coordinated mass-reporting campaign against an individual. It's just bad anti-spam and YouTube deserves the criticism.
What makes you think they don't use manual review for highly-viewed videos?
The video in question wouldn't have triggered that manual review threshold because it's not even close to a million views. I would actually assume that highly-viewed videos are moved up much higher in the manual review priority queue, as it only makes sense.
The controversies like the one in the article are generally among moderately popular channels with 10K - 100K views, not in the millions.
> The video in question wouldn't have triggered that manual review threshold because it's not even close to a million views.
What makes you say that? I don't have a source on that specific video, but socialblade says her channel was getting hundreds of thousands of views per day in the week after that video went up, three weeks since her previous video.
Edit: Bing cache says 720k as of some point. Archive.org says 1.5 million as of three days ago.
I would have set the manual review threshold no higher than 100k anyway.
> Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of social media companies.
If social media companies can't function well at that scale, what's the reason for having social media companies at that scale? We should set and enforce expectations, and when companies get to the scale where they can't meet those expectations, fine them until they "rightsize."
I'm a fan of removing legal carve outs for social media companies. If it's hosted on your domain, then you are liable, just as a book publisher would be.
If people want to publish stuff, they can buy a raspberry pi or an s3 bucket.
If people want to moderate content, they can hire an editorial staff (like magazines and podcasts do).
I'm not sure how to handle Wikipedia. It's a net positive for society, and this proposal would effectively ban it. That's the only impacted site I can think of that I think is worth saving.
> I'm not sure how to handle Wikipedia. It's a net positive for society, and this proposal would effectively ban it.
The rule could only apply when you profit from impressions from the content. Platforms that rely on ad revenue tied to views would be covered (as the forbidden content is directly driving their revenue), platforms that are either free or use an alternative monetization model not dependent on impressions (flat monthly fee regardless of which content was consumed or how many times) would be exempt.
nothing is perfect but google has a market capitalization of 1.5 trillion dollars, i'm sure they can afford to remove of put warning on dangerous videos
> Imperfect moderation is inevitable at the massive scale of social media companies. YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and it’s clearly impossible to have humans review all of it
Then maybe they shouldn't spread it across the globe?
> YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and it’s clearly impossible to have humans review all of it.
Micro moderation might not be possible, but meta moderation certainly is. If a story such as the fractal burning has made the news that means it has passed through plenty of human brains along the way. That sort of thing should be noticed by meta moderation. This reminds me of the YouTuber who uploaded 2 Million Videos over the course of years and was not shut down.
> YouTube receives an enormous quantity of video every day and it’s clearly impossible to have humans review all of it
But not all of that content gets picked by the algorithm to be shown to millions of people.
They don’t have to manually check everything. But if they are considering putting something at the top of their homepage for a large number of people, would it kill them to have someone give the content a once over to see if it might be dangerous?
I noticed I feel literally unsafe watching any DIY video on there now that the dislikes are gone. I realize I'm proceeding in a place where I relied on a warning system that has been taken away.
Don't you have empathy for poor creators like the executive branch of the US federal government though? The dislike button was making things rough for them.
Videos of Biden (speeches, etc) were regularly seeing abysmal like/dislike ratios, esp on official news channels like CNN. Then suddenly YouTube removed dislikes because of "dislike bombs". There was some speculation they were specifically pressured by someone (Biden or the media) to remove dislikes so their ratings would stop being negatively affected.
This is really silly because the theory assumes that A) Biden cares or even knows about people disliking YouTube videos of him and B) that CNN doesn't already receive preferential treatment from YouTube and couldn't just ask for an algorithmic boost regardless of how many likes/dislikes they have
Most likely it was because YouTube's own content (such as Rewind) was getting dislike bombed.
>Most likely it was because YouTube's own content (such as Rewind) was getting dislike bombed.
If Biden or CNN don't care about dislikes, why would YouTube? The most obvious explanation is that some data scientists noticed that removing dislikes tends to increase ad revenue or watch time.
YouTube got a massive amount of bad press about it, whereas I don't think the average person knew Biden was getting dislike bombed. But you're probably right.
The AAW have banned the practice because it is so dangerous and have been maintaining a list of the people killed by it, including at least one professional electrician.
Never trust corporations (or anyone for that matter), even the most well intentioned of ones, to always make rational decisions, even when they hire rational people and write down rational policies.
Disagreed. I see this as perfectly rational in given their business model and regulatory environment they operate in.
Their business relies on ad revenue (derived from video views) and they are no regulations that hold them liable for hosting dangerous content, nor for mistakenly-deleted content.
Therefore the rational thing to do is let the mistakenly-deleted videos down (reviewing them manually would cost too much) while leaving anything else that doesn't trip the spam filter up (since they generate ad views).
Example from the parent's link:
"""
Upper Caboolture, Queensland, Australia
Reported by: Energy Source & Distribution
Death: Liam Keegan, age 17
March 23, 2021
"""
^ Many don't list the age, but this one did. And it made me sad.
Exactly. I can't sympathise with any of the people who mess around with stuff like this. Surely if you had even the littlest bit of common sense, you would know not to mess around with high voltages without training.
To the people saying "mass report all fractal burning videos" - why not also take down videos on surfing, outdoor rock-climbing, and other dangerous sports?
The whole point of the 'trusted news initiative' [0] is to combat the so called 'fake news', and disinformation and to replace that (or at least flag these videos as 'misleading') with actual fact checked articles, videos, etc.
What is happening here is the direct opposite of the TNI [0] and especially YouTube is removing videos unveiling the dangers in these fractal wood-burning videos and are instead promoting these absolutely hazardous and high risk videos whilst still aiding and 'sharing dangerous falsehoods.'.
This isn't the only occurrence but it's quite clear that YouTube as well as the rest of the TNI is a giant failure in stopping disinformation and are instead doing the exact opposite.
The TNI should not be trusted in the first place and is now a disinformation source.
They can auto generate warning messages on every video even tangentially referencing the c-word for 2 years, but they let this kind of thing slide for years and years.
Ignoring the politics & posturing, my impression is that the number of people dead due to stupidity about COVID-19 is a few orders of magnitude larger than the number of people dead due to this sort of video.
I don't think the point was about the relative number of dead; I think it the observation that YT clearly has the technology to automatically annotate content, but declines to use it for things (like dangerous hacks) where it could save lives.
Reasonable...but I suspect that YT's "technology to automatically annotate..." is actually pretty sucky in the real world - high error rates, lots of (paid hourly) moderation needed, pushback from Legal on "issues and exposure" that it creates, etc. So they're not gonna deploy that tech against hazards which don't have a huge body count and/or political weight behind 'em.
They still push anti vaxxer conspiracy theory crap, but they immediately banned actual tenured scientists with decades of experience writing and reviewing papers on pandemic response.
If anything, their treatment of this video is par for the course. They're banning the factually correct content, and pushing popular misinformation that kills people.
Someone made a commercial fractal wood burning device years ago. It had very long handled probes (1-2 ft.) and a pedal for switching on the power (there might have been a main power switch inline on the device itself.) It had a dial to let you crank up the amperage. I think someone did get hurt using it. Reputable art/woodworking events and people do not allow or use fractal wood burning because the inherent risk is so high.
I am sorry but I strongly disagree with most comments here.
I do a lot of things potentially extremely dangerous, like burning wood with a microwave, or driving a motorcycle, or playing with hydrogen and oxygen in stoichiometric ratio, I tried to melt a wrench with a 12V battery, and all that makes me a better engineer and a better person, more aware of the weakness of flesh and how reality is scary and how it dont care about our stupid meaty body.
I feel I see a lot of class contempt here, "those stupid people dont know that it's dangerous, they should stick with devices conceived by us. We educated people put stupid warning labels on it just for them". Of course, those poor soul should have been more aware of the danger, but censuring those video, or forbidding them to play with microwave, is that really what we want ? Anybody should be aware about the basic physics, that's the real problem here. I dont want to see moral video "dont do that because it's wrong", I would more video like "look at that how dangerous it is, and also, how cool is that".
About electroboom, I am the only one to think that being zapped again and again does a really poor job at passing the message "electricity is dangerous and can kill you"? If some people dont understand the dangerousity of electricity, maybe they just learnt from electroboom.
I much prefer the channel "diode gone wild".
I'm not against people taking risks as long as it's very clear what risks they're taking, and as long as the reward is worth it (for any reasonable definition of "worth it").
Pretty much everyone knows how dangerous motorcycles are, and plans (or doesn't, but still their choice) accordingly. The whole point of Ann Reardon's video is that tons of people tried this, and at least 60+ died, without having any concept of how dangerous it actually is. That is also evidenced by many of the videos showing, for example, bare legs and bare hands inches away from lethal contact.
On the "worth it" side of things, obviously that's subjective, and I think the original patterns are neat, but it seems very much a "you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all" type of effect. Are you honestly saying that you think a substantial risk of death is worth it here?
That's not really her point, she says "even professional electrician" and so on, she adopt a very of moral approach and I am not very fond of moral.
It's a substantial risk of death only if you doing it wrong. I mean, the problem here is not playing with a microwave transformer, it's doing it inside, it's holding both electrodes in both hands, it's the lack of isolation, it's having a device you can switch on by accident and so on.
A lot of people here seems to consider it's moral imperative to not do that, this wont make people smarter, nor more reasonable.
That's 34 known and only in the US, as noted by Ann. Her new video notes 30 in the UK and more in Australia (where she lives). And it can't be reiterated enough, this is those that are known to be caused by this. It makes you wonder how many other electrocutions or fires were caused by this without noting this as the source, whether known or not.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's precedence nor law that places liability on these people.
If they contributed to the takedown of the critical video which informs about the dangers and deaths then I don't find myself able to casually dismiss the accusation of murder (as I would were that not the case).
You can go back and delete the videos from your history and YT should treat it as though you never watched it. I make use of this on occasion when I click a video I really shouldn't have.
Is there any way to filter out certain Youtube channels such that they cannot be viewed in your house? My kids like some of TheSoul channels and I'm not particularly happy with them watching content created by Russians.
There's only so many videos a single reasonable person can watch. And once you scale it it's no longer a single reasonable person but a vast army of low-paid content watchers.
Censorship sucks but when its it YouTube's responsibility to protect idiots from themselves? If they removed these videos are they still responsible for people attempting the stunt because they heard about it there six months ago?
I demand the freedom to suffer the consequences of my own actions.
YouTube has their own policy of taking down content they call “harmful & dangerous,” this person is complaining that they are enforcing it incorrectly by taking down her video talking about the dangers and not taking down or age gating the videos of people showing how to do it.
> I demand the freedom to suffer the consequences of my own actions.
You will absolutely suffer the consequences of whatever actions you take, I’m not sure why you seem to think YouTube would prevent that.
It could easily be the case that a popular channel warning 'DON'T DO THIS' could make the situation worse by telling more people about an idea they would never have heard of otherwise.
The fact that some (presumably less seen) videos haven't been removed (yet) doesn't change this calculus.
That is a very creative excuse but it cannot explain why this video which described the dangers of the practice and did not explain in detail how to go about doing. It would be removed when none of the videos that demonstrate how to do this were taken down.
I think a much more plausible explanation is that YouTube simply does not have an effective mechanism for deciding what videos to take down and which ones to leave up.
Thats an extremely negative view of people's ability. There's a point where you have to realize you can't protect people from themselves. A video that simply provides knowledge in an accessible way without preaching and condescension does far more than an outright ban that gives the viewer no information.
The new video shows lots of examples of comments on the original video where people thanked her for warning them not to do it, so it's worth factoring that in. Certainly a couple people will go 'wow, getting killed to make cool wood? sounds sick' and do it but I suspect the number of people scared away is higher.
We really need to finish with this content removal business and simply hold people accountable for the content.
In other words, YouTube or any "utility level" platform should not have the right to remove content by its own and just request information to protect itself. For example, if someone is posting about something harmful the videos should remain and the person who does that should face the consequences.
It's not just that the platforms suck in judging the content, the more important aspect is that this content is also part of historical record. I would like to be able to watch and examine content from criminals, from fraudsters or pranksters.
For example, it's fascinating that Heaven's Gate cult website is still alive and kicking[0]. I'm glad that I can take a look at the real thing but if their mass su*cide happened today, I'm sure that all kind of materials about them would be promptly removed and we will be forced to accept only the official narrative(which might be or might not be correct on this case but that's not the point). None of us would be allowed to read their texts, listen to their conversation and judge it by ourselves.
> For example, if someone is posting about something harmful the videos should remain and the person who does that should face the consequences.
Ok, so now a video is up and people are tricked by it and injure themselves in the process. Some people die. Is that an acceptable cost? Does your solution make any considerations for ongoing harm?
Sue the person who uploaded the video, as it happens with all the malicious activities with the real world.
Sure, we can have tools to reduce risk - maybe there can be a warning under the video that the contents are disputed and some people claimed harm. If those people are lying the video uploader can sue them.
Just because some people don't know how to behave and have delusions that nothing is real on the internet, we can't have total speech control in an attempt of "saving the kids".
Just as with the real world, people need to develop the right habits to stay safe.
You actually have that right in any sane country. The limitations are on the frequency you can broadcast or the volume if you do your broadcast through sound systems.
Actually, only on extremely crazy dictatorships you will have police storming you before you finish your broadcast. On most places, you can be sued but the police wont try to silence you as if your words are a spell.
Where did the police come in? We were talking about Youtube selecting what to make available on their platform. Is that analogous to the police stifling your speech in your view?
You don't want private entities making decisions on what content they host on their platforms, but you do want the government to make that decision (host everything) and force those private entities to abide by that decision under threat of penalty? And that is how we avoid dictatorships in your view?
The government has a due process, if the government doesn't have a fair due process you change them until you have a fair due process. You change the governments by election and if that's not available by burning down their stuff.
Companies don't have a fair due process. Google is infamous for not providing a human response for their algorithmic censorship. You can Google it.
Public access tv (in the US at least) is actually a private platform, you do not have the right to broadcast anything you with on it "as long as it's not illegal."
As with newspapers, magazines, radio, social media platforms, etc., the owners public access tv stations are allowed to exercise editorial discretion with regards to what they publish. There was actually a landmark Supreme Court case about it:[0]
Depending on your dictatorship, it will be different everywhere.
In free countries you just broadcast. It's like the right to eat pancakes, it's not specifically regulated. Of course there are rules of what you are allowed to do or not, for example you can't broadcast in specific frequencies because those are licensed and if you like to do that you need to purchase a license. If you broadcast using loudspeakers, you will have regulations on the loudness of it.
The commercial license might come with its own limitations. Depending on your location, you might get into trouble if you take advertisements for drugs or cigarettes or alcohol. You can lose your license over it but your broadcasting equipment wont try stopping you from doing it.
Sure, and anyone who is banned on YouTube can still "just broadcast". Their rights were not harmed in any way.
To borrow your analogy, you may have the right to eat pancakes but you don't have the right to eat at IHOP. You can be banned from every pancake selling diner in town yet you can still eat pancakes. No one has stopped you from eating pancakes.
I can't agree with this one. Due to the different nature of the mediums(radio waves v.s. internet platform) you can't just broadcast because unlike radio waves Youtube will refuse to carry your signal. That's why I advocate for Youtube be impartial to the content and carry whatever the users put in it. If there's a problem with the content, let it be solved by the parties impacted.
Again, unlike radio, with internet platforms each platform is in its own reality. With radio, when you broadcast your signal reaches everyone indiscriminately. On the internet you broadcast into platforms as if they are different universes with different populations.
> Sue the person who uploaded the video, as it happens with all the malicious activities with the real world.
A corpse is discovered in a garage with charred stumps where the hands should be. Investigators look through that person's browser history and find they watched a few hundred wood burning videos. What now, hundreds of lawsuits? Who would pay for that?
> Some people die. Is that an acceptable cost? Does your solution make any considerations for ongoing harm?
You talk as if this isn't exactly what happened in the current framework of private censorship.
Even if abolishing private censorship would cause the scenario you outlined, that wouldn't be worse than the current situation and at least you'd solve the problem of pointless censorship.
> Even if abolishing private censorship would cause the scenario you outlined, that wouldn't be worse than the current situation
This seems like a statement with nothing behind it but your confidence that it is truth. I believe that could be much worse than the current situation.
If the video goes down and fewer people see it, fewer people die. How was the censorship pointless? You didn't "solve" any problems, you just ignored the actual complexity of the real world to uphold your ideals.
Speech is not magic spell. Sure, in Turkey the government believes that Netflix makes people gay and they regulate Netflix to ungay the Turkish youth but this is just as ridiculous as the censorship on other topics on other parts of the world.
If someone is dying because of a video, the fix is not in removal of the video. Sure, you can put labels agains poor judgement like they do on physical products.
Many things can be a fix to many problems. Listening devices at homes can be a fix to domestic violence for example.
The point is, for "a fix" of an issue we are trading things and I don't find it a good trade. Total unchallenged censorship is ot a good compromise to "save the kids".
I don't think a private company choosing what they host on their platform is total unchallenged censorship. With such a vast gap in understanding of terms I don't think discussion will get us anywhere.
You can find a lot of feedback of creators about their objections falling on deaf ears but yes, you are right; that's the core of the disagreement, let's agree to disagree.
YouTube didn't introduce content moderation (apart from copyright, and flat out illegal material) because daddy government told them to.
They introduced moderation because companies threatened to pull advertising because they didn't want their brands plastered next to awful content.
YouTube totally has the right to leave plenty of dangerous or morally repugnant content up. But they don't have the right to other companies' advertising money if said companies jump ship.
Yes but by what level of accountability? If I make a video about changing a clutch, and then some kid drops a gearbox on his face and kills himself, who is responsible? Is Demolition Ranch responsponsible for mass shootings? Is the History channel actually racist because it rebroadcasts Hitler all the time?
The thing is the whole house of cards was built on pseudonymous growth. Most Youtube accounts can be traced back to specific people and corporations, sure, but it takes a lot of manual effort to figure it out and the success rate is not 100%. And what do you do when the person is based in a country with no regards for the rule of law, no extradition treaty with the US, yet its citizens still have the ability to post videos to Youtube?
What you're proposing would not only slow down the growth of Youtube, it would contract it. And proposing to Google that anything they do should get smaller for the benefit of mankind is somehow a cardinal sin against capitalism.
I have this proposition that I wrote about previously. The core of the idea is that the platforms can remove your content only if you are anonymous and you can re-instantiate your content and override moderation by accepting full responsibility through revealing your true identity. So if it happens that someone post some really nasty material, the police knocks on their door and content is removed only then(some type of content can be straight out illegal, like specific types of porn).
Here's a better idea: hold the publisher responsible for what they publish. Don't force the public to dive down rabbit-holes trying to figure out who uploaded the dodgy content, find out what jurisdiction they're in, and try to find an advocate in that jurisdiction to hold the uploader to account.
Sure, the publisher can also be responsible but YouTube is not a publisher. They are like electrical company that provides you with cables and electricity.
Youtube removing videos is like the electric company cutting of your electricity when they believe there's something harmful on the TV.
There are plenty of publishers on youtube and as they do curate their content, they should definitely be responsible. They are already responsible actually.
They're publishers to me. They produce, even if it's with computers, a landing page where they recommend different. They produce recommendations. I don't get how that's not publishing.
I don't think the lines are blurry. Discover algorithms and monetisation are not content.
I understand the desire to protect indy content from megacorps litigation. Some kind of protection is needed. But swearing that black is white is a "solution" that's bound to cause new problems.
Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer cake in a toaster, the fakers already cash in on the views. Usually the risk of these faked craft hacks is just cut fingers and kitchen fires, but the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos take it to another level of lethality.