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Comment by awalton | Hacker News Reader

It's more likely the channel was brigaded by r/The_Donald supporters or 4chan than YouTube actually doing anything. Their systems are so automated, stuff like this happens all of the time - the users wield an unseemly huge amount of power to knock content offline.

So, lessons learned: 1) Keep backups of everything you'd upload to YouTube. 2) Vimeo.com account 3) Petition YouTube to revamp their content policing strategies to keep humans in the loop instead of algorithms knocking content offline because a mob with pitchforks decides they don't agree with you.

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Is anyone else wondering why they're selling domains like SpaceAlpha.com [1] or their own domain ClimateState.com [2]?

And that they're using clickbait titles like "YouTube/Google shuts down largest climate science channel" to say that their channel was shut down?

Doesn't it look a bit fishy?

[1] http://climatestate.com/product/domain-spacealpha-com/

[2] http://climatestate.com/product/domain-climatestate-com/

Edit: auto-correct typo

That is weird, though climatestate.com is "out of stock" (and it's $100k).

Also fishy: they have another very large YouTube channel[1], which is still up and running. Seems like it would have been worth mentioning? It's referenced in their shop page for site sponsorship[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/ClimateProgressWorld

[2] http://climatestate.com/product/climate-hawk/

That is weird.

On the other hand, if a relatively small charity could get an offer of ~ $100,000 for their domain name, I guess it could be considered prudent to go ahead with selling the domain and relocating? That could pay for a lot of... somethings. Similar to how charities sometimes sell off land to interested developers and relocate, since their location isn't that important and the money can help their core mission.

They don't say anything about being a non-profit. And it's not clear what they actually do aside from selling domains, memberships, and making a YouTube playlist.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for awareness of climate change and science in general. But not everybody is in it to support that cause.

> 2) Vimeo.com account

When I stopped using all things Google[1], I switched to Vimeo for any potential videos I might make. So far what I've seen is a more mature, professional, and technologically superior platform for video producers. Gone are the hordes of single-digit-IQ trolls and hate speech spewing masses, replaced with thoughtful commentary. Making money with your original content is straightforward and doesn't feel scummy like on YouTube.

The only thing I miss is the wide range of "how to" videos on YouTube; for all of its flaws, the service is a never ending fountain of hands-on knowledge.

[1] In the interest of full disclosure, I have yet to find a suitable replacement for the Nvidia Shield TV. There is simply nothing else on the market that comes close to it for our uses. I'll probably eventually replace it with a Roku 4 or similar device, but I'll keep the Shield and try to port Linux to it.

> Gone are the hordes of single-digit-IQ trolls and hate speech spewing masses, replaced with thoughtful commentary

Perhaps this is because Vimeo's reach is incredibly small when compared to Youtube.

Youtube-dl [1] is a great tool to backup videos from Youtube. (And just a pip install away)

[1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

Also, despite the name, it works for a wide range of online video sources. youtube-dl is an amazing project.

On Android: Install Termux and you can install youtube-dl via pip.

Bonus tip: install the Termux API app, and termux-tools package, and get clipboard access (along with other Android features).

On Android I use Youtube Downloader, which has the necessary Intents stuff to let you just open an YT link with it. Shame it went closed source, though.

Is there some terminal app that lets you create new Intents to run commands? Should be simple to tie the action "Open link to youtube.com/" to running "youtube-dl $link".

On terminal apps / intents: not that I'm aware, though that would be a great question to put to the Termux folk.

There _are_ dialog prompts and such.

Here's [1] an open source app that lets you share a link from youtube which then uses a hosted version of youtube-dl to get the direct link to the mp4 url and pass it back to the Android Download app

[1] https://github.com/zeronickname/VideoDownloader

Or you can just use Google Takeout to download the original videos you uploaded before YouTube reencoded them.

For just Youtube, I use this script with Tampermonkey: https://github.com/gantt/downloadyoutube

I don't think I've ever updated it. It's just worked even during times when Youtube-dl required an update to start working again.

Makes it a little more convenient because it adds a download dropdown to the video page. These days, I use it to download all the good stuff because I've had too many experiences of good content disappearing forever.

NewPipe also serves as a good youtube downloader for Android.

More likely it was rival climate channels that want their subscribers so are just going through the vids, finding something that looks copyright and spamming google with the license in hopes the channel is taken down. If you have any kind of popular channel you will experience this as there's money to be made by somebody else gaining all your views.

Have you looked at vimeos business model? It is the opposite of youtube. On the latter, you get paid for uploading videos, on the former you pay for uploading them. And you pay quite heftily and even their most expensive option, from what I can tell, can't sustain even a moderately large youtube channel.

How do you imagine this "humans-in-the-loop" policy? Do i get jury-duty emails by google?

Why are you asking me as if it's my problem to solve? If you're trying to imply that Google can't do any better than robots taking things offline, then you're going to have to try harder - back in my day we had human moderators on internet forum boards and they did a damned fine job.

Google's done it the way they have because it's cheap compared to paying a bunch of moderators, and mostly because they really don't give a damn as long as YouTube still generates ad revenue for them at the end of the day.

So how to incentivize? Make a morally outrageous ad-blocker?

I think YouTube is already trying to do this with their "YouTube Heroes" program, which seems to be about trusting vetted volunteers more than random users.

>brigaded by r/The_Donald supporters or 4chan

Proof, please.

If somebody says "It's more likely..." then this person is expressing an opinion and not a fact.

I find that such opinions are valuable in addition to other opinions as far as they remain plausible in cases where all we have are other opinions.

One opinion is on top of the comment thread, while the other got downvoted.

opinion opinions. and i suppose you've got an opinion about that. an opinion opinion opinion.

I don't see how targeting groups and political entities with completely unverified FUD is valuable.

So quick to point fingers at /r/The_Donald. I lurk there and they are just ppl who support Trump and like to meme about it. They certainly aren't the nazis or the kkk or whatever the progressive left in America has decided to call em today, and as far as I know they don't deny climate change either.

Reporting climate science videos sounds like memeing to me...

I think that's just called being an asshole

a) For what it's worth, the The_Donald subreddit doesn't brigade and the moderators do a lot of work to ensure that they're complying with Reddit rules.

b) Having backups and an alternate hosting service is always very good advice, especially for Google's services where they use algorithms to shut down and ban people all of the time.

c) It's not in Google or YouTube's DNA to provide actual decent human customer service. They don't even provide that for actual paying customers, let alone their free services! Sadly, I think YouTube laughs at your petition idea.

re: a) prove it. even if the moderators try to enforce that, their tools are limited to actions the users do on reddit. brigading to a different website seems totally beyond the control of reddit mods.

> The_Donald subreddit doesn't brigade

Let me point you in the direction of this quote:

> The admins accused the_donald users of “brigading” or mass downvoting comments by r/politics moderators explaining why the posts were deleted and sending them threatening personal messages.

Oh, look at this other post trying to stop The_Donald from brigading so much

> Reddit announced this week that it would tweak the algorithm on r/all, a feed of popular posts across all the site’s subreddits, to stop certain communities from promoting large numbers of their own posts into the top of that feed.

> “I cannot deny their [The_Donald] behavior hastened its deployment,”

In response to The_Donald brigading several posts about Trump to the front page in a very short amount of time.

> For what it's worth, the The_Donald subreddit doesn't brigade and the moderators do a lot of work to ensure that they're complying with Reddit rules.

r/The_Donald brigaded my university's subreddit en masse from a post the moderators there stickied to the top of the sub.

Trump supporters on reddit don't all come from /r/The_Donald. Unless you're willing to show specifics of how the brigading happened on that subreddit, most of the time when people make those claims it means: "my sub was suddenly full of people who agreed with Trump, so it must be the case that /r/The_Donald was behind it". Guess what, when protests in Berkeley happened it's not a surprise that /r/Berkeley is going to be full of people who sound like Trump supporters, for instance.

Aye, mate - no true Scotsman, as far as the aYe can see. Good feeling, though, cause the other side didn't stay classy as well, thus we can all, trench in and drill to moral rock bottom.

If only we had some tool, that no side would subvert, doctor, hijack and decry - like science and reasoning.

What are you even talking about?

It's a very convoluted reference to "No True Scotsman":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

("no true Scotsman would do such a thing"; i.e., those who perform that action are not part of our group and thus criticism of that action is not criticism of the group).

This was in relation to a small chalking incident that would have had no reason to attract attention outside of our school except that the r/The_Donald mods stickied it to the top of their subreddit. I skimmed through a few of the brigaders' histories to see where they were coming from and saw mostly r/The_Donald posts. Some had posted in the stickied thread before hopping over to our subreddit. Some had previously specified that they went to other universities, so had even less reason to be visiting the subreddit for ours. It's not as if we'd hit r/all or anything.

> For what it's worth, the The_Donald subreddit doesn't brigade and the moderators do a lot of work to ensure that they're complying with Reddit rules.

Lemme guess, if I respectfully disagree with you, I'll find all of my accounts blocked and my websites DDoSed into the ground? Because the evidence that this claim is wrong is beyond staggering... Keep your Alternative Facts to yourself please.

I re-read your comment several times. Your beyond staggering evidence must have been removed, probably by pro-Donald Russian hackers.

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